Clinical characteristics, sepsis interventions and outcomes in the obese patients with septic shock: an international multicenter cohort study

La calidad educativa de los centros de hoy depende del nivel de competencias adquirido por sus educadores (Perrenoud, 2002). En este sentido, debemos apostar por un equipo humano formado por sujetos que sepan superarse permanentemente, aptos para ejercer tareas dinámicas y cambiantes y que compartan alternativas para crecer en todos los sentidos. Más todavía, debemos apostar por profesionales capaces de identificar y dominar los procesos que se deben realizar actuando con decisión y responsabilidad. La adquisición de competencias comporta aptitud y actitud para utilizar conocimientos, más concretamente, habilidades y valores, de manera interdisciplinaria, transversal e interactiva en contextos y situaciones que requieren la intervención de contenidos vinculados a las diferentes áreas del currículum (Lleixà, 2007), sin exclusividad, en este caso, del área de Educación Física. Presentamos una propuesta metodológica, el «Paradigma Estratégico para el desarrollo de habilidades competenciales», cuya ejecución implica comprensión, reflexión y discernimiento, teniendo en cuenta la dimensión social de cada situación. El estudio se ha llevado a cabo en la Universidad de Lleida con 40 alumnos de tercer curso de la asignatura «Educación Física y su didáctica». Se pretende valorar el impacto que provoca la implementación del programa «Paradigma estratégico para la adquisición de habilidades competenciales» sobre sus propias percepciones competenciales intrapersonales, antes y después de la aplicación de dicho programa

Middle East respiratory syndrome

The Middle East respiratory syndrome is caused by a coronavirus that was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. Periodic outbreaks continue to occur in the Middle East and elsewhere. This report provides the latest information on MERS

“In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational Child Trafficking in Contemporary Crime Fiction.

This chapter investigates representations of transnational child trafficking in contemporary crime fiction, focusing specifically on the depiction of child trafficking and its victims. Beyer examines the role of crime fiction in raising reader awareness of human trafficking and of the child victims’ predicament and plight, considering didactic dimensions of the genre and how it tends to erase victims in the aftermath of crime. Through detailed examinations of representations of child trafficking and its social and cultural contexts in selected post-2000 British and Scandinavian crime fiction texts, the chapter argues that crime fiction can be seen to engage explicitly in public and private debates around human trafficking, and, through its popular outreach, has the potential to affect popular perceptions of human trafficking and its victims

Braided geographies: bordered forms and cross-border formations in refugee comics

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter-geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities

Feasibility of Using Convalescent Plasma Immunotherapy for MERS-CoV Infection, Saudi Arabia

We explored the feasibility of collecting convalescent plasma for passive immunotherapy of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection by using ELISA to screen serum samples from 443 potential plasma donors: 196 patients with suspected or laboratory-confirmed MERS-CoV infection, 230 healthcare workers, and 17 household contacts exposed to MERS-CoV. ELISA-reactive samples were further tested by indirect fluorescent antibody and microneutralization assays. Of the 443 tested samples, 12 (2.7%) had a reactive ELISA result, and 9 of the 12 had reactive indirect fluorescent antibody and microneutralization assay titers. Undertaking clinical trials of convalescent plasma for passive immunotherapy of MERS-CoV infection may be feasible, but such trials would be challenging because of the small pool of potential donors with sufficiently high antibody titers. Alternative strategies to identify convalescent plasma donors with adequate antibody titers should be explored, including the sampling of serum from patients with more severe disease and sampling at earlier points during illness

Experimental Investigation of New Indices of Broken Rotor Bar in Induction Motor

International audienc

Real-Time Experimental Assessment of Hill Climbing MPPT Algorithm Enhanced by Estimating a Duty Cycle for PV System

Better functioning of maximum power point tracking (MPPT) can significantly increase the energy efficiency of photovoltaic systems. This process is provided by MPPT algorithms. Such as fractional open-circuit voltage, perturb and observe, fractional short-circuit current, hill climbing, incremental conductance, fuzzy logic controller, neural network controller, just to name a few. The hill climbing algorithm uses the duty cycle of the boot converter as a retraction parameter when the MPPT task is performed. However, this technique has disadvantages in terms of the stability of the system during periods of constant radiation. To overcome this disadvantage, A MPPT technique based on the estimation of the boost converter duty cycle associated with the conventional hill climbing, fractional open-circuit voltage and fractional short-circuit current algorithm is proposed. A comprehensive description of the experimental implementation hardware and software platforms is presented. On the basis of the measured data, the enhanced algorithm was compared to the conventional hill climbing MPPT technique according to various criteria, showing the disadvantages and advantages of each. Experimental results show advantage of the enhanced algorithm compared to the conventional hill climbing MPPT technique in time response attenuation (0.25s versus 0.6s), little oscillations (0.5 W versus 2.5 W), power loss reductions and better maximum power point tracking accuracy (98.45 W versus 92.75 W) of the enhanced algorithm compared to the conventional hill climbing MPPT technique