On the road to personalised and precision geomedicine: medical geology and a renewed call for interdisciplinarity

Our health depends on where we currently live, as well as on where we have lived in the past and for how long in each place. An individual’s place history is particularly relevant in conditions with long latency between exposures and clinical manifestations, as is the case in many types of cancer and chronic conditions. A patient’s geographic history should routinely be considered by physicians when diagnosing and treating individual patients. It can provide useful contextual environmental information (and the corresponding health risks) about the patient, and should thus form an essential part of every electronic patient/health record. Medical geology investigations, in their attempt to document the complex relationships between the environment and human health, typically involve a multitude of disciplines and expertise. Arguably, the spatial component is the one factor that ties in all these disciplines together in medical geology studies. In a general sense, epidemiology, statistical genetics, geoscience, geomedical engineering and public and environmental health informatics tend to study data in terms of populations, whereas medicine (including personalised and precision geomedicine, and lifestyle medicine), genetics, genomics, toxicology and biomedical/health informatics more likely work on individuals or some individual mechanism describing disease. This article introduces with examples the core concepts of medical geology and geomedicine. The ultimate goals of prediction, prevention and personalised treatment in the case of geology-dependent disease can only be realised through an intensive multiple-disciplinary approach, where the various relevant disciplines collaborate together and complement each other in additive (multidisciplinary), interactive (interdisciplinary) and holistic (transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary) manners

I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing: Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users' Privacy

In this paper, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype, although other real-time communication applications may have similar privacy issues. We first design a scheme that calls an identified targeted user inconspicuously to find his IP address, which can be done even if he is behind a NAT. By calling the user periodically, we can then observe the mobility of the user. We show how to scale the scheme to observe the mobility patterns of tens of thousands of users. We also consider the linkability threat, in which the identified user is linked to his Internet usage. We illustrate this threat by combining Skype and BitTorrent to show that it is possible to determine the file-sharing usage of identified users. We devise a scheme based on the identification field of the IP datagrams to verify with high accuracy whether the identified user is participating in specific torrents. We conclude that any Internet user can leverage Skype, and potentially other real-time communication systems, to observe the mobility and file-sharing usage of tens of millions of identified users.Comment: This is the authors' version of the ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2011 pape

El edificio del antiguo Café Moderno de Pontevedra: su arquitectura

Publicado en gallego en: “O antigo Café Moderno de Pontevedra” ISBN 84-9541-33-8. Págs.135-15. A Coruña 2001[Resumen] La rehabilitación por Álvaro Siza, para Centro Cultural de una entidad financiera de Galicia, del edificio de viviendas de Pontevedra en cuyo bajo estuvo el Café Moderno, centro literario y artístico de la sociedad decimonónica local, ha puesto en valor un edifico ecléctico que reúne toda la singularidad propia de la arquitectura burguesa, compendio de los mejores oficios de la construcción galleg

Metarel: an Ontology to support the inferencing of Semantic Web relations within Biomedical Ontologies

While OWL, the Web Ontology Language, is often regarded as the preferred language for Knowledge Representation in the world of the Semantic Web, the potential of direct representation in RDF, the Resource Description Framework, is underestimated. Here we show how ontologies adequately represented in RDF could be semantically enriched with SPARUL. To deal with the semantics of relations we created Metarel, a meta-ontology for relations. The utility of the approach is demonstrated by an application on Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) RDF graphs in the RDF Knowledge Base BioGateway. We show that Metarel can facilitate inferencing in BioGateway, which allows for queries that are otherwise not possible. Metarel is available on http://www.metarel.org

A Coruña: plaza fuerte, Castillo de San Antón y bahía.

En el último cuarto del siglo XVIII, el pintor Mariano Sánchez emprendió una serie de viajes por España para tomar las vistas de sus principales puertos. Este encargo del rey dio como resultado un conjunto excepcional de pinturas de algunos de los más importantes arsenales y puertos españoles, así como de otras obras civiles como puentes y torres costeras. La Fundación Juanelo Turriano ha reunido a un amplio equipo de historiadores, ingenieros y arquitectos para la realización de este libro, en el que por primera vez se presentan y analizan las vistas de Mariano Sánchez. A través de ellas se plantea un recorrido por los puertos españoles en un periodo capital de su historia como fue la Ilustración, cuando se multiplicaron los planes de reforma de muchos de ellos, confiando en que el mar podía proporcionar un futuro mejor al país