Implementing energy saving algorithms for Ethernet link aggregates with ONOS

During the last few years, there has been plenty of research for reducing energy consumption in telecommunication infrastructure. However, many of the proposals remain unim-plemented due to the lack of flexibility in legacy networks. In this paper we demonstrate how the software defined networking (SDN) capabilities of current networking equipment can be used to implement some of these energy saving algorithms. In particular, we developed an ONOS application to realize an energy-aware traffic scheduler to a bundle link made up of Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) links between two SDN switches. We show how our application is able to dynamically adapt to the traffic characteristics and save energy by concentrating the traffic on as few ports as possible. This way, unused ports remain in Low Power Idle (LPI) state most of the time, saving energy.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

The graded effect of valence on word recognition in Spanish

The influence of emotional content on language processing remains unclear. Previous research conducted in English has obtained contradictory results regarding the effects of valence on word recognition. Whereas some studies indicate that valence predicts recognition latencies such that negative words are processed more slowly than positive words, other studies indicate facilitation of responses to emotional (both positive and negative) compared to neutral words. The authors examined the influence of valence and arousal on word recognition reaction time (RT) using large-scale word naming and lexical decision data-sets in Spanish. They found that linear mixed-effects model estimates revealed a valence but not an arousal effect on reading latencies. The influence of valence was better captured by a graded (RTs to positive words < neutral < negative) than by a categorical (positive < negative) valence effect. A categorical emotional versus neutral effect was not reliably observed. In an advance on previous research, the authors' analyses showed that the valence effect is substantially more prominent in lexical decision than in pronunciation. These results mirror some of those reported previously in English, adding evidence to support their validity, and demonstrating important parallels in word recognition processes in orthographically shallow as well as deep languages

The moral foundations of illusory correlation

Podeu consultar dades primàries associades a l'article a: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/114909Previous research has studied the relationship between political ideology and cognitive biases, such as the tendency of conservatives to form stronger illusory correlations between negative infrequent behaviors and minority groups. We further explored these findings by studying the relation between illusory correlation and moral values. According to the moral foundations theory, liberals and conservatives differ in the relevance they concede to different moral dimensions: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Whereas liberals consistently endorse the Care and Fairness foundations more than the Loyalty, Authority and Purity foundations, conservatives tend to adhere to the five foundations alike. In the present study, a group of participants took part in a standard illusory correlation task in which they were presented with randomly ordered descriptions of either desirable or undesirable behaviors attributed to individuals belonging to numerically different majority and minority groups. Although the proportion of desirable and undesirable behaviors was the same in the two groups, participants attributed a higher frequency of undesirable behaviors to the minority group, thus showing the expected illusory correlation effect. Moreover, this effect was specifically associated to our participants' scores in the Loyalty subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. These results emphasize the role of the Loyalty moral foundation in the formation of attitudes towards minorities among conservatives. Our study points out the moral system as a useful fine-grained framework to explore the complex interaction between basic cognitive processes and ideology

Supervsion of classical PID adpative regulators using fuzzy logic techniques

This work describes the supervisory task of controlled plants whose strategy is based on classical adaptive PID regulators. The supervisory task includes the detection of the dynamic behaviour. According to this it decides whether to perform the autotuning, as a result of the defuzzification of a rule-base proposed for this purpose. The result of the fuzzy rule-base is applied in sequential mode to a deterministic rule-base (Boolean), whose conclusion serves to initiate the state of the regulator in the plant

Schizotypal personality and semantic functioning: Revisiting category fluency effects in a subclinical sample

Semantic disturbances have been proposed as a possible cause of formal thought disorder in schizophrenia. Fluency tasks, in which volunteers are asked to produce as many exemplars as they can for a given category during one minute, are usually applied to the assessment of semantic processing. However, studies associating fluency and proneness to psychosis have provided conflicting results so it is not clear whether these disturbances can be identified at subclinical stages. We conducted two experiments. In the first one, 71 volunteers completed written category fluency tasks with four semantic categories (animals, fruits, clothing and vehicles). In the second experiment, 77 new participants completed oral category and phonological fluency tasks (words starting with f, t, p and c). In both experiments, we assessed schizotypal personality and vocabulary size. Schizotypal traits were not reliably associated with either productivity or originality of the responses in any experiment. In contrast, vocabulary size significantly predicted the participants' scores in all the tasks. Along with results of other recent studies, our data cast doubt on the reliability of previous observations pointing out an association between schizotypy and lexical-semantic disturbances, at least in relation to productivity and originality in fluency tests

Too Worried to Judge: On the Role of Perceived Severity in Medical Decision-Making

