A sociotechnical approach to users' heritage values and decision-making processes for energy efficiency and thermal comfort in heritage buildings: A pilot study in Mexico City

Historic buildings have been gradually considered within energy efficiency practices and renewable energy systems, but the implementation of such measures is more complex for historic buildings. It is fundamental to understand the importance of users in the heritage-energy sector. Thus, energy conservation practices of historic buildings that involve less invasive interventions that could lead to loss of value must be promoted. The paper illustrates how residents of historic buildings in the Historic Centre of Mexico City (World Heritage) make decisions on energy efficiency with the ultimate goal of improving thermal comfort and reducing energy consumption. This study consists of five in-depth semi-structured interviews complemented by monitoring internal environmental conditions such as temperature and relative humidity. The thematic analysis of the interviews was followed by a system dynamics analysis to better understand the changes in decision making over time. The dynamic hypothesis is that heritage values assigned to historic buildings change over time and they drive or prohibit changes in energy efficiency. Moreover, a tension arises over time between the limitations on listed buildings in which making many changes in use and energy efficiency interventions is prevented. Our results show that participants take passive thermal-comfort actions (e.g., wearing more clothes and closing windows) when internal temperatures are low. They oppose major interventions or invasive retrofitting to the building, given the high cost and potential loss of value assigned to their buildings. The changes the users would consider while dealing with uncomfortable internal conditions are small interventions in floors and ceilings; however, they avoid making changes to aspects they consider are important and must be preserved and protected (social and cultural values). Integrating the understanding of users' behaviours toward energy efficiency and heritage values can enhance retrofitting policies and guidelines that help protect and maintain the heritage-built stock

Study on mechanical properties of mortars containing steel shot and sea sand as fine aggregate replacement

In this study, the use of solid waste known in the metallurgical market as steel shot that is generated in the production of metallic elements has been analyzed. Normally the destination of this solid waste is the sanitary landfills of the cities or the security cells since it is classified as hazardous waste. In addition, the use of materials with high availability and that were not previously used in the construction industry, such as sea sand was used in the manufacture of mortar cubes as a fine aggregate. A granulometric analysis of each of the filling materials followed by the casting of 63 mortar cubes with four different fine aggregate replacement ratios (0%, 30%, 70% and 100%) were carried out. After the curing period, the compressive strength and the weight of the resulting mortars have been determined. The results from this study indicated that by completely replacing the fine aggregate with the s teel shot waste the density and the compressive strength of the resulting mortars were increased, which indicates that this new material can be used in the construction industry

La Violación de la Segunda Ley de la Termodinámica por el Método de Elementos Finitos

El presente artículo pretende alertar sobre un hecho grave: la Segunda Ley de la Termodinámica es violada como consecuencia de la discretización numérica resultante de la aplicación del Método de Elementos Finitos (FEM, por Finite Element Method). En este trabajo se estudia la consistencia termodinámica de las formulaciones FEM. El estudio está basado en el análisis de la ecuación del calor 1-Dimensional (1D) y 2-Dimensional (2D). Los resultados presentados afectan a todas las simulaciones de Elementos Finitos relacionadas a Dinámica de Fluidos y a Transferencia del Calor.Fil: Limache, Alejandro Cesar. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; ArgentinaFil: Rojas Fredini, Pablo Sebastián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; ArgentinaFil: Murillo, Marina H.. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico. Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales; Argentin

Building an enhanced vocabulary of the robot environment with a ceiling pointing camera

Mobile robots are of great help for automatic monitoring tasks in different environments. One of the first tasks that needs to be addressed when creating these kinds of robotic systems is modeling the robot environment. This work proposes a pipeline to build an enhanced visual model of a robot environment indoors. Vision based recognition approaches frequently use quantized feature spaces, commonly known as Bag of Words (BoW) or vocabulary representations. A drawback using standard BoW approaches is that semantic information is not considered as a criteria to create the visual words. To solve this challenging task, this paper studies how to leverage the standard vocabulary construction process to obtain a more meaningful visual vocabulary of the robot work environment using image sequences. We take advantage of spatio-temporal constraints and prior knowledge about the position of the camera. The key contribution of our work is the definition of a new pipeline to create a model of the environment. This pipeline incorporates (1) tracking information to the process of vocabulary construction and (2) geometric cues to the appearance descriptors. Motivated by long term robotic applications, such as the aforementioned monitoring tasks, we focus on a configuration where the robot camera points to the ceiling, which captures more stable regions of the environment. The experimental validation shows how our vocabulary models the environment in more detail than standard vocabulary approaches, without loss of recognition performance. We show different robotic tasks that could benefit of the use of our visual vocabulary approach, such as place recognition or object discovery. For this validation, we use our publicly available data-set

Mecanismos para atender y reducir la violencia en el ámbito escolar. (Algunas ideas para docentes)

