Olfactory function in focal epilepsies: Understanding mesial temporal lobe epilepsy beyond the hippocampus

Several lines of research have linked olfactory regions with the pathophysiology of focal epilepsies. Among those regions, the piriform cortex represents the major part of the primary olfactory cortex. According to these data, we raised the hypothesis that in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy associated with hippocampal sclerosis exists an interictal dysfunction of olfactory processing that could be more significant compared to patients with extra‐hippocampal focal epilepsy and healthy controls. This could be the consequence of a dysfunctional epileptogenic network that extends beyond the hippocampus and affects other structures, including the piriform cortex. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the olfactory function with the Sniffin' Sticks test in 32 patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy associated with hippocampal sclerosis, 30 patients with extra‐hippocampal focal epilepsy, and 22 healthy controls. Compared to the other study groups, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy due to hippocampal sclerosis showed a basal olfactory dysfunction characterized by an impairment in odor discrimination and odor identification. We also found that high seizure frequency had a strong correlation with the evaluated olfactory tasks. Our results are consistent with neuroimaging and neuropathological data that establish a link between olfactory regions and the pathophysiology of temporal lobe epileps

Estudio por medio de elementos finitos de la concentracion de esfuerzos en piezas mecanicas

87 p.La presente Memoria tiene por finalidad hacer un estudio de la concentración de esfuerzos en entalles a través del método de elementos finitos. Debido a que los problemas de entalles son difíciles de analizar analíticamente se eligió esta técnica numérica y se ocupó el programa comercial ABAQUS de elementos finitos. Se realizó un análisis de elementos finitos de dos tipos de entalles y que son comunes en problemas de Ingeniería: una placa perforada y el contacto entre un pasador y una placa. También se realizo un análisis de distribución de presiones en el agujero simulando el comportamiento del contacto entre una placa y pasador. Estos problemas se modelaron según la simetría del componente, aplicando condiciones de borde, una malla optima, con un afinamiento en los entalles, para así obtener resultados cercanos a los teóricos. Para probar la efectividad de la metodología se comparó los resultados numéricos con los teóricos. También se comparó los resultados entregados por ABAQUS entre modelos en 3-D y 2-D para lo cual el modelo en 3-D se aproximo más a los resultados teóricos. El modelo en 3-D tiene un costo alto de trabajo, resultados excelentes y resultados tridimensionales, en cambio el modelo en 2-D tiene un costo bajo de trabajo y resultados buenos. Esto permitió concluir que para modelar un óptimo problema se debe: o Hacer una malla con elementos adecuados y realizar un afinamiento en las zonas críticas (entalles). o Modelar en 3-D para problemas en que se requieran una gran exactitud porque entregan resultados más exactos que el modelo en 2-D

Cognition and its relationship with endogenous and exogenous factors in engineering students

In this research, a relational study was carried out between student cognition with endogenous factors (student attitude and age) and exogenous (collegiate origin) in engineering students of the University of Cartagena. The project was carried out in three (3) phases where the survey allowed the desired information to be obtained from an estimated nine hundred sixty (960) students between 2014 and 2016. In the second phase, the instrument was used to collect the information, which was constituted the cognitive scale of the Self-Regulation Inventory for Learning (SRLI) and in the third phase, the independent endogenous and exogenous variables were crossed with the dependent one (student cognition), constructing the bar diagram of the relationship analysis; being possible to determine statistical significance with the attitude of the student to a level of confidence of 95% while with the age and collegial origin was not relevant

Impacto de las crisis dot-com, Subprime, europea y Covid-19 en la morosidad bancaria: México

