La sacramentalitat com a principi hermenèutic de l'Eclesiologia

El Concili Vaticà II descriu l’Església, a fi de determinar la seva relació específica amb l’actuació salvífica de Déu vers al món, amb la paraula sacramentum usada deu vegades. Aquest Concili se separa de l’ensenyament tradicional sobre la teologia sacramental i apunta a una comprensió del sagrament com a «designi de Déu» a través d’aquestes tres formulacions: 1) L’Església com a «sagrament de Crist»: afirmada tres cops; 2) L’Església com a «sagrament d’unitat»: afirmada dues vegades amb citacions de sant Cebrià; 3) L’Església com a «sagrament universal de salvació de la humanitat i el món»: que hi apareix cinc cops. Així apareix la sacramentalitat com a categoria teologicohermenèutica, que pressuposa una ontologia relacional, en la seva triple dimensió: la dimensió fenomenològica, pròpia del signum o sacramentum tantum, referida al seu signe exterior de l’Església organitzada com a societat (cf. LG 8); la dimensió meta-empírica, referida a la seva res et sacramentum expressada en el seu signe interior que és l’Església com a comunitat (cf. LG 8); i la res tantum, o dimensió teològica última de l’Església que és la filiació divina i la fraternitat (cf. LG 1). D’aquesta manera, aquestes tres dimensions i nivells es mantenen units sota la categoria global de sacramentalitat, mantenint cadascun d’ells la seva especificitat, i així s’estableix una coordinació diferenciadora per distingir entre l’estructura visible i la naturalesa espiritual de l’Església tot tenint present que «tot el bé que el Poble de Déu pot donar a la família humana deriva del fet que l’Església és “sagrament universal de salvació” » (GS 45)

"Ecclesia semper reformanda". La recepción del Vaticano II: Balance y perspectivas

Es comença pels textos del Vaticà II sobre la reforma de l’Església (LG 8; UR 6) i es tracta del valor magisterial d’aquest concili com a «doctrina catòlica». Pel que fa a la seva recepció es presenten distintes respostes: l’escola de Bolonya, la de Tubinga, l’hermenèutica de la reforma de Benet XVI amb el debat suscitat pels «lefevrebians», els tradicionalistes, els defensors de la «renovació dins de la Tradició» i la radicalització de la identitat teològica de la extensa obra de C. Théobald. Sorgeix així l’actual «xoc de relats interpretatius» sobre el Vaticà II entre els partidaris de la «no continuïtat» o els de la «continuïtat». Les perspectives finals proposen a partir dels criteris del Sínode de 1985: recuperar el caràcter magisterial del Concili; realitzar una lectura essencial de les seves quatre constitucions; estudiar la «història dels seus efectes»; subratllar el seu caràcter «pastoral» d’aggiornamento i la seva decisiva dimensió «renovadora-reformista».The starting point of the article is the texts of Vatican II on the reform of the Church (LG 8; UR 6) and it considers the magisterial value of this council as ‘Catholic Doctrine’. With respect to its reception, the following are presented: the school of Bologna, that of Tubingen, the hermeneutic of the reform of Benedict XVI with the debate created by the ‘Lefevrists’, the traditionalists, the advocates of ‘renewal within Tradition’ and the radicalisation of the theological characteristics of the great work of C. Théobald. Thus, the present-day ‘conflict of interpretive responses’ to Vatican II is brought out, with their differences regarding ‘continuity’ and ‘non-continuity’. The concluding sections are based on the criteria of the 1985 Synod: retrieving the magisterial character of the Council; undertaking an essential reading of its four constitutions; studying the ‘history of its effects’; underlining the ‘pastoral’ nature of the adjournment and its decisive dimension of ‘renewal-reform’

Les ciutats invisibles

L'autor de l'article, en la seva valoració, que estén també als altres plans del Programa de planejament territorial, assenyala que a les propostes del PTMB hi ha nombrosos "silencis" que cal entendre com les oportunitats ocultes que hauran de desenvolupar-se en un nou context social i econòmic

Initialization algorithms for wireless ad-hoc networks

The aim of this master thesis is the implementation of simulation models and the simulation of energy-efficient network initialization algorithms. First of all, it is presented a survey of state-of-the-art strategies for network initialization and exploration in wireless ad-hoc networks. Among the routing approaches presented in the survey it has been chosen the clustering-based approach due to it is the most suitable for ad-hoc sensor networks. Following are explained the features and properties of the clustering-based routing algorithms that have been selected for their implementation on this work. These implemented routing protocols are LEACH, LEACH-C, the solaraware extensions of both, HEED and a protocol based on direct transmission just as a reference in the comparison among the rest of them. On the other hand, all these routing protocols have been implemented and simulated using the OMNeT++ 4.0, which is a freeware discrete simulation environment. Subsequently, all the protocols have been simulated with different parameters and conditions to prove their functionality and to find out their behaviour in different sorts of sensor networks. Next, the simulations of the algorithms are compared among each other especially in terms of communication and energy efficiency. There are presented different comparisons such as LEACH and LEACH-C with their respective solar-aware extensions of both, a comparison between HEED with optimized parameters and non-optimized parameters, and finally a general comparison among One-hop, LEACH, LEACH-C and HEED. To sum up, some conclusions are drawn about the performance of the different protocols and some key points are given for future work. Furthermore, it is presented a brief study of the environmental impact this work may have

