Procesos de sostenibilidad en España: implicaciones territoriales y urbanas

La ocupación del suelo es una de las variables clave para medir con rigor la sostenibilidad. España tiene todavía uno de los territorios más diversos y, excepcionalmente valiosos de Europa. La calidad de vida actual y de las generaciones futuras, la utilización de los recursos naturales, la biodiversidad, y los propios sectores productivos están determinados por esta ocupación del suelo. Por todo ello, el análisis de los cambios de ocupación es clave para conocer el estado actual y las tendencias en los procesos de sostenibilidad en España. El objetivo de este artículo es describir las consecuencias sociales, económicas y ambientales de los cambios de uso del suelo en España

Observed-predicted length of stay for an acute psychiatric department, as an indicator of inpatient care inefficiencies. Retrospective case-series study.

BACKGROUND: Length of stay (LOS) is an important indicator of efficiency for inpatient care but it does not achieve an adequate performance if it is not adjusted for the case mix of the patients hospitalized during the period considered. After two similar studies for Internal Medicine and Surgery respectively, the aims of the present study were to search for Length of Stay (LOS) predictors in an acute psychiatric department and to assess the performance of the difference: observed-predicted length of stay, as an indicator of inpatient care inefficiencies. METHODS: Retrospective case-series of patients discharged during 1999 from the Psychiatric Department from General Hospital "Hermanos Ameijeiras" in Havana, Cuba. The 374 eligible medical records were randomly split into two groups of 187 each. We derived the function for estimating the predicted LOS within the first group. Possible predictors were: age; sex; place of residence; diagnosis, use of electroconvulsive therapy; co morbidities; symptoms at admission, medications, marital status, and response to treatment. LOS was the dependent variable. A thorough exam of the patients' records was the basis to assess the capacity of the function for detecting inefficiency problems, within the second group. RESULTS: The function explained 37% of LOS variation. The strongest influence on LOS came from: age (p = 0.002), response to treatment (p < 0.0001), the dummy for personality disorders (p = 0.01), ECT therapy (p = 0.003), factor for sexual and/or eating symptoms (p = 0.003) and factor for psychotic symptoms (p = 0.025). Mean observed LOS is 2 days higher than predicted for the group of records with inefficient care, whereas for the group with acceptable efficiency, observed mean LOS was 4 days lower than predicted. The area under the ROC curve for detecting inefficiencies was 69% CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the importance of possible predictors of LOS, in an acute care Psychiatric department. The proposed indicator can be readily used to detect inefficiencies

Maximum-confidence discrimination among symmetric qudit states

We study the maximum-confidence (MC) measurement strategy for discriminating among nonorthogonal symmetric qudit states. Restricting to linearly dependent and equally likely pure states, we find the optimal positive operator valued measure (POVM) that maximizes our confidence in identifying each state in the set and minimizes the probability of obtaining inconclusive results. The physical realization of this POVM is completely determined and it is shown that after an inconclusive outcome, the input states may be mapped into a new set of equiprobable symmetric states, restricted, however, to a subspace of the original qudit Hilbert space. By applying the MC measurement again onto this new set, we can still gain some information about the input states, although with less confidence than before. This leads us to introduce the concept of "sequential maximum-confidence" (SMC) measurements, where the optimized MC strategy is iterated in as many stages as allowed by the input set, until no further information can be extracted from an inconclusive result. Within each stage of this measurement our confidence in identifying the input states is the highest possible, although it decreases from one stage to the next. In addition, the more stages we accomplish within the maximum allowed, the higher will be the probability of correct identification. We will discuss an explicit example of the optimal SMC measurement applied in the discrimination among four symmetric qutrit states and propose an optical network to implement it.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Published versio

Gait recognition and fall detection with inertial sensors

In contrast to visual information that is recorded by cameras placed somewhere, inertial information can be obtained from mobile phones that are commonly used in daily life. We present in this talk a general deep learning approach for gait and soft biometrics (age and gender) recognition. Moreover, we also study the use of gait information to detect actions during walking, specifically, fall detection. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation of the proposed approach on different datasets: OU-ISIR Biometric Database, DFNAPAS, SisFall, UniMiB-SHAR and ASLH. The experimental results show that inertial information can be used for gait recognition and fall detection with state-of-the-art results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Análisis de los factores genéticos y ambientales con influencia en la circunferencia escrotal en el vacuno de carne de Raza Retinta

De los caracteres del vacuno de carne, los relacionados con la eficiencia reproductiva han sido considerados de una importancia fundamental. Dentro de éstos, cabe destacar la CE, parámetro correlacionado positivamente con las características cualitativas y cuantitativas del semen, asl como asociado a parámetros reproductivos en hembras (precocidad sexual y fertilidad). En este trabaja se ha estudiado la CE desde distintos aspectos como los factores ambientales que le influyen, su evolución a lo largo del tiempo, el cálculo del parámetro genético de la heredabilidad y las relaciones con otras variables como el peso vivo del animal. Para ello, se realizaron 1.020 mediciones en 281 animales pertenencientes a 20 ganaderías del núcleo de Control del plan de mejora de esta raza. la media obtenida para la circunferencia escrotal fue de 30,66 ± 0, 166 (CV. = 17,3%)y 34,38 ± 0, 140 (C.V.= 9, 1%) para an ima les de un año de edad, y la heredabilidad estimada para este carácter de 0,36. El peso vivo, y en segundo lugar la edad, fueron las dos variables con mayor influencia en la circunferencia escrotal en esta raza. Otros factores ambientales a tener en cuenta en los análisis genéticos de esta variable son la ganadería y año -estación de medida-, cuyo efecto se ha mostrado altamente significativo. Así si bien la curva de crecimiento de la CE que mejor se ajusta al intervalo de crecimiento analizado fue la logistítica 2, a efectos prácticos de tipificac ión al año, consideramos que la curva polinómica de segundo grado da un ajuste equivalente, permitienndo una mayor simplificación de los cálculos necesarios para su aplicación en un plan de mejora