Modelling of heat and moisture transfer in concrete at high temperature

Moisture diffusion and related fluid pressures play a key role in cracking and spalling of concrete subject to high temperatures. This paper describes recent developments of a mode for moisture and heat transfer in porous materials, to be combined with an existing and well tested meso-mechanical model for concrete. Liquid and gas flows are formulated separately, yet later they can be combined in terms of s single variable, Pv. The material pore distribution curve is taken as the basis for developing a new physically-based desorption isotherm alternative to the traditional Bazant & Thonguthai’s model. A simple academic example for temperatures between 27 and 800ºC is presented to show the behaviour of the model

Working Environment in Nursing: Needs Improvement?

Background: Knowing the quality of life of professionals is important because it is related to job performance, better results, and greater productivity, which results in better patient care. Objective: To know the Professional Quality of Life perceived by the nurses at the Geriatric Hospital of Toledo (Spain). Method: A descriptive cross-section study was employed to measure the Professional Quality of Life of all healthcare nurses (69 in total) at the Geriatric Hospital of Toledo. The questionnaire used as a measuring instrument was the Professional Quality of Life - 35. The data obtained was analyzed by means of: descriptive statistics, single-factor ANOVA variance analysis, T Student tests, and simple and multiple regression analysis. The study was approved by both the research commission and the ethics commission at the Hospital Complex of Toledo. Participation in the study on behalf of the nursing staff was voluntary. Results: In total, 45 responses were obtained (65.2%). The overall mean score measured the perceived Professional Quality of Life to be low. In relation to the three dimensions evaluated in the study, the highest average found was in “intrinsic motivation,” followed by “workload”, and then “management support.” In the multivariate analysis, “management support” was shown as the most influential factor in the Professional Quality of Life with a 23% influence (P<0.001), followed by workload with 9% (P = 0.01). Conclusions: The professionals at the participating center perceive their workplace as having an elevated degree of responsibility, a large quantity of work, a high occurrence of rushes and fatigue, and all this with little support on behalf of management. Promotions are scarce or the policies for receiving a promotion are inadequate. The perception of Professional Quality of Life in nursing is low. The obtained results indicate a need for an organizing cultural change based on participation, motivation, and increased management support

Neural Network architectures design by Cellular Automata evolution

4th Conference of Systemics Cybernetics and Informatics. Orlando, 23-26 July 2000The design of the architecture is a crucial step in the successful application of a neural network. However, the architecture design is basically, in most cases, a human experts job. The design depends heavily on both, the expert experience and on a tedious trial-and-error process. Therefore, the development of automatic methods to determine the architecture of feedforward neural networks is a field of interest in the neural network community. These methods are generally based on search techniques, as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing or evolutionary strategies. Most of the designed methods are based on direct representation of the parameters of the network. This representation does not allow scalability, so to represent large architectures very large structures are required. In this work, an indirect constructive encoding scheme is proposed to find optimal architectures of feed-forward neural networks. This scheme is based on cellular automata representations in order to increase the scalability of the method.Publicad

Grammars and cellular automata for evolving neural networks architectures

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Nashville, TN, 8-11 October 2000The class of feedforward neural networks trained with back-propagation admits a large variety of specific architectures applicable to approximation pattern tasks. Unfortunately, the architecture design is still a human expert job. In recent years, the interest to develop automatic methods to determine the architecture of the feedforward neural network has increased, most of them based on the evolutionary computation paradigm. From this approach, some perspectives can be considered: at one extreme, every connection and node of architecture can be specified in the chromosome representation using binary bits. This kind of representation scheme is called the direct encoding scheme. In order to reduce the length of the genotype and the search space, and to make the problem more scalable, indirect encoding schemes have been introduced. An indirect scheme under a constructive algorithm, on the other hand, starts with a minimal architecture and new levels, neurons and connections are added, step by step, via some sets of rules. The rules and/or some initial conditions are codified into a chromosome of a genetic algorithm. In this work, two indirect constructive encoding schemes based on grammars and cellular automata, respectively, are proposed to find the optimal architecture of a feedforward neural network

Journal of Parents and Teachers

In varietate, concordia, el lema de la Unión Europea refleja de manera certera sus valores: mayor cohesión social (donde todos los ciudadanos de la Unión Europea tengan las mismas oportunidades de educación, de movilidad y de empleabilidad), mayor sentimiento de pertenencia a una Europa (cuyos pueblos son diversos culturalmente pero comparten los valores de la democracia y el respeto a la pluralidad) y una educación centrada en la adquisición no tanto de contenidos (solamente); sino en competencias (que suponen la aplicación práctica de esos contenidos en un desempeño útil para la vida real). Y la educación ha tomado hoy el papel crucial de ser partícipe de que ellos se materialicen en la ciudadanía de esta nueva Europ

Femtosecond time-resolved phase-change microscopy and ablation threshold calculations to understand ultrafast laser ablation

El trabajo recoge experimentos realizados en una configuración sonda-prueba haciendo uso de un láser de femtosegundos, con el objetivo de comprender los fenómenos de ablación de materiales sólidos ras irradiación con láseres de pulso ultracorto.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

First-order equivalent to Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian

A first-order Lagrangian L ∇ variationally equivalent to the second-order Einstein- Hilbert Lagrangian is introduced. Such a Lagrangian depends on a symmetric linear connection, but the dependence is covariant under diffeomorphisms. The variational problem defined by L ∇ is proved to be regular and its Hamiltonian formulation is studied, including its covariant Hamiltonian attached to ∇