The role of non-profit housing cooperatives in urban development. The case of Kalkbreite

El presente artículo comienza analizando la trayectoria y el funcionamiento de las cooperativas de vivienda en cesión de uso en el marco geográfico suizo. Después, particulariza en el caso de la genossenschaft Kalkbreite, una experiencia reciente localizada en el tradicional distrito obrero de Zúrich. Allí una renovada atención sobre la promoción inmobiliaria sin fines de lucro ha producido ejemplos de notable interés arquitectónico a la vez que novedosos en el ámbito de la participación y la gestión del cooperativismo. Mediante un análisis transversal –político, económico y socioespacial– del caso de estudio, se deducen sus procesos proyectuales y sus consecuencias en el diseño urbano y arquitectónico. Estos procesos derivan del entendimiento de la vivienda no como un producto sino como un proceso que fortalece a las comunidades urbanas emergentes en su papel de agentes de un nuevo modelo de desarrollo de ciudad.The article begins by analyzing the evolution and dynamics of cession of use housing cooperatives in the Swiss context. Following this, it focuses on the case study of the genossenschaft Kalkbreite, a recent experience located within Zurich’s traditional workers district. There, a renewed approach to non-profit real-estate development has produced examples of notable architectural interest that also offer an original take regarding the realm of participation and cooperative management. A crosssectional –political, economical and social-spatial– analysis of the case study has revealed its design process as well as the consequences it has at an urban and architectural level. These processes derive from understanding housing not as a product but, instead, as a process that strengthens emerging urban communities in their role as agents in a new model of urban development

Identification and quantification of drivers of forest degradation in tropical dry forests: a case study in Western Mexico

The intensity of forest degradation is linked to landowners' decisions on management of their shifting cultivation systems. Understanding the processes involved in this land use type is therefore essential for the design of sustainable forest management practices. However, knowledge of the processes and patterns of forest transition that result from this practice is extremely limited. In this study, we used spatially-explicit binary logistic regression to study the proximate factors that relate to forest degradation by combining biophysical and socio-economic variables. Our study region is within the Ayuquila Basin, in Western Mexico, a typical fragmented tropical dry forest landscape dominated by shifting cultivation. Through a survey and semi-structured interviews with community leaders, we obtained data on the forest resources and on the uses that people make of them. Detailed forest cover maps for 2004 and 2010 were produced from high-resolution SPOT 5 data, and ancillary geographical data were used to extract spatial variables. The degree of social marginalization of each community and the ratio of forest area to population size were the main factors positively correlated with the probability of the occurrence of forest degradation. Livestock management and use of fence posts by the communities were also positively associated with forest degradation. Among biophysical factors, forest degradation is more likely to occur in flatter areas. We conclude that local drivers of forest degradation include both socioeconomic and physical variables and that both of these factors need to be addressed at the landscape level while developing measures for activities related to REDD+. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Génesis y desarrollo de un problema didáctico: el papel de la modelización matemática en la enseñanza universitaria de las CCEE

Partiremos del problema docente de la enseñanza de las matemáticas para las ciencias experimentales (CCEE) relativo a la dificultad para integrar de forma “normalizada” la actividad de modelización matemática en las instituciones de enseñanza universitaria. Utilizaremos la Teoría Antropológica de lo Didáctico (TAD) para formular dicho problema como un problema de investigación didáctica relacionado con el fenómeno de la desarticulación escolar del currículum y con la pérdida de sentido de la matemática enseñada, enfatizando sus dimensiones epistemológica y ecológica

Point-to-Multipoint Communication Enablers for the Fifth Generation of Wireless Systems

