Structural safety analysis of the aqueducts 'Coll de foix' and 'Capdevila' of the Canal of Aragon and Catalonia

The Canal of Aragon and Catalonia (CAC) is 134 km long and irrigates 105,000 ha (131 irrigation user communities) and it is owned by the River Ebro’s Water Agency. The aqueducts are located between km 67 and 71 of the canal and were designed by the civil engineer Félix de los Ríos Martín in 1907. The cross-section of both aqueducts, Coll de Foix and Capdevila, was extended within the framework of the project by Fernando Hué Herrero in 1962 in order to reach design flows of 26.1 m3/s and 25.7 m3/s, respectively. The structural performance of the aqueducts has been satisfactory; nevertheless, the hydraulic capacity has reduced over the years. As a result, the irrigation user communities have expressed the need to extend the cross-section of the aqueducts to meet the irrigation demands. Given the age of the structure and the different design considerations at the time, it is paramount to verify the structural reliability of the aqueducts in the new load configuration. Therefore, the objective of this contribution is to present the structural safety analysis conducted and to describe the new extended cross-section for both aqueducts (maintaining the original structural typology).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Perfil matemático de los niños con Dificultades Específicas de Aprendizaje en Matemáticas en función de su capacidad lectora

Este trabajo pretende identificar las características matemáticas diferenciadoras de los niños que sólo presentan dificultades en matemáticas (DAM) de aquellos que además tienen dificultades en lectura (DAL). Para ello, comparamos la ejecución matemática de tres grupos de niños de 3.º de E.P.: uno con dificultades de aprendizaje en matemáticas (DAM) que tenía además un nivel lector bajo (DAM-DL), otro con dificultades de aprendizaje en matemáticas y un nivel lector aceptable (DAM), y un tercero formado por niños sin dificultades. Los resultados muestran que los grupos con dificultades de aprendizaje obtienen rendimientos significativamente inferiores a los niños sin dificultades en general. Por otra parte, los niños DAM alcanzan puntuaciones más altas que los DAM-DL en conteo, lectura y escritura de números, cálculo, hechos numéricos, sentido del número, problemas verbales y relaciones conceptuales, pero lo hacen de forma significativa en conteo, lectura y escritura de números. No se ha podido relacionar el tipo de DAM con la mayor o menor dominancia hemisférica.This work pretends to identify the differentiating characteristics of the children that only present Learning Difficulties in mathematics (LDM) and those that also have difficulties in reading (LDM-LDR). To do so, we compare the mathematical execution of three groups of children in the third grade of primary school: one group with Learning Difficulties in Mathematics (LDM) that also had a low reading level (LDM-LDR), another with learning difficulties in mathematics and a acceptable reading level (LDM), and a third group formed by children without difficulties. The results show that the groups with learning difficulties obtain significantly inferior performances to the children without difficulties, both in the total scoring of the applied mathematical test, like in the different count subtests: reading and writing of numbers, calculation, numeric facts, numerical sense, verbal problems and conceptual relationships. Also the LDM children reach achieve higher scores than the LDM-LDR in all these tasks, but even higher in counting, reading and writing of numbers. It has not been possible to relate the type of LDM with the bigger or smaller hemispheric dominance

Recuerdo de un peregrino teresiano

Copia digital. Valladolid : Junta de Castilla y León. Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 201

Reality games en España: crónica de un éxito anunciado

Producción CientíficaEn 2000, Gran Hermano irrumpía en el ecosistema audiovisual español como un vendaval y abría las puertas a un nuevo formato televisivo, el reality game, que se ha convertido en un elemento habitual en las pantallas españolas durante la última década. La aproximación de las cámaras a la vida cotidiana del telespectador fue un proceso lento pero continuo, que ha mostrado escasos síntomas de agotamiento a pesar de las críticas recibidas. Los debates éticos que poblaron los medios de comunicación y las conversaciones cotidianas terminaron por languidecer ante unos índices de audiencia que justifi can, según los dominantes criterios de racionalidad económica, su propagación por las cadenas televisivas (Prado, 1999; Bueno, 2002). Este capítulo profundiza sobre la evolución del formato televisivo de los juegos de telerrealidad, perfi lando el recorrido seguido desde 2000 hasta la actualidad. Son ocho años muy intensos, presididos por una veloz transformación formal y por una constante diversifi cación temática de las propuestas, que han ido distribuyendo tanto aplastantes éxitos (Operación Triunfo, ¡Mira quién baila!) como mediocres programas que pasaron sin pena ni gloria por las parrillas televisivas. La audiencia ha sido, una vez más, el juez implacable, obligando a los profesionales de la televisión a reinventar constantemente el formato en un entorno altamente competitivo, donde los reality games han pasado de ser la excepción a ser la norma en las programaciones, proporcionando argumentos para sostener la hipótesis de que, quizás, la telerrealidad se esté convirtiendo en la tele-normalidad

