GLOBAL-MANAGER: A Serious Game for Providing Training in Project Manager Skills

The emergence of Global Software Development (GSD) has led to certain difficulties in the life cycle of global projects, in addition to the traditional challenges of collocated development, particularly as regards Project Management (PM). These difficulties are caused by the geographical, linguistic and cultural distance among the members of the team, signifying that the project manager requires special skills with which to mitigate these issues. Bearing this in mind, this paper describes a serious game (SG), denominated as GLOBAL-MANAGER, whose objective is to provide training in the management of GSD projects. The game attempts to develop several skills in its players whilst simultaneously providing them with an immersive, pleasant and attractive experience. The skills developed are related to coordination, communication and control, which are three of the principal challenges in GSD

Enseñando a los estudiantes cómo mejorar su atención y gestión del tiempo

En este artículo se describe un estudio empírico realizado para cuantificar las interrupciones a las que se ven sometidos los estudiantes a través de las aplicaciones de sus portátiles y teléfonos móviles, normalmente redes sociales, que tantas veces utilizan en el aula. En base a los resultados obtenidos en el mismo, los estudiantes realizaron un taller de gestión del tiempo, los pensamientos y la atención. Se evaluó la participación en este taller y los efectos que tuvo sobre sus participantes. Los resultados obtenidos, bastante optimistas, se describen en este trabajo para animar a otros centros universitarios a llevar a cabo iniciativas similares.This article describes an empirical study conducted to quantify the disruptions students are subjected to through the applications on their laptops and mobile phones, usually social networks, which they often use in the classroom. Based on the results obtained in this study, the students carried out a workshop on time, thought and attention management. Participation in this workshop and the effects it had on its participants were evaluated. The quite optimistic results obtained are described in this paper to encourage other university schools to perform similar initiatives

Fototeca y laboratorio de imágenes 2.0. Nuevos recursos para la educación en abierto y la enseñanza virtual de la Historia del Arte

El proyecto estaba destinado a la creación de un laboratorio de imágenes, destinado a la educación en Historia del Arte. Asimismo se ha tratado de crear una fototeca útil para la enseñanza práctica en el Departamento

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

The IDENTIFY study: the investigation and detection of urological neoplasia in patients referred with suspected urinary tract cancer - a multicentre observational study

Objective To evaluate the contemporary prevalence of urinary tract cancer (bladder cancer, upper tract urothelial cancer [UTUC] and renal cancer) in patients referred to secondary care with haematuria, adjusted for established patient risk markers and geographical variation. Patients and Methods This was an international multicentre prospective observational study. We included patients aged ≥16 years, referred to secondary care with suspected urinary tract cancer. Patients with a known or previous urological malignancy were excluded. We estimated the prevalence of bladder cancer, UTUC, renal cancer and prostate cancer; stratified by age, type of haematuria, sex, and smoking. We used a multivariable mixed-effects logistic regression to adjust cancer prevalence for age, type of haematuria, sex, smoking, hospitals, and countries. Results Of the 11 059 patients assessed for eligibility, 10 896 were included from 110 hospitals across 26 countries. The overall adjusted cancer prevalence (n = 2257) was 28.2% (95% confidence interval [CI] 22.3–34.1), bladder cancer (n = 1951) 24.7% (95% CI 19.1–30.2), UTUC (n = 128) 1.14% (95% CI 0.77–1.52), renal cancer (n = 107) 1.05% (95% CI 0.80–1.29), and prostate cancer (n = 124) 1.75% (95% CI 1.32–2.18). The odds ratios for patient risk markers in the model for all cancers were: age 1.04 (95% CI 1.03–1.05; P < 0.001), visible haematuria 3.47 (95% CI 2.90–4.15; P < 0.001), male sex 1.30 (95% CI 1.14–1.50; P < 0.001), and smoking 2.70 (95% CI 2.30–3.18; P < 0.001). Conclusions A better understanding of cancer prevalence across an international population is required to inform clinical guidelines. We are the first to report urinary tract cancer prevalence across an international population in patients referred to secondary care, adjusted for patient risk markers and geographical variation. Bladder cancer was the most prevalent disease. Visible haematuria was the strongest predictor for urinary tract cancer

IT Governance

Corporate Governance Encompasses the set of rules, processes, and methods aimed at defining and meeting the strategic objectives of an organization.1 These objectives normally have long-term repercussions and define the road map of the companies, considering the different entities directly affected by the strategic decisions taken, such as external stakeholders

Global Software Development governance: Challenges and solutions

Global software development (GSD) has become a rising software developmentmodel in the last few years. Although much research has been performed in terms ofGSD management, GSD governance research is scarce at the present time and pre-sents multiple challenges that need to be addressed. In this paper, a systematic map-ping study has been conducted, the aim of which was to discover the main issuesdealt with in GSD governance literature, as well as to point out the particularresearch gaps that are still present in this domain. This allowed us to find out newchallenges to be addressed, along with possible solutions to these. The results reveala lack of research in key aspects such as tools, culture, people, and information, all ofwhich provides a great opportunity for future approaches while also highlighting newopportunities in GSD governance researc

Distortion of the local density of states in a plasmonic cavity by a quantum emitter

12 pags., 5 figs., 2 apps.We investigate how the local density of states in a plasmonic cavity changes due to the presence of a distorting quantum emitter. To this end, we use first-order scattering theory involving electromagnetic Green’s function tensors for the bare cavity connecting the positions of the emitter that distorts the density of states and the one that probes it. The confined, quasistatic character of the plasmonic modes enables us to write the density of states as a Lorentzian sum. This way, we identify three different mechanisms behind the asymmetric spectral features emerging due to the emitter distortion: the modification of the plasmonic coupling to the probing emitter, the emergence of modal-like quadratic contributions and the absorption by the distorting emitter. We apply our theory to the study of two different systems (nanoparticle-on-mirror and asymmetric bow-tie-like geometries) to show the generality of our approach, whose validity is tested against numerical simulations. Finally, we provide an interpretation of our results in terms of a Hamiltonian model describing the distorted cavityThis work was funded by the Spanish MINECO under Contract No. MDM-2014-0377-16-4 and from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation under Contract No. RTI2018-099737-B-I00 and through the ‘María de Maeztu’ programme for Units of Excellence in R & D (CEX2018-000805-M). It was also supported by a Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation. AM acknowledges support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant DMR-1941680) and the Spanish MICINN (Grant TEM-FLU PID2019-109502GA-I00).Peer reviewe