(c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.[EN] 3GPP has enhanced the point-to-multipoint (PTM) communication capabilities of 4G LTE in all releases since the adoption of eMBMS in Release-9. Recent enhancements cover not only television services, but also critical machine-type and vehicular communications, following the backward-compatibility design philosophy of LTE. This article discusses the opportunity in the design and standardization of 5G to break with the existing paradigm for PTM transmissions in 4G LTE, where broadcast PTM transmissions were initially conceived as an add-on and pre-positioned service. 5G brings the opportunity to incorporate PTM capabilities as built-in delivery features from the outset, integrating point-to-point and PTM modes under one common framework and enabling dynamic use of PTM to maximize network and spectrum efficiency. This approach will open the door to completely new levels of network management and delivery cost efficiency. The article also discusses the implications of PTM for network slicing to customize and optimize network resources on a common 5G infrastructure to accommodate different use cases and services taking into account user densityThis work was supported in part by the European Commission under the 5G-PPP project Broadcast and Multicast Communication Enablers for the Fifth-(H2020-ICT-2016-2 call, grant number 761498). The views expressed in this contribution are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the project.Generation of Wireless Systems 5G-XcastGomez-Barquero, D.; Navratil, D.; Appleby, S.; Stagg, M. (2018). Point-to-Multipoint Communication Enablers for the Fifth Generation of Wireless Systems. IEEE Communications Standards Magazine. 2(1):53-59. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOMSTD.2018.170006953592

Impact of Sugary Food Consumption on Pregnancy: A Review

Obesity in pregnancy has been directly associated with an increased risk of almost all pregnancy complications such as gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), and premature delivery. Thereby, according to current evidence available, life-style interventions to prevent pre-pregnancy overweight and obesity in women of fertile age are necessary to reduce the negative impact of obesity on mother and child health. Unhealthy dietary patterns, together with the increased consumption of processed foods rich in simple sugar and sweeteners are some of the responsible, among others, for the increase in obesity rates during the last years. Nevertheless, how its consumption can affect pregnancy outcomes and long-term children's health is still uncertain. This review aims to collate the available evidence about the consequences of unhealthy dietary patterns and sugary products consumption, including sweeteners, during pregnancy for obesity in childhood and mid-childhood. High simple sugar intake during gestation may contribute to an excessive gestational weight gain (GWG) as well as to develop other pregnancy complications such as GDM, preeclampsia and preterm birth. The heterogeneity of study populations, sample size, different approaches to measure GWG, GMD, preeclampsia, and birth weight, among other conditions, might explain the divergences observed among studies. Therefore, large, well-designed intervention-controlled trials with biological biomarkers to ensure dietary adherence are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of lifestyle interventions in order to provide effective nutritional advice

Non-invasive Estimation of Atrial Fibrillation Driver Position With Convolutional Neural Networks and Body Surface Potentials

[EN] Atrial fibrillation (AF) is characterized by complex and irregular propagation patterns, and AF onset locations and drivers responsible for its perpetuation are the main targets for ablation procedures. ECG imaging (ECGI) has been demonstrated as a promising tool to identify AF drivers and guide ablation procedures, being able to reconstruct the electrophysiological activity on the heart surface by using a non-invasive recording of body surface potentials (BSP). However, the inverse problem of ECGI is ill-posed, and it requires accurate mathematical modeling of both atria and torso, mainly from CT or MR images. Several deep learning-based methods have been proposed to detect AF, but most of the AF-based studies do not include the estimation of ablation targets. In this study, we propose to model the location of AF drivers from BSP as a supervised classification problem using convolutional neural networks (CNN). Accuracy in the test set ranged between 0.75 (SNR = 5 dB) and 0.93 (SNR = 20 dB upward) when assuming time independence, but it worsened to 0.52 or lower when dividing AF models into blocks. Therefore, CNN could be a robust method that could help to non-invasively identify target regions for ablation in AF by using body surface potential mapping, avoiding the use of ECGI.This work has been partially supported by: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (PID2019-105032GB-I00), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, and Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (supported by FEDER Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional PI17/01106 and RYC2018-024346B-750), Consejeria de Ciencia, Universidades e Innovacion of the Comunidad de Madrid through the program RIS3 (S-2020/L2-622), EIT Health (Activity code 19600, EIT Health is supported by EIT, a body of the European Union) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 860974.Cámara-Vázquez, MÁ.; Hernández-Romero, I.; Morgado-Reyes, E.; Guillem Sánchez, MS.; Climent, AM.; Barquero-Pérez, O. (2021). Non-invasive Estimation of Atrial Fibrillation Driver Position With Convolutional Neural Networks and Body Surface Potentials. Frontiers in Physiology. 12:1-11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.733449S1111

An Overview of the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Specification

"(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.")This paper provides an overview of the physical layer specification of Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0, the next-generation digital terrestrial broadcasting standard. ATSC 3.0 does not have any backwards-compatibility constraint with existing ATSC standards, and it uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based waveforms along with powerful low-density parity check (LDPC) forward error correction codes similar to existing state-of-the-art. However, it introduces many new technological features such as 2-D non-uniform constellations, improved and ultra-robust LDPC codes, power-based layered division multiplexing to efficiently provide mobile and fixed services in the same radio frequency (RF) channel, as well as a novel frequency pre-distortion multiple-input single-output antenna scheme. ATSC 3.0 also allows bonding of two RF channels to increase the service peak data rate and to exploit inter-RF channel frequency diversity, and to employ dual-polarized multiple-input multiple-output antenna system. Furthermore, ATSC 3.0 provides great flexibility in terms of configuration parameters (e.g., 12 coding rates, 6 modulation orders, 16 pilot patterns, 12 guard intervals, and 2 time interleavers), and also a very flexible data multiplexing scheme using time, frequency, and power dimensions. As a consequence, ATSC 3.0 not only improves the spectral efficiency and robustness well beyond the first generation ATSC broadcast television standard, but also it is positioned to become the reference terrestrial broadcasting technology worldwide due to its unprecedented performance and flexibility. Another key aspect of ATSC 3.0 is its extensible signaling, which will allow including new technologies in the future without disrupting ATSC 3.0 services. This paper provides an overview of the physical layer technologies of ATSC 3.0, covering the ATSC A/321 standard that describes the so-called bootstrap, which is the universal entry point to an ATSC 3.0 signal, and the ATSC A/322 standard that describes the physical layer downlink signals after the bootstrap. A summary comparison between ATSC 3.0 and DVB-T2 is also provided.Fay, L.; Michael, L.; Gómez Barquero, D.; Ammar, N.; Caldwell, MW. (2016). An Overview of the ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Specification. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 62(1):159-171. doi:10.1109/TBC.2015.2505417S15917162

Predictive capacity of boar sperm morphometry and morphometric sub-populations on reproductive success after artificial insemination

The aim of the study was to compare the morphometric features of sperm head size and shape from the Pietrain line and the Duroc × Pietrain boar crossbred terminal lines, and to evaluate their relationship with reproductive success after artificial insemination of sows produced from crossbreeding the York, Landrace and Pietrain breeds. Semen samples were collected from 11 sexually mature boars. Only ejaculates with greater than 70% motility rate and <15% of abnormal sperm were used for artificial inseminations (AI) and included in the study. Samples were analyzed using an ISAS®v1 computer-assisted sperm analysis system for eight morphometric parameters of head shape and size (CASA-Morph). Sub-populations of morphometric ejaculates were characterized using multivariate procedures, such as principal component (PC) analysis and clustering methods (k-means model). Four different ejaculate sub-populations were identified from two PCs that involved the head shape and size of the spermatozoa. The discriminant ability of the different morphometric sperm variables to predict sow litter size was analyzed using a receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis. Sperm head length, ellipticity, elongation, and regularity showed significant predictive capacity on litter size (0.59, 0.59, 0.60, and 0.56 area under curve (AUC), respectively). The morphometric sperm sub-populations were not related to sow litter size

Water chemistry and soil radon survey at the Poas volcano (Costa Rica)

Radon-in-soil monitoring at the Poas volcano (Costa Rica) has been performed together with water chemistry from the hot crater lake since 1981 and 1983 respectively. The results are discussed as a function of the eruptive evolution of the volcano over a 13 years period (1981-1994). It is shown that no definitely clear precursory radon signals have been recorded. On the contrary, ionic species concentrations are likely to be considered good precursors, together with the temperature variations of the crater lake water