The heartbeat of the city

Human activity is organised around daily and weekly cycles, which should, in turn, dominate all types of social interactions, such as transactions, communications, gatherings and so on. Yet, despite their strategic importance for policing and security, cyclical weekly patterns in crime and road incidents have been unexplored at the city and neighbourhood level. Here we construct a novel method to capture the weekly trace, or "heartbeat" of events and use geotagged data capturing the time and location of more than 200,000 violent crimes and nearly one million crashes in Mexico City. On aggregate, our findings show that the heartbeats of crime and crashes follow a similar pattern. We observe valleys during the night and peaks in the evening, where the intensity during a peak is 7.5 times the intensity of valleys in terms of crime and 12.3 times in terms of road accidents. Although distinct types of events, crimes and crashes reach their respective intensity peak on Friday night and valley on Tuesday morning, the result of a hyper-synchronised society. Next, heartbeats are computed for city neighbourhood 'tiles', a division of space within the city based on the distance to Metro and other public transport stations. We find that heartbeats are spatially heterogeneous with some diffusion, so that nearby tiles have similar heartbeats. Tiles are then clustered based on the shape of their heartbeat, e.g., tiles within groups suffer peaks and valleys of crime or crashes at similar times during the week. The clusters found are similar to those based on economic activities. This enables us to anticipate temporal traces of crime and crashes based on local amenities

An Electromagnetic Study of the Impact of Brain Anatomy on Deep Brain Stimulation

An electromagnetic simulation was performed to assess the volume of tissue activated on deep brain stimulation for two patients randomly selected. The finite element method is used to calculate the electric field distribution that predicts the volume of tissue activated. High-resolution magnetic resonance images are utilized to create patient-specific anatomical models of the subthalamic nucleus and the internal pallidum. The results confirmed the influence of brain anatomy leading to different shape and volume of tissue activated despite similar technical features. Thus, a patient-specific model and an adequate choice of stimulation parameters are crucial on deep brain stimulation outcomes.S

Voluntary control of wearable robotic exoskeletons by patients with paresis via neuromechanical modeling.

BACKGROUND: Research efforts in neurorehabilitation technologies have been directed towards creating robotic exoskeletons to restore motor function in impaired individuals. However, despite advances in mechatronics and bioelectrical signal processing, current robotic exoskeletons have had only modest clinical impact. A major limitation is the inability to enable exoskeleton voluntary control in neurologically impaired individuals. This hinders the possibility of optimally inducing the activity-driven neuroplastic changes that are required for recovery. METHODS: We have developed a patient-specific computational model of the human musculoskeletal system controlled via neural surrogates, i.e., electromyography-derived neural activations to muscles. The electromyography-driven musculoskeletal model was synthesized into a human-machine interface (HMI) that enabled poststroke and incomplete spinal cord injury patients to voluntarily control multiple joints in a multifunctional robotic exoskeleton in real time. RESULTS: We demonstrated patients' control accuracy across a wide range of lower-extremity motor tasks. Remarkably, an increased level of exoskeleton assistance always resulted in a reduction in both amplitude and variability in muscle activations as well as in the mechanical moments required to perform a motor task. Since small discrepancies in onset time between human limb movement and that of the parallel exoskeleton would potentially increase human neuromuscular effort, these results demonstrate that the developed HMI precisely synchronizes the device actuation with residual voluntary muscle contraction capacity in neurologically impaired patients. CONCLUSIONS: Continuous voluntary control of robotic exoskeletons (i.e. event-free and task-independent) has never been demonstrated before in populations with paretic and spastic-like muscle activity, such as those investigated in this study. Our proposed methodology may open new avenues for harnessing residual neuromuscular function in neurologically impaired individuals via symbiotic wearable robots

Diagnóstico molecular de los síndromes de prader-willy y angelman a través de la técnica me-pcr

Desarrollar una técnica basados en métodos moleculares, Metilación Específica PCR para comprobar el diagnóstico clínico de pacientes afectados por los síndromes de Prader-Willi y Angelman

Estudio epidemiológico del síndrome de waardenburg en colombia

Ampliar los conocimientos clínicos y genéticos sobre el Síndrome de Waardenburg (WS), definiendo la frecuencia de los tipos de síndrome y su distribución geográfica en la población sorda colombiana

Mitochondrial phylogeography and demographic history of the Vicuña: implications for conservation

The vicuña (Vicugna vicugna; Miller, 1924) is a conservation success story, having recovered from near extinction in the 1960s to current population levels estimated at 275 000. However, lack of information about its demographic history and genetic diversity has limited both our understanding of its recovery and the development of science-based conservation measures. To examine the evolution and recent demographic history of the vicuña across its current range and to assess its genetic variation and population structure, we sequenced mitochondrial DNA from the control region (CR) for 261 individuals from 29 populations across Peru, Chile and Argentina. Our results suggest that populations currently designated as Vicugna vicugna vicugna and Vicugna vicugna mensalis comprise separate mitochondrial lineages. The current population distribution appears to be the result of a recent demographic expansion associated with the last major glacial event of the Pleistocene in the northern (18 to 22°S) dry Andes 14–12 000 years ago and the establishment of an extremely arid belt known as the 'Dry Diagonal' to 29°S. Within the Dry Diagonal, small populations of V. v. vicugna appear to have survived showing the genetic signature of demographic isolation, whereas to the north V. v. mensalis populations underwent a rapid demographic expansion before recent anthropogenic impacts

