Design and construction of the Maternal Self-efficacy Scale for the Prevention of Excess Weight / Diseño y construcción de la Escala de Autoeficacia Materna para la Prevención del Exceso de Peso

Abstract The objective of the present study was to design, validate and obtain the reliability of the Maternal Self-efficacy Scale for the Prevention of Overweight. From an exploratory research where the role of mothers in childhood obesity was studied, 25 items were written, after an assessment by a panel of judges. The validation was carried out twice with different samples. The first one were 400 mothers (Mage = 33.1, SD = 6.8) of children aged 3-6 years (M = 5.0, SD = 0.6) and 18 items were obtained, divided into four factors: Food, Programming, Solutions, and Prohibition, with a Cronbach's alpha (α) between .62 - .88 and omega (ω) coefficients of .76 - .94. The second validation was with 369 participants, 97% were mothers (Medad = 32.4, DS = 7.9) of children aged 3-6 years (M = 5.0, DS = 0.6) and 3% were grandmothers. The scale was one-dimensional composed by 11 items, with α = .90, ω = .92, and explaining 52% of the variance that evaluates the perceived self-efficacy in the prevention of body weight excess. The proposed scale showed to be suitable and, therefore, its use will promote a greater understanding of childhood obesity. Resumen El objetivo del presente estudio fue diseñar, validar y obtener la confiabilidad de la Escala de Autoeficacia Materna para la Prevención del Exceso de Peso. De un estudio exploratorio que indagó el papel de las madres en la obesidad infantil, fueron redactados 25 ítems, mismos que fueron evaluados por un panel de jueces. La validación de este instrumento se realizó con diferentes muestras. En la primera, participaron 400 madres (Medad  = 33.1, DS = 6.8) de hijos de 3 a 6 años (M= 5, DS= 0.6), y se obtuvieron 18 ítems, distribuidos en cuatro factores: Alimentación, Programación, Soluciones y Prohibición, con alpha de Cronbach (α) entre .62 y .88, y coeficiente omega (ω) de .76 a .94. En la segunda validación participaron 369 madres (Medad = 32.43, DS = 7.9) de hijos de 3 a 6 años (M= 5, DS= .65) y el 3% de abuelas. La escala fue unidimensional, compuesta por 11 reactivos con α = .90, ω = .92, y varianza explicada del 52% de la autoeficacia percibida para la prevención del exceso de peso. La escala propuesta mostró ser apta y, por tanto, su uso promoverá un mayor entendimiento de la obesidad infantil.

Guía Mexicana para el Diagnóstico y el Tratamiento de la Urticaria

La urticaria es una enfermedad que padece una quinta parte de la población en algún momento de su vida. Las guías inter- nacionales recientes han propuesto unos cambios de fondo en su diagnóstico y tratamiento, por lo que había la necesidad de crear una guía nacional y multidisciplinaria, con base amplia en los gremios de especialistas y médicos de primer contacto en México. ABSTRACT Urticaria is a disease that a fifth of the population shall suffer once in a lifetime. Recent clinical guidelines have proposed some fundamental changes in the diagnosis and treatment of urticaria, making the development of a national, multidisciplinary guideline, with wide acceptability among different professional groups –both specialists and primary health care workers–, necessary in Mexico

Extraction of the Muon Signals Recorded with the Surface Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory Using Recurrent Neural Networks

We present a method based on the use of Recurrent Neural Networks to extract the muon component from the time traces registered with water-Cherenkov detector (WCD) stations of the Surface Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The design of the WCDs does not allow to separate the contribution of muons to the time traces obtained from the WCDs from those of photons, electrons and positrons for all events. Separating the muon and electromagnetic components is crucial for the determination of the nature of the primary cosmic rays and properties of the hadronic interactions at ultra-high energies. We trained a neural network to extract the muon and the electromagnetic components from the WCD traces using a large set of simulated air showers, with around 450 000 simulated events. For training and evaluating the performance of the neural network, simulated events with energies between 1018.5, eV and 1020 eV and zenith angles below 60 degrees were used. We also study the performance of this method on experimental data of the Pierre Auger Observatory and show that our predicted muon lateral distributions agree with the parameterizations obtained by the AGASA collaboration

A search for ultra-high-energy photons at the Pierre Auger Observatory exploiting air-shower universality

The Pierre Auger Observatory is the most sensitive detector to primary photons with energies above ∼0.2 EeV. It measures extensive air showers using a hybrid technique that combines a fluorescence detector (FD) with a ground array of particle detectors (SD). The signatures of a photon-induced air shower are a larger atmospheric depth at the shower maximum (X$_{max}$) and a steeper lateral distribution function, along with a lower number of muons with respect to the bulk of hadron-induced background. Using observables measured by the FD and SD, three photon searches in different energy bands are performed. In particular, between threshold energies of 1-10 EeV, a new analysis technique has been developed by combining the FD-based measurement of X$_{max}$ with the SD signal through a parameter related to its muon content, derived from the universality of the air showers. This technique has led to a better photon/hadron separation and, consequently, to a higher search sensitivity, resulting in a tighter upper limit than before. The outcome of this new analysis is presented here, along with previous results in the energy ranges below 1 EeV and above 10 EeV. From the data collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory in about 15 years of operation, the most stringent constraints on the fraction of photons in the cosmic flux are set over almost three decades in energy

Study on multi-ELVES in the Pierre Auger Observatory

Since 2013, the four sites of the Fluorescence Detector (FD) of the Pierre Auger Observatory record ELVES with a dedicated trigger. These UV light emissions are correlated to distant lightning strikes. The length of recorded traces has been increased from 100 μs (2013), to 300 μs (2014-16), to 900 μs (2017-present), to progressively extend the observation of the light emission towards the vertical of the causative lightning and beyond. A large fraction of the observed events shows double ELVES within the time window, and, in some cases, even more complex structures are observed. The nature of the multi-ELVES is not completely understood but may be related to the different types of lightning in which they are originated. For example, it is known that Narrow Bipolar Events can produce double ELVES, and Energetic In-cloud Pulses, occurring between the main negative and upper positive charge layer of clouds, can induce double and even quadruple ELVES in the ionosphere. This report shows the seasonal and daily dependence of the time gap, amplitude ratio, and correlation between the pulse widths of the peaks in a sample of 1000+ multi-ELVES events recorded during the period 2014-20. The events have been compared with data from other satellite and ground-based sensing devices to study the correlation of their properties with lightning observables such as altitude and polarity