The influence of Infotainment in the role of TV newscasts' main characters

Newscasts are one of the most easily recognisable elements of any TV channel. In Spain there is a tough battle for the audience between all open air stations in this field. Despite the increasing quantity of available newscasts, their content is still walking towards a higher homogenization (Vicente-Mariño & Monclús, 2009). Within this wider process of convergence, infotainment appears as a clear trend, following a similar pattern as the one described by Thussu (2008). This paper is focused on the role played by the main characters of broadcasted news, as they are a key part of any newscast. One can detect this transition in the Spanish newscasts from a traditional way of reporting daily news to a new combination between anonymous and famous. Blurred boundaries are not enough to keep the distance and the way they are presented is sometimes biased. By means of a content analysis of six Spanish TV channels during a sample week, this paper presents the combination of these two social groups. TV channel's ideological position and thematic section are the two main cleavages leading to alternative models, but all of them devoted more space to anonymous than some years ago (Langer, 1998; Prado, 2003)

I want to believe: Prior beliefs influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative and scientific medicine

Previous research suggests that people may develop stronger causal illusions when the existence of a causal relationship is consistent with their prior beliefs. In the present study, we hypothesized that prior pseudoscientific beliefs will influence judgments about the effectiveness of both alternative medicine and scientific medicine. Participants (N = 98) were exposed to an adaptation of the standard causal illusion task in which they had to judge whether two fictitious treatments, one described as conventional medicine and the other as alternative medicine, could heal the crises caused by two different syndromes. Since both treatments were completely ineffective, those believing that any of the two medicines worked were exhibiting a causal illusion. Participants also responded to the Pseudoscience Endorsement Scale (PES) and some questions about trust in alternative therapies that were taken from the Survey on the Social Perception of Science and Technology conducted by FECYT. The results replicated the causal illusion effect and extended them by revealing an interaction between the prior pseudoscientific beliefs and the scientific/pseudoscientific status of the fictitious treatment. Individuals reporting stronger pseudoscientific beliefs were more vulnerable to the illusion in both scenarios, whereas participants with low adherence to pseudoscientific beliefs seemed to be more resistant to the illusion in the alternative medicine scenario. Alternative medicine refers to a wide range of health practices not included in the healthcare system and not considered conventional or scientific medicine (World Health Organization, 2022). A common feature of alternative therapies is the lack of scientific evidence on their effectiveness, with some popular examples being homeopathy (Hawke et al., 2018; Peckham et al., 2019) and reiki (Zimpel et al., 2020). Therefore, they often can be considered pseudoscientific (i.e., practices or beliefs that are presented as scientific but are unsupported by scientific evidence; Fasce and Picó, 2019). Understanding why some people rely on alternative medicine despite this lack of evidence is relevant, since its usage can pose a threat to a person’s health (Freckelton, 2012; Hellmuth et al., 2019; Lilienfeld, 2007), either by replacing evidence-based treatments (Chang et al., 2006; Johnson et al., 2018a, 2018b; Mujar et al., 2017) or by reducing their effectiveness (Awortwe et al., 2018). In this research, we will assume that people assess the effectiveness of a given treatment (whether scientific or alternative) by estimating the causal link between the treatment (potential cause) and symptom relief (outcome). To achieve this, people can resort to various information sources, but they could certainly use their own experience of covariation between the treatment and the symptoms. However, biases can occur in this process. In particular, the causal illusion is the systematic error of perceiving a causal link between unrelated events that happen to occur in time proximity (Matute et al., 2015). This cognitive bias could explain why people sometimes judge that completely ineffective treatments cause health benefits (Matute et al., 2011), particularly when both the administration of the treatment (i.e., the cause) and the relief of the symptoms (i.e., the outcome) occur with high frequency (Allan et al., 2005; Hannah and Beneteau, 2009; Musca et al., 2010; Perales et al., 2005; Vadillo et al., 2010). Although the causal illusion is subject to variations in the probability with which the potential cause and the outcome occur, and hence most theoretical analyses of the phenomenon have focused on how people acquire contingency information (e.g., Matute et al., 2019), the participant’s prior beliefs could also play a role, and this will be the focus of the current paper. In fact, influence of prior beliefs seems common in other cognitive biases that enable humans to protect their worldviews. A good example is the classical phenomenon of belief bias (Evans et al., 1983; Klauer et al., 2000; Markovits and Nantel, 1989). This consists of people’s tendency to accept the conclusion of a deductive inference based on their