Efectos de la cubierta en la durabilidad de las geomembranas poliméricas empleadas en la impermeabilización de embalses

La utilización de geomembranas sintéticas en el campo de las Obras Hidráulicas surgeen España en los años 1970 en el sudeste peninsular, concretamente en la zona de Ibi, enla provincia de Alicante. Las primeras geomembranas instaladas estaban constituidaspor materiales elastoméricos de caucho butilo (IIR). Posteriormente surgieron nuevosmateriales como el poli(cloruro de vinilo) plastificado (PVC-P), polietileno de altadensidad (PEAD) y el caucho terpolímero de etileno-propileno-dieno (EPDM) que hanconseguido situarse como los materiales más empleados a nivel mundial, en laimpermeabilización de embalses.Uno de los hechos que favoreció la introducción y expansión de las geomembranas dePVC-P en nuestro país, fue el desarrollo del Plan Hidráulico de la Comunidad Autónomade Canarias en los años 80 del siglo pasado. En los años 90, el organismo autónomo local,Balsas de Tenerife (BALTEN), inició la colaboración con el Centro de Estudios yExperimentación de Obras Públicas (CEDEX) con el propósito de estudiar elcomportamiento de las geomembranas de PVC-P, instaladas en los primeros embalsesconstruidos en la isla de Tenerife, siendo uno de ellos el embalse de El Saltadero, situadoen el sur de la isla.Posteriormente se proyectó la construcción de un campo experimental dentro del recintodel embalse de El Saltadero, con el fin de instalar nuevos materiales poliméricos y otros,que sin ser nuevos, su comportamiento a la intemperie era desconocido en nuestro país.Dicho campo experimental está orientado hacia el sur, ubicación que recibe mayorradiación procedente del sol en el hemisferio norte y debido a que es la situación másfavorable para acelerar la degradación de los materiales poliméricos..

Monte Bernorio (Palencia): siglo I a.C. / 1936- 1937 d.C. Arqueología de un campo de batalla

El yacimiento de Monte Bernorio es uno de los más importantes de la Edad del Hierro en el norte de la Península Ibérica. Por su estratégico emplazamiento, este oppidum tuvo un importante papel en la guerra de conquista que el Emperador Augusto desarrolló contra los territorios de Cántabros y Ástures. Dos mil años más tarde este núcleo volvió a tener una crucial importancia estratégica en los enfrentamientos de la Guerra Civil, en los que Monte Bernorio jugó un papel fundamental dentro del denominado “Frente Norte”. A través del estudio arqueológico de los restos que se han conservado de los combates se puede llegar a comprender la dureza de la guerra en esta área y las condiciones de vida de los soldados en las posiciones que se erigieron entre los restos de la Edad del Hierro.Monte Bernorio is one of the most important Iron Age sites in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. Due to its strategic position, this oppidum played a relevant role in the war of conquest that Emperor Augustus carried out in the land of the Cantabrians and Asturians. Two thousand years later, this place was again of great strategic relevance during the Spanish Civil War: Monte Bernorio played a crucial role within the so-called “Northern Front”. Through the archaeological study of the Civil War remains, it is possible to understand the hardness of the combats that took place in this area, as well as the harsh conditions of life experienced by those soldiers who fought among the ruins of an Iron Age settlement

Attack and destruction of the Monte Bernorio oppidvm and the establishment of a roman castellvm

El "oppidum" de Monte Bernorio resulta bien conocido como una de las ciudades fortificadas de la Edad del Hierro más importantes del cantábrico. En las campañas militares que el emperador Octavio Augusto desencadeno contra "Cántabros y Ástures" la conquista de este "oppidum" resultó esencial, como demuestran las recientes campañas de excavación arqueológicas. Se presentan en este trabajo algunas novedades relacionadas con el descubrimiento, en su "acrópolis", del "agger" de un "castellum" romano construido aprovechando en parte el dispositivo defensivo indígena. Este "castellum" tuvo varias fases de ocupación sucesivas con al menos dos reconstrucciones de las estructuras defensivas de esta fortificación.Monte Bernorio Hillfort is a very well known "oppidum" and one of the most important Iron Age sites in the North of Spain. The siege of this "oppidum" was essential during Emperor Augustus’ military campaign against Cantabrian and Asturian peoples, as shown by the latest archaeological researches in this site. In this paper we introduce new findings regarding the discovery, in the "acropolis" of the hillfort, of the "agger" of a Roman fort, built using some parts of the indigenous defenses. The roman fort has experienced different occupation periods with no less than two different phases

