Literature as a methodology to teach English in Primary School: The Witches by Roald Dahl

The current high requirement for English language skills calls for an educational system that integrates the process of teaching and learning the language, leaving behind the so-called traditional methodologies or those that teach it exclusively based on writing and grammar. This project aims to show English teachers in Primary Education a more recent and practical methodological perspective of teaching the English language. It also seeks to encourage primary students in Spain to read in their second language (SL), i.e. English and to improve their SL in a different and more creative and fun way. In order to do so, a classroom intervention has been proposed based on the children’s fantasy novel The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983) and by practising a combination of three teaching methodologies, namely, Total Physical Response, The Communicative Approach and Project-based Learning.La demanda actual de conocimientos de inglés exige un sistema educativo que integre el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje del idioma, dejando atrás las denominadas metodologías tradicionales o las que lo enseñan exclusivamente basadas en la escritura y la gramática. El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar a los profesores de inglés en Educación Primaria una metodología reciente y práctica para la enseñanza de la lengua inglesa. También pretende animar a los alumnos de Educación Primaria a leer en la segunda lengua de una forma diferente, creativa y divertida. Para ello se ha propuesto una intervención en el aula basada en la novela fantástica infantil Las Brujas de Roald Dahl (1983) y en la práctica de una combinación de tres metodologías de enseñanza, como son, la Respuesta Física Total, el Enfoque Comunicativo y el Aprendizaje basado en Proyectos.Grado en Educación Primari

Nomad. Aplicación móvil de gestión de rutas e itinerarios de viajes

En la actualidad el uso de aplicaciones de viajes como Airhopping o Trivago está en un crecimiento continuo, siendo usadas sobre todo por la juventud. En este trabajo proponemos una aplicación que ofrecerá itinerarios de viajes. La propuesta ha requerido un análisis del sector en aplicación móvil, un plan de viabilidad y un análisis de plan digital.Departamento de Sociología y Trabajo SocialGrado en Publicidad y Relaciones Pública

Multivariate extreme storm surge flooding events on the UK’s east coast

In the United Kingdom (UK), floods, and specifically coastal flooding, are a hazard that is commonly thought likely to increase due to the impacts of climate change and the results of development in areas at risk. East coast storm surges have been extremely devastating in the recent past, such as the events of 1953 or the winter of 2013/14. The challenge is to analysis the risk of widespread, concurrent and clustered coastal flooding in a regional scale. It is widely accepted that extreme value analysis (EVA) is an important tool for studying coastal flood risk, but it requires the estimation of a threshold to define extreme events and has to cope with the problems of missing values within the dataset. The main areas of research discussed in this thesis involve making improvements to the way that extreme thresholds are selected and providing an alternative approach for multivariate missing values. By applying an automated threshold selection method to the data, more plausible and less subjective results can be yielded over the traditional manual approach. The alternative multivariate analysis at regional scale considers the statistical dependences between locations and which possible combination of events to take into account in order to handle missing values within time series dataset. Both areas of research provide developments to existing extreme value methodologies, hence enhancing the predicted future storm surge coastal flood modelling. An application of this research is to analysis the potential impacts of proposed nuclear power stations considering the increase likelihood of occurrence of extreme storm surge events. This research undertakes EVA with the statistical programming language R. However, R provides a range of functions embedded in different R packages, it was necessary to create new functions, scripts and commands to improve the analysis of extremes in order to undertake the threshold selection and cope with missing values. This research selects, as a case study, fourteen tide gauges along the East Coast of the UK from Lerwick to Dover. The main measure is skew surge due to be an independent and identically distributed variable and all phase differences in the calculations are removed. The multivariate model provides the likelihood of future significant storm surge flooding events along the East Coast of the UK. Results show that return levels for 50, 100 and 250 years estimates higher impact of ≈1m in Felixstowe, Sheerness, Immingham, Cromer and Lowestoft, while the northern gauges show an increment of ≈0.5m. Moreover, due to the overdispersion of the dataset, high predicted values are estimated in Lowestoft, Felixstowe and Dover where currently nuclear power sites are generating energy and new sites will be built in the future. In summary, the main aim of this research is to undertake a multivariate extreme model to analysis the potential impacts of future storm surge coastal flooding at a regional scale. By analysing extreme skew surge events at a regional level, a more complex storm surge coastal flooding model can be elaborated, and therefore, better results can be obtained. The multivariate extreme model requires how to select extreme events and how to handle missing values within the dataset. Hence, the proposed Automated Graphic Threshold Selection (AGTS) method provides a mathematical and computational tool to select extreme threshold, and moreover, the Multivariate Extreme Missing Value Approach (MEMVA) handles the missing values in time series dataset. The multivariate extreme model has the potential to improve the regional risk assessment of widespread, concurrent and clustered coastal flooding events

Activity suppressed phase separation

We use a continuum model to examine the effect of activity on a phase separating mixture of an extensile active nematic and a passive fluid. We highlight the distinct role of previously considered interfacial active stresses and bulk active stresses that couple to liquid crystalline degrees of freedom. Interfacial active stresses can arrest phase separation, as previously demonstrated. Bulk extensile active stresses can additionally strongly suppress phase separation by sustained self-stirring of the fluid, substantially reducing the size of the coexistence region in the temperature/concentration plane relative to that of the passive system. The phase separated state is a dynamical emulsion-like steady state of continuously splitting and merging droplets, as suggested by recent experiments. Using scaling analysis and simulations, we identify various regimes for the dependence of droplet size on activity. These results can provide a criterion for identifying the mechanisms responsible for arresting phase separation in experiments

Diseño de un modelo basado en criterios e indicadores de características para la evaluación de los sitios webs de archivos

Archives cannot be left out the Internet as the Web has become an indispensable tool for the development of the societies and to publicize the services and products that the institutions offer. This openness and diffusion of the archive through the Internet has also brought the need to check what level of quality they present. To do that it is necessary to evaluate them and to attend to some indicators or specific features related to their design, structure or contents. The main target of his work is to design a comprehensive template of specific characteristics for the evaluation of archive websites. The results and conclusions of this work demonstrate that it is possible to design a specific model of features determining which ones are those that best represent the quality of an archive on the Web.Los archivos no pueden quedarse al margen de Internet puesto que la Red se ha convertido en una herramienta imprescindible para el desarrollo de las sociedades y para dar a conocer los servicios y los productos que ofrecen las instituciones. Esta apertura y difusión del archivo a través de la Web contribuye, sin duda, al incremento de su visibilidad. Ahora bien, el aumento de los archivos en Internet también ha traído consigo la necesidad de comprobar qué nivel de calidad presentan. Para ello, es preciso evaluarlos atendiendo a unos indicadores o características específicas relacionadas con su diseño, estructura o contenido. El objetivo principal del presente trabajo es el diseño de una plantilla exhaustiva de características específicas para la evaluación de los sitios web de archivos. Los resultados y las conclusiones del trabajo demuestran que es posible diseñar un modelo específico de características determinando cuáles son las que mejor representan la calidad de un archivo en la Web

Prevalence and characteristics of hepatitis C virus infection detected by extended screening of working-age adults in Madrid (Spain).

post-print228 K

Vorticity phase separation and defect lattices in the isotropic phase of active liquid crystals

We use numerical simulations and linear stability analysis to study the dynamics of an active liquid crystal film on a substrate in the regime where the passive system would be isotropic. Extensile activity builds up local orientational order and destabilizes the quiescent isotropic state above a critical activity value, eventually resulting in spatiotemporal chaotic dynamics akin to the one observed ubiquitously in the nematic state. Here we show that tuning substrate friction yields a variety of emergent structures at intermediate activity, including lattices of flow vortices with associated regular arrangements of topological defects and a new state where flow vortices trap pairs of $+1/2$ defect that chase each other tail. These chiral units spontaneously pick the sense of rotation and organize in a hexagonal lattice, surrounded by a diffuse flow of opposite rotation to maintain zero net vorticity. The length scale of these emergent structures is set by the screening length $l_\eta=\sqrt{\eta/\Gamma}$ of the flow, controlled by the shear viscosity $\eta$ and the substrate friction $\Gamma$, and can be captured by simple mode selection of the vortical flows. We demonstrate that the emergence of coherent structures can be interpreted as a phase separation of vorticity, where friction plays a role akin to that of birth/death processes in breaking conservation of the phase separating species and selecting a characteristic scale for the patterns. Our work shows that friction provides an experimentally accessible tuning parameter for designing controlled active flows

Improvement of dough rheology, bread quality and bread shelf-life by enzymes combination

12 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables.-- Published online 28 November 2006.Present work seeks to systematically analyse the individual and synergistic effects of some gluten-crosslinking enzymes (transglutaminase, glucose oxidase and laccase), along with polysaccharide and gluten degrading enzymes (alpha-amylase, xylanase and protease), in breadmaking systems. Except glucose oxidase (GO) and laccase (LAC), enzymes affected significantly to viscoelastic properties of dough. Results confirmed the strengthening effect exerted by transglutaminase (TG). However, alpha-amylase (AMYL), xylanase (XYL) and protease (PROT) promoted a similar decrease in all dynamic moduli analysed, particularly after 180 min of incubation. Addition of XYL to TG containing samples showed to be an interesting alternative to prevent excessive dough strengthening. Bread quality parameters were significantly affected by individual enzyme addition, except when LAC was used. TG diminished loaf specific volume and provided a finer crumb structure. Polysaccharide degrading enzymes and PROT led to better shape, greater specific volume and void fraction of loaves. Significant interactions between TG and all the other enzymes except GO, were proved. According to crumb texture evolution during storage, bread staling increased with TG addition, whilst AMYL, XYL and PROT exhibited a significant antistaling effect.This work was financially supported by Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología Projects (MCYT, AGL2002-04093-C03ALI and AGL2005-05192-C04), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and Universidad de Valladolid, Spain.Peer reviewe

IDE-OTALEX. The first crossborder SDI between Portugal and Spain

IDE-OTALEX is the first crossborder spatial data infrastructure between contiguous Portuguese (Alentejo and Centro) and Spanish (Extremadura) regions. IDE-OTALEX was implemented to share official geographic information, from Alentejo and Extremadura, and now Centro region, with everyone. This is the most effective way to have a distributed and flexible system to be used as a territorial observatory for sustainable development and environment protection in these rural and low populated regions. It also contributes to territorial cohesion, one of the tree main pillars of European Cohesion Policy. It’s characterized for being a distributed, decentralized, modular and collaborative system, based on standards (OGC, W3C, ISO) and open source technology, developed to guarantee interoperability between the different GIS provided by each project partner. The geoportal is multilingual (Portuguese, Spanish and English) and integrates a Map viewer, Metadata Catalogue and Gazetteer. It consists in central and local nodes which communicate through WMS (Web Map Services), CSW (Catalog Service Web) and WFS (Web Feature Services). It is now implementing SOS (sensor observation services) and WPS (web map processing). The geographic information on it available results of an extensive work of data harmonisation adapted to INSPIRE Directive (D 2007/2/EC, of the European Parliament and Council, of March 14, 2007). It integrates basic cartography, socio-economic and environmental indicators