Un oscuro personaje de «El Ruedo Ibérico», de Valle-Inclán: el Conde Blanc

En este estudio se profundiza en el conocimiento de un personaje real que circula por las novelas de El Ruedo Ibérico de Valle-Inclán, un ser incógnito del que apenas se tenían noticias de su vida. Por ello se reconstruye su biografía, con el fin de clarificar en qué medida la trayectoria de este personaje se acomoda a la representación literaria que hizo el escritor gallego de él, cómo utilizó los datos que llegó a conocer de su carácter, y de qué manera construyó este prototipo de parásito social encumbrado. Pero lo esencial del presente trabajo es llegar a conocer quién fue el Conde Blanc, Luis María César de Borbón, algo que, hasta el momento, no se había realizado. A través de una investigación bibliográfica, hemerográfica y archivística se ha podido dilucidar quién fue tal personaje, y cómo actuó ante la corte real española

”Cara de Plata”. Tres donjuanes en el telar de Valle-Inclán

Cara de Plata, tercera obra de la serie dramática Comedias bárbaras, resultó una anomalía en la producción creativa de Valle-Inclán, pues en el período en el que el autor creaba el esperpento, parecía volver a estéticas y modelos superados hacía años. Así lo sugiere la inter-pretación de la crítica contemporánea a su edición, y en cierta medida también la investigación posterior. Sin embargo, la clave que podría explicar esta interrupción en su evolución estética acaso se encuentre en la necesidad del escritor por dar corporeidad literaria a su revisada teoría del donjuanismo, que en los años de la década de los veinte obsesionaba al escritor gallego. Según la hipótesis que se expone en este trabajo, Valle-Inclán quiso representar su pensamiento de forma dramática, encarnando en los protagonistas de Cara de Plata a sus tres modelos tradi-cionales de Don Juan

Design and Implementation of a Test-Bench for Efficiency Measurement of Domestic Induction Heating Appliances

The operation of a domestic induction cooktop is based on the wireless energy transfer from the inductor to the pot. In such systems, the induction efficiency is defined as the ratio between the power delivered to the pot and the consumed power from the supplying converter. The non-transferred power is dissipated in the inductor, raising its temperature. Most efficiency-measuring methods are based on measuring the effective power (pot) and the total power (converter output). While the converter output power is directly measurable, the measurement of the power dissipation in the pot is usually a cause of inaccuracy. In this work, an alternative method to measure the system’s efficiency is proposed and implemented. The method is based on a pot with a reversible base to which the inductor is attached. In the standard configuration, the inductor is placed below the pot in such a way that the delivered power is used to boil water, and the power losses are dissipated to the air. When the pot base is flipped, the inductor is immersed into the water. In this case the losses in the inductor also contribute to heating up and boiling the water. The induction efficiency is calculated from the boiling rates in both configurations. A commercial inductor was tested under real working conditions with consistent results

On the Effects of Image Quality Degradation on Minutiae- and Ridge-Based Automatic Fingerprint Recognition

The effect of image quality degradation on the verification performance of automatic fingerprint recognition is investigated. We study the performance of two fingerprint matchers based on minutiae and ridge information under varying fingerprint image quality. The ridge-based system is found to be more robust to image quality degradation than the minutiae-based system for a number of different image quality criteria.Comment: Published at IEEE International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology (ICCST

Thinning of the Monte Perdido Glacier in the Spanish Pyrenees since 1981

Producción CientíficaThis paper analyzes the evolution of the Monte Perdido Glacier, the third largest glacier in the Pyrenees, from 1981 to the present. We assessed the evolution of the glacier's surface area by analysis of aerial photographs from 1981, 1999, and 2006, and changes in ice volume by geodetic methods with digital elevation models (DEMs) generated from topographic maps (1981 and 1999), airborne lidar (2010) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014) data. We interpreted the changes in the glacier based on climate data from nearby meteorological stations. The results indicate that the degradation of this glacier accelerated after 1999. The rate of ice surface loss was almost three times greater during 1999–2006 than during earlier periods. Moreover, the rate of glacier thinning was 1.85 times faster during 1999–2010 (rate of surface elevation change  = −8.98 ± 1.80 m, glacier-wide mass balance  = −0.73 ± 0.14 m w.e. yr−1) than during 1981–1999 (rate of surface elevation change  = −8.35 ± 2.12 m, glacier-wide mass balance  = −0.42 ± 0.10 m w.e. yr−1). From 2011 to 2014, ice thinning continued at a slower rate (rate of surface elevation change  = −1.93 ± 0.4 m yr−1, glacier-wide mass balance  = −0.58 ± 0.36 m w.e. yr−1). This deceleration in ice thinning compared to the previous 17 years can be attributed, at least in part, to two consecutive anomalously wet winters and cool summers (2012–2013 and 2013–2014), counteracted to some degree by the intense thinning that occurred during the dry and warm 2011–2012 period. However, local climatic changes observed during the study period do not seem sufficient to explain the acceleration of ice thinning of this glacier, because precipitation and air temperature did not exhibit statistically significant trends during the study period. Rather, the accelerated degradation of this glacier in recent years can be explained by a strong disequilibrium between the glacier and the current climate, and likely by other factors affecting the energy balance (e.g., increased albedo in spring) and feedback mechanisms (e.g., heat emitted from recently exposed bedrock and debris covered areas).Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad - IBERNIEVE (project CGL2014-52599-P)Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente (project 844/2013

