Advancing on the road of psychological differentiation of sportsmen. Examples in differences in sex and sport mode

Estudiar lo que identifica psicológicamente al deportista no debe reducirse a establecer una lista de indicadores disposicionales; precisa determinar relaciones, carácter prioritario, variabilidad o compensación de unos sobre otros dentro del sistema deportista–deporte. La muestra (N=623), con una media de 23,96 años, se encuentra aleatoriamente distribuida por sexo (hombres=64,8% mujeres=35,2%) y deporte (individual=32,58%; colectivo=67,41%). Se analizan variables de personalidad, motivación y creencias hacia el éxito deportivo. La variabilidad entre las cualidades del deportista incide en sus relaciones, mostrándose mujeres más tenaces y afables, hombres más estables, mayor afabilidad en deportes colectivos y de apertura mental en individuales, mayor orientación motivacional hacia lo extrínseco, y creencias de esfuerzo hacia el éxito en mujeres y deportes individuales. La particular relación persona-deporte, plantea un marco adecuado para descubrir y aprender actitudes implicadas para desarrollar cualidades como la responsabilidad, superación, autocontrol, motivación de logro, persistencia de esfuerzos, así como otros importantes procesos mediadores.Psychological descriptions of athletes should not be constrained to a list of abilities. Rather, they require descriptions of relations among its priority, variability or compensation within a person-sport system. The sample (N=623), mean age 23.96, is randomly distributed by sex (male=64.8%, female=35.2%) and type of sport (individual=32.58%; team=67.41%). Variables such as personality, motivation, and beliefs in sport success are analysed. Variability among athletes´ qualities has an impact on their relationships with others; in particular, women are gentler, as well as more persistent and determined, while men are more stable and sociable in team sports, and show greater open-mindedness in individual sports, more extrinsic motivational orientation, and beliefs of effort to succes in women and individual sports. The personsport relationship is a framework for discovering and learning which attitudes are involved in the development of traits such as responsibility, achievement, self-control, achievement motivation, persistence of effort, as well as other relevant intermediary processes

SRL pathogenicity island contributes to the metabolism of D-aspartate via an aspartate racemase in Shigella flexneri YSH6000

In recent years, multidrug resistance of Shigella strains associated with genetic elements like pathogenicity islands, have become a public health problem. The Shigella resistance locus pathogenicity island (SRL PAI) of S. flexneri 2a harbors a 16Kbp region that contributes to the multidrug resistance phenotype. However, there is not much information about other functions such as metabolic, physiologic or ecological ones. For that, wild type S. flexneri YSH6000 strain, and its spontaneous SRL PAI mutant, 1363, were used to study the contribution of the island in different growth conditions. Interestingly, when both strains were compared by the Phenotype Microarrays, the ability to metabolize D-aspartic acid as a carbon source was detected in the wild type strain but not in the mutant. When D-aspartate was added to minimal medium with other carbon sources such as mannose or mannitol, the SRL PAI-positive strain was able to metabolize it, while the SRL PAI-negative strain did not. In order to identify the genetic elements responsible for this phenotype, a bioinformatic analysis was performed and two genes belonging to SRL PAI were found: orf8, coding for a putative aspartate racemase, and orf9, coding for a transporter. Thus, it was possible to measure, by an indirect analysis of racemization activity in minimal medium supplemented only with D-aspartate, that YSH6000 strain was able to transform the D-form into L-, while the mutant was impaired to do it. When the orf8-orf9 region from SRL island was transformed into S. flexneri and S. sonnei SRL PAI-negative strains, the phenotype was restored. Also, when single genes were cloned into plasmids, no complementation was observed. Our results strongly suggest that the aspartate racemase and the transporter encoded in the SRL pathogenicity island are important for bacterial survival in environments rich in D-aspartate

Challenges For Managing The North American Coastal Zone

Canada, the United States and Mexico are adjacent coastal nations where the impact of significantly increased human activity in the coastal zone by the year 2050 will be potentially catastrophic. Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) may well have a role to play within and between all three countries to help ameliorate this situation. This paper looks at the challenges facing sub-continental ICM, from institutional foundations to large-scale environmental management practices that cross political and cultural boundaries. To assist in this discussion, we have analyzed the overlapping sets of political-administrative units within terrestrial ecosystems, especially those with complex landscape attributes, to arrive at a series of issues that help identify areas of convergence and joint action as well as barriers to action. Finally, we look at landscape attributes on a regional scale to show that joint institutional initiatives that recognize existing ecological, socio-economic, and political-administrative differences between Canada, the United States and Mexico need to be built

Una experiencia práctica reutilizando aspectos

Este art´ıculo cuenta nuestra experiencia obtenida tras haber realizado un proyecto utilizando la tecnolog´ıa de aspectos AspectJ, y plantearsenos el hecho de reutilizar los aspectos definidos en el mismo con un nuevo proyecto a desarrollar. En definitiva, comprobar de forma pr´actica el grado de reutilizaci´on que tienen los aspectos en distintas aplicaciones

Femtosecond infrared intrastromal ablation and backscattering-mode adaptive-optics multiphoton microscopy in chicken corneas

The performance of femtosecond (fs) laser intrastromal ablation was evaluated with backscattering-mode adaptive-optics multiphoton microscopy in ex vivo chicken corneas. The pulse energy of the fs source used for ablation was set to generate two different ablation patterns within the corneal stroma at a certain depth. Intrastromal patterns were imaged with a custom adaptive-optics multiphoton microscope to determine the accuracy of the procedure and verify the outcomes. This study demonstrates the potential of using fs pulses as surgical and monitoring techniques to systematically investigate intratissue ablation. Further refinement of the experimental system by combining both functions into a single fs laser system would be the basis to establish new techniques capable of monitoring corneal surgery without labeling in real-time. Since the backscattering configuration has also been optimized, future in vivo implementations would also be of interest in clinical environments involving corneal ablation procedures

Non-linear classifiers applied to EEG analysis for epilepsy seizure detection

This work presents a novel approach for automatic epilepsy seizure detection based on EEG analysis that exploits the underlying non-linear nature of EEG data. In this paper, two main contributions are presented and validated: the use of non-linear classifiers through the so-called kernel trick and the proposal of a Bag-of-Words model for extracting a non-linear feature representation of the input data in an unsupervised manner. The performance of the resulting system is validated with public datasets, previously processed to remove artifacts or external disturbances, but also with private datasets recorded under realistic and non-ideal operating conditions. The use of public datasets caters for comparison purposes whereas the private one shows the performance of the system under realistic circumstances of noise, artifacts, and signals of different amplitudes. Moreover, the proposed solution has been compared to state-of-the-art works not only for pre-processed and public datasets but also with the private datasets. The mean F1-measure shows a 10% improvement over the second-best ranked method including cross-dataset experiments. The obtained results prove the robustness of the proposed solution to more realistic and variable conditions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved