New Physics in s→uℓ−νˉs\to u\ell^-\bar\nu: Interplay between semileptonic kaon and hyperon decays

We review a novel model-independent approach to the analysis of new-physics effects in the $s\to u\ell^-\bar\nu$ transitions. We apply it to (semi)leptonic kaon decays and study their complementarity with pion and hyperon $\beta$ decays or with collider searches of new physics.Comment: Contribution to the NA62 Physics Handbook. It summarizes the analysis presented in arXiv:1605.07114 and discusses in more detail the interplay between $K_{\mu3}$ and semileptonic hyperon decays as new-physics probe

Evaluando el discurso docente: desarrollo de un modelo de Rasch a partir de la evidencia audiovisual de profesores chilenos de primer ciclo de educación básica en el aréa de lenguaje

El presente estudio investiga la naturaleza del discurso docente en aula de los profesores y profesoras de lenguaje de enseñanza básica en Chile. Para ello reanaliza datos de videos recolectados en un estudio previo en 2003. El modelo estadístico utilizado para analizar dicha información permite ubicar en una misma escala intervalar las características (habilidades) de los profesores y las características (dificultades) de las tareas que definen el discurso docente; esto permite no sólo la comparación directa entre profesores, sino también entre profesores con respecto a las variables de discurso docente. De esta forma, es posible interpretar la habilidad de los profesores con respecto al significado sustantivo de las variables del discurso docente. Utilizando estas comparaciones, este estudio pretende alcanzar dos fines: primero, detectar cuáles son las principales fortalezas y debilidades que caracterizan el discurso docente y, en segundo lugar, tratar de posicionar estas fortalezas y debilidades en un enfoque de diferencias individuales.La preparación de este manuscrito fue financiada por el proyecto "Estrategias de medición y análisis de datos educacionales usando modelos con variables latentes. Proyecto VRAID 2008 Concurso Especial en Educación". Adicionalmente, el trabajo de David Preiss en la preparación de este manuscrito fue financiado por el proyecto FONDECYT No. 11060389

Gender differences in e-learning satisfaction

In line with recent research, the question this paper raises is whether or not gender differences also exist in e-learning. This study is based on a sample of 1,185 students who are doing on-line courses at the Universidad de Granada in Spain. The main conclusion is that female students are more satisfied than male students with the e-learning subjects that make up the sample. Furthermore, we find that female students assign more importance to the planning of learning, as well as to being able to contact the teacher in various ways.: Gender Studies; Evaluation Methodologies

Parallelization of ARACNe, an Algorithm for the Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Networks

[Abstract] Gene regulatory networks are graphical representations of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expression. There are different computational approaches for the reverse engineering of these networks. Most of them require all gene-gene evaluations using different mathematical methods such as Pearson/Spearman correlation, Mutual Information or topology patterns, among others. The Algorithm for the Reconstruction of Accurate Cellular Networks (ARACNe) is one of the most effective and widely used tools to reconstruct gene regulatory networks. However, the high computational cost of ARACNe prevents its use over large biologic datasets. In this work, we present a hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallel implementation of ARACNe to accelerate its execution on multi-core clusters, obtaining a speedup of 430.46 using as input a dataset with 41,100 genes and 108 samples and 32 nodes (each of them with 24 cores).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TIN2016-75845-PXunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/0

Use of Heat Transfer Enhancement Techniques in the Design of Heat Exchangers

Heat transfer enhancement refers to application of basic concepts of heat transfer processes to improve the rate of heat removal or deposition on a surface. In the flow of a clean fluid through the tube of a heat exchanger, the boundary layer theorem establishes that a laminar sublayer exists where the fluid velocity is minimal. Heat transfer through this stagnant layer is mainly dominated by thermal conduction, becoming the major resistance to heat transfer. From an engineering point of view, heat transfer can be enhanced if this stagnant layer is partially removed or eliminated. In single-phase heat transfer processes, three options are available to increase the heat transfer rate. One of them is the choice of smaller free flow sectional area for increased fluid velocity bringing about a reduction of the thickness of the laminar sublayer. A second option is the engineering of new surfaces which cause increased local turbulence, and the third option consists in the use of mechanical inserts that promote local turbulence. The application of these alternatives is limited by the pressure drop. This chapter describes the concept of heat transfer enhancement and the ways it is applied to the development of new heat exchanger technology

Circuitos equivalentes en bandas milimétricas

The use of ideal equivalent circuits which represent the electrical response of a physical device is a very common practice in microwave and millimeter wave circuit design. However, these equivalent circuit models only get accurate results in a certain frequency range. In this document, some basic devices have been analyzed, with several equivalent circuit models for each one. Physical devices have been manufactured and measured, and measurements have been compared with the responses obtained from the equivalent models. From this comparison, it?s possible to see what equivalent models are more advisable in each case and which are their limitations

PyToxo: a Python tool for calculating penetrance tables of high-order epistasis models

[Abstract] Background Epistasis is the interaction between different genes when expressing a certain phenotype. If epistasis involves more than two loci it is called high-order epistasis. High-order epistasis is an area under active research because it could be the cause of many complex traits. The most common way to specify an epistasis interaction is through a penetrance table. Results This paper presents PyToxo, a Python tool for generating penetrance tables from any-order epistasis models. Unlike other tools available in the bibliography, PyToxo is able to work with high-order models and realistic penetrance and heritability values, achieving high-precision results in a short time. In addition, PyToxo is distributed as open-source software and includes several interfaces to ease its use. Conclusions PyToxo provides the scientific community with a useful tool to evaluate algorithms and methods that can detect high-order epistasis to continue advancing in the discovery of the causes behind complex diseases.This study and publication costs were funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (grant PID2019-104184RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by Xunta de Galicia and FEDER funds of the EU (CITIC-Centro de Investigación de Galicia accreditation, grant ED431G 2019/01; Consolidation Program of Competitive Reference Groups, grant ED431C 2021/30). CP was funded by the Ministry of Education of Spain (grant FPU16/01333). The funders did not play any role in the design of the study, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, or in writing of the manuscriptXunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2021/3

Powerful knowledge, transposition/transformation and ICT: an empirical study across school subjects in primary education

Artículo de investigación[EN] This article presents a study that analyses the types of activity used to teach the curriculum in primary education, and the use made accordingly of digital and analogue resources. The research’s purpose was to discover whether there are any differentiated patterns of activity in the teaching of these subjects, and whether they are linked to the use of ICT/non-ICT resources. A multiple case study was conducted with 10 primary teachers, with three schooldays being recorded over the 2018–2019 school year, which provided 132 hours of recordings. The research design involved the use of mixed methods. The results reveal a differentiated use of patterns of activity linked to the subjects that make up the curriculum in primary education, as well as a differentiated use of ICT and non-ICT resources when teaching these subjects. The study includes the need to investigate the process of transforming/transposing the academic content into effective classroom teaching practices.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidade

Fiuncho: a program for any-order epistasis detection in CPU clusters

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: CRUE/CISUG[Abstract]: Epistasis can be defined as the statistical interaction of genes during the expression of a phenotype. It is believed that it plays a fundamental role in gene expression, as individual genetic variants have reported a very small increase in disease risk in previous Genome-Wide Association Studies. The most successful approach to epistasis detection is the exhaustive method, although its exponential time complexity requires a highly parallel implementation in order to be used. This work presents Fiuncho, a program that exploits all levels of parallelism present in x86_64 CPU clusters in order to mitigate the complexity of this approach. It supports epistasis interactions of any order, and when compared with other exhaustive methods, it is on average 358, 7 and 3 times faster than MDR, MPI3SNP and BitEpi, respectively.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (PID2019-104184RB-I00 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033), the Xunta de Galicia and FEDER funds of the EU (CITIC-Centro de Investigación de Galicia accreditation 2019–2022, Grant no. ED431G 2019/01), Consolidation Program of Competitive Research (Grant no. ED431C 2021/30), and the FPU Program of the Ministry of Education of Spain (Grant no. FPU16/01333).Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2021/3

Applying dynamic balancing to improve the performance of MPI parallel genomics applications

© ACM 2024. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '24).[Absctract]: Genomics applications are becoming more and more important in the field of bioinformatics, as they allow researchers to extract meaningful information from the huge amount of data generated by the new sequencing technologies. The analysis of these data is a very time consuming task and, therefore, the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) and parallel processing techniques is essential. Although the structure of these applications can be easily adapted to parallel systems by distributing the data to be processed among the available processors, load imbalance is a usual cause of performance degradation. In this paper we propose a dynamic load balancing method based on MPI RMA one-sided communications to minimize the synchronization among processes and the overhead due to communications while improving the workload balance. The strategy is applied, as a case study, to ParRADMeth, an MPI/OpenMP parallel application for the identification of Differential Methylated Regions (DMRs). Results show that the new version of the tool outperforms the previous one in all cases, achieving high performance and scalability. For example, our approach is up to 243 times faster than the sequential version and 1.74 times faster than the previous parallel version when processing a real dataset on a cluster with 8 nodes, each one with 32 CPU cores.This work has been supported by grants PID2019-104184RB-I00 and PID2022-136435NB-I00, both grants funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, PID2022 also funded by "ERDF A way of making Europe", EU; the Ministry of Universities of Spain under grant FPU21/03408; and by Xunta de Galicia and FEDER funds (Centro de Investigación de Galicia accreditation 2019-2022 and Consolidation Program of Competitive Reference Groups, under Grants ED431G 2019/01 and ED431C 2021/30, respectively)Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2021/3