Bilateral and Unilateral Asymmetries of Strength and Flexibility in Young Elite Sailors: Windsurfing, Optimist and Laser Classes

In sport sailing, performance is related to the sailor’s ability to maintain the stability of the boat, and the boat class determines the variables involved in such ability. In monohull-type vessels, such as the Optimist and Laser classes, the flexibility of the hip joint is a key performance factor. In the Windsurfing class, performance is determined by the strength of the flexors of the fingers and elbows. The performance of the sailor may be a ected by asymmetries in the strength and flexibility of the muscles and joints involved in technical actions. The objective of this study was to evaluate asymmetries in strength and flexibility in young sailors. Thirty-three young sailors (ten girls) from the Windsurfing, Optimist and Laser classes were assessed for manual strength and flexibility, by dynamometry and straight leg lift tests, respectively. The symmetry index and the functional asymmetry of compression force were calculated. The results showed no di erences between sailors according to gender. The sailors of the Laser class obtained the highest levels of manual strength, whereas those of the Windsurfing class showed the highest flexibility levels. The girls’ group andWindsurfing class had the highest percentage of sailors with strength asymmetry, whereas, the sailors of the Optimist class presented a greater percentage of asymmetry in flexibility. There were no di erences in upper limb strength and lower limb flexibility between the dominant and non-dominant sides

Laplace Approximation for Divisive Gaussian Processes for Nonstationary Regression

The standard Gaussian Process regression (GP) is usually formulated under stationary hypotheses: The noise power is considered constant throughout the input space and the covariance of the prior distribution is typically modeled as depending only on the difference between input samples. These assumptions can be too restrictive and unrealistic for many real-world problems. Although nonstationarity can be achieved using specific covariance functions, they require a prior knowledge of the kind of nonstationarity, not available for most applications. In this paper we propose to use the Laplace approximation to make inference in a divisive GP model to perform nonstationary regression, including heteroscedastic noise cases. The log-concavity of the likelihood ensures a unimodal posterior and makes that the Laplace approximation converges to a unique maximum. The characteristics of the likelihood also allow to obtain accurate posterior approximations when compared to the Expectation Propagation (EP) approximations and the asymptotically exact posterior provided by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo implementation with Elliptical Slice Sampling (ESS), but at a reduced computational load with respect to both, EP and ESS

Expresiones faciales

Treballs Finals de Grau de Belles Arts de la Facultat de Belles Arts de la Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2014, Tutor: Lino Cabezas Gelabert[cat] Expresiones faciales es un proyecto artístico que representa e investiga los diferentes niveles de intimidad de tres personas a partir del rostro. Se trata de establecer una lectura múltiple de la obra: por un lado, la visión subjetiva del retrato por parte del artista, y por otro lado está la intención de conducir las posibles interpretaciones del espectador hacia un terreno ambiguo. La búsqueda constante del misterio, de rasgos enfrentados, de expresiones a medio camino, de emociones que se contradicen, responde siempre a una dicotomía intencionada. Se evoca el punto muerto entre la consciencia y la inconsciencia de los retratados, entre la pose premeditada y la mueca distraída. Un punto muerto en el rostro que rompe en cierto modo con el arquetipo actual del retrato y que pretende dejar al espectador un leve rastro de privacidad.[eng] Facial expressions is an art project that portrays and looks into the different levels of intimacy of three people by looking at their faces. The idea is to set up a dual reading of the works. On the one hand, there is the artist's subjective vision of the portrait; on the other hand, there is a will of leading the observer's feasible interpretations to a context of ambiguity. The constant search for mystery – confronted features, halfway-there expressions, contradictory emotions – always arises from this deliberate dichotomy. Thus, it suggests a neutrality between conscious and subconscious mind, the premeditated pose and the idle look. The neutral faces break away somehow from the current archetype of portraying, giving the observer a slight trace of privacity

Etnografía de un hábitat disperso de montaña. La masía La Leguna de Cortes de Arenoso (Castellón)

