Consolidating the periphery: three residential complexes in Zaragoza by Grupo Z

The rural exodus after the Spanish Civil War led to many irregular settlements on the outskirts of Spanish cities.These new neighbourhoods often lacked planning, infrastructure, public facilities and services and consisted of rural-like self-built housing, evoking the origins of the inhabitants. Later urban planning efforts often distorted the original character of these settlements by pursuing the model of commuter towns dominated by road infrastructure and large-scale residential slabs. With the transition to democracy, citizens, professionals and institutions experimented with new solutions for these peripheral settlements. In the early 1980s, Grupo Z was involved in such efforts, taking part on the interior reform of the La Paz district, building three adjacent residential complexes. Rather than embracing sweeping, universal solutions, such as those resulting from previous planning projects,the architects of Grupo Z, by designing these buildings, offered specific responses based on logic, applied to an urban context, to a particular socioeconomic reality and identity. These buildings were more respectful of the preexisting built environment and restored rural architectural values: used vernacular architectural resources such as façade fronts, courtyards, openings, roofs and materiality; interacted with the urban fabric through a fragmented volumetry; gave new life to the adjacent public space by spreading out the access points; and included very different types of housing to attract a diverse population and promote community identity with a wide variety of relational spaces. The purpose of this study is to analyse these three complexes in detail and to recognise the architectural values that have helped to consolidate the neighbourhood with respect for its original form and identity, in contrast to previous efforts that nearly transformed the peripheral district

A MATLAB program for the computation of the confluent hypergeometric function Φ2

We here present a sample MATLAB program for the numerical evaluation of the confluent hypergeometric function Φ2. This program is based on the calculation of the inverse Laplace transform using the algorithm suggested by Simon and Alouini in their reference textbook [1]

Mining of public sequencing databases supports a non-dietary origin for putative foreign miRNAs: underestimated effects of contamination in NGS

The report that exogenous plant miRNAs are able to cross the mammalian gastrointestinal tract and exert gene-regulation mechanism in mammalian tissues has yielded a lot of controversy, both in the public press and the scientific literature. Despite the initial enthusiasm, reproducibility of these results was recently questioned by several authors. To analyze the causes of this unease, we searched for diet-derived miRNAs in deep-sequencing libraries performed by ourselves and others. We found variable amounts of plant miRNAs in publicly available small RNA-seq data sets of human tissues. In human spermatozoa, exogenous RNAs reached extreme, biologically meaningless levels. On the contrary, plant miRNAs were not detected in our sequencing of human sperm cells, which was performed in the absence of any known sources of plant contamination. We designed an experiment to show that cross-contamination during library preparation is a source of exogenous RNAs. These contamination-derived exogenous sequences even resisted oxidation with sodium periodate. To test the assumption that diet-derived miRNAs were actually contamination-derived, we sought in the literature for previous sequencing reports performed by the same group which reported the initial finding. We analyzed the spectra of plant miRNAs in a small RNA sequencing study performed in amphioxus by this group in 2009 and we found a very strong correlation with the plant miRNAs which they later reported in human sera. Even though contamination with exogenous sequences may be easy to detect, cross-contamination between samples from the same organism can go completely unnoticed, possibly affecting conclusions derived from NGS transcriptomics

A Tractable Product Channel Model for Line-of-Sight Scenarios

We present a general and tractable fading model for line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios, which is based on the product of two independent and non-identically distributed $\kappa$-$\mu$ shadowed random variables. Simple closed-form expressions for the probability density function, cumulative distribution function and moment-generating function are derived, which are as tractable as the corresponding expressions derived from a product of Nakagami-$m$ random variables. This model simplifies the challenging characterization of LOS product channels, as well as combinations of LOS channels with non-LOS ones. We leverage these results to analyze performance measures of interest in the contexts of wireless powered and backscatter communications, where both forward and reverse links are inherently of LOS nature, as well as in device-to-device communications subject to composite fading. In these contexts, the model shows a higher flexibility when fitting field measurements with respect to conventional approaches based on product distributions with deterministic LOS, together with a more complete physical interpretation of the underlying propagation characteristics.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

