L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menester: Classical Sources of a Catalan proverb included in Sebastià Farnés’ Paremiologia catalana comparada

This paper aims to investigate the Classical proverbs listed as equivalents to the Catalan proverb L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menester by Sebastià Farnés in his volume entitled Paremiologia catalana comparada. In this paper, I will establish these Classical proverbs’ sources, consider their authenticity and correspondence with this Catalan proverb, and increase the number of Classical sources, since this Catalan proverb bears witness to its Classical tradition and is related to philosophical and literary passages that can be considered as previous manifestations of this tradition. These Greek and Latin passages are compiled and compared so as to determine the different ways in which the idea included in this Catalan proverb was expressed over time. The conclusion is that the consideration about friendship presented by this proverb is embedded into a long textual/ideological tradition which ultimately refers to the sage Solon, the poet Theognis and the philosopher Theofrast, although there may be connections with the Judeo-Christian tradition as well.This paper aims to investigate the Classical proverbs listed as equivalents to the Catalan proverb L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menester by Sebastià Farnés in his volume entitled Paremiologia catalana comparada. In this paper, I will establish these Classical proverbs’ sources, consider their authenticity and correspondence with this Catalan proverb, and increase the number of Classical sources, since this Catalan proverb bears witness to its Classical tradition and is related to philosophical and literary passages that can be considered as previous manifestations of this tradition. These Greek and Latin passages are compiled and compared so as to determine the different ways in which the idea included in this Catalan proverb was expressed over time. The conclusion is that the consideration about friendship presented by this proverb is embedded into a long textual/ideological tradition which ultimately refers to the sage Solon, the poet Theognis and the philosopher Theofrast, although there may be connections with the Judeo-Christian tradition as well

Suffer, Bear, and Endure: Latin Sources of Resignation in Spanish Proverbs

Spanish refranero forms a sort of code whose aim is to guide and control the conduct of the members of the linguistic community that has coined these proverbs and uses them. A great part of the ideology that can be gathered from Spanish proverbs was already present in Classical culture. Therefore my overall objective is to trace the Classical precedents of Spanish proverbs. Particularly this paper aims to find in Latin language and literature formal or ideological precursors of a certain amount of Spanish proverbs concerning the stoic attitude we should take in order to confront misfortune. This attitude is based on facing with resignation what fate holds in store for us and it results in accepting pain as an essential part of human existence, promoting a conformist behavior that restrains aspirations to better conditions and makes it unlikely that the establishment will be broken.Spanish refranero forms a sort of code whose aim is to guide and control the conduct of the members of the linguistic community that has coined these proverbs and uses them. A great part of the ideology that can be gathered from Spanish proverbs was already present in Classical culture. Therefore my overall objective is to trace the Classical precedents of Spanish proverbs. Particularly this paper aims to find in Latin language and literature formal or ideological precursors of a certain amount of Spanish proverbs concerning the stoic attitude we should take in order to confront misfortune. This attitude is based on facing with resignation what fate holds in store for us and it results in accepting pain as an essential part of human existence, promoting a conformist behavior that restrains aspirations to better conditions and makes it unlikely that the establishment will be broken

Temporal activity detection in untrimmed videos with recurrent neural networks

This work proposes a simple pipeline to classify and temporally localize activities in untrimmed videos. Our system uses features from a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (C3D) as input to train a a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns to classify video clips of 16 frames. After clip prediction, we post-process the output of the RNN to assign a single activity label to each video, and determine the temporal boundaries of the activity within the video. We show how our system can achieve competitive results in both tasks with a simple architecture. We evaluate our method in the ActivityNet Challenge 2016, achieving a 0.5874 mAP and a 0.2237 mAP in the classification and detection tasks, respectively. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://imatge-upc.github.io/activitynet-2016-cvprw/Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Efficient heuristics for the parallel blocking flow shop scheduling problem

We consider the NP-hard problem of scheduling n jobs in F identical parallel flow shops, each consisting of a series of m machines, and doing so with a blocking constraint. The applied criterion is to minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum completion time of all the jobs in F flow shops (lines). The Parallel Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (PFSP) is conceptually similar to another problem known in the literature as the Distributed Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (DPFSP), which allows modeling the scheduling process in companies with more than one factory, each factory with a flow shop configuration. Therefore, the proposed methods can solve the scheduling problem under the blocking constraint in both situations, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been studied previously. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model along with some constructive and improvement heuristics to solve the parallel blocking flow shop problem (PBFSP) and thus minimize the maximum completion time among lines. The proposed constructive procedures use two approaches that are totally different from those proposed in the literature. These methods are used as initial solution procedures of an iterated local search (ILS) and an iterated greedy algorithm (IGA), both of which are combined with a variable neighborhood search (VNS). The proposed constructive procedure and the improved methods take into account the characteristics of the problem. The computational evaluation demonstrates that both of them –especially the IGA– perform considerably better than those algorithms adapted from the DPFSP literature.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Anatomical and functional brain approach along short abrupt changes in G-levels

To conduct experiments under abrupt changes in g-levels, a single-engine aerobatic aircraft has been used, providing 6-8 seconds of reduced gravity, preceded and followed by 5-7 seconds of hypergravity periods. Due to the specific conditions of the flight and previous findings [1], the hypothesis of the present work lies on the idea that some sensory inputs could have a notorious effect on brain final responses when gravity is altered. Therefore, this study focuses on the evaluation of such hypothesis, based on the analysis of the evolution in time of intracranial activity of limbic, visual and auditory cortices. Five subjects (N=5, age 41¿14 years) have flown in parabolic flight with their eyes both open and closed. Electroencephalogram signals were recorded with an Emotive Epoc headset, synchronized with a triaxial accelerometer. The intracranial brain bioelectric activity (standardized current density) throughout the parabola, was calculated by applying Standard Low Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography, and it was analyzed for the limbic, visual and auditory cortices. Intracranial activity of the Temporal, Parietal and Occipital lobes were carried out as well in order to compare the different periods/phases of the flight. Results detected a lower brain activity during the hypogravity phase in all lobes and cortices, only in the case of open eyes. The bioelectrical brain activity along the parabola showed similar patterns in all lobes and cortices, when visual inputs are highlighted. Suppressing the sight, two major behaviors were detected in brain activity: one for temporal lobe and auditory cortex, and second one for the rest of the lobes and visual cortex. It Seemed that, flying with closed eyes, other sensory stimuli were enhanced, in this case the auditory cortex. To confirm the validity of the results two-way ANOVA (factors lobe/phases) and Fisher post hoc test have been applied on mean intracranial activity values in all cases. Spectral entropy evolution in time has been considered as a fast indicator of the sudden extracranial brain activity variation during short g-changes. For open eyes, spectral entropy values indicated a slight decrease at the onset of the hypogravity phase, whereas in case of closed eyes, this change was detected in the last seconds of the parabola, even though these fluctuations were statistically non-significant. Results suggest that some of the sensory inputs can indeed have an impact on brain final response, when gravity conditions are altered.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

El portero de balonmano: una aplicación práctica de entrenamiento perceptivo-decisional ante lanzamientos de primera línea

El trabajo que se presenta incide en una forma de trabajo que se aparta de la tradicional de entrenamiento de los porteros de balonmano ante un tipo de lanzamientos muy concreto como son los de primera línea. Se hace hincapié en la importancia del entrenamiento de los mecanismos perceptivo y decisional, ya que parece que un entrenamiento eminentemente técnico no es suficiente debido a que la velocidad de reacción del portero no basta para alcanzar el balón antes de que éste entre en la portería si espera a ver su salida. En este sentido, se trata de justificar, a partir de las teorías ya existentes sobre adquisición y gestión de información, y de un estudio realizado sobre lanzamientos realizados en Liga ASOBAL desde primera línea, que consiguiendo una mejora en la gestión que los porteros realizan de la información que reciben del entorno, es decir, mejorando su comprensión del juego, su capacidad táctica, mejorarán su rendimiento ante este tipo concreto de lanzamientos, ya que serán capaces de anticipar sus acciones basándose en una serie de señales que el juego le aporta y que deben ser capaces de sustraer y analizar para emitir una respuesta ajustada en el tiempo y el espacio. Para esto se ponen como ejemplo una serie de tareas que se centran en una mejora de los mecanismos perceptivo y decisional

Renal Impairment in Axial Spondyloarthritis: A Prevalent Condition to Consider

We read with interest the paper by Couderc, et al1 on the prevalence of renal impairment in patients with spondyloarthritis (SpA) from the ASASCOMOSPA study (Assessment of Spondyloarthritis international Society–COMOrbidities in SPondyloArthritis). Their results encouraged us to investigate renal impairment prevalence in our cohort. Renal impairment [estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) < 60 ml/min/1.73 m2] prevalence in the ASAS-COMOSPA cohort was 5.2% and was associated with age, HLA-B27 positivity, and inflammation in the multivariate analysis. Data are scarce on the prevalence of renal involvement in SpA with evident heterogeneity, ranging from 0.1% to 11.3% of the cases