Etnografía de un asentamiento rural en zona de montaña, donde las condiciones de vida han sido, hasta su abandono, muy duras y alejadas de las comodidades de la modernidad. En el artículo se analizan los modos de vida de este protopueblo, donde la arquitectura de piedra en seco es mayoritaria. Las entrevistas a los antiguos pobladores del lugar aportan información etnográfica.Rural settlement ethnography in a mountain area, where life conditions were, until abandoning, hard and fare away from modernity commodities. In this article, life conditions in this hamlet, where dry stone are very important. Former settlers interview offer ethnographic information.Etnografía de un asentamiento rural en zona de montaña, donde las condiciones de vida han sido, hasta su abandono, muy duras y alejadas de las comodidades de la modernidad. En el artículo se analizan los modos de vida de este protopueblo, donde la arquitectura de piedra en seco es mayoritaria. Las entrevistas a los antiguos pobladores del lugar aportan información etnográfica

A modular CMOS analog fuzzy controller

The low/medium precision required for many fuzzy applications makes analog circuits natural candidates to design fuzzy chips with optimum speed/power figures. This paper presents a sixteen rules-two inputs analog fuzzy controller in a CMOS 1 /spl mu/m single-poly technology based on building blocks implementations previously proposed by the authors (1995). However, such building blocks are rearranged here to get a highly modular architecture organized from two high level blocks: the label block and the rule block. In addition, sharing of membership function circuits allows a compact design with low area and power consumption and its highly modular architecture will permit to increase the number of inputs and rules in future chips with hardly design effort. The paper includes measurements from a silicon prototype of the controller

CMOS design of adaptive fuzzy ASICs using mixed-signal circuits

Analog circuits are natural candidates to design fuzzy chips with optimum speed/power figures for precision up to about 1%. This paper presents a methodology and circuit blocks to realize fuzzy controllers in the form of analog CMOS chips. These chips can be made to adapt their function through electrical control. The proposed design methodology emphasizes modularity and simplicity at the circuit level - prerequisites to increasing processor complexity and operation speed. The paper include measurements from a silicon prototype of a fuzzy controller chip in CMOS 1.5 /spl mu/m single-poly technology

A multiplexed mixed-signal fuzzy architecture

Analog circuits provide better area/power efficiency than their digital counterparts for low-medium precision requirements. This limit in precision as well as the lack of design tools when compared to the digital approach, imposes a limit of complexity, hence fuzzy analog controllers are usually oriented to fast low-power systems with low-medium complexity. The paper presents a strategy to preserve most of the advantages of an analog implementation, while allowing a notorious increment of the system complexity. Such strategy consists in implementing a reduced number of rules, those that really determine the output in a lattice controller, which we call analog core, then this core is dynamically programmed to perform the computation related to a specific rule set. The data to program the analog core are stored in a memory, and constitutes the whole knowledge base in a kind of virtual rule set. HSPICE simulations from an exemplary controller are shown to illustrate the viability of the proposal

Neuro-fuzzy chip to handle complex tasks with analog performance

This Paper presents a mixed-signal neuro-fuzzy controller chip which, in terms of power consumption, input-output delay and precision performs as a fully analog implementation. However, it has much larger complexity than its purely analog counterparts. This combination of performance and complexity is achieved through the use of a mixed-signal architecture consisting of a programmable analog core of reduced complexity, and a strategy, and the associated mixed-signal circuitry, to cover the whole input space through the dynamic programming of this core [1]. Since errors and delays are proportional to the reduced number of fuzzy rules included in the analog core, they are much smaller than in the case where the whole rule set is implemented by analog circuitry. Also, the area and the power consumption of the new architecture are smaller than those of its purely analog counterparts simply because most rules are implemented through programming. The Paper presents a set of building blocks associated to this architecture, and gives results for an exemplary prototype. This prototype, called MFCON, has been realized in a CMOS 0.7μm standard technology. It has two inputs, implements 64 rules and features 500ns of input to output delay with 16mW of power consumption. Results from the chip in a control application with a DC motor are also provided