P02-187 Assessing initial patient's affective disposition towards the hospitalization and the treatment: A validation study

The present work shows some preliminary results of a longitudinal study aimed at validating a psychometric instrument - the Subjective Distance Scale (SDS) - developed to assess the patient's affective nearness/remoteness towards/from the psychiatric treatment in a Day Hospital program. 55 day hospital patients were assessed at different moments of the treatment: At admission they were evaluated by means of the SDS, the SCL-90-R (patient's psychiatric symptoms) and the GAS (patient's mental health level). Institutional therapeutic alliance was assessed one week from admission (IWAI-p) and finally, patient's psychiatric symptoms were retested (SCL-90-R) at the end of the treatment and 3 months from discharge. The main results reveal good psychometric properties of the SDS: its factorial structure partially confirms the dimensions theoretically hypothesised; its internal consistency - total and most of its subscales - reach adequate reliability levels; and related to its predicted validity, the scale correlates with some important aspects of the treatment, like the quality of the early institutional alliance, the symptomatic improvement and the stability of the improvements in time. New studies with larger samples and conducted in additional psychiatric settings are necessary to guarantee the validity and reliability of the scale before it could be used as a clinical screening instrument

Decentralizing UNIX abstractions in the exokernel architecture

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).by Héctor Manuel Briceño Pulido.M.Eng

Short-Term Effect of Daily Herbage Allowance Restriction on Pasture Condition and the Performance of Grazing Dairy Cows during Autumn

The aim of this study was to evaluate the short-term effects of daily herbage allowance (DHA, defined as the product of pre-grazing herbage mass and offered area per animal) on pasture conditions and milk production of Holstein-Friesian dairy cows. Forty-four early lactation dairy cows were randomly assigned to one of four treatments in a 2 × 2 factorial design that tested two levels of DHA (17 and 25 kg DM/cow.day) and two levels of maize silage supplementation (MSS, 4.5 and 9 kg DM/cow.day) over a 77-day period. Low DHA decreased the post-grazing herbage mass from 1546 to 1430 kg DM/ha and the compressed sward height from 5 to 4.4 cm, while the grazing efficiency remained unaffected. Low DHA induced a faster herbage mass reduction, while the sward-height and pasture characteristics did not differ from the high DHA regime. Low DHA decreased the tiller production rates and daily lamina growth, while the leaf-production rate was not affected by the DHA. Daily increases of herbage mass were greater in the high DHA than in the low DHA treatments. Individual milk production and milk protein concentration decreased at a low DHA compared to high DHA, while the milk fat concentration was greater and the milk output per hectare increased by 1510 kg. Neither the MSS level nor the interaction DHA by the MSS level had any effect on the sward characteristics or the productivity of the cows. From these results, it is suggested that,in a high-quality pasture, using 17 kg DM/cow.day was appropriate for improving both herbage utilization and milk production per hectare while maintaining the short-term conditions of a pasture grazed by dairy cows in the autumn

Improved linkage analysis of Quantitative Trait Loci using bulk segregants unveils a novel determinant of high ethanol tolerance in yeast

Background: Bulk segregant analysis (BSA) coupled to high throughput sequencing is a powerful method to map genomic regions related with phenotypes of interest. It relies on crossing two parents, one inferior and one superior for a trait of interest. Segregants displaying the trait of the superior parent are pooled, the DNA extracted and sequenced. Genomic regions linked to the trait of interest are identified by searching the pool for overrepresented alleles that normally originate from the superior parent. BSA data analysis is non-trivial due to sequencing, alignment and screening errors. Results: To increase the power of the BSA technology and obtain a better distinction between spuriously and truly linked regions, we developed EXPLoRA (EXtraction of over-rePresented aLleles in BSA), an algorithm for BSA data analysis that explicitly models the dependency between neighboring marker sites by exploiting the properties of linkage disequilibrium through a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Reanalyzing a BSA dataset for high ethanol tolerance in yeast allowed reliably identifying QTLs linked to this phenotype that could not be identified with statistical significance in the original study. Experimental validation of one of the least pronounced linked regions, by identifying its causative gene VPS70, confirmed the potential of our method. Conclusions: EXPLoRA has a performance at least as good as the state-of-the-art and it is robust even at low signal to noise ratio's i.e. when the true linkage signal is diluted by sampling, screening errors or when few segregants are available