Ideally, decisions regarding one's health should be made after assessing the objective probabilities of relevant outcomes. Nevertheless, previous beliefs and emotional reactions also have a role in decision-making. Furthermore, the comprehension of probabilities is commonly affected by the presentation format, and by numeracy. This study aimed to assess the extent to which the influence of these factors might vary between different medical conditions. A sample of university students were presented with two health scenarios containing statistical information on the prevalence of breast cancer and hypertension either through icon arrays (N = 71) or natural frequencies (N = 72). They also received information regarding a preventive measure (mammogram/low-sodium diet) and the likelihood of a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet either when suffering or not suffering from the disease. Before seeing the data, participants rated the severity of the disease and the inconvenience of the preventive measure. After reading the health scenario, participants had to rate its difficulty, and how worrisome it was. They had also to rate the prior probability of suffering from this medical condition, and the posterior probability of it, provided a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet. Finally, they rated the extent to which they would recommend the preventive measures. All the rates used the same 1 (little)-8 (a great deal) scale. Participants' numeracy was also assessed. The scenarios differed significantly in perceived severity and worry, with the cancer scenario obtaining higher scores. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the recommendations in the two health scenarios depended on different variables. A model taking into consideration severity and worry rates best explained decisions in the cancer scenario; in contrast, in the hypertension scenario the model that best explained the recommendations comprised both the posterior probability estimate and the severity rate. Neither numeracy nor presentation format affected recommendation but both affected difficulty, worrying and probability rates. We conclude that previous perceptions of the severity of a health condition modulate the use of probabilistic information for decision-making. The roles of presentation format and numeracy in enabling patients to understand statistical information are also discussed. Introductio

The foreign language effect on motivational quotes

According to the 'reduced emotionality hypothesis', we are less emotionally driven when reasoning in a foreign language (FL) than in a native language (NL). We examined whether this foreign language effect (FLe) extends to the way we perceive motivational quotes (i.e., encouraging slogans conveying a profound and inspirational message): we expected FL participants to rate motivational quotes as less profound than NL participants. Strikingly, we observed the opposite: FL participants found motivational quotes more profound than NL participants, even after controlling for potential confounders (e.g., IQ, reasoning style). Both FL and NL participants gave similarly low profundity ratings to pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (i.e., meaningless sentences sounding profound), indicating that the message must be meaningful for the FLe to arise. We propose that, like space or time, language could promote psychological distance. This favours a focus on the background of a message to indicate profoundness

The effect of motion content in action naming by Parkinson's disease patients

Introduction The verb-specific impairment present in patients with motion-related neurological diseases has been argued to support the hypothesis that the processing of words referring to motion depends on neural activity in regions involved in motor planning and execution. We presented a group of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with an action-naming task in order to test whether the prevalence of motion-related semantic content in different verbs influences their accuracy. Methods Forty-nine PD patients and 19 healthy seniors participated in the study. All of PD participants underwent a neurological and neuropsychological assessment to rule out dementia. Subjective ratings of the motion content level of 100 verbs were obtained from 14 young voluntaries. Then, pictures corresponding to two subsets of 25 verbs with significantly different degrees of motor component were selected to be used in an action-naming task. Stimuli lists were matched on visual and psycholinguistic characteristics. Results ANOVA analysis reveals differences between groups. PD patients obtained poor results in response to pictures with high motor content compared to those with low motor association. Nevertheless, this effect did not appear on the control group. The general linear mixed model analytic approach was applied to explore the influence of the degree of motion-related semantic content of each verb in the accuracy scores of the participants. The performance of PD patients appeared to be negatively affected by the level of motion-related semantic content associated to each verb. Conclusions Our results provide compelling evidence of the relevance of brain areas related to planning and execution of movements in the retrieval of motion-related semantic content

Características diferenciais da violencia de xénero en grupos etarios especiais : adolescentes e anciás.

