Estar cerca en la lejanía : el surgimiento de los entornos de vida en una periferia

En el presente artículo me baso en una investigación cualitativa realizada en el municipio periurbano de El Salto, Área Metropolitana de Guadalajara, México. Mi propósito es mostrar buena parte de las contradicciones que conlleva el proceso de poblamiento de unos espacios en principio inhóspitos y precarios. Desde la ubicación periférica de este municipio, me interrogo por la reconquista de las cercanías espaciales y vitales, por el papel de las micromovilidades en la apropiación de los entornos periféricos, o por el despliegue de precarios proyectos de vida. El principal resultado del artículo es comprender la periferia como un espacio que se construye desde la tensión entre los alejamientos espaciales y sociales sufridos, y entre los intentos por recuperar entornos de vida habitables.In this paper I retrieve some findings from a qualitative research conducted in the town of El Salto, Guadalajara Metropolitan Area, Mexico. My purpose is to show some of the contradictions that are implicit in how peripheral populations dwell dull and precarious spaces. From the peripheral situation of El Salto, I try to elucidate how populations recuperate spatial and living proximities, the way as proximity and short trips influence the appropriation of the peripheral environment, or the maintenance of ephemeral life projects. The most important discovery is the purview of the periphery as a field strained by the polarity between the spatial and social distancing, and the endeavor to build sustainable living environments

Hand geometry

Hand Geometry is a biometric modality whose promising features are the ease of use and high friendliness to the user. Furthermore, researchers have demonstrated that error rates below 5% are possible, and when applied to limited number of users, the level of performance is high enough for certain applications. Commercial products have found their business applicationsin Access Control Systems, as well as in Timeand Attendance environments

BioAPI, standardization

BioAPI is a comprehensive definition of an API for biometric-related applications, which can be adopted by any kind of application and under any kind of platform. Although defined in ANSI C language, there are also specifications in object-oriented languages, such as the specified family of standards ISO/IEC 30106 [3]. The basic specification is currently being revised as to build up a new 3.0 version that integrates all the evolutions that BioAPI has accomplished in the past years

Tamper-proof operating system

Due to the sensibility of biometric data, security in biometric devices has to be considered. One of the ways to protect privacy is to include a tamper-proof operating system. This O.S. would not allow direct access to hardware resources of the device, neither to temporary nor permanent data.This O.S. has also to control the different life stages of the device. A set of requirements have been defined that have to be considered when developing such tamper-proof O.S. Finally an example of the commands to be covered by some devices have been given. Including this kind of O.S. in all biometric devices will improve the security of the whole system. Unfortunately, when someparts of the biometric system has to be implemented in a general-purpose computer with an open operating system, applying these rules is not easy

CHANGES IN SOIL MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES AFTER LONG-TERM WARMING EXPOSURE

Microbial metabolism is a key controller of ecosystem processes (e.g., carbon cycling). However, we are only starting to identify the molecular mechanisms and feedback in response to long-term warming. My dissertation integrates multi-omics techniques to capture changes in soil microbial communities after long-term warming exposure. The research projects leverage three warming sites (i.e., SWaN, Barre Woods, and Prospect Hill) located in Western Massachusetts at Harvard Forest. These sites provided a unique experimental setup to better understand microbes in response to long-term temperature change. For the three research projects, we delved into the (i) microbial biodiversity across all three warming sites, (ii) integration of soil carbon chemistry and metatranscriptomics at the Barre Woods site, (iii) and a time series of soil metatranscriptomes at the Prospect Hill site. Overall, these studies revealed a broader scope of changes occurring with long-term warming than anticipated. The warming treatment induced shifts in fungi groups and recalcitrant carbon decomposer bacteria. Changes in microbial functions involved metabolic pathways associated to biogeochemical and cellular stability as result of nutrient limitation. Further, our results provided new insights in microbial response to chronic temperature stress, suggested an ongoing change in community structure and function, and linked soil carbon decrease to cellular processes using high throughput molecular techniques. This information will help to better understand interactions between microbial communities and the Earth’s climate

Finger data interchange format, standardization

To provide interoperability in storing and transmitting finger-related biometric information, 4 standards are already developed to define the formats needed for raw images, minutia-based feature vectors, spectral information, and skeletal representation of a fingerprint. Beyond that, other standards deal with conformance and quality control, as well as interfaces or performance evaluation and reporting (see relevant entries in this Encyclopaedia for further information)

Biometric system-on-card, standardization

A biometric system-on-card (BSoC) is a smartcard containing a complete set of biometric modules, from the data acquisition to the decision making. This technology is being standardized in the ISO/IEC 17839 series of standards in a modality independent way to allow in the future multiple biometric modalities available in the market

Finger data interchange format, standardization

To provide interoperability in storing and transmitting finger-related biometric information, four International Standards have already been published by ISO defining the formats for raw images, minutia-based feature vectors, spectral information, and skeletal representation of a fingerprint. Beyond that, other standards deal with conformance testing and sample quality data, as well as profiles and interfaces or performance evaluation and reporting (see Related Entries below for further information)

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