Absolute magnitudes and kinematics of CP stars from Hipparcos data

The position in the HR diagram and the kinematic characteristics of different kinds of CP stars of the upper main sequence are obtained using the LM method (Luri et al., 1996). Most of the CP stars are main sequence stars occupying the whole width of the sequence. From a kinematic point of view, they belong to the young disk population (ages < 1.5 Gyr). It has also been found that, on kinematic grounds, the behaviour of lambda Bootis stars is similar to the one observed for normal stars of the same spectral range. On the other hand, roAp and noAp stars show the same kinematic characteristics. The peculiar velocity distribution function has been decomposed into a sum of three dimensional gaussians and the presence of Pleiades, Sirius and Hyades moving groups has been clearly established. Finally, a small number of CP stars are found to be high-velocity objects.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, to appear in: Proc. of the 26th workshop of the European Working Group on CP stars, eds. P. North, A. Schnell and J. Ziznovsky, Contrib. Astr. Obs. Skalnate Pleso Vol. 27, No

The spatial distribution of O-B5 stars in the solar neighborhood as measured by Hipparcos

We have developed a method to calculate the fundamental parameters of the vertical structure of the Galaxy in the solar neighborhood from trigonometric parallaxes alone. The method takes into account Lutz-Kelker-type biases in a self-consistent way and has been applied to a sample of O-B5 stars obtained from the Hipparcos catalog. We find that the Sun is located 24.2 +/- 1.7 (random) +/- 0.4 (systematic) pc above the galactic plane and that the disk O-B5 stellar population is distributed with a scale height of 34.2 +/- 0.8 (random) +/- 2.5 (systematic) pc and an integrated surface density of (1.62 +/- 0.04 (random) +/- 0.14 (systematic)) 10^{-3} stars pc^{-2}. A halo component is also detected in the distribution and constitutes at least ~5% of the total O-B5 population. The O-B5 stellar population within ~100 pc of the Sun has an anomalous spatial distribution, with a less-than-average number density. This local disturbance is probably associated with the expansion of Gould's belt.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the May 2001 issue of the Astronomical Journa

Disrupted Lipid Metabolism in Multiple Sclerosis: A Role for Liver X Receptors?

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurological disease driven by autoimmune, inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes leading to neuronal demyelination and subsequent degeneration. Systemic lipid metabolism is disturbed in people with MS, and lipid metabolic pathways are crucial to the protective process of remyelination. The lipid-activated transcription factors liver X receptors (LXRs) are important integrators of lipid metabolism and immunity. Consequently, there is a strong interest in targeting these receptors in a number of metabolic and inflammatory diseases, including MS. We have reviewed the evidence for involvement of LXR-driven lipid metabolism in the dysfunction of peripheral and brain-resident immune cells in MS, focusing on human studies, both the relapsing remitting and progressive phases of the disease are discussed. Finally, we discuss the therapeutic potential of modulating the activity of these receptors with existing pharmacological agents and highlight important areas of future research

Learning fuzzy measures for aggregation in fuzzy rule-based models

Comunicación presentada al 15th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2018 (15 - 18 october 2018).Fuzzy measures are used to express background knowledge of the information sources. In fuzzy rule-based models, the rule confidence gives an important information about the final classes and their relevance. This work proposes to use fuzzy measures and integrals to combine rules confidences when making a decision. A Sugeno &#x0024;&#x0024;\lambda &#x0024;&#x0024; -measure and a distorted probability have been used in this process. A clinical decision support system (CDSS) has been built by applying this approach to a medical dataset. Then we use our system to estimate the risk of developing diabetic retinopathy. We show performance results comparing our system with others in the literature.This work is supported by the URV grant 2017PFR-URV-B2-60, and by the Spanish research projects no: PI12/01535 and PI15/01150 for (Instituto de Salud Carlos III and FEDER funds). Mr. Saleh has a Pre-doctoral grant (FI 2017) provided by the Catalan government and an Erasmus+ travel grant by URV. Prof. Bustince acknowledges the support of Spanish project TIN2016-77356-P

Consensus-Based Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering

Producción CientíficaIn this contribution, we consider that a set of agents assess a set of alternatives through numbers in the unit interval. In this setting, we introduce a measure that assigns a degree of consensus to each subset of agents with respect to every subset of alternatives. This consensus measure is defined as 1 minus the outcome generated by a symmetric aggregation function to the distances between the corresponding individual assessments. We establish some properties of the consensus measure, some of them depending on the used aggregation function. We also introduce an agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure that is generated by similarity functions based on the previous consensus measuresMinisterio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (ECO2012-32178)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación – Ref. VA066U13

Barium stars, galactic populations and evolution

In this paper HIPPARCOS astrometric and kinematical data together with radial velocities from other sources are used to calibrate both luminosity and kinematics parameters of Ba stars and to classify them. We confirm the results of our previous paper (where we used data from the HIPPARCOS Input Catalogue), and show that Ba stars are an inhomogeneous group. Five distinct classes have been found i.e. some halo stars and four groups belonging to disk population: roughly super-giants, two groups of giants (one on the giant branch, the other at the clump location) and dwarfs, with a few subgiants mixed with them. The confirmed or suspected duplicity, the variability and the range of known orbital periods found in each group give coherent results supporting the scenario for Ba stars that are not too highly massive binary stars in any evolutionary stages but that all were previously enriched with Ba from a more evolved companion. The presence in the sample of a certain number of ``false'' Ba stars is confirmed. The estimates of age and mass are compatible with models for stars with a strong Ba anomaly. The mild Ba stars with an estimated mass higher than 3Msun_ may be either stars Ba enriched by themselves or ``true'' Ba stars, which imposes new constraints on models

The HR diagram from Hipparcos data. Absolute magnitudes and kinematics of Bp-Ap stars

The HR-diagram of about 1000 Bp - Ap stars in the solar neighbourhood has been constructed using astrometric data from Hipparcos satellite as well as photometric and radial velocity data. The LM method \cite{luri95,luri96} allows the use of proper motion and radial velocity data in addition to the trigonometric parallaxes to obtain luminosity calibrations and improved distances estimates. Six types of Bp - Ap stars have been examined: He-rich, He-weak, HgMn, Si, Si+ and SrCrEu. Most Bp - Ap stars lie on the main sequence occupying the whole width of it (about 2 mag), just like normal stars in the same range of spectral types. Their kinematic behaviour is typical of thin disk stars younger than about 1 Gyr. A few stars found to be high above the galactic plane or to have a high velocity are briefly discussed. Based on data from the ESA Hipparcos astrometry satellite and photometric data collected in the Geneva system at ESO, La Silla (Chile) and at Jungfraujoch and Gornergrat Observatories (Switzerland). Tables 3 and 4 are only available in electronic form at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/Abstract.htm