Objetivos Generales: Planteado el problema (“Mecanismo para Atender y Reducir la Violencia en el Ámbito Escolar”. Algunas ideas para Docentes) se tienen los siguientes objetivos. -Promover los Mecanismos para Atender y Reducir la Violencia en el Ámbito Escolar. Objetivos Específicos: -Capacitar a los docentes en torno a las creencias que tienen con respecto a las causas de violencia. -Establecer estrategias sistemáticas de motivación para la práctica de conducta dentro y fuera del aula. -Realizar jornadas de sensibilización para los docentes sobre temas como el respeto, la tolerancia y la convivencia. -Desarrollar dinámicas durante las cuales los estudiantes estén ocupados en tareas específicas de manera individual o grupal

Procesos de enseñanza : estrategias didácticas utilizadas por los docentes en la lengua y literatura, Licenciatura de Español, Facultad de Humanidades.

La presente investigación titulada "Proceso de Enseñanza: Estrategias Didácticas Utilizadas por los Docentes en La Lengua y Literatura, Licenciatura de Español Facultad de Humanidades". La elaboración de este trabajo tiene como objetivo conocer las estrategias didácticas de enseñanza- aprendizaje que utilizan los docentes en la Lengua y la Literatura, así como el logro de nuevas estrategias de enseñanza-aprendizaje que permitan hacer del proceso educativo algo que podamos disfrutar cuando aprendemos. El estudio se ha realizado mediante una estrategia de trabajo desarrollando una investigación cualitativa, y descriptiva, que permite captar con mayor precisión la realidad en el contexto educativo en el cual se encuentran los sujetos estudiados. Para tal fin se inicia la búsqueda de la literatura especializada sobre los modelos didácticos, las teorías psicológicas del aprendizaje, las corrientes didácticas, tradicionales o modernas, los procesos de estrategias didácticas y de evaluación, recogidas a través de las encuestas, las observaciones no participativas (notas de campo) y la programación curricular durante la investigación. Según la opinión de los docentes se evidencia que utilizan procesos, estrategias didácticas y de evaluación diversas, fundamentalmente de naturaleza constructivistas en el acto didáctico, criterios no compartidos con los estudiantes, porque se enfatiza en la expresión verbal, dialogada, uso de tablero, en la heteroevaluación y la evaluación sumativa, ante el panorama descrito se presenta como propuesta, un Seminario-Taller "Didáctica- Proceso de Enseñanza-Aprendizaje" el cual será sometido al estudio y aprobación de las autoridades e instancias correspondientes para su implementación. Palabras clave: didáctica, enseñanza, aprendizaje, estrategias didácticas, evaluación

No-tillage permanent bed planting and controlled traffic in a maize-cotton irrigated system under Mediterranean conditions: Effects on soil compaction, crop performance and carbon sequestration

11 páginas.-- 8 figuras.-- 2 tablas.-- 66 referenciasUnder irrigated Mediterranean conditions, no-tillage permanent bed planting (PB) is a promising agriculture system for improving soil protection and for soil carbon sequestration. However, soil compaction may increase with time up to levels that reduce crop yield. The aim of this study was to evaluate the mid-term effects of PB on soil compaction, root growth, crop yield and carbon sequestration compared with conventionally tilled bed planting (CB) and with a variant of PB that had partial subsoiling (DPB) in a Typic Xerofluvents soil (Soil Survey Staff, 2010) in southern Spain. Traffic was controlled during the whole study and beds, and furrows with (F+T) and without traffic (F-T), were spatially distinguished during measurements. Comparisons were made during a crop sequence of maize (Zea mays L.)-cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.)-maize, corresponding to years 4-6 since trial establishment. After six years, soil compaction was higher in PB than in CB, particularly under the bed (44 and 27% higher in top 0.3- and 0.6-m soil layers, respectively). Around this time, maize root density at early grain filling was 17% lower in PB than in CB in the top 0.6-m layer. In DPB, the subsoiling operation was not effective in increasing root density. Nevertheless, root density appeared to maintain above-ground growth and yield in both PB and DPB compared to CB. Furthermore, at the end of the study, more soil organic carbon was stocked in PB than in CB and the difference increased significantly with a depth down to 0.5 m (5.7 Mg ha-1 increment for the top 0.5-m soil layer). Residues tended to accumulate on furrows, and this resulted in spatial and temporal differences in superficial soil organic carbon concentration (SOC) in the permanent planting systems. In PB, SOC in the top 0.05-m layer increased with time faster in furrows than on beds, and reached higher stable values (1.67 vs. 1.09% values, respectively). In CB, tillage homogenized the soil and reduced SOC in the top 0.05-m layer (average stable value of 0.96% on average for beds and furrows).This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Project AGL2010-22050-CO3) and FEDER funds. P. Cid received a grant from the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (CSIC, Spain).Peer reviewe