Ground-based near-IR observations of the secondary eclipse of CoRoT-2b

We present the results of a ground-based search for the secondary eclipse of the 3.3 Mjup transiting planet CoRoT-2b. We performed near infrared photometry using the LIRIS instrument on the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope, in the H and K_s filters. We monitored the star around two expected secondary eclipses in two nights under very good observing conditions. For the depth of the secondary eclipse we find in H-band a 3 sigma upper limit of 0.17%, whereas we detected a tentative eclipse with a depth of 0.16+-0.09% in the K_s-band. These depths can be translated into brightness temperatures of T_H<2250 K and T_{K_s} = 1890(+260-350) K, which indicate an inefficient re-distribution of the incident stellar flux from the planet's dayside to its nightside. Our results are in agreement with the CoRoT optical measurement (Alonso et al. 09) and with Spitzer 4.5 and 8 micron results (Gillon et al. 09c).Comment: Astronomical Journal, accepte

Possible Tomography of the Sun's Magnetic Field with Solar Neutrinos

The data from solar neutrino experiments together with standard solar model predictions are used in order to derive the possible profile of the magnetic field inside the Sun, assuming the existence of a sizeable neutrino magnetic moment and the resonant spin flavour mechanism. The procedure is based on the relationship between resonance location and the energy dependent neutrino suppression, so that a large neutrino suppression at a given energy is taken to be connected to a large magnetic field in a given region of the Sun. In this way it is found that the solar field must undergo a very sharp increase by a factor of at least 6 - 7 over a distance no longer than 7 - 10% of the solar radius, decreasing gradually towards the surface. The range in which this sharp increase occurs is likely to be the bottom of the convective zone. There are also indications in favour of the downward slope being stronger at the start and more moderate on approaching the solar surface. Typical ranges for the magnetic moment are from a few times 10^{-13}\mu_B to its laboratory upper bounds while the mass square difference between neutrino flavours is of order (0.6-1.9) x 10^{-8}eV^2.Comment: Several minor corrections performed, sunspot anticorrelation discussed, references added, 29 pages including 8 figures in PostScrip

Developing a water-energy-GHG emissions modeling framework: Insights from an application to California's water system

[EN] Integrating processes of water and energy interdependence in water systems can improve the understanding of the tradeoffs between water and energy in management and policy. This study presents a development of an integrated water resources management model that includes water-related energy use and GHG emissions. We apply the model to a simplified representation of California's water system. Accounting for water demands from cities, agriculture, environment and the energy sector, and combining a surface water management model with a simple groundwater model, the model optimizes water use across sectors during shortages from an economic perspective, calculating the associated energy use and electricity generation for each water demand. The results of California's water system show that urban end-uses account for most GHG emissions of the entire water cycle, but large water conveyance produces significant peaks over the summer season. Different policy scenarios show the significant tradeoffs between water, energy, and GHG emissions.Escrivà Bou, À.; Lund, J.; Pulido-Velazquez, M.; Hui, R.; Medellín-Azuara, J. (2018). Developing a water-energy-GHG emissions modeling framework: Insights from an application to California's water system. Environmental Modelling & Software. 109:54-65. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2018.07.011S546510

Entanglement between charge qubits induced by a common dissipative environment

We study entanglement generation between two charge qubits due to the strong coupling with a common bosonic environment (Ohmic bath). The coupling to the boson bath is a source of both quantum noise (leading to decoherence) and an indirect interaction between qubits. As a result, two effects compete as a function of the coupling strength with the bath: entanglement generation and charge localization induced by the bath. These two competing effects lead to a non-monotonic behavior of the concurrence as a function of the coupling strength with the bath. As an application, we present results for charge qubits based on double quantum dots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure