Coupled Extraction/Re-Extraction Method for the Chemical Speciation of Nickel in NaturalWaters

Chemical fractionation and speciation of metals species in natural waters and its relation with bioavailability have received increased attention in recent years. A simple liquid membranes method, based on coupled liquid extraction and re-extraction processes, is proposed to separate and quantify the species of nickel present in water samples. A simplex optimization of chemical variables, such as carrier concentration in the organic solution and nitric acid concentration in the receiving solution, was performed and, under optimized conditions, the extraction system was applied to determine nickel species in water samples at natural level concentrations. A linear relationship was established between extraction e cacy and the concentration of dissolved organic carbon in the samples, allowing the separation and determination of labile and non-labile nickel fractions, since the latter was not transported through the organic solution acting as liquid membrane. When the total and labile concentrations of metals were analyzed in real samples with di erent salinities, no significant di erences were found between the results obtained and those from well-established methods. An average relative error of 1.50 and 2.37 was obtained for total Ni concentration and labile fraction, respectively. Finally, a comparison with the theoretical speciation data calculated with the softwareWinHumic V was successfully performed. Thus, the proposed method allows the simultaneous determination of labile and non-labile nickel fractions, presented as a simple alternative to nickel fractionation in natural waters

Aplicaciones de la calculadora CASIO FX-82SPXII en el tema de divisibilidad para alumnos de 1PMAR

Treball final de Màster Universitari en Professor/a d'Educació Secundària Obligatòria i Batxillerat, Formació Professional i Ensenyaments d'Idiomes. Codi: SAP509. Curs acadèmic 2015-2016En el trabajo expuesto a continuación, se pretende comprobar que existe una nueva forma de resolver los ejercicios del tema de 2º de ESO de Divisibilidad, usando la calculadora CASIO fx–82SPXII y, por lo tanto, se puede explicar este tema usando esta calculadora. Se propone aplicar esta nueva metodología didáctica únicamente en el grupo de 1 PMAR, ya que son alumnos con dificultades del aprendizaje que, durante sucesivos años, no han sido capaces de aprender a resolver los problemas de divisibilidad mediante la metodología tradicional. Esta propuesta pretende simplemente comprobar que la metodología se puede aplicar, sin entrar en la discusión de si es correcto o didáctico enseñar este tema con la calculadora, sin aplicar los algoritmos de resolución manuales. Para empezar, el trabajo muestra cómo han ayudado desde la prehistoria las herramientas de cálculo a que las matemáticas evolucionen hacia la ciencia que conocemos hoy en día, seguido de una búsqueda bibliográfica sobre cómo han evolucionado las leyes de educación y qué cambios han conllevado dentro de las aulas. A continuación, se resuelven los ejercicios propuestos en el tema de divisibilidad del libro Matemáticas SM (Savia) para 2º de ESO, usando la calculadora, mediante las nuevas funciones de factorizar (FACT), división exacta (), máximo común divisor (MCD) y mínimo común múltiplo (MCM). De esta manera, se comprueba que la nueva metodología es viable a nivel instrumental, ya que no se discuten los efectos positivos o negativos que tendrían su implantación en el aula. Lo que sí que es cierto, es que, utilizando la calculadora, los alumnos se incorporan al proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de una forma activa, ya que se toman el uso de la calculadora en la resolución de actividades como un juego y, por tanto, su motivación y atención se multiplican, siendo así actores de su construcción del conocimiento y no meros espectadores. Para terminar, se analizan los resultados obtenidos en el grupo de 1 de PMAR del Instituto Matilde Salvador, en el examen de Divisibilidad, resuelto por los alumnos mediante la metodología tradicional. Puesto que estos resultados no son positivos, más bien desastrosos, se resuelve el examen esta metodología y se cuestiona sobre si, mediante la nueva propuesta metodológica, los alumnos llegarían a un aprendizaje significativo, y, por lo tanto, se obtendrían resultados más positivos

La empresa y el abandono del socio en tiempos de crisis...

The financial economic crisis that has passed through Spain and the euro zone in general has impacted the business fabric that has caused devastating effects on it with such force. These losses have been expressed in the permanent misunderstandings and difficult internal relationships among the shareholders who have seen sometimes, against the violation of their rights, the abandonment of the company a possible solution to recover your investment. Spanish law with the promulgation of the text revised of the law societies of Capital includes certain cases but these are very limited and partners which adversely affected their interests only can go to statutory provisions of separation that, in most of the cases, tend not to be introduced nor provided for in the bylaws.

A software service supporting software quality forecasting

Software repositories such as source control, defect tracking systems and project management tools, are used to support the progress of software projects. The exploitation of such data with techniques like forecasting is becoming an increasing need in several domains to support decision-making processes. However, although there exist several statistical tools and languages supporting forecasting, there is a lack of friendly approaches that enable practitioners to exploit the advantages of creating and using such models in their dashboard tools. Therefore, we have developed a modular and flexible forecasting service allowing the interconnection with different kinds of databases/data repositories for creating and exploiting forecasting models based on methods like ARIMA or ETS. The service is open source software, has been developed in Java and R and exposes its functionalities through a REST API. Architecture details are provided, along with functionalities’ description and an example of its use for software quality forecasting.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Cardiac stem cells in the postnatal heart: lessons from development

Heart development in mammals is followed by a postnatal decline in cell proliferation and cell renewal from stem cell populations. A better understanding of the developmental changes in cardiac microenvironments occurring during heart maturation will be informative regarding the loss of adult regenerative potential. We reevaluate the adult heart’s mitotic potential and the reported adult cardiac stem cell populations, as these are two topics of ongoing debate. The heart’s early capacity for cell proliferation driven by progenitors and reciprocal signalling is demonstrated throughout development. The mature heart architecture and environment may be more restrictive on niches that can host progenitor cells. The engraftment issues observed in cardiac stem cell therapy trials using exogenous stem cells may indicate a lack of supporting stem cell niches, while tissue injury adds to a hostile microenvironment for transplanted cells. Engraftment may be improved by preconditioning the cultured stem cells and modulating the microenvironment to host these cells. These prospective areas of further research would benefit from a better understanding of cardiac progenitor interactions with their microenvironment throughout development and may lead to enhanced cardiac niche support for stem cell therapy engraftment

High-temperature mechanical behavior of polycrystalline yttrium-doped barium cerate perovskite

The high-temperature mechanical properties of the mixed ionic-electronic conductor perovskite BaCe0.95Y0.05O3-δ with average grain size of 0.40μm have been studied in compression between 1100 and 1300°C in air at different initial strain rates. The true stress-true strain curves display an initial stress drop, followed by an extended steady-state stage. As the temperature decreases and/or the strain rate increases, there is a transition to a damage-tolerant strain-softening stage and eventually to catastrophic failure. Analysis of mechanical and microstructural data revealed that grain boundary sliding is the primary deformation mechanism. The strength drop has been correlated with the growth of ultrafine grains during deformation, already present at grain boundaries and triple grain junctions in the as-fabricated material.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación MAT2009-13979-C03-0

Deep learning based semantic segmentation on hyperspectral data.

Nowadays, many applications are taking advantage of the recent advances on artificial intelligence to improve their performance, being Deep Learning one of the newest and most powerful tools. Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is an analytical technique based on spectroscopy, where some of the main purposes are identifying materials, detecting objects or following processes. Deep Learning has shown promising results on many computer vision related tasks, including processing of HSI data. This project evaluates the state-of-the-art Deep Learning methods and benchmarks for semantic segmentation on available HSI datasets, with the purpose of replicating the state-of-the-art and finding new strategies that can improve the performance of existing models. Most existing works are based on per-patch classification, and have shown great results for the task, but they were evaluated by their authors in relatively artificial scenarios, where training and testing data were extremely similar. We have performed extensive experimentation to replicate their results and to evaluate on additional existing benchmarks, obtaining similarly good results. In this master thesis we have designed new benchmarks to evaluate the performance of each model in more realistic scenarios. In particular, new benchmarks based on existing data have been built with disjoint training and testing data and to test across different datasets. This is a tedious task and not straight forward, since existing datasets usually cover a single (large) scene, and consist of a single (very large) hyperspectral image. An exhaustive verification of these per-patch models in the proposed benchmarks has shown how the performance does not really achieve such perfect scores, and shows an evaluation closer to how the model would perform in a real life situation. Besides, this thesis evaluates and adapts a new type of architecture for the task of segmenting HSI. In particular, a general purpose semantic segmentation model. This model has shown high performance on RGB semantic segmentation, has been adapted and evaluated on the available datasets and proposed HSI benchmarks. This general purpose semantic segmentation network MiniNet-v2, based on an encoder-decoder architecture, has required to be adapted to work with hyperspectral data in two aspects: not only the model itself needed to be adjusted, but a new pre-processing of the data was needed. Numerous variations have been explored and evaluated thoroughly to find the best pre-processing of the data for this kind of network. As this kind of model learns from image contextual information, the input patches to the network need to be as big as possible, always keeping in mind each HSI dataset is limited to a single scene. The choice of MiniNet as alternative model was partially guided by its properties, specially that it is built towards efficiency. In our adaptation it has exhibited higher performance than per-patch models, and much higher efficiency in terms of inference time since the prediction is done as a whole instead of predicting each small patch. As Deep Learning shows good performance and efficiency on hyperspectral data, this technology could exhibit great advances in the near future in fields like recycling, medicine or disaster prediction, where HSI technology has a lot of potential interest.<br /

PLAYING IN SCIENCE: A proposal of activities to engage Infant Education children in learning Science and English as a Second Language

Since birth, children need to understand the world where they live and learn. That knowledge is achieved through the exploration of their environment with adults supporting their development, which is related to science learning. Moreover, children achieve socialization step by step and one of the best strategies to understand their environment and socialize is “playing”. Through play, they learn to interpret their world, to interact with others and to use language to express their ideas and feelings. The present study focuses on describing learning through science play in order to provide some materials related to this idea to be used in English as a Second Language classroom

Patrimonio Biocultural, Turismo Micológico Y Etnoconocimiento

Las comunidades indígenas forestales del centro de México son poseedoras de diversos etnoconocimientos, entre los que destacan los referentes a los HCS y sus saberes asociados. La presente investigación, de tipo cualitativo, se basó en el análisis de los espacios en donde dichos productos son recolectados, comercializados y distribuidos, con lo que se obtuvieron datos sobre el aprovechamiento y uso que los actores locales hacen sobre los HCS.Derivado de las transformaciones socioeconómicas del medio rural mexicano, surgen nuevas estrategias para reinterpretar su potencial productivo en el mundo contemporáneo. La ruptura de la exclusividad campo-agricultura apunta a una relectura de las funciones de los territorios rurales y de la diversidad de actividades que realizan sus actores. Entre dichas acciones destaca el turismo en el espacio rural, actividad basada en el patrimonio biocultural que ostenta el campo respecto a las ciudades. A partir de un estudio de caso, con un enfoque cualitativo, se emplea la etnografía y la observación como herramientas para entender la relación entre conocimientos tradicionales y turismo micológico, desde una perspectiva crítica. Se concluye que el entoconocimiento sobre los hongos comestibles silvestres (HCS) representa un patrimonio susceptible de ser apropiado por las comunidades indígenas, pero cuyo horizonte es ambivalente entre los postulados de una visión capitalista sobre los recursos naturales y nuevas alternativas de aprovechamiento turístico, basadas en los modos de vida de los grupos étnicos