The teaching of Spanish in Maltese secondary schools : an overview of the current state and needs

This contribution looks at the teaching of Spanish in Maltese secondary schools. However, before looking more closely at its establishment and development in Malta, it is probably desirable that we review the growth of Spanish in the world. In this manner we will be in a position to better understand the specific context of the teaching of Spanish in Forms IV and V in Maltese secondary schools.peer-reviewe

MUEGANO: A divide and conquer algorithm to overcome memory limitations when assembling shotgun projects

When assembling a large quantity of reads in a genomic shotgun project a serious limitation is the amount of random access memory (RAM) of the computers used in the project. This arises because all assembling programs must look at all the overlaps between reads at the same time, using RAM in order to construct contigs, and the memory of the computer can be filled up during this step, causing the abortion of the assembling process.
Here we propose an algorithm that is capable of overcoming any memory limitation by using redundancy of processing and thus producing an increase in computing time but overcoming the memory limitation.
The proposed algorithm consists in dividing the reads in a set of groups which size is half the maximum capability in memory of the computer used and performing assembling for all the possible combination pairs of such groups. After eliminating the redundancy of the set of contigs obtained in the previous step, the process is iterated until a set of contigs of manageable size is obtained such that the set can be handled by the assembler in a final step.
Each step of the procedure increases the time of computing from k to approximately k + k(k-1)/2, but in many practical cases only one step is needed to finish the assembling process. The procedure is suitable for any kind of assembler and was successfully applied to the assembly of a very large set of reads from the maize genome

Physics reach of CERN-based SuperBeam neutrino oscillation experiments

We compare the physics potential of two representative options for a SuperBeam in Europe, studying the achievable precision at 1\sigma with which the CP violation phase (\delta) could be measured, as well as the mass hierarchy and CP violation discovery potentials. The first setup corresponds to a high energy beam aiming from CERN to a 100 kt liquid argon detector placed at the Pyh\"asalmi mine (2300 km), one of the LAGUNA candidate sites. The second setup corresponds to a much lower energy beam, aiming from CERN to a 500 kt water \v{C}erenkov detector placed at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory (730 km). This second option is also studied for a baseline of 650 km, corresponding to the LAGUNA candidate sites of Umbria and the Canfranc underground laboratory. All results are presented also for scenarios with statistics lowered by factors of 2, 4, 8 and 16 to study the possible reductions of flux, detector mass or running time allowed by the large value of \theta_{13} recently measured.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Reassessing the sensitivity to leptonic CP violation

We address the validity of the usual procedure to determine the sensitivity of neutrino oscillation experiments to CP violation. An explicit calibration of the test statistic is performed through Monte Carlo simulations for several experimental setups. We find that significant deviations from a $\chi^2$ distribution with one degree of freedom occur for experimental setups with low sensitivity to $\delta$. In particular, when the allowed region to which $\delta$ is constrained at a given confidence level is comparable to the whole allowed range, the cyclic nature of the variable manifests and the premises of Wilk's theorem are violated. This leads to values of the test statistic significantly lower than a $\chi^2$ distribution at that confidence level. On the other hand, for facilities which can place better constraints on $\delta$ the cyclic nature of the variable is hidden and, as the potential of the facility improves, the values of the test statistics first become slightly higher than and then approach asymptotically a $\chi^2$ distribution. The role of sign degeneracies is also discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, RevTeX4. The discussion of the results has been improved and considerably extended. Version accepted for publication in JHE