Towards the validation of a druggable amyloid-beta oligomer as a target for Alzheimer´s disease = Cap a la validació d’un oligomer de beta-amiloide com a diana en la malaltia d’Alzheimer

[eng] Amyloid-beta peptide (Aβ) is strongly linked to the aetiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Aβ is the main component of the amyloid plaques found in the brain of AD patients, however, Aβ is also present in the brain of healthy humans. It has been described that for this peptide to be neurotoxic, aggregation is needed. The accumulation of Aβ causes aggregation from low order oligomers through different intermediate species up to the formation of amyloid fibrils. However, is not the presence of the fibrils what correlates the harmfulness of the disease, but the concentration of soluble oligomeric intermediate species. Nowadays, is accepted that the neurotoxicity of these oligomers is produced on the membrane. From this point, the laboratory of Dr. Carulla developed the beta-barrel Pore Forming Oligomer (βPFO). βPFO, was produced with Aβ42, the most neurotoxic version of Aβ. It was the first described example of a stable, well-defined and homogeneous membrane oligomer with the ability to form pores on lipid membranes. In this thesis, we aim to advance in the characterization of this βPFO and the validation of βPFO as a druggable target for AD. First, as βPFO was described using detergents as a biomimetic membrane environment, we aimed to move towards a more native environment using natural lipids. By using lipid-detergent micelles we studied βPFO. In this work we demonstrated that βPFO is not able to reconstitute into the common 1,2-dihexanoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine - 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-phosphatidylcholine (DHPC-DMPC) bicelles. Therefore, we described a new type of bicelles using dodecylphosphocholine (DPC) and DMPC, not described in the literature in these conditions until then. We showed that βPFO was able to reconstitute into DPC-DMPC bicelles preserving its overall structure and pore-forming function. Then, to advance towards βPFO validation, we immunized an alpaca with βPFO in order to generate Nanobodies. A Nanobody is a fragment of the single-chain antibodies produced by camelids, with many different properties from conventional antibodies, their reduced size, their cavity specificity, their ease of modification and production, etc. Upon the Nanobodies generation, we selected the ones specific against βPFO obtaining 11 different Nanobodies. Using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) we showed that they had both, a high specificity for βPFO compared to monomeric and fibrillar Aβ42, and a high affinity for them. Moreover, we showed that these generated Nanobodies, were binding to βPFO in different manners affecting differently the protection they could cause to proteolysis. Finally, we demonstrated that upon Nanobody binding on membrane-inserted βPFO, some of the Nanobodies did not affect the current pass across the bilayer while others reduced the current pass and two of them completely blocked the pore formed. In the future, these Nanobodies could serve, not only as a tool to validate as a player βPFO in the context of AD, but also as possible therapeutics

Conseqüències teològiques: Del Crist de la fe al Jeús de la història: La "Fides quaerens veritatem historicam"

L’Església des dels seus primers inicis tenia una regla de la fe, veritat i tradició rebuda per mitjà del baptisme. A partir d’aquesta fe s’escriviren els Evangelis i per això fou a partir de la professió del Crist de la fe que l’Església primitiva començà a narrar el Jesús de la història. D’aquí que hem de situar la recerca històrica sobre Jesús tot seguint l’axioma anselmià en aquests forma: «fides quaerens veritatem historicam», i mostrant que tal recerca històrica no té un caràcter demostratiu, sinò indicatiu en clau de «signe», com a expressió de l’encarnació intra-històrica de Jesús, el Crist, centre de la fe cristiana.The primitive Church initially had their “regula fidei” in Jesus, the Christ, and later wrote the Gospels. In this sense, they began with the profession of faith in Christ and afterwards came to know the Jesus of History. That is a reason for taking the axiom stated by Anselm: “fides quaerens veritatem historicam”, to demonstrate the priority of faith and the role of History as an expression of the intra-historical incarnation of Jesus, the Christ, who is the centre of the Christian faith

Non-acted multi-view audio-visual dyadic interactions. Project master thesis: multitask learning for facial attributes analysis

Treballs finals del Màster de Fonaments de Ciència de Dades, Facultat de matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2019, Tutor: Sergio Escalera Guerrero, Cristina Palmero i Julio C. S. Jacques Junior[en] In this thesis we explore the use of Multitask Learning for improving performance in facial attributes tasks such as gender, age and ethnicity prediction. These tasks, along with emotion recognition will be part of a new dyadic interaction dataset which was recorded during the development of this thesis. This work includes the implementation of two state of the art multitask deep learning models and the discussion of the results obtained from these methods in a preliminary dataset, as well as a first evaluation in a sample of the dyadic interaction dataset. This will serve as a baseline for a future implementation of Multitask Learning methods in the fully annotated dyadic interaction dataset