Monte Bernorio (Palencia): siglo I a.C. / 1936- 1937 d.C. Arqueología de un campo de batalla

El yacimiento de Monte Bernorio es uno de los más importantes de la Edad del Hierro en el norte de la Península Ibérica. Por su estratégico emplazamiento, este oppidum tuvo un importante papel en la guerra de conquista que el Emperador Augusto desarrolló contra los territorios de Cántabros y Ástures. Dos mil años más tarde este núcleo volvió a tener una crucial importancia estratégica en los enfrentamientos de la Guerra Civil, en los que Monte Bernorio jugó un papel fundamental dentro del denominado “Frente Norte”. A través del estudio arqueológico de los restos que se han conservado de los combates se puede llegar a comprender la dureza de la guerra en esta área y las condiciones de vida de los soldados en las posiciones que se erigieron entre los restos de la Edad del Hierro.Monte Bernorio is one of the most important Iron Age sites in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. Due to its strategic position, this oppidum played a relevant role in the war of conquest that Emperor Augustus carried out in the land of the Cantabrians and Asturians. Two thousand years later, this place was again of great strategic relevance during the Spanish Civil War: Monte Bernorio played a crucial role within the so-called “Northern Front”. Through the archaeological study of the Civil War remains, it is possible to understand the hardness of the combats that took place in this area, as well as the harsh conditions of life experienced by those soldiers who fought among the ruins of an Iron Age settlement

SVMs for Automatic Speech Recognition: a Survey

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are, undoubtedly, the most employed core technique for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Nevertheless, we are still far from achieving high-performance ASR systems. Some alternative approaches, most of them based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), were proposed during the late eighties and early nineties. Some of them tackled the ASR problem using predictive ANNs, while others proposed hybrid HMM/ANN systems. However, despite some achievements, nowadays, the preponderance of Markov Models is a fact. During the last decade, however, a new tool appeared in the field of machine learning that has proved to be able to cope with hard classification problems in several fields of application: the Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The SVMs are effective discriminative classifiers with several outstanding characteristics, namely: their solution is that with maximum margin; they are capable to deal with samples of a very higher dimensionality; and their convergence to the minimum of the associated cost function is guaranteed. These characteristics have made SVMs very popular and successful. In this chapter we discuss their strengths and weakness in the ASR context and make a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques. We organize the contributions in two parts: isolated-word recognition and continuous speech recognition. Within the first part we review several techniques to produce the fixed-dimension vectors needed for original SVMs. Afterwards we explore more sophisticated techniques based on the use of kernels capable to deal with sequences of different length. Among them is the DTAK kernel, simple and effective, which rescues an old technique of speech recognition: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Within the second part, we describe some recent approaches to tackle more complex tasks like connected digit recognition or continuous speech recognition using SVMs. Finally we draw some conclusions and outline several ongoing lines of research

Attack and destruction of the Monte Bernorio oppidvm and the establishment of a roman castellvm

El "oppidum" de Monte Bernorio resulta bien conocido como una de las ciudades fortificadas de la Edad del Hierro más importantes del cantábrico. En las campañas militares que el emperador Octavio Augusto desencadeno contra "Cántabros y Ástures" la conquista de este "oppidum" resultó esencial, como demuestran las recientes campañas de excavación arqueológicas. Se presentan en este trabajo algunas novedades relacionadas con el descubrimiento, en su "acrópolis", del "agger" de un "castellum" romano construido aprovechando en parte el dispositivo defensivo indígena. Este "castellum" tuvo varias fases de ocupación sucesivas con al menos dos reconstrucciones de las estructuras defensivas de esta fortificación.Monte Bernorio Hillfort is a very well known "oppidum" and one of the most important Iron Age sites in the North of Spain. The siege of this "oppidum" was essential during Emperor Augustus’ military campaign against Cantabrian and Asturian peoples, as shown by the latest archaeological researches in this site. In this paper we introduce new findings regarding the discovery, in the "acropolis" of the hillfort, of the "agger" of a Roman fort, built using some parts of the indigenous defenses. The roman fort has experienced different occupation periods with no less than two different phases

The burn severity and plant recovery relationship affect the biological and chemical soil properties of Pinus halepensis Mill. stands in the short and midterms after wildfire

In the Mediterranean Basin, changes in climate and fire regime (increased recurrence and severity) reduce ecosystem services after wildfires by increasing soil degradation and losses in plant diversity. Our study was a biological approach to relate soil properties to vegetation recovery and burn severity. We focused our study on the natural recovery of the soil-plant interphase in Pinus halepensis Mill. forests located in the SE of Iberian Peninsula, a semiarid climate. We included some chemical properties 3 years after fire (available phosphorus (P) and soil organic carbon (Corg), among others), and biological soil indicators 3 and 5 years after fire (i.e. basal soil respiration (BSR), microbial biomass carbon (Cmic), carbon mineralization coefficient (Cmineral), metabolic quotient (qCO2) and microbial quotient (Cmic:Corg)). We analyzed the activity of three different enzymes: urease (UR), phosphatase (PHP) and β-glucosidase (GLU). The changes in most chemical properties were ephemeral, but P and Corg showed higher values in burned areas, and the highest were found for low-moderate severity. Plant recovery was the triggering factor for the recovery of Corg and biological soil function. Burn severity and time after fire influenced Cmic and the Cmic:Corg, which were higher for moderate-high severity 3 years later, but were below the unburned values 5 years after fire. The microbial activities of GLU and UR were recovered in burned areas 5 years after fire. The PHP values lowered according to higher burn severity and time after fire. The soil ecological trends obtained by a principal component analysis revealed a relationship linking GLU, BSR and qCO2 that explained soil response to burn severity. PHP, Cmic and Cmic:Corg explained most of the variability related to time after fire. Our results provide insights into how burn severity, in Mediterranean fire-prone Aleppo pine stands, modulated the natural plant recovery linked to soil biochemical and microbiological response to fire. High burn severity limited natural vegetation recovery, and both reduced biological soil functionality. This knowledge can be implemented in post-fire planning to apply post-fire management (for mitigation and restoration) in which the “no intervention” tool should be contemplated. These findings provide information to be applied in adaptive forest management to improve the resilience of vulnerable ecosystems and to reduce burn severity in future fire events.This study was supported by a research award provided by the Instituto Estudios Albacetenses (IEA2016-Daniel Moya) and funds provided to the Forest Ecology Research Group by the University Castilla-La Mancha.The authors also thank the Spanish Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (INIA) for the funding awarded through National Research Projects GEPRIF (RTA2014-00011-C06), POSTFIRE_CARE (CGL2016-75178-C2-1-R) financed by the Spanish Research Agency (AIE), and the European Union for European Funding for Regional Development (FEDER)