Traballo de Fin de Grao en Medicina. Curso 2019-2020.Introdución: A violencia de xénero, en particular a violencia de parella contra a muller, é unha problemática común na nosa sociedade. A maioría da literatura céntrase na violencia sufrida por adultas novas e de mediana idade, descoñecéndose os efectos noutros colectivos como as adolescentes e as mulleres maiores. Obxectivos: Identificar as características da violencia de parella nas adolescentes e anciás co fin de establecer similitudes e diferenzas co grupo xeral de mulleres maltratadas. Materiais e métodos: Realizouse unha revisión bibliográfica utilizando artigos orixinais e revisións, así como informes de organismos oficiais enfocados na violencia de xénero nos extremos da vida. Resultados e discusión: A violencia de xénero é menor nos extremos de idade. As adolescentes atópanse nun período de desenvolvemento e inmadurez emocional que afecta á expresión da violencia, caracterizada fundamentalmente por ser bidireccional e normalizada dentro das súas relacións de parella. Nas mulleres maiores, as relacións e o maltrato son de longa duración, engadíndose circunstancias propias da idade que as volve máis vulnerables. A violencia psicolóxica de control é a máis frecuente en ambos grupos de idade. A violencia física nas adolescentes é de carácter leve, nas mulleres anciás predomina o tipo mais severo e a violencia sexual en ambas é menos frecuente que no grupo xeral de mulleres maltratadas. As consecuencias sobre a saúde física son menores nas adolescentes, pero de gran importancia no resto de mulleres, mentres que as consecuencias sobre a saúde mental e sexual son moi similares en todos os grupos. Todas as mulleres comparten determinados factores de risco, pero outros son mais destacados segundo a idade. Nas adolescentes destaca o papel da comunidade e nas maiores aqueles que dependen da idade e recompilación de experiencias. Ambos grupos de mulleres solicitan os recursos de axuda en menor medida que o resto de afectadas por o maltrato. Conclusións: A violencia de parella nas adolescentes e anciás ten características propias debido ás circunstancias que acompañan estas etapas vitais.Introducción: La violencia de género, en particular la violencia de pareja contra la mujer, es una problemática común en nuestra sociedad. La mayoría de la literatura se centra en la violencia sufrida por adultas jóvenes y de mediana edad, desconociéndose los efectos en otros colectivos como las adolescentes y las mujeres mayores. Objetivos: Identificar características de la violencia de pareja en las adolescentes y ancianas con el fin de establecer similitudes y diferencias con el grupo general de mujeres maltratadas. Materiales y métodos: Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica utilizando artículos originales y revisiones, así como informes de organismos oficiales enfocados en la violencia de género en los extremos da la vida. Resultados y discusión: La violencia de género es menor en los extremos de edad. Las adolescentes se encuentran en un periodo de desarrollo e inmadurez emocional que afecta a la expresión de la violencia, caracterizada fundamentalmente por ser bidireccional y normalizada dentro de sus relaciones de pareja. En las mujeres mayores, las relaciones y el maltrato son de larga duración, añadiéndose circunstancias propias de la edad que las vuelve más vulnerables. La violencia psicológica de control es la más frecuente en ambos grupos de edad. La violencia física en las adolescentes es de carácter leve, en las ancianas predomina el tipo más severo y la violencia sexual en ambas es menos frecuente que en el grupo general de mujeres maltratadas. Las consecuencias sobre la salud física son menores en las adolescentes, pero de gran importancia en el resto de mujeres, mientras que las consecuencias sobre la salud mental y sexual son muy similares en todos los grupos. Todas las mujeres comparten determinados factores de riesgo, pero otros son más destacados según la edad. En las adolescentes destaca el papel de la comunidad y en las mayores aquellos que dependen de la edad y la recopilación de experiencias. Ambos grupos de mujeres solicitan los recursos de ayuda en menor medida que el resto de afectadas por el maltrato. Conclusiones: La violencia de pareja en las adolescentes y ancianas tiene características propias debido a las circunstancias que acompañan estas etapas vitales.Introduction: Gender violence, particularly intimate partner violence against women, is a common issue in our society. Most of the literature focuses on violence suffered by young adult and middle aged women while the effects on other groups such as teenagers and elderly women remain unknown. Objectives: Identify the characteristics of intimate partner violence against teenagers and elderly women in order to establish similarities and differences with the general group of abused women. Material and methods: A literature review was conducted using original articles and reviews, as well as reports from official organizations focused on gender based violence at the extremes of life. Results and discussion: Gender-based violence is less frequent at the extremes of life. Teenagers are in a period of development and emotional immaturity that affects the expression of violence, characterized primarily by being bidirectional and normalized within their relationships. Relationships and abuse in older women are longer, plus the higher age and the circumstances that come with it which put them in a more vulnerable spot. Controlling violence is the most frequent kind in both groups. Physical violence in teenagers is mild while in the elderly severe violence has a bigger presence and both groups suffer less sexual violence than the rest of women. The consequences for physical health are minor in teenagers but very important in other women, while the impact on mental and sexual health is very similar across all groups. All women share certain risk factors, although others stand out due to / according to the age. In teenagers the importance of the community stands out and in older women those that come from the older age and the compilation of experiences are more characteristic. Both groups of women request less help than the rest of the women who suffer abuse. Conclusions: Teenagers and elderly women intimate partner violence has its own characteristics due to the circumstances that come with these different life stages