This paper analyzes the impact of the dot-com, Subprime, European, and Covid-19 crises on the delinquency rates of the seven largest banks in Mexico. To meet this objective, the delinquency rates of the seven banks in each of the crises were calculated; and by means of multiple least squares regressions with dummy variables representing each of the crises and with the loan portfolio size variable, their impact on delinquency was measured. The results showed that the dot-com crisis increased delinquency to a greater extent, the Subprime and European crises had a lesser impact, and the Covid-19 crisis modified delinquency rates to a lesser extent. The size of bank loan portfolios has increased steadily between 2000 and 2022, showing a variable relationship with the NPL ratio. In addition, it was observed that according to the values of the coefficients of the regressions, each of the crises has a different impact on each bank.  En este artículo se analiza el impacto que tienen las crisis dot-com, Subprime, europea y de Covid-19 en los índices de morosidad de los siete bancos más grandes de México. Para cumplir con este objetivo, se calcularon los índices de morosidad de los siete bancos en cada una de las crisis; y mediante regresiones múltiples por mínimos cuadrados con variables dummy que representan cada una de las crisis y con la variable tamaño de la cartera de créditos se midió su impacto en la morosidad. En los resultados se observó que la crisis dot-com aumentó en mayor magnitud la morosidad, las crisis Subprime y europea tuvieron menor impacto, y la crisis de Covid-19 modificó en menor medida los índices de morosidad. El tamaño de las carteras de créditos bancarias ha aumentado constantemente entre 2000 y 2022, mostrando una relación variable con el índice de morosidad. Además, se observó que conforme a los valores de los coeficientes de las regresiones cada una de las crisis impacta de manera diferenciada a cada banco.  &nbsp

La educación ambiental en proyectos de intervención universitaria. La experiencia del Parque Ecológico de Tepic, Nayarit.

El presente trabajo condensa la experiencia del proyecto de intervención universitaria Campamento Parque Ecológico de Tepic, cuyo objetivo es recuperar el espacio público para ofrecer a los visitantes del parque, una propuesta cultural recreativa que difunda temas relevantes para el mejoramiento ambiental de la ciudad. Como parte de la política institucional de la Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit el proyecto ingresó a conjunto de propuestas de intervención social. La metodología utilizada es de investigación acción participativa que involucra el trabajo de estudiantes y docentes del Área de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades. El trabajo se enmarca en uno de los espacios más emblemáticos de Tepic, caracterizado por un déficit de áreas verdes y problemas ambientales arraigados en prácticas sociales, culturales y políticas desarticuladas, que en su conjunto afectan la manera en que los ciudadanos interactúan con este parque.Uno de los principales hallazgos es encontrar que la población no ha hecho suyo este espacio público, ello se refleja en visitas poco frecuentes al parque, incluso por parte de vecinos circundantes. No obstante, el desarrollo del proyecto mostró el potencial que puede tener para que la gente retorne a estos espacios

Accelerating edit-distance sequence alignment on GPU using the wavefront algorithm

Sequence alignment remains a fundamental problem with practical applications ranging from pattern recognition to computational biology. Traditional algorithms based on dynamic programming are hard to parallelize, require significant amounts of memory, and fail to scale for large inputs. This work presents eWFA-GPU, a GPU (graphics processing unit)-accelerated tool to compute the exact edit-distance sequence alignment based on the wavefront alignment algorithm (WFA). This approach exploits the similarities between the input sequences to accelerate the alignment process while requiring less memory than other algorithms. Our implementation takes full advantage of the massive parallel capabilities of modern GPUs to accelerate the alignment process. In addition, we propose a succinct representation of the alignment data that successfully reduces the overall amount of memory required, allowing the exploitation of the fast shared memory of a GPU. Our results show that our GPU implementation outperforms by 3- 9× the baseline edit-distance WFA implementation running on a 20 core machine. As a result, eWFA-GPU is up to 265 times faster than state-of-the-art CPU implementation, and up to 56 times faster than state-of-the-art GPU implementations.This work was supported in part by the European Unions’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program through the DeepHealth Project under Grant 825111; in part by the European Union Regional Development Fund within the Framework of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Operational Program of Catalonia 2014–2020 with a Grant of 50% of Total Cost Eligible through the Designing RISC-V-based Accelerators for next-generation Computers Project under Grant 001-P-001723; in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (MCIN) Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI)/10.13039/501100011033 under Contract PID2020-113614RB-C21 and Contract TIN2015-65316-P; and in part by the Generalitat de Catalunya (GenCat)-Departament de Recerca i Universitats (DIUiE) (GRR) under Contract 2017-SGR-313, Contract 2017-SGR-1328, and Contract 2017-SGR-1414. The work of Miquel Moreto was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal Fellowship under Grant RYC-2016-21104.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

OpenCL-based FPGA accelerator for semi-global approximate string matching using diagonal bit-vectors

An FPGA accelerator for the computation of the semi-global Levenshtein distance between a pattern and a reference text is presented. The accelerator provides an important benefit to reduce the execution time of read-mappers used in short-read genomic sequencing. Previous attempts to solve the same problem in FPGA use the Myers algorithm following a column approach to compute the dynamic programming table. We use an approach based on diagonals that allows for some resource savings while maintaining a very high throughput of 1 alignment per clock cycle. The design is implemented in OpenCL and tested on two FPGA accelerators. The maximum performance obtained is 91.5 MPairs/s for 100 × 120 sequences and 47 MPairs/s for 300 × 360 sequences, the highest ever reported for this problem.This research was supported by the EU Regional Development Fund under the DRAC project [001-P-001723], by the MINECO-Spain (contract TIN2017-84553-C2-1-R), by the MICIU-Spain (contract RTI2018-095209-B-C22) and by the Catalan government (contracts 2017-SGR-1624, 2017-SGR313, 2017-SGR-1328). M.M. was partially supported by the MINECO under RYC-2016-21104. We thank Intel for granting us access to the DevCloud system and let us join the HARP research program. The presented HARP-2 results were obtained on resources hosted at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2) in the Intel Hardware Accelerator Research Program (HARP2).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Conditions of work and dermatitis in workers exposed to chemical risks by cement

This research was carried out in order to identify the working conditions in workers exposed to cement in a cement factory in the city of Cartagena. Through different tools it was possible to carry out the diagnosis of the working conditions and to identify the hazards to which the workers of the company are exposed when being in direct contact with the cement; in this way it was possible to know that the dermatitis that were manifesting the workers has its direct relation with this chemical and therefore to be able to establish those measures tending to ensure the complete state of health of the workers. The type of research carried out is descriptive-qualitative, the applied methodology used as a closed questions survey tool, it was obtained as a result that 70% of the respondents did not use personal protection elements when handling cement, so can say that there is a considerable number of people exposed, which increases the likelihood that they may suffer contact dermatitis, through this the different preventive measures for working and health conditions among the employees of the cement company were raised

Renal Complications Due to SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Pediatric Population

Background and Aim: COVID-19 pandemic originated in Wuhan City, China, in 2019.The disease spectrum ranges from asymptomatic to severe respiratory failure leadingto death. Although in a lower percentage, pediatric patients also have complications,not only pulmonary but also systemic, affecting other organs. This article aims to studythe renal involvement of pediatric patients infected by the Severe Acute RespiratorySyndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).Methods: We designed a retrospective observational cohort study of patientshospitalized in the emergency department and intensive care unit of a tertiary medicalfacility hospital Infantil de México Federico Gomez in Mexico City, from March 1,2020, to May 16, 2021. The inclusion criteria included patients younger than 18 yearswho had a positive Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test ora positive rapid antigen test of nasopharyngeal sample for SARS-CoV-2 at admission.Results: We included 165 patients, of whom 29(17.6%) patients developed renalcomplications during hospitalization. In these patients, 12(41.3%) patients developedproteinuria, 10(34.5%) developed any type of Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), i.e., AcuteKidney Injury Network (AKIN-1) in 26.6%, AKIN-2 in 40% and AKIN-3 in 33.3%.Also, 5(17.2%) patients had arterial hypertension, 2(6.9%) required renal replacementtherapy, 4(13.8%) had hematuria. Only 1(3.4%) patient had developed rapidlyprogressive glomerulonephritis.Conclusion: COVID-19 infection within its spectrum can cause kidney disease; themost common complications are proteinuria and AKI. Older age and admission to theintensive care unit are risk factors for kidney damage

El desarrollo municipal, factor estratégico en el posicionamiento de México en los escenarios políticos y sociales del siglo XXI

LA DEMOCRACIA COMO GOBERNABILIDAD IMPLICA, EN UN PRIMER MOMENTO, establecer una revisión periódica del papel interventor del Estado, por ser éste el principal factor de estabilidad y desarrollo democrático. En un segundo punto, de forma simultánea al estudio del papel del Estado en la conformación de un ambiente de estabilidad, crecimiento, desarrollo, orden y gobernabilidad, merece especial atención el papel y funciones cumplidas tradicionalmente por sus ámbitos de gobierno, como instancias que son fundamentales para la transición, democratización, liberalización y para la propia gobernabilidad