Las políticas de reequilibro territorial e innovación institucional en Madrid, 2015-2019

Lograr un mejor reparto de los recursos materiales es una tarea inseparable de una transformación institucional dirigida a un mejor reparto del poder y de la capacidad de decisión. Es preciso reconfigurar las instituciones para redefinir la relación entre estas y la ciudadanía. El espacio de cooperación entre las instituciones públicas y la sociedad civil organizada es un terreno privilegiado para lograr esa reconfiguración institucional. El Fondo de Reequilibrio Territorial se concibe como un primer paso en ese complejo camino y se relaciona con el proceso de descentralización y con el concepto de cooperación público-social. Debe entenderse en relación con otros desarrollos institucionales, como el Consejo Coordinador de los Distritos o los Foros Locales. Una tarea de estas características no puede realizarse desde un solo espacio institucional y en un solo mandato, pero en todo caso debe hacerse contando con la firme voluntad y dirección política del equipo de gobierno que quiera desempeñarla. El gobierno es una herramienta formidable para emprender un proceso de reequilibrio territorial, pero aun cuando no hay en el mismo voluntad política en este sentido existen posibilidades para estimular o condicionar la voluntad del equipo de gobierno: articular un amplio pacto entre los actores políticos, sociales, económicos, académicos, etc. que ponga la cuestión en el centro de la agenda política y eleve hasta lo impagable el coste político de seguir dando la espalda a una cuestión crucial para el futuro de la democracia.Lograr un mejor reparto de los recursos materiales es una tarea inseparable de una transformación institucional dirigida a un mejor reparto del poder y de la capacidad de decisión. Es preciso reconfigurar las instituciones para redefinir la relación entre estas y la ciudadanía. El espacio de cooperación entre las instituciones públicas y la sociedad civil organizada es un terreno privilegiado para lograr esa reconfiguración institucional.El Fondo de Reequilibrio Territorial se concibe como un primer paso en ese complejo camino y se relaciona con el proceso de descentralización y con el concepto de cooperación público-social. Debe entenderse en relación con otros desarrollos institucionales, como el Consejo Coordinador de los Distritos o los Foros Locales. Una tarea de estas características no puede realizarse desde un solo espacio institucional y en un solo mandato, pero en todo caso debe hacerse contando con la firme voluntad y dirección política del equipo de gobierno que quiera desempeñarla. El gobierno es una herramienta formidable para emprender un proceso de reequilibrio territorial, pero aun cuando no hay en el mismo voluntad política en este sentido existen posibilidades para estimular o condicionar la voluntad del equipo de gobierno: articular un amplio pacto entre los actores políticos, sociales, económicos, académicos, etc. que ponga la cuestión en el centro de la agenda política y eleve hasta lo impagable el coste político de seguir dando la espalda a una cuestión crucial para el futuro de la democracia

Pandemic Boredom: Little Evidence That Lockdown-Related Boredom Affects Risky Public Health Behaviors Across 116 Countries

Some public officials have expressed concern that policies mandating collective public health behaviors (e.g., national/regional "lockdown ") may result in behavioral fatigue that ultimately renders such policies ineffective. Boredom, specifically, has been singled out as one potential risk factor for noncompliance. We examined whether there was empirical evidence to support this concern during the COVID-19 pandemic in a large cross-national sample of 63,336 community respondents from 116 countries. Although boredom was higher in countries with more COVID-19 cases and in countries that instituted more stringent lockdowns, such boredom did not predict longitudinal within-person decreases in social distancing behavior (or vice versa; n = 8,031) in early spring and summer of 2020. Overall, we found little evidence that changes in boredom predict individual public health behaviors (handwashing, staying home, self-quarantining, and avoiding crowds) over time, or that such behaviors had any reliable longitudinal effects on boredom itself. In summary, contrary to concerns, we found little evidence that boredom posed a public health risk during lockdown and quarantine

Double-Wall Carbon Nanotube Hybrid Mode-Locker in Tm-doped Fibre Laser: A Novel Mechanism for Robust Bound-State Solitons Generation

The complex nonlinear dynamics of mode-locked fibre lasers, including a broad variety of dissipative structures and self-organization effects, have drawn significant research interest. Around the 2 μm band, conventional saturable absorbers (SAs) possess small modulation depth and slow relaxation time and, therefore, are incapable of ensuring complex inter-pulse dynamics and bound-state soliton generation. We present observation of multi-soliton complex generation in mode-locked thulium (Tm)-doped fibre laser, using double-wall carbon nanotubes (DWNT-SA) and nonlinear polarisation evolution (NPE). The rigid structure of DWNTs ensures high modulation depth (64%), fast relaxation (1.25 ps) and high thermal damage threshold. This enables formation of 560-fs soliton pulses; two-soliton bound-state with 560 fs pulse duration and 1.37 ps separation; and singlet+doublet soliton structures with 1.8 ps duration and 6 ps separation. Numerical simulations based on the vectorial nonlinear Schr¨odinger equation demonstrate a transition from single-pulse to two-soliton bound-states generation. The results imply that DWNTs are an excellent SA for the formation of steady single- and multi-soliton structures around 2 μm region, which could not be supported by single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). The combination of the potential bandwidth resource around 2 μm with the soliton molecule concept for encoding two bits of data per clock period opens exciting opportunities for data-carrying capacity enhancement.M.C. acknowledges the support of EU Horizon2020 Marie S.-Curie IF MINDFLY project. A.E.B. acknowledges the support of Russian Science Foundation (grant 14-21-00110). M.A.A. acknowledges the support of Ministry of Higher Education Sultanate of Oman. T.H. acknowledges the support of Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship (Graphlex). The support by the Marie-Curie Inter-national Research Staff Exchange Scheme “TelaSens” project, Research Executive Agency Grant No. 269271, Programme: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IRSES and European Research Council through the FP7-IDEAS-ERC grant ULTRALASER are gratefully acknowledged

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Using machine learning to identify important predictors of COVID-19 infection prevention behaviors during the early phase of the pandemic

Before vaccines for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became available, a set of infection-prevention behaviors constituted the primary means to mitigate the virus spread. Our study aimed to identify important predictors of this set of behaviors. Whereas social and health psychological theories suggest a limited set of predictors, machine-learning analyses can identify correlates from a larger pool of candidate predictors. We used random forests to rank 115 candidate correlates of infection-prevention behavior in 56,072 participants across 28 countries, administered in March to May 2020. The machine-learning model predicted 52% of the variance in infection-prevention behavior in a separate test sample—exceeding the performance of psychological models of health behavior. Results indicated the two most important predictors related to individual-level injunctive norms. Illustrating how data-driven methods can complement theory, some of the most important predictors were not derived from theories of health behavior—and some theoretically derived predictors were relatively unimportant

Improved primary regulation for minimum energy losses in islanded microgrids

In this paper, an improved primary regulation is proposed for grid forming units supplying islanded microgrids. A minimum losses Optimal Power Flow is run off-line to devise the operating set points composing the primary regulation curve. In this way, after load perturbations, generators can reach an optimized operating point for a given and unique minimum losses energy flows distribution. The idea is to skip the hierarchical control architecture and provide a feasible and optimized operating point. A case study over 24 hours shows the effectiveness of this new approach as well as the improved operation quality of the system

Baseline assessment of microplastic concentrations in marine and freshwater environments of a developing Southeast Asian country, Viet Nam

In aquatic environments, assessment of microplastic concentrations is increasing worldwide but environments from developing countries remain under-evaluated. Due to disparities of facilities, financial resources and human resources between countries, protocols of sampling, analysis and observations used in developed countries cannot be fully adapted in developing ones, and required specific adaptations. In Viet Nam, an adapted methodology was developed and commonly adopted by local researchers to implement a microplastic monitoring in sediments and surface waters of 21 environments (rivers, lakes, bays, beaches) of eight cities or provinces. Microplastic concentrations in surface waters varied from 0.35 to 2522 items m-3, with the lowest concentrations recorded in the bays and the highest in the rivers. Fibers dominated over fragments in most environments (from 47% to 97%). The microplastic concentrations were related to the anthropogenic pressure on the environment, pointing out the necessity in a near future to identify the local sources of microplastics

The Distribution of Dengue Virus Serotype in Quang Nam Province (Vietnam) during the Outbreak in 2018

Objectives: Quang Nam province in the Centre of Vietnam has faced an outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) in 2018. Although DHF is a recurrent disease in this area, no epidemiological and microbiological reports on dengue virus serotypes have been conducted mainly due to lack of facilities for such a kind of advanced surveillance. The aim of this study was to detect different dengue virus serotypes in patients’ blood samples. Design and Methods: Suspected cases living in Quang Nam province (Vietnam) and presenting clinical and hematological signs of dengue hemorrhagic fever were included in the study. The screening was performed, and the results were compared by using two methodologies: RT real-time PCR (RT-rPCR) and the Dengue NS1 rapid test. Results: From December 2018 to February 2019, looking both at RT-rPCR [+] and NS1 [+] methodologies, a total of 488 patients were screened and 336 were positive for dengue virus detection (74 children and 262 adults); 273 of these patients (81.3%) underwent viral serotype identification as follows: 12.82% (35/273) D1 serotype, 17.95% (49/273) D2, 0.37% (1/273) D3, 68.50 (187/283) D4, and 0.37% (1/273) D2+D4 serotypes. The RT-rPCR outcomes showed higher sensitivity during the first three days of infection compared to NS1 (92.3% vs. 89.7%). The NS1 increased sensitivity after the first 3 days whilst the RT-rPCR decreased. Conclusions: Advanced surveillance with dengue virus serotypes identification, if performed routinely, may help to predict and prevent further DHF epidemics based on the exposure of the different serotypes during different periods that lead to the intensification of disease severity as a consequence of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)