Convergent validity of two items to differentiate between active and sedentary students

Este estudio examina la validez y fiabilidad de dos ítems de actividad física (AF) incluidos en el CHIP-CE para discriminar entre escolares activos y sedentarios. Se realizó un estudio observacional-transversal, con 1.073 escolares de ambos sexos, de 10-13 años. Mediante los ítems 13 y 28 del CHIP-CE se clasificó a los escolares como activos o sedentarios. La validez convergente fue examinada utilizando como criterio variables de adiposidad, lipídicas, metabólicas, de presión arterial y de fitness. El coeficiente de correlación de Spearman entre los dos ítems fue de 0,60. Los coeficientes de correlación de Spearman entre la media de los dos items de AF y las variables de salud mostraron valores más altos con el % grasa corporal, la insulina basal, la frecuencia cardiaca de recuperación y el fitness. La escala de dos ítems extraída del CHIP-CE es un instrumento válido para clasificar a los escolares en activos o sedentarios.This study examined the validity and reliability of two physical activity Child Health and Illness Profile - Child Edition (CHIP-CE) items to differentiate between active and sedentary students. An observational cross-sectional study design was used with 1,073 students from 11 to 13 years old, from 20 schools in the province of Cuenca (Spain). Item 13 and item 28 of the CHIP-CE, a generic childhood quality of life instrument, were evaluated. Convergent validity was examined using adiposity, lipidic, metabolic, blood pressure and cardiorespiratory fitness variables as criteria. The Spearman coefficient of correlation between the two items was 0.60. The Spearman correlation coefficients between the physical activity items and the anthropometric, lipidic, metabolic, blood pressure and cardiorespiratory fitness variables showed higher values with percentage body fat, fasting insulin, recovery heart rate and cardiorespiratory fitness. Our two-item questionnaire exhibited acceptable validity and high internal consistency for classifying students as either active or sedentary.Este estudio fue financiado por la Consejería de Sanidad de Castilla-La Mancha (beca GC03060-00). Financiación adicional fue obtenida del Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Red de Investigación en Actividades Preventivas y de Promoción de Salud (grant RD06/0018/0038)

Mapping the Viability, Time, and Cost of Manual Borehole Drilling in Developing Regions

While access to water remains an issue in arid and semiarid regions across the world, aquifers have the potential to help millions of people out of poverty by providing a reliable source of drinking and irrigation water. Manual boreholes are increasingly advocated as a safe and cost-effective substitute to mechanized drilling, as well as to traditional excavation methods. This research banks on the assumption that field and remote sensing data can be integrated within a geospatial database in order to map the viability of manual boreholes based on factors such as rock type, water table depth, landforms, or water quality. The approach presents three main novelties in relation to methodological precedents: (1) outcomes are not only expressed in terms of technical feasibility, but also as a function of drilling time and cost; (2) maps refer to a specific drilling technique; and (3) results take into account borehole diameter, as this constrains both drilling time and cost. The method provides univocal outcomes that can be immediately useful for non-experts, donors, planners, or practitioners and that can be readily exported to other catchment-scale settings. Results were validated against geophysical data

Reliability and validity of the Spanish version of the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (10-item CD-RISC) in young adults

