Reconocimiento y cooperación en la intervención en infancia en riesgo social

Enfront del progressiu augment de les tasques de caràcter burocràtic present en l’àmbit de l’atenció a menors en risc social, és convenient recordar l’existència d’altres formes d’intervenció que aposten per aconseguir un autèntic treball conjunt de professionals i famílies. La cooperació esdevé un concepte central que implica el reconeixement per part dels professionals als menors i a les seves famílies com a subjectes de ple dret, amb dificultats i conflictes, però també, amb capacitats conservades. En aquest article es planteja una reflexió sobre els conceptes de reconeixement i cooperació aplicats a aquest àmbit i s’exposen els punts bàsics que d’ells es deriven en aquelles pràctiques que els incorporen.Faced with the increasing workload of bureaucracy involved in assisting minors at social risk, it should be remembered that there are other forms of intervention that support achieving solid results from families and professionals working together. Cooperation becomes a central concept, requiring professionals to recognise minors and their families as persons with full rights who are experiencing difficulties and conflicts, but who also have capacities in reserve. The article reflects the concepts of recognition and cooperation applied to the subject, and describes the basic points arising from putting these into practice.Frente al progresivo aumento de las tareas de carácter burocrático presente en el ámbito de la atención a menores en riesgo social, es conveniente recordar la existencia de otras formas de intervención que apuestan por lograr un auténtico trabajo conjunto de profesionales y familias. La cooperación resulta un concepto central que implica el reconocimiento por parte de los profesionales a los menores y a sus familias como sujetos de pleno derecho, con dificultades y conflictos, pero también con capacidades conservadas. En el presente artículo se plantea una reflexión sobre los conceptos de reconocimiento y cooperación aplicados a ese ámbito y se exponen los puntos básicos que de ellos se derivan en aquellas prácticas que los incorporan

Sequence information gain based motif analysis

Background: The detection of regulatory regions in candidate sequences is essential for the understanding of the regulation of a particular gene and the mechanisms involved. This paper proposes a novel methodology based on information theoretic metrics for finding regulatory sequences in promoter regions. Results: This methodology (SIGMA) has been tested on genomic sequence data for Homo sapiens and Mus musculus. SIGMA has been compared with different publicly available alternatives for motif detection, such as MEME/MAST, Biostrings (Bioconductor package), MotifRegressor, and previous work such Qresiduals projections or information theoretic based detectors. Comparative results, in the form of Receiver Operating Characteristic curves, show how, in 70 % of the studied Transcription Factor Binding Sites, the SIGMA detector has a better performance and behaves more robustly than the methods compared, while having a similar computational time. The performance of SIGMA can be explained by its parametric simplicity in the modelling of the non-linear co-variability in the binding motif positions. Conclusions: Sequence Information Gain based Motif Analysis is a generalisation of a non-linear model of the cis-regulatory sequences detection based on Information Theory. This generalisation allows us to detect transcription factor binding sites with maximum performance disregarding the covariability observed in the positions of the training set of sequences. SIGMA is freely available to the public at http://b2slab.upc.edu.Postprint (published version

Spoken and Written Representation of Number in L2 Catalan Indefinite Determiner Phrases

The study explores the relationship that second language (L2) learners of Catalan establish between the spoken and the written representation of number inflection within an indefinite-article Determiner Phrase (DP); and it also addresses first language (LI) influence in this processo Five- to eight-year-olds, speakers of varieties of Chinese and Moroccan Arabic, with differing degrees of literacy instruction in their home countries -but similar time of residence in Catalonia- participated in the study. The children carried out individual semi-structured tasks designed to evaluate comprehension and production of changes in number inflectÏons (un cotxe 'a car'; uns cotxes 'a-pl cars '). Results showed that, irrespective of children's language background, comprehension preceded production of singular and plural indefinite-article DPs; spoken representatÏon was easier than written representation of number changes; and production of plural indefinite-article DPs was more difficult than its singular counterpart. Despite rypological differences between the languages compared, both groups of L2 learners, even the Catalan control group, underwent similar processes

Propietats pragmàtiques i gramaticals en el desenvolupament de la coreferència pronominal

Summary: In this paper, we examine the referential properties of null and overt subject pronouns in Catalan in the semi-spontaneous production of oral and written narrative texts by three groups of speakers/writers: 9–10 year olds, 12–13 year olds, and 16–17 year olds. We aim at determining whether these two types of pronouns play the same role and to what extent they contribute to anaphora resolution and discourse cohesion, both at an intra- and an inter-sentential level. We concentrate on anaphoric relations expressed by 3rd person pronouns in subject position. Our results show that, at an intra-sentential level, null pronouns normally refer to subject antecedents, mainly in the spoken modality, while overt pronouns refer back to either a subject or a non-subject antecedent. This entails that once a discourse element becomes a discourse topic and is the subject of a sentence, a null pronoun is used. Moreover, a parallel tendency is observed at an inter-sentential and discourse level. [Keywords: Reference; pronouns; Catalan; anaphora resolution; written development; oral development

The Cuntz semigroup of a ring

For any ring $R$, we introduce an invariant in the form of a partially ordered abelian semigroup $\mathrm{S}(R)$ built from an equivalence relation on the class of countably generated projective modules. We call $\mathrm{S}(R)$ the Cuntz semigroup of the ring $R$. This construction is akin to the manufacture of the Cuntz semigroup of a C*-algebra using countably generated Hilbert modules. To circumvent the lack of a topology in a general ring $R$, we deepen our understanding of countably projective modules over $R$, thus uncovering new features in their direct limit decompositions, which in turn yields two equivalent descriptions of $\mathrm{S}(R)$. The Cuntz semigroup of $R$ is part of a new invariant $\mathrm{SCu}(R)$ which includes an ambient semigroup in the category of abstract Cuntz semigroups that provides additional information. We provide computations for both $\mathrm{S}(R)$ and $\mathrm{SCu}(R)$ in a number of interesting situations, such as unit-regular rings, semilocal rings, and in the context of nearly simple domains. We also relate our construcion to the Cuntz semigroup of a C*-algebra.Comment: 43 page