Evolución geológica en la cuenca baja del río Colorado durante el cenozoico, Patagonia Norte, Argentina

Climatic changes and eustatic sea levels have been assumed to be the most important controllers of the Colorado River alluvial fan in northern Patagonia. Although the alluvial fan occurs in a region considered tectonically stable, there are pieces of evidence that the Miocene Andean orogeny has reactivated inherited structures, with subsequent geomorphological changes that date back to the Pleistocene. Besides, the clear evidence of neotectonism in the region and their effects on the evolution of this fan, it has not been studied in detail yet. In this study, we map and analyze six sections outcropping in different terraces of the alluvial fan with the primary aim of disentangling the role of tectonism, climate and eustatic changes on the evolution of the alluvial fan. This study is part of a bigger project aimed to understand the origin of the shallow lakes occurring in northern Patagonia. Our results indicate that the alluvial fan of the Colorado River was established in the area around the Middle Pleistocene. Evidence of deformations in Miocene to Pleistocene units indicates significant neotectonism during the Upper Pleistocene. By the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, tectonism produced incision generating a set of terraces. After this time, an important climate change from semiarid to arid favored the calcretization of some terraces. By the Pleistocene-Middle Holocene, the terraces were covered by ancient eolian sediment accumulated during dry conditions. By the Middle Holocene, a broad alluvial fan developed in the region under a warmer and more humid climate generating the Alluvial Colorado River-III deposit at the T3 terrace. In the late Holocene, aggradation process was favored by a high sea level and temperate-arid climate, producing T4 terrace. At the same time, this climate condition favored the local deflation-sedimentation processes that resulted in the deposition of modern eolian deposits (mE) over the T3 terrace. The depressions generated by the deflation were, later on, occupied by shallow lakes when the climate turn more humid. Subsequently, during regressive sea level condition, ca. 2000 years BP, the T4 terrace was partially eroded and the modern alluvial plain formed.La evolución geológica y morfológica del abanico aluvial del río Colorado en el norte de Patagonia ha sido explicada, en su zona distal, como resultado de cambios eustáticos y climáticos. A pesar de que el abanico se encuentra en una región considerada como una zona tectónicamente estable, hay evidencia de que la orogenia andina durante el Mioceno reactivó estructuras preexistentes y produjo cambios geomorfológicos asignados al Pleistoceno. Sin embargo, la influencia de la tectónica en la evolución del abanico aluvial del río Colorado no ha sido aún estudiada. En este trabajo, se levantaron y estudiaron seis secciones que afloran en distintas terrazas del abanico aluvial del río Colorado con el objetivo principal de comprender el rol de la tectónica, los cambios climáticos y eustáticos en la evolución del abanico aluvial. Este estudio es parte de un proyecto mayor que busca entender el origen de las lagunas someras presentes en la parte norte de la Patagonia. Nuestros resultados indican que el abanico aluvial del río Colorado se estableció en el área alrededor del Pleistoceno medio. La evidencia de deformaciones en las unidades del Mioceno al Pleistoceno indica una significativa actividad neotectónica durante el Pleistoceno superior. Para la transición Pleistoceno-Holoceno, el tectonismo generó una serie de terrazas. Posteriormente, un cambio climático de semiárido a árido favoreció la calcretización de las terrazas. Durante el Pleistoceno-Holoceno medio, las terrazas fueron cubiertas por la acumulación de sedimentos eólicos antiguos en condiciones de clima seco. En el Pleistoceno medio se desarrolló un amplio abanico aluvial en la región, en un clima más cálido y húmedo, que generó los depósitos aluviales del río Colorado-III en un nuevo nivel de terraza (T3). En el Holoceno tardío, el proceso de agradación fue favorecido por un alto nivel del mar y un clima templado-árido, que produjo la terraza T4. Al mismo tiempo, estas condiciones climáticas favorecieron los procesos de deflación-sedimentación local que dieron lugar a la deposición de depósitos eólicos modernos (mE) sobre la terraza T3. Las depresiones generadas por la deflación fueron, más tarde, ocupadas por los lagos poco profundos cuando el clima se volvió más húmedo. Posteriormente, durante condiciones regresivas del nivel del mar, ca. 2000 años AP, la terraza T4 fue parcialmente erosionada y se formó la llanura aluvial moderna.Fil: Seitz, Carina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Geología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto Argentino de Oceanografía. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Instituto Argentino de Oceanografía; ArgentinaFil: Vélez, María I.. University Of Regina; CanadáFil: Perillo, Gerardo Miguel E.. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto Argentino de Oceanografía. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Instituto Argentino de Oceanografía; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Geología; Argentin