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (10-item CD-RISC) is an instrument for measuring resilience that has shown good psychometric properties in its original version in English. The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Spanish version of the 10-item CD-RISC in young adults and to verify whether it is structured in a single dimension as in the original English version.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Cross-sectional observational study including 681 university students ranging in age from 18 to 30 years. The number of latent factors in the 10 items of the scale was analyzed by exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to verify whether a single factor underlies the 10 items of the scale as in the original version in English. The convergent validity was analyzed by testing whether the mean of the scores of the mental component of SF-12 (MCS) and the quality of sleep as measured with the Pittsburgh Sleep Index (PSQI) were higher in subjects with better levels of resilience. The internal consistency of the 10-item CD-RISC was estimated using the Cronbach α test and test-retest reliability was estimated with the intraclass correlation coefficient.</p> <p>The Cronbach α coefficient was 0.85 and the test-retest intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.71. The mean MCS score and the level of quality of sleep in both men and women were significantly worse in subjects with lower resilience scores.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The Spanish version of the 10-item CD-RISC showed good psychometric properties in young adults and thus can be used as a reliable and valid instrument for measuring resilience. Our study confirmed that a single factor underlies the resilience construct, as was the case of the original scale in English.</p

Real-time robust automatic speech recognition using compact support vector machines

In the last years, support vector machines (SVMs) have shown excellent performance in many applications, especially in the presence of noise. In particular, SVMs offer several advantages over artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have attracted the attention of the speech processing community. Nevertheless, their high computational requirements prevent them from being used in practice in automatic speech recognition (ASR), where ANNs have proven to be successful. The high complexity of SVMs in this context arises from the use of huge speech training databases with millions of samples and highly overlapped classes. This paper suggests the use of a weighted least squares (WLS) training procedure that facilitates the possibility of imposing a compact semiparametric model on the SVM, which results in a dramatic complexity reduction. Such a complexity reduction with respect to conventional SVMs, which is between two and three orders of magnitude, allows the proposed hybrid WLS-SVC/HMM system to perform real-time speech decoding on a connected-digit recognition task (SpeechDat Spanish database). The experimental evaluation of the proposed system shows encouraging performance levels in clean and noisy conditions, although further improvements are required to reach the maturity level of current context-dependent HMM based recognizers.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation TEC 2008-06382 and TEC 2008-02473 and Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid-UC3M CCG10-UC3M/TIC-5304.Publicad

Central America [in State of the Climate in 2017]

For this region, nine stations from five countries were analyzed. Stations on the Caribbean slope are: Philip Goldson International Airport, Belize; Puerto Barrios, Guatemala; Puerto Lempira, Honduras; and Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. Stations located on the Pacific slope are: Tocumen International Airport and David, Panamá; Liberia, Costa Rica; Choluteca, Honduras; and Puerto San José, Guatemala.Universidad de Costa Rica/[805-B8-766]/UCR/Costa RicaUCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Básicas::Centro de Investigaciones Geofísicas (CIGEFI

Stability of the factorial structure of metabolic syndrome from childhood to adolescence: a 6-year follow-up study

Background Metabolic syndrome (MS) is a clustering of cardiometabolic risk factors that is considered a predictor of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and mortality. There is no consistent evidence on whether the MS construct works in the same way in different populations and at different stages in life. Methods We used confirmatory factor analysis to examine if a single-factor-model including waist circumference, triglycerides/HDL-c, insulin and mean arterial pressure underlies metabolic syndrome from the childhood to adolescence in a 6-years follow-up study in 174 Swedish and 460 Estonian children aged 9 years at baseline. Indeed, we analyze the tracking of a previously validated MS index over this 6-years period. Results The estimates of goodness-of-fit for the single-factor-model underlying MS were acceptable both in children and adolescents. The construct stability of a new model including the differences from baseline to the end of the follow-up in the components of the proposed model displayed good fit indexes for the change, supporting the hypothesis of a single factor underlying MS component trends. Conclusions A single-factor-model underlying MS is stable across the puberty in both Estonian and Swedish young people. The MS index tracks acceptably from childhood to adolescence.This study was supported by grants from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Science (No 0180027 and 0942706) and the Estonian Science Foundation (No 6932 and 6788). The study was also supported by grants from the Stockholm County Council, the Spanish Ministry of Education (EX-2008-0641), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (RYC-2010-05957), and the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation (20090635)

Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and cardiovascular risk factors in primary care