A Tractable Line-of-Sight Product Channel Model: Application to Wireless Powered Communications

We here present a general and tractable fading model for line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios, which is based on the product of two independent and non-identically distributed κ- μ shadowed random variables. Simple closed-form expressions for the probability density function and cumulative distribution function are derived, which are as tractable as the corresponding expressions derived from a product of Nakagami-m random variables. This newly proposed model simplifies the challenging characterization of LOS product channels, as well as combinations of LOS channels with non-LOS ones. Results are used to analyze performance measures of interest in the context of wireless powered communications.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

De la devoción al coleccionismo. Las reliquias, mediadoras entre el poder y la identidad

Bajo el título De la devoción al coleccionismo. Las reliquias, mediadoras entre el poder y la identidad, el presente volumen recoge los textos presentados en las “IV Jornadas Internacionales. El culto a las reliquias, interpretación, difusión y ritos”, celebradas en el Aula Magna de la Facultad de Derecho de nuestra Universidad durante los días 6 y 7 de abril de 2021. Los organizadores agradecen el esfuerzo y el interés que, una vez más, todos los ponentes han mostrado en la consecución de un proyecto que trata de aunar el trabajo de profesores consagrados, investigadores predoctorales y estudiantes de Grado para desarrollar nuevas investigaciones en relación al fenómeno cultural de las reliquias a lo largo de la historia. Como el lector podrá comprobar a partir de aquí, los estudios que se presentan en las páginas que siguen analizarán cuestiones muy diversas del tema que toca, abordando para ello cuestiones tocantes a las diferentes épocas históricas (desde la Antigüedad a la Edad Contemporánea) y refiriéndose a su vez a latitudes de lo más variado (no solamente al occidente europeo, sino también a diversas partes del continente asiático, de África y de América). Esperamos que, en esta cuarta edición dedicada al culto a las reliquias, puedan extraerse conclusiones valiosas capaces de acercarnos a cuestiones sobre las cuales la historiografía actual está prestando especial interés: los usos políticos de las devociones; el influjo del poder sobre las masas populares; o la importancia del coleccionismo como forma de representación social y como elemento identitario

A versatile robotic platform for educational interaction

This version of the paper has been accepted for publication. The final published paper is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1109/IDAACS.2017.8095065.Included in: 2017 9th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), Bucharest, Romania, 21-23 September 2017.[Abstract]: This paper describes a new educational robot called ROBOBO which was developed in order to provide an engaging and natural interactive experience with children. The objective is to motivate children to explore and cooperate with the robots while they learn concepts and abilities related to STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The robot and the educational approach has been tested in different school environments corresponding to different educational levels with very successful results.This work has been partially funded by the EU’s H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 640891 (DREAM project) and by the Xunta de Galicia and redTEIC network (ED341D R2016/012).Xunta de Galicia; ED341D R2016/01

The Robobo Project: Bringing Educational Robotics Closer to Real-World Applications

This version of the conference paper has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use (https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-science/policies/accepted-manuscript-terms), but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62875-2_20.[Abstract]: The Robobo Project is a STEM-based project that aims to bring educational robotics, in primary and high school, closer to real-world applications. It is based on the use of a smartphone-based robotic platform called Robobo, a very flexible programming environment, and a set of lessons to integrate them. The smartphone provides high-level hardware capabilities in terms of sensors, communications and processing capabilities that allow to create more practical and realistic lessons that exploit human-robot interaction, with a small investment. In this paper, we present the main elements of The Robobo Project in terms of hardware and software, and two illustrative educational projects that can be developed within it.This work has been partially funded by the EU’s H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 640891 (DREAM project) and by the Xunta de Galicia and redTEIC network (ED341D R2016/012).Xunta de Galicia; ED341D R2016/01