Perceived needs of entering students at the University of Puerto Rico : an exploratory study.

Research has indicated that the first year of college is more stressful for the college student than the three remaining years. A descriptive, exploratory study was conducted which assessed the general freshman population of a large public university in Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking country. Freshmen (N = 1665) completed, in the Fall of 1993, a 73-item survey which collected data on demographics, academic and financial backgrounds, employment patterns, and academic, career, and personal needs. Students were asked to rate the intensity of the needs they were experiencing as they entered the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. Results indicated that participants, as a group, rated academic-career related items stronger than personal items. In general terms, higher need levels were associated also with specific sub-populations of freshmen: females, students coming from public schools in Puerto Rico, and students enrolled in the Colleges of Business Administration, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The findings of this study are valuable for planning college counseling services at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus and for clarifying student development theory. The identification of these needs should enable administrators, orientation planners, counselors, and policy makers of this University to design programs to better meet the academic, career, and personal needs of the freshman population as well as the individualized needs of specifically designated subgroups of incoming freshmen. The planning of such interventions must be followed by systematic evaluation of the effects of the programs that are developed

Jornades francocatalanes. Polítiques de conservació del patrimoni medieval a França i a Catalunya. Originals i còpies als segles xix i xx

Arran de l’exposició «Memòria del vidre. Grans vitralls medievals de França», organitzada conjuntament pel MEV i el Musée des Monuments Français, departament de la Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, que tingué lloc a Vic de l’1 d’abril a l’1 d’octubre del 2006, van dur-se a terme les Jornades Francocatalanes. Polítiques de conservació del patrimoni medieval a França i a Catalunya. Originals i còpies als segles xix i xx, en l’organització de les quals participà també el Museu Frederic Marès de Barcelona. Se celebraren els dies 15, 16 i 17 de juny a Vic i Barcelona, i van comptar amb el suport del Servei de Patrimoni Arquitectònic Local de la Diputació de Barcelona. To coincide with the exhibition entitled «The Memory of Glass. Great Medieval Stained-Glass Windows of France» organised jointly by the Museu Episcopal de Vic and the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris, departament de la Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, and held in Vic from April 1st to October 1st 2006, a series of day conferences was held entitled «Franco-Catalan conferences. Policies for preserving the medieval heritage in France and Catalonia. Originals and copies in the 19th and 20th century». The Museu Frederic Marès in Barcelona also participated in the organisation. The conferences were held on the 15th, 16th and 17th of June in Vic and Barcelona, with support from Barcelona County Council’s Local Architectural Heritage Service

Joint Feature Selection and Parameter Tuning for Short-term Traffic Flow Forecasting based on Heuristically Optimized Multi-layer Neural Networks

Short-term traffic flow forecasting is a vibrant research topic that has been growing in interest since the late 70’s. In the last decade this vibrant field has shifted its focus towards machine learning methods. These techniques often require fine-grained parameter tuning to obtain satisfactory performance scores, a process that usually relies on man- ual trial-and-error adjustment. This paper explores the use of Harmony Search optimization for tuning the parameters of neural network jointly with the selection of the input features from the dataset at hand. Re- sults are discussed and compared to other tuning methods, from which it is concluded that neural predictors optimized via the proposed heuris- tic wrapper outperform those tuned by means of na ̈ıve parametrized algorithms, thus allowing for longer-term predictions. These promising results unfold potential applications of this technique in multi-location neighbor-aware traffic prediction

Alternativas de diseño: arquitectura para el ciberespacio como estrategia de enseñanza Caso Sede Virtual 3D Interactiva Multiusuario para el Taller Virtual de las Américas

This article seeks to describe products of the course «Alternatives of Design 2005», that aims to prepare architects from the Master Studies Department of Computing in Architecture (LU Z-Maracaibo) by applying a methodology based on VR ML and Java Script, oriented to attain a proposal for: «Las Americas Virtual Design Studio».Este artículo se orienta a describir productos del curso «Alternativas de Diseño 2005» que persigue preparar arquitectos del Departamento de Maestría de Computación en Arquitectura (LUZ-Maracaibo) aplicando una metodología basada en VRML y Java Script orientada a alcanzar una propuesta para el «Taller de Diseño Virtual Las Américas»

A novel Fireworks Algorithm with wind inertia dynamics and its application to traffic forecasting

Fireworks Algorithm (FWA) is a recently contributed heuristic optimization method that has shown a promising performance in applications stemming from different domains. Improvements to the original algorithm have been designed and tested in the related literature. Nonetheless, in most of such previous works FWA has been tested with standard test functions, hence its performance when applied to real application cases has been scarcely assessed. In this manuscript a mechanism for accelerating the convergence of this meta-heuristic is proposed based on observed wind inertia dynamics (WID) among fireworks in practice. The resulting enhanced algorithm will be described algorithmically and evaluated in terms of convergence speed by means of test functions. As an additional novel contribution of this work FWA and FWA-WID are used in a practical application where such heuristics are used as wrappers for optimizing the parameters of a road traffic short-term predictive model. The exhaustive performance analysis of the FWA and FWA-ID in this practical setup has revealed that the relatively high computational complexity of this solver with respect to other heuristics makes it critical to speed up their convergence (specially in cases with a costly fitness evaluation as the one tackled in this work), observation that buttresses the utility of the proposed modifications to the naive FWA solver

Lattice effects and current reversal in superconducting ratchets

Competition between the vortex lattice and a lattice of asymmetric artificial defects is shown to play a crucial role in ratchet experiments in superconducting films. We present a novel and collective mechanism for current reversal based on a reconfiguration of the vortex lattice. In contrast to previous models of vortex current reversal, the mechanism is based on the global response of the vortex lattice to external forces.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Automatic detection of discordant outliers via the Ueda's method

The importance of identifying outliers in a data set is well known. Although variousoutlier detection methods have been proposed in order to enable reliable inferencesregarding a data set, a simple but less known method has been proposed by Ueda(1996/2009). Since this new method, called Uedas method, has not been systematicallyanalysed in previous research, a simulation study addressing its performance androbustness is presented. Although the method was derived assuming that theunderlying data is normally distributed, its performance was analysed using data fromvarious outlier-prone distributions commonly found in several research fields. Theresults obtained enable us to define the strengths and weaknesses of the methodalong with its limits of applicability. Furthermore, an unforeseen field of application ofthe method, which requires further studies was also identified

Innovation, public support and productivity in Colombia

We investigate the association between perceived barriers to innovation and the allocation of public support for innovation in manufacturing and service industries in Colombia, as well as the potential heterogeneity of returns to innovation across the firm-level productivity distribution. We extend the CDM recursive system by including an equation for the allocation of direct support and using quantile regression methods to estimate the productivity equation. We find some differences across manufacturing and service industries. Financing constraints are correlated with obtaining public support in manufacturing and in some services, but in knowledge intensive services (KIS) barriers associated with regulations are more significant. The introduction of innovations increases mostly the productivity of firms below the median of the productivity distribution, especially in services. Increasing human capital would boost productivity of firms in all industries, providing support to the hypothesis that human capital is indeed a bottleneck for productivity growth across the board in Colombia. We conclude that addressing factors that hinder innovation by low productivity firms in all service industries could significantly contribute to increasing productivity and reduce its dispersion