Mexico’s Information Policies at the End of the Millenium

Mexico’s information policies have been adapted to participate in a more global world in the last decade of the millenium. The formal joining of the country to the former GATT, and NAFTA, and several other free trade agreements with Latin American nations has meant changes and adaptations of intellectual property, copyright and flow of information legislation. This in turn has shaped information policies at institutional, county, state and national level. The new legal national information framework is just beginning to impact information servicies of most type of organizations, such as libraries. This paper gives an overview of Mexico’s laws and legal initiatives that will shape the future flow of information in Mexican society in the years to come and the effect in library and information services

Mexico’s Information Policies at the End of the Millenium

Mexico’s information policies have been adapted to participate in a more global world in the last decade of the millenium. The formal joining of the country to the former GATT, and NAFTA, and several other free trade agreements with Latin American nations has meant changes and adaptations of intellectual property, copyright and flow of information legislation. This in turn has shaped information policies at institutional, county, state and national level. The new legal national information framework is just beginning to impact information servicies of most type of organizations, such as libraries. This paper gives an overview of Mexico’s laws and legal initiatives that will shape the future flow of information in Mexican society in the years to come and the effect in library and information services

Efecto agudo del entrenamiento muscular excéntrico sobre la estabilidad del miembro inferior durante el aterrizaje después de caida desde diferentes alturas en jóvenes futbolistas de élite

El objetivo principal de la presente investigación fue analizar el efecto agudo de una sesión de entrenamiento de fuerza con sobrecarga excéntrica sobre la estabilidad del miembro inferior tras aterrizaje después de caída desde altura de 30 cm y 50 cm. La muestra estuvo constituida por un total de dieciocho jugadores de fútbol (edad = 17 ± 1.2 años; altura = 178 ± 2,34 cm; peso = 71 ± 4.56 kg; IMC = 19.12 ± 2.45) pertenecientes a la cantera de un equipo profesional de fútbol de la liga española participaron en el estudio. Previamente al inicio del estudio se procedió con dos sesiones de familiarización con los dispositivos utilizados y se llevó a cabo un test de potencia máxima (Pmax) para el ejercicio de ½ squat y de leg curl con dispositivo YoYoTM. Los sujetos participantes fueron aleatorizados para la realización de tres sesiones de entrenamiento: situación control (CON), entrenamiento con ejercicio de ½ squat (EXP-Q) y entrenamiento con ejercicio de leg curl (EXP-ISQ). Todas las sesiones fueron precedidas de un calentamiento estandarizado en el que se realizaron 5 min en cicloergómetro a 80 rpm y 80 W. En el caso de las situaciones experimentales en ambos casos se llevó a cabo 4 series de 6 repeticiones separadas por un descanso de 90 s. Inmediatamente después de cada sesión los sujetos realizaron 3 aterrizajes desde altura de 30 cm y otros tanto desde altura de 50 cm sobre una plataforma de fuerza separados por un intervalo de 15 s. Los resultados arrojaron incremento del pico de fuerza en todos los ejes del movimiento analizados al comparar las situaciones experimentales con la control, si bien, tales diferencias sólo fueron estadísticamente significativas para las componentes positivas del eje “y” y del eje “x” desde ambas alturas (p<0.05). En base a estos resultados, podemos concluir que una sesión de entrenamiento con carga de Pmax y con sobrecarga excéntrica mejora la estabilidad medio-lateral de la rodilla reduciendo el valgo de la misma. Sin embargo, el incremento del pico de fuerza en el eje “y” positivo puede relacionarse con un incremento de la traslación anterior del peso del cuerpo y, por tanto, de la tibia, con el consiguiente aumento del riesgo de lesión del ligamento cruzado anterior

Use of discrete choice to obtain urban freight evaluation data

The ex-ante evaluation of urban freight solutions is a complex task, due to the interference of different stakeholder groups with different views and objectives. The multi-actor multi-criteria methods have developed as a response to this scenario, but the determination of the weights required by them remains an unclear and controversial task. We propose the use of discrete choice methods as a powerful tool to confront these multi-faced evaluation problems, since the resulting surveys are flexible and easy to respond, and do not give away the final quantitative results. We have applied this methodology to the selection of urban freight solutions in the city of Seville, in Spain, followed by the determination of the relative weights associated to different objectives, both analyses carried out from the side of the carriers stakeholder group.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2013-47286-C3-3-