Los descansos activos y la mejora de los aprendizajes en educación infantil: una propuesta de intervención

The objective of this work is the study of the relationship between active breaks and academic performance in children preschool education, improving the curricular contents, through physical education games. The sample was formed by 50 participants, divided into a control group (n = 25) and an experimental group (n = 25). For the data collection, two evaluations were conducted, one before the programme (pre) and the other one after the programme (post). For the data analysis the t-Student test was used. The results obtained reflected the importance of physical activity in academic performance, as well as the transversal benefits it brings to health.El objetivo de este trabajo es el estudio de la relación entre los descansos activos y el rendimiento académico en niños del segundo ciclo de educación infantil, mejorando los diversos contenidos curriculares, a través de juegos de Educación Física. La muestra estuvo compuesta por un total de 50 alumnos, divididos en grupo control (n=25) y un grupo experimental (n=25). Para la recopilación de datos se llevaron a cabo dos evaluaciones, una antes de la realización de los descansos activos, pre-test y otra posterior, post-test. Para el análisis de datos se utilizó la prueba t-Student, para medias de muestras relacionadas. Los resultados obtenidos reflejaron la importancia de la actividad física en el rendimiento académico, así como los beneficios transversales que aporta a la salud

Interacting Supernovae: Types IIn and Ibn

Supernovae (SNe) that show evidence of strong shock interaction between their ejecta and pre-existing, slower circumstellar material (CSM) constitute an interesting, diverse, and still poorly understood category of explosive transients. The chief reason that they are extremely interesting is because they tell us that in a subset of stellar deaths, the progenitor star may become wildly unstable in the years, decades, or centuries before explosion. This is something that has not been included in standard stellar evolution models, but may significantly change the end product and yield of that evolution, and complicates our attempts to map SNe to their progenitors. Another reason they are interesting is because CSM interaction is an efficient engine for making bright transients, allowing super-luminous transients to arise from normal SN explosion energies, and allowing transients of normal SN luminosities to arise from sub-energetic explosions or low radioactivity yield. CSM interaction shrouds the fast ejecta in bright shock emission, obscuring our normal view of the underlying explosion, and the radiation hydrodynamics of the interaction is challenging to model. The CSM interaction may also be highly non-spherical, perhaps linked to binary interaction in the progenitor system. In some cases, these complications make it difficult to definitively tell the difference between a core-collapse or thermonuclear explosion, or to discern between a non-terminal eruption, failed SN, or weak SN. Efforts to uncover the physical parameters of individual events and connections to possible progenitor stars make this a rapidly evolving topic that continues to challenge paradigms of stellar evolution.Comment: Final draft of a chapter in the "SN Handbook". Accepted. 25 pages, 3 fig

What is the value of social values? The uselessness of assessing health-related quality of life through preference measures

BACKGROUND: The use of preference-based measures in the evaluation of health outcomes has extended considerably over the last decade. Their alleged advantage over other types of general instruments in the evaluation of health related quality of life (HRQOL), supposedly lies in the fact that preference measures incorporate values or utilities that reflects the value of social preferences through health states. The objective of this study was to determine whether the use of social preference weights or utilities makes any real difference when calculating scores for the Euroqol (EQ5-D) questionnaire, a HRQOL preference-based measure. METHODS: Responses to the EQ5-D of a sample of 10,972 patients from 10 countries enrolled in an observational study of the treatment of schizophrenia in Europe were used for this purpose. Two different methods of scoring the EQ-5D where compared: 'weighting the items' of the questionnaire through the UK official weight coefficients, and 'non-weighting the items'. Pearson's, Spearman's, and two-way mixed parametric intraclass correlation coefficients were used to estimate the association of the scores obtained in both ways. RESULTS: The association between weighted and unweighted Euroqol scores was extremely high (Pearson's r = 0.91), as was the association between their ranks (Spearman's ρ = 0.93). The intraclass correlation coefficient obtained (0.89) also suggested that the concordance between the score distributions was prominent. CONCLUSIONS: A non-weighted approach to score the EQ5-D is enough to explain a high proportion of variance in scores obtained through the use of utilities. The differential contribution of weights based on population preference values is therefore minimal and, in our opinion, negligible

Sports, morality and body. The voices of sportswomen under Franco's dictatorship

The aim of this research is to study sportswomen's perceptions and experiences of women's sport in Francoist Spain (1939-1975). The main objective is to analyse the social, moral and aesthetic elements that are present in the experience of these athletes. This study was carried out with an intentional sample of 24 women from Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Basque Country, Catalonia and Valencia. They were interviewed by a network of researchers from six universities. Outstanding results show the existence of social limitations to start sports practice (particularly in the post-war period); the importance of sport as a character-building aspect; sport's remarkable influence on their body self-concept; and the incidence on sports of the mainstream moral discourse, which created a female model that even affected sports clothing. The main conclusion is that sportswomen in that period were pioneers and had to fight against most of society in order to develop their facet as athletes, as they would not follow the established model