Biodigestor experimental calefaccionado

El gran costo que genera la dependencia energética de los combustibles tradicionales para el pequeño productor, hace la diferencia entre que su campo sea rentable o no. Dichos problemas derivaron en consultas sobre diferentes alternativas para racionalizar el aprovechamiento y mejoramiento del funcionamiento en las distintas áreas de la actividad rural. Basándonos en estas consultas se llegó a la conclusión que el Biogas podría ser una alternativa rentable, lo cual llevó a la construcción de un biodigestor experimental que a través de la evaluación de las condiciones reales en que se desenvuelve el proceso, logre una metodología de cálculo para ser utilizada en el diseño de biodigestores para uso rural. Este trabajo expone las experiencias obtenidas en el funcionamiento del biodigestor durante un periodo de dos años.Asociación Argentina de Energías Renovables y Medio Ambiente (ASADES

Módulo experimental para el diseño de sistemas solares pasivos

El presente trabajo consiste en desarrollar y ejecutar un proyecto que tenga la incorporación de criterios constructivos Bioambientales cuyo objetivo general es evaluar el ahorro energético en función de la envolvente y la aplicación de una metodología de cálculo para un diseño solar pasivo, para lo cual se desarrolló una programación de mediciones sistemáticas de las temperaturas superficiales, temperaturas del aire, flujos de calor y energías consumidas para mantener el grado de confort en el interior del módulo. En el análisis de este trabajo se buscó relacionando el valor “G" del balance térmico de la envolvente con la energía consumida y las temperaturas exteriores colocando los valores obtenidos en una función lineal que nos permita cuantificar el ahorro energético. Y de esta forma se puede confeccionar o estipular la relación costo - beneficio.Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanism

Integration of Sensory and Reward Information during Perceptual Decision-Making in Lateral Intraparietal Cortex (LIP) of the Macaque Monkey

Single neurons in cortical area LIP are known to carry information relevant to both sensory and value-based decisions that are reported by eye movements. It is not known, however, how sensory and value information are combined in LIP when individual decisions must be based on a combination of these variables. To investigate this issue, we conducted behavioral and electrophysiological experiments in rhesus monkeys during performance of a two-alternative, forced-choice discrimination of motion direction (sensory component). Monkeys reported each decision by making an eye movement to one of two visual targets associated with the two possible directions of motion. We introduced choice biases to the monkeys' decision process (value component) by randomly interleaving balanced reward conditions (equal reward value for the two choices) with unbalanced conditions (one alternative worth twice as much as the other). The monkeys' behavior, as well as that of most LIP neurons, reflected the influence of all relevant variables: the strength of the sensory information, the value of the target in the neuron's response field, and the value of the target outside the response field. Overall, detailed analysis and computer simulation reveal that our data are consistent with a two-stage drift diffusion model proposed by Diederich and Bussmeyer [1] for the effect of payoffs in the context of sensory discrimination tasks. Initial processing of payoff information strongly influences the starting point for the accumulation of sensory evidence, while exerting little if any effect on the rate of accumulation of sensory evidence

Stimulus saliency modulates pre-attentive processing speed in human visual cortex

The notion of a saliency-based processing architecture [1] underlying human vision is central to a number of current theories of visual selective attention [e.g., 2]. On this view, focal-attention is guided by an overall-saliency map of the scene, which integrates (sums) signals from pre-attentive sensory feature-contrast computations (e. g., for color, motion, etc.). By linking the Posterior Contralateral Negativity (PCN) component to reaction time (RT) performance, we tested one specific prediction of such salience summation models: expedited shifts of focal-attention to targets with low, as compared to high, target-distracter similarity. For two feature-dimensions (color and orientation), we observed decreasing RTs with increasing target saliency. Importantly, this pattern was systematically mirrored by the timing, as well as amplitude, of the PCN. This pattern demonstrates that visual saliency is a key determinant of the time it takes for focal-attention to be engaged onto the target item, even when it is just a feature singleton