Post-humanismo en la pista olímpica: casos Pistorius/Semenya y la re-definición del deporte

La presentación de dos recientes y polémicos casos en el mundo del atletismo (Pistorius y Semenya) va a permitirnos mostrar de forma específica el modo en que los enfoques post-humanistas pueden ser aplicados de modo fructífero al análisis de lo deportivo. Veremos como la subjetividad deportiva de Semenya y Pistorius, lejos de ser una esencia dada, va a ir produciéndose mediante un reensamblaje de actores humano y no humanos (Latour, 2005), proceso en el cual toma una especial relevancia la noción de tecno-biopoder (Haraway, 1997). Esa dinámica constitución de su subjetividad va a afectar tanto a la definición de categorías básicas que parcelaban el mundo deportivo (olímpico-paralímpico; masculino-femenino), como a la propia definición de principios rectores del deporte (igualdad en la competición y fair play) y al tipo y grado de relación y autonomía que mantiene el ámbito deportivo con respecto a la sociedad en generalTwo recent polemic cases in the world of athletics (Pistorius and Semenya) will help us to show how posthumanism can be applied to sports in a fruitful way. The sport subjectivity of Semenya and Pistorius, far from being a given essence, is going to be built through the re-assembling of human and non human actors (Latour, 2005); the notion of tecno-biopower is going to have a special relevance during this process (Haraway, 1997). Such dynamic constitution of the subjectivity is going to affect, not only the definition of basic sport categories (olympic-paralympic;male-female), but the core principles of sport (competition equality and fair play) as well. The kind and degree of autonomy that the sport field maintains from society in general will be affected to

Changes in soil microbial community structure influenced by agricultural management practices in a mediterranean agro-ecosystem.

Agricultural practices have proven to be unsuitable in many cases, causing considerable reductions in soil quality. Land management practices can provide solutions to this problem and contribute to get a sustainable agriculture model. The main objective of this work was to assess the effect of different agricultural management practices on soil microbial community structure (evaluated as abundance of phospholipid fatty acids, PLFA). Five different treatments were selected, based on the most common practices used by farmers in the study area (eastern Spain): residual herbicides, tillage, tillage with oats and oats straw mulching; these agricultural practices were evaluated against an abandoned land after farming and an adjacent long term wild forest coverage. The results showed a substantial level of differentiation in the microbial community structure, in terms of management practices, which was highly associated with soil organic matter content. Addition of oats straw led to a microbial community structure closer to wild forest coverage soil, associated with increases in organic carbon, microbial biomass and fungal abundances. The microbial community composition of the abandoned agricultural soil was characterised by increases in both fungal abundances and the metabolic quotient (soil respiration per unit of microbial biomass), suggesting an increase in the stability of organic carbon. The ratio of bacteria:fungi was higher in wild forest coverage and land abandoned systems, as well as in the soil treated with oat straw. The most intensively managed soils showed higher abundances of bacteria and actinobacteria. Thus, the application of organic matter, such as oats straw, appears to be a sustainable management practice that enhances organic carbon, microbial biomass and activity and fungal abundances, thereby changing the microbial community structure to one more similar to those observed in soils under wild forest coverage