prior knowledge and beliefs rather than on the logical validity of the arguments. For example, the syllogism ‘All birds can fly. Eagles can fly. Therefore, eagles are birds’ is invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises, but people would often judge it as valid just because the conclusion seems in line with their previous knowledge. There is a specific form of belief bias known as ‘motivated reasoning’ (Trippas et al., 2015), in which people exhibit a strong preference or motivation to arrive at a particular conclusion when they are making an inference (Kunda, 1990). Thus, individuals draw the conclusion they want to believe from the available evidence. To do this, people tend to dismiss information that is incongruent with prior beliefs and focus excessively on evidence that supports prior conceptions, which resembles the popular confirmation bias (Oswald and Grosjean, 2004). Additionally, some evidence points out that motivated reasoning can specifically affect causal inferences (Kahan et al., 2017), particularly when people learn about cause–effect relationships from their own experience (Caddick and Rottman, 2021). Thus, if these cognitive biases show the effect of prior beliefs, it should not be surprising that causal illusions operate in a similar way. In fact, some experimental evidence suggests that this is the case. For example, Blanco et al. (2018) found that political ideology could modulate causal illusion so that the resulting inference fits previous beliefs. In particular, the results from their experiments suggest that participants developed a causal illusion selectively to favor the conclusions that they were more inclined to believe from the beginning. Thus, we predict that prior beliefs about science and pseudoscience could also bias causal inferences about treatments and their health outcomes. More specifically, we suggest that, when people attempt to assess the effectiveness of a pseudoscientific or scientific medical treatment, their causal inferences may be biased to suit their prior beliefs and attitudes about both types of treatments. In line with this idea, a recent study by Torres et al. (2020) explicitly examined the relationship between causal illusion in the laboratory and belief in pseudoscience. These authors designed a causal illusion task with a pseudoscience-framed scenario: participants had to decide whether an infusion made up of an Amazonian plant (i.e., a fictitious natural remedy that mimicked the characteristics of alternative medicine) was effective at alleviating headache. They found that participants who held stronger pseudoscientific beliefs (assessed by means of a questionnaire) showed a greater degree of causal illusion in their experiment, overestimating the ability of the herbal tea to alleviate the headache. Importantly, note that this experiment only contained one cover story, framed in a pseudoscientific scenario. We argue that the results observed by Torres et al. (2020) have two possible interpretations: the first is that people who believed in pseudoscience were more prone to causal illusion in general, regardless of the cover story of the task; the second, based on the effect observed by Blanco et al. (2018) in the context of political ideology, is that the illusion is produced to confirm previous beliefs, that is, those participants who had a positive attitude toward alternative medicine were more inclined to believe that the infusion was working to heal the headache, and causal illusion developed to favor this conclusion. Given that only one pseudoscientific scenario was used in Torres et al.’s experiment, it is impossible to distinguish between the two interpretations. Thus, further research is necessary to analyze how individual differences in pseudoscientific beliefs modulate the intensity of causal illusion, and whether this modulation interacts with the scenario so that prior beliefs are reinforced. To sum up, the present research aims to fill this gap by assessing the participants’ attitude toward pseudoscience, and then presenting an experimental task in which participants are asked to judge the effectiveness of two fictitious medical treatments: one presented as conventional/scientific, and the other one as alternative/pseudoscientific. None of these treatments were causally related to recovery. Our main hypothesis is that the intensity of the observed causal illusion will depend on the interaction between previous beliefs about pseudoscience and the current type of medicine presented. Specifically, we expect that: • Participants with less positive previous beliefs about pseudoscience will develop weaker illusions in the pseudoscientific scenario than in the scientific scenario. For those participants, the conclusion that an alternative medicine is working is not very credible according to their prior beliefs. • Participants with more positive beliefs about pseudoscience could either show the opposite pattern (so that they find more believable the conclusion that the pseudoscientific medicine works than the conclusion that the scientific medicine works), which would be consistent with the studies by Blanco et al. (2018) on political ideology, or, alternatively, they could show similar levels of (strong) causal illusion for both treatments, which would suggest that pseudoscientific beliefs are associated with stronger causal illusions in general, as has been previously suggested (Torres et al., 2020)Grant PID2021-126320NB-I00 from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish GovernmentGrant IT1696-22 from the Basque Governmen