Varias circunstancias motivan el creciente interés por la esteatosis hepática no alcohólica (EHNA): la elevada prevalencia de la enfermedad en el mundo occidental, su capacidad de progresión a formas histológicas más agresivas y su asociación con enfermedades que incrementan el riesgo cardiovascular. Objetivo: analizar la relación de la esteatosis hepática no alcohólica con los factores de riesgo cardiovascular en pacientes con criterios de síndrome metabólico. Método: fue realizado un estudio descriptivo transversal con una muestra de 100 pacientes, con 2 o más factores de riesgo cardiovascular, con nula o baja ingesta de alcohol, que acudían a consulta de atención primaria. A los seleccionados se les solicitó analítica completa e interconsulta para ecografía de abdomen completo. Se evaluó si tenían esteatosis hepática; en caso de ser afirmativo, se estratificaba en 3 grados. Se recogieron las siguientes variables tanto cualitativas (sexo, antecedentes personales y familiares de diabetes, hipertensión arterial, dislipidemia, entre otros) y cuantitativas (edad, peso, talla, índice de masa corporal, tratamiento farmacológico, cifras de distintos parámetros analíticos, cifras de tensión arterial y perímetro abdominal). Resultados: participaron 100 pacientes, 56% de los cuales eran mujeres, con una edad media de 61,84 DE ± 9,5 años. Del total de sujetos del estudio, el 23 % no tenía esteatosis hepática no alcohólica; un 29% tenía esteatosis hepática leve; otro 29%, esteatosis hepática moderada; y el 19% restante, esteatosis hepática severa. En los hombres, el 82% presentó esteatosis hepática. De las mujeres, el 28,57% no presentó hígado graso. Un 22% tenía sobrepeso y un 38% de los pacientes eran obesos. Solo un 22% y un 18% tenían alteradas las cifras tensionales sistólica y diastólica, respectivamente. El 60% tenía una glucemia basal alterada. En cuanto a los parámetros lipídicos, el 36% tenía hipertrigliceridemia; el 41%, hipercolesterolemia, con un 65% de colesterol LDL alto y un 16% de colesterol HDL bajo. El 83% de los pacientes tenía 2 o más criterios de síndrome metabólico. Conclusiones: hay una estrecha relación entre la aparición de esteatosis hepática no alcohólica y los factores de riesgo cardiovascular en pacientes con síndrome metabólico, por lo que se recomienda que, ante la aparición de estos, se analice el hígadoSeveral factors motivate the growing interest in this disease. They include the high prevalence of the disease in the Western world, its ability to progress to more aggressive histological forms, and its association with diseases that increase cardiovascular risk. Objective: The objective of this study was to analyze the relationship of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) with cardiovascular risk factors in patients with criteria for metabolic syndrome. Method: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study of 100 patients who had two or more cardiovascular risk factors, who did not consume alcohol or consumed only small amounts of alcohol, and who came to the primary care clinic. The patients selected underwent complete analyses including abdominal ultrasound. They were evaluated for hepatic steatosis, and, if they tested positive, it was stratified into three degrees. Among the qualitative variables used were sex, personal and family history of diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and the quantitative variables included age, weight, height, body mass index, pharmacological treatment, numbers of different analytical parameters, blood pressure and abdominal perimeter. Results: There were 100 patients, 56% of whom were women. Patients’ mean age was 61.84 SD ± 9.5 years. Of the total number of subjects in the study, 23% did not have NASH, 29% had mild hepatic steatosis, 29% had moderate hepatic steatosis and 19% had severe hepatic steatosis. Of the men in the study, 82% had hepatic steatosis. Of the women, 28.57% did not have fatty livers. 22% were overweight and 38% obese. Only 22% had altered the systolic blood pressure and and 18% had altered diastolic blood pressure. 60% had altered basal glycemia. 36% had hypertriglyceremia, 41% had hypercholesterolemia including 65% with high LDL cholesterol and 16% with low HDL cholesterol. 83% of the patients had two or more criteria for metabolic syndrome.Conclusions: There is a close relationship between the occurrence of NASH and cardiovascular risk factors in patients with metabolic syndrome, and it is advisable that the liver be analyzedEstudio financiado en parte por la Comisión de Investigación de la Gerencia Integrada de Albacet