Sports entrepreneurship during COVID-19: Technology as an ally to maintain the competitiveness of small businesses

The sports sector, specifically the field of personal trainer entrepreneurship, has been severely affected by the COVID-19 crisis. However, there are still few empirical studies that analyze how the actions taken before and during this crisis can affect sports entrepreneurs' performance. This research aims to analyze which combinations of sports entrepreneurs' personal characteristics and actions performed have been most and least effective in minimizing the negative impact of COVID-19 on their businesses. A validated online questionnaire was administered to personal trainer entrepreneurs from May to June 2020 before they reopened their facilities. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was performed to assess the impacts. The results show that both post-COVID measures (adaptation of the business model) and previous strategic orientation seemed essential. Specifically, high levels of sports entrepreneurs' resilience and innovation/R&D when competing against their closest competitors before the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased use of technologies (sports services digitization) during the pandemic have been essential to maintaining the performance of the sports business. Thus, improvements in the digital competencies of personal trainers' sports entrepreneurs, the devel- opment of strategic plans and activities related to innovation/R&D and process improvements are important measures to maintain the competitiveness of small sports businesses during crises

MIRACLE’s hybrid approach to bilingual and monolingual Information Retrieval

The main goal of the bilingual and monolingual participation of the MIRACLE team at CLEF 2004 was testing the effect of combination approaches to information retrieval. The starting point is a set of basic components: stemming, transformation, filtering, generation of n-grams, weighting and relevance feedback. Some of these basic components are used in different combinations and order of application for document indexing and for query processing. Besides this, a second order combination is done, mainly by averaging or by selective combination of the documents retrieved by different approaches for a particular query

CDIO Experiences in Biomedical Engineering: Preparing Spanish Students for the Future of Medicine and Medical Device Technology

Biomedical engineering is one of the more recent fields of engineering, aimed at the application of engineering principles, methods and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes, mainly as a support for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic tasks. Biomedical engineering professionals are expected to achieve, during their studies and professional practice, considerable knowledge of both health sciences and engineering. Studying biomedical engineering programmes, or combining pre-graduate studies in life sciences with graduate studies in engineering, or vice versa, are typical options for becoming qualified biomedical engineering professionals, although there are additional interesting alternatives, to be discussed. According to our experience, the graduates and post-graduates from multidisciplinary engineering programmes, not just from biomedical engineering, but also from more traditional fields including industrial, mechanical and telecommunications engineering, can play varied and very relevant roles in the biomedical industry and in extremely complex biomedical device development projects. In spite of the different ways of becoming a professional of the biomedical engineering field, it is true that their impact as successful professionals can be importantly increased, by means of an adequate integration into their curricula of fundamental biomedical engineering design concepts, methodologies and good practices, applied to the development of biomedical devices. In this study we present the complete development and comparative study of three courses, belonging to different plans of study taught at the Technical University of Madrid and benefiting from using a CDIO approach focused on the development of biomedical devices. The three courses are “Development of Medical Devices”, “Bioengineering Design” and “Biomedical Engineering”, respectively belonging to the “Bachelor’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering”, to the “Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering” and to the “Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering”. During the courses, groups of students live through the development process of different biomedical devices aimed at providing answers to relevant social needs. Depending on their background and European credits assigned to the different courses, students carry out more conceptual projects or are able to live through more complete CDIO experiences. Main benefits, lessons learned and future challenges, linked to these courses, are analyzed, taking account of the results from 2014-2015 academic year

La publicación de noticias sobre los resultados de I+ D+ i ¿Cómo es percibida por los investigadores españoles?

This study aims to know what is the perception that researchers of Spanish universities have about the impact they generated on their careers, the scientific news published with the results of their Research, Development and Innovation (R+D+I) activities. To this end, data were collected by an online survey conducted in 2016 of 602 researchers of scientific communication from 20 universities in Spain. The only requirement was that any of their publications had been subject to -at least- a press release issued by their own university in the last five years before the survey launched (2016). For the analysis of the data, the test of the significant difference among variables (Z test) and the Kruskal-Wallis independence test, had been used. According to the results, the researchers trust more in the journalists of their institution rather than those of other media. In addition, they perceive that the dissemination of their scientific articles gives them more benefits than damages. However, these results also encourage considering all current challenges in the field of professionalization and scientific dissemination