La promoción de la responsabilidad social en los tratados de inversión. Los casos de Bolivia y Venezuela

Las inversiones son principalmente transacciones privadas que tienden a generar tasas de retorno positivas, pero pueden tener implicaciones de largo alcance para el bienestar de los países receptores, incluyendo las perspectivas del desarrollo sostenible, el uso y la protección de los recursos naturales, el empleo, la salud o los ingresos económicos de las comunidades locales. El presente estudio nace de la inquietud de conciliar dos tendencias: el equilibrio entre las preocupaciones sobre el desarrollo y la sostenibilidad asociadas a la inversión y la evolución armónica de la compleja relación entre inversores, estados anfitriones y las comunidades locales. Desde un punto de vista económico, los acuerdos de inversión internacionales pretenden promover el desarrollo sostenible, sin embargo, existen pocos estudios que avalen los beneficios de los acuerdos de inversión. Mientras los gobiernos enfatizan las oportunidades que crea la inversión extranjera directa, y su principal objetivo es desarrollar marcos que protejan a los inversionistas, la sociedad civil se hace eco de los riesgos que pueden crear los inversionistas extranjeros, y tiende por tanto, a defender enfoques más prohibitivos que minimicen los efectos negativos. Los acuerdos de inversión constituyen en principio, mecanismos para promover una mejor distribución del capital a través de la no discriminación; al mismo tiempo que la reducción de riesgos políticos determina inversiones con menor rendimiento. Por otra parte, en cuanto a los efectos para el receptor, el mismo Banco Mundial ha reconocido que la miríada de los tratados bilaterales de inversión existentes “no parecen haber aumentado los flujos de inversión hacia los países en desarrollo signatarios”. Sin embargo, las potencialidades de un acuerdo de inversión para la promoción de un desarrollo sostenible y efectivo son enormes. Un acuerdo internacional debe promover la interacción con las instituciones domésticas para equilibrar los derechos del inversor (derechos de entrada, tratamiento no discriminatorio, etc.) frente a los bienes públicos(integridad medioambiental, salud, etc.). En los países en desarrollo el objetivo fundamental de estos acuerdos ha de ser promover las instituciones existentes y desarrollar capacidades institucionales que evalúen, regulen y construyan adecuadamente proyectos de inversión a la luz del interés público y los derechos privados que se tratan de proteger. Hasta hoy no existe un vínculo entre la responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) y las negociaciones de acuerdos de inversión. Sin embargo, podemos aventurar la hipótesis de que si la responsabilidad social empresarial pretende avanzar hacia un enfoque más constructivo, tratando de influir en la conducta de las compañías, no mediante la confrontación sino mediante la cooperación, generando soluciones de ganancias mutuas, a través de beneficios sociales, económicos y ambientales, los acuerdos de inversión serían una instancia lógica para abordar estos temas

Gas chromatography olfactometry (gc-o) for the (semi)quantitative screening of wine aroma

This review discusses the different approaches developed by researchers in the last 40 years for the qualitative and semi-quantitative screening of odorants, with special emphasis in wine aroma profiling. In the first part, the aims and possibilities of Gas chromatography-olfactometry (GC-O) as odour-screening and aroma profiling technique are discussed. The critical difference between approaches is whether the ranking of odorants is carried out on an extract containing all the odorants present in the product, or on an extract representative of the odorants contained in the vapour phases that cause the odour and flavour. While the second alternative is more direct and can be more efficient, it requires a good understanding of the factors affecting orthonasal olfaction, handling volatiles (purging, trapping, eluting, and separating) and about the sensory assessment of GC effluents. The review also includes an updated list compiling all the odorants detected in wine by GC-O, including retention indexes and odour descriptions with a general guideline for the identification of odorants