Robust ASR using Support Vector Machines

The improved theoretical properties of Support Vector Machines with respect to other machine learning alternatives due to their max-margin training paradigm have led us to suggest them as a good technique for robust speech recognition. However, important shortcomings have had to be circumvented, the most important being the normalisation of the time duration of different realisations of the acoustic speech units. In this paper, we have compared two approaches in noisy environments: first, a hybrid HMM–SVM solution where a fixed number of frames is selected by means of an HMM segmentation and second, a normalisation kernel called Dynamic Time Alignment Kernel (DTAK) first introduced in Shimodaira et al. [Shimodaira, H., Noma, K., Nakai, M., Sagayama, S., 2001. Support vector machine with dynamic time-alignment kernel for speech recognition. In: Proc. Eurospeech, Aalborg, Denmark, pp. 1841–1844] and based on DTW (Dynamic Time Warping). Special attention has been paid to the adaptation of both alternatives to noisy environments, comparing two types of parameterisations and performing suitable feature normalisation operations. The results show that the DTA Kernel provides important advantages over the baseline HMM system in medium to bad noise conditions, also outperforming the results of the hybrid system.Publicad

Reliability and validity of the Spanish version of the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (10-item CD-RISC) in young adults

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (10-item CD-RISC) is an instrument for measuring resilience that has shown good psychometric properties in its original version in English. The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Spanish version of the 10-item CD-RISC in young adults and to verify whether it is structured in a single dimension as in the original English version.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Cross-sectional observational study including 681 university students ranging in age from 18 to 30 years. The number of latent factors in the 10 items of the scale was analyzed by exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to verify whether a single factor underlies the 10 items of the scale as in the original version in English. The convergent validity was analyzed by testing whether the mean of the scores of the mental component of SF-12 (MCS) and the quality of sleep as measured with the Pittsburgh Sleep Index (PSQI) were higher in subjects with better levels of resilience. The internal consistency of the 10-item CD-RISC was estimated using the Cronbach α test and test-retest reliability was estimated with the intraclass correlation coefficient.</p> <p>The Cronbach α coefficient was 0.85 and the test-retest intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.71. The mean MCS score and the level of quality of sleep in both men and women were significantly worse in subjects with lower resilience scores.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The Spanish version of the 10-item CD-RISC showed good psychometric properties in young adults and thus can be used as a reliable and valid instrument for measuring resilience. Our study confirmed that a single factor underlies the resilience construct, as was the case of the original scale in English.</p

Cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between cardiorespiratory fitness and health-related quality of life in primary school children in England: the mediating role of psychological correlates of physical activity

Aims: The aims were (1) to analyse the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between children’s cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and (2) to examine whether these associations were mediated by physical activity self-efficacy and physical activity enjoyment. Methods: This study involved 383 children (10.0 ± 0.5 years) recruited from 20 primary schools in northwest England. Data were collected on two occasions 12 weeks apart. The number of laps completed in the 20-m Shuttle Run Test was used as the CRF indicator. HRQoL was assessed using the KIDSCREEN-10 questionnaire. Physical activity self-efficacy and enjoyment were assessed with the social-cognitive and Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale questionnaires, respectively. Linear mixed models with random intercepts (schools) assessed associations between CRF and HRQoL cross-sectionally, and longitudinally. Boot-strapped mediation procedures were performed, and indirect effects (IE) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) not including zero considered as statistically significant. Analyses were adjusted for sex, time of the year, socioeconomic status, waist-to-height ratio, maturation, and physical activity. Results: CRF was cross-sectionally associated with HRQoL (β = 0.09, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.16; p = .015). In the longitudinal analysis, CRF at baseline was associated with HRQoL at 12 weeks after additionally controlling for baseline HRQoL (β = 0.08, 95% CI = 0.002; p = .15, p = .045). Cross-sectionally, physical activity self-efficacy and enjoyment acted individually as mediators in the relationship between CRF and HRQoL (IE = 0.069, 95% CI = 0.038; p = .105 and IE = 0.045, 95% CI = 0.016; p = .080, respectively). In the longitudinal analysis, physical activity self-efficacy showed a significant mediating effect (IE = 0.025, 95% CI = 0.004; p = .054). Conclusion: Our findings highlight the influence of CRF on children’s psychological correlates of physical activity and their overall HRQoL

Extent and persistence of soil water repellency induced by pines in different geographic regions

This work was supported by the Slovak Scientific Grant Agency VEGA Project Nos. 2/0054/14 and 2/0009/2015, the Slovak Research and Development Agency Project No. APVV-15-0160, and it results from the project implementation of the “Centre of excellence for integrated flood protection of land” (ITMS 26240120004).Peer reviewedPublisher PD