Vein biometric recognition on a smartphone

Topic: Intelligent Biometric Systems for Secure Societies.Human recognition on smartphone devices for unlocking, online payment, and bank account verification is one of the significant uses of biometrics. The exponential development and integration of this technology have been established since the introduction in 2013 of the fingerprint mounted sensor in the Apple iPhone 5s by Apple Inc.© (Motorola© Atrix was previously launched in 2011). Nowadays, in the commercial world, the main biometric variants integrated into mobile devices are fingerprint, facial, iris, and voice. In 2019, LG© Electronics announced the first mobile exhibiting vascular biometric recognition, integrated using the palm vein modality: LG© G8 ThinQ (hand ID). In this work, in an attempt to become the become the first research-embedded approach to smartphone vein identification, a novel wrist vascular biometric recognition is designed, implemented, and tested on the Xiaomi© Pocophone F1 and the Xiaomi© Mi 8 devices. The near-infrared camera mounted for facial recognition on these devices accounts for the hardware employed. Two software algorithms, TGS-CVBR® and PIS-CVBR®, are designed and applied to a database generation and the identification task, respectively. The database, named UC3M-Contactless Version 2 (UC3M-CV2), consists of 2400 contactless infrared images from both wrists of 50 different subjects (25 females and 25 males, 100 individual wrists in total), collected in two separate sessions with different environmental light environmental light conditions. The vein biometric recognition, using PIS-CVBR®, is based on the SIFT®, SURF®, and ORB algorithms. The results, discussed according to the ISO/IEC 19795-1:2019 standard, are promising and pave the way for contactless real-time-processing wrist recognition on smartphone devices

Deep Learning for Vein Biometric Recognition on a Smartphone

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has pointed out, even more, the important need for hygiene contactless biometric recognition systems. Vein-based devices are great non-contact options although they have not been entirely well-integrated in daily life. In this work, in an attempt to contribute to the research and development of these devices, a contactless wrist vein recognition system with a real-life application is revealed. A Transfer Learning (TL) method, based on different Deep Convolutional Neural Networks architectures, for Vascular Biometric Recognition (VBR), has been designed and tested, for the first time in a research approach, on a smartphone. TL is a Deep Learning (DL) technique that could be divided into networks as feature extractor, i.e., using a pre-trained (different large-scale dataset) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to obtain unique features that then, are classified with a traditional Machine Learning algorithm, and fine-tuning, i.e., training a CNN that has been initialized with weights of a pre-trained (different large-scale dataset) CNN. In this study, a feature extractor base method has been employed. Several architecture networks have been tested on different wrist vein datasets: UC3M-CV1, UC3M-CV2, and PUT. The DL model has been integrated on the Xiaomi© Pocophone F1 and the Xiaomi© Mi 8 smartphones obtaining high biometric performance, up to 98% of accuracy and less than 0.4% of EER with a 50–50% train-test on UC3M-CV2, and fast identification/verification time, less than 300 milliseconds. The results infer, high DL performance and integration reachable in VBR without direct user-device contact, for real-life applications nowadays

Sistema de carteleras digitales como canal de comunicación interno, apoyado en las TIC en la Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia.

El presente es un proyecto innovador para la Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, seccional Medellín, porque fortalece la comunicación interna por medio de las TIC, a su vez, le permitió divulgar grandes cantidades de información en un mismo espacio al implementar el SCD, lo que le ayudó a reemplazar el uso de papeles impresos por información digital, actualizada y atractiva, que en otras palabras representa ir a la vanguardia en tecnología y trabajar por el medio ambiente

Etnografías del deporte y actividades físicas

In this monograph we find different studies that apply the ethnographic method to research that has to do with physical activity and sports. The issue is made up of two articles from the special section, six research articles and a book review on sports ethnography. It should be noted that the research articles produce an in-depth dialogue between studies carried out on both sides of the Atlantic: cities located in the Spanish and Mexican states. On the other hand, from a gender perspective we detected the total absence of women in the special issue, which should prompt us to seriously reflect on the factors that are influencing the low female participation in sports ethnographic research.En este monográfico encontramos distintos estudios que aplican el método etnográfico a investigaciones que tienen que ver con la actividad física y deportiva. El número está compuesto por dos artículos de la sección especial, seis artículos de investigación y una reseña de libro sobre etnografía deportiva. Cabe destacar que los artículos de investigación producen un diálogo de fondo entre estudios realizados a ambos lados del Atlántico: ciudades situadas en el estado español y mexicano. Por otro lado, desde una perspectiva de género detectamos la ausencia total de mujeres en el número especial, lo que debería plantearnos una seria reflexión sobre cuáles son los factores que están influyendo en la poca participación femenina en investigación etnográfica deportiva