On the efficiency of reductions in µ-SIMD media extensions

Many important multimedia applications contain a significant fraction of reduction operations. Although, in general, multimedia applications are characterized for having high amounts of Data Level Parallelism, reductions and accumulations are difficult to parallelize and show a poor tolerance to increases in the latency of the instructions. This is specially significant for µ-SIMD extensions such as MMX or AltiVec. To overcome the problem of reductions in µ-SIMD ISAs, designers tend to include more and more complex instructions able to deal with the most common forms of reductions in multimedia. As long as the number of processor pipeline stages grows, the number of cycles needed to execute these multimedia instructions increases with every processor generation, severely compromising performance. The paper presents an in-depth discussion of how reductions/accumulations are performed in current µ-SIMD architectures and evaluates the performance trade-offs for near-future highly aggressive superscalar processors with three different styles of µ-SIMD extensions. We compare a MMX-like alternative to a MDMX-like extension that has packed accumulators to attack the reduction problem, and we also compare it to MOM, a matrix register ISA. We show that while packed accumulators present several advantages, they introduce artificial recurrences that severely degrade performance for processors with high number of registers and long latency operations. On the other hand, the paper demonstrates that longer SIMD media extensions such as MOM can take great advantage of accumulators by exploiting the associative parallelism implicit in reductions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Three-dimensional memory vectorization for high bandwidth media memory systems

Vector processors have good performance, cost and adaptability when targeting multimedia applications. However, for a significant number of media programs, conventional memory configurations fail to deliver enough memory references per cycle to feed the SIMD functional units. This paper addresses the problem of the memory bandwidth. We propose a novel mechanism suitable for 2-dimensional vector architectures and targeted at providing high effective bandwidth for SIMD memory instructions. The basis of this mechanism is the extension of the scope of vectorization at the memory level, so that 3-dimensional memory patterns can be fetched into a second-level register file. By fetching long blocks of data and by reusing 2-dimensional memory streams at this second-level register file, we obtain a significant increase in the effective memory bandwidth. As side benefits, the new 3-dimensional load instructions provide a high robustness to memory latency and a significant reduction of the cache activity, thus reducing power and energy requirements. At the investment of a 50% more area than a regular SIMD register file, we have measured and average speed-up of 13% and the potential for power savings in the L2 cache of a 30%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Fuzzy memoization for floating-point multimedia applications

Instruction memoization is a promising technique to reduce the power consumption and increase the performance of future low-end/mobile multimedia systems. Power and performance efficiency can be improved by reusing instances of an already executed operation. Unfortunately, this technique may not always be worth the effort due to the power consumption and area impact of the tables required to leverage an adequate level of reuse. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a novel way of understanding multimedia floating-point operations based on the fuzzy computation paradigm: performance and power consumption can be improved at the cost of small precision losses in computation. By exploiting this implicit characteristic of multimedia applications, we propose a new technique called tolerant memoization. This technique expands the capabilities of classic memoization by associating entries with similar inputs to the same output. We evaluate this new technique by measuring the effect of tolerant memoization for floating-point operations in a low-power multimedia processor and discuss the trade-offs between performance and quality of the media outputs. We report energy improvements of 12 percent for a set of key multimedia applications with small LUT of 6 Kbytes, compared to 3 percent obtained using previously proposed techniques.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A viral system to optimise the daily drayage problem

The intermodal transport chain can become more efficient by means of a good organisation of the drayage movements. Drayage in intermodal container terminals involves the pick up or delivery of containers at customer locations, and the main objective is normally the assignment of transportation tasks to the different vehicles, often with the presence of time windows. This paper focuses on a new approach to tackle the daily drayage problem by the use of viral system (VS). VS is a novel bio-inspired approach that makes use of a virus-infection biological analogy that is producing very satisfactory results when dealing with complex problems with huge feasibility region.Unión Europea TEC2013-47286-C3-3-