Selección de dieta del arrui (Ammotragus lervia) en el sureste peninsular

Trabajo de Fin de Máster en Investigación Básica y Aplicada en Recursos Cinegéticos presentado por Mª Amparo Cano Menchén, y realizado en la Universidad de Castilla –La Mancha y el Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos.El movimiento e introducción de especies ha existido siempre entre diferentes lugares y regiones. Uno de los motivos es la caza, actividad que mueve especies por todo el mundo. En España encontramos un ejemplo en el arrui (Ammotragus lervia), un ungulado norteafricano que se introdujo en nuestro país a comienzo de los años 70 en el Parque Natural de Sierra Espuña. El alto potencial de crecimiento, la ausencia de depredadores y su amplio nicho trófico hacen de esta especie un buen invasor. Por un lado, puede ser un competidor potencial con ungulados nativos. Por otro, al tratarse de un herbívoro, puede ocasionar impactos negativos sobre la vegetación debido al consumo, especialmente sobre las especies leñosas. En el presente trabajo se determinó la composición de la dieta y el grado de selección de especies leñosas del arrui en Sierra Espuña. La técnica empleada fue la microhistología y para calcular la selección de las distintas especies se utilizó el Índice de Selección de Savage. El consumo de leñosas durante la primavera fue alto. La familia Cistaceae apareció como la más abundante en la dieta, siendo Cistus albidus, Daphne gnidium y Helianthemum marifolium las especies más consumidas. En cuanto a selección, Ballota hirsuta y Oleaceae son, respectivamente, la especie y la familia más seleccionadas. A pesar de que ambas presentan baja disponibilidad, su consumo es alto. Para la mayoría de las especies protegidas en el Parque no se han encontrado evidencias de su consumo durante la primavera, quizás por su baja disponibilidad. Por otra parte, el solapamiento en dieta con determinados herbívoros autóctonos, como el ciervo y el gamo, es poco probable ya que las especies leñosas que éstos consumen son rechazadas por el arrui. Sin embargo, la probabilidad de un solapamiento en dieta con la cabra montés sería mayor, debido a la gran similitud entre ambas especies. Por ello, sería necesario desarrollar estudios tróficos comparados entre ambos caprinos.El proyecto en el que se encuadra este trabajo ha sido financiado por el Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia con ayuda del Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (Ref. CGL2007-63707/BOS). La realización del máster ha sido financiada por el Ministerio de Educación a través de su programa de “Becas y Ayudas al Estudio de Carácter General y de Movilidad”.Peer Reviewe

Using social media to inform policy making: to whom are we listening?

Domination of social media is giving today’s web users a venue for expressing their views and sharing their experiences with others. With well over a billion active users, social networking sites (SNS) have become dynamic sources of information on peoples’ interests, needs and opinions and are considered an extremely rich source of content to reach out to many millions of people. This is creating a revolutionary opportunity for governments to learn about the citizens and to engage with them more effectively. The potential is there for eParticipation applications to go from simply informing the public to unprecedented levels of interaction and engagement between Policy Makers (PMs) and the community, involving the public in deliberation processes leading to legislation. Despite its great potential, several concerns arise from the exploitation of social media, especially when used to inform policy making. Among these issues we can highlight the lack of awareness of the characteristics of those citizens discussing policy topics in social media, and lack of awareness of the characteristics of their discussions. Although some studies have emerged in the last few years that aim to capture the demographics of social media users (e.g., gender, age, geographical locations) they tend not to focus on those specific users participating in policy discussions. Understanding who are the users discussing policy in social media and how policy topics are debated could help assessing how their views and opinions should be weighted and considered to inform policy making. Aiming to provide a step forward in this direction, this paper investigates the characteristics of over 8K users involved in policy discussions in Twitter. These discussions were collected by monitoring, for one week, 42 different political topics selected by sixteen PMs from different political institutions in Germany. Our results indicate that: (i) a high volume of conversations around policy topics does not come from citizens, but from news agencies and other organisations, (ii) the average user discussing policy topics in Twitter is more active, popular and engaged than the average Twitter user and, (iii) users engaged in social media conversations around policy topics tend to be geographically concentrated in constituencies with high population density. Regarding the analysed conversations, a small subset of topics is extensively discussed while the majority go relatively unnoticed

Ontology Forecasting in Scientific Literature: Semantic Concepts Prediction based on Innovation-Adoption Priors

The ontology engineering research community has focused for many years on supporting the creation, development and evolution of ontologies. Ontology forecasting, which aims at predicting semantic changes in an ontology, represents instead a new challenge. In this paper, we want to give a contribution to this novel endeavour by focusing on the task of forecasting semantic concepts in the research domain. Indeed, ontologies representing scientific disciplines contain only research topics that are already popular enough to be selected by human experts or automatic algorithms. They are thus unfit to support tasks which require the ability of describing and exploring the forefront of research, such as trend detection and horizon scanning. We address this issue by introducing the Semantic Innovation Forecast (SIF) model, which predicts new concepts of an ontology at time t + 1, using only data available at time t. Our approach relies on lexical innovation and adoption information extracted from historical data. We evaluated the SIF model on a very large dataset consisting of over one million scientific papers belonging to the Computer Science domain: the outcomes show that the proposed approach offers a competitive boost in mean average precision-at-ten compared to the baselines when forecasting over 5 years

Use of a new enrichment nanosorbent for speciation of mercury by FI-CV-ICP-MS

Mercury is one of the most toxic environmental pollutants and its effects on human and ecosystem health are well known. All mercury species are toxic, with organic mercury compounds generally being more toxic than inorganic species. Chromatography techniques (GC, HPLC) coupled to element specific detectors, are able to separate mercury species in order to elucidate mercury transformation and transport processes where the determination of all mercury species is desirable. However, in practice, especially in sampling campaigns for sea water analysis where a large number of samples are collected over a longer period of time, a combination of methods is usually applied to accurately determine the most toxic mercury species. These include non-chromatographic methods based on the different chemical and/or physical behavior of the mercury species. These non-chromatographic methods can be less time consuming, more cost effective and available, and present competitive limits of detection. Especially when mercury could vapor (CV) generation technique is employed, which reduces salt effect on the analytical signal and improve the sensibility. Among non-chromatographic methods, solid phase extraction and microextraction (SPE and SPME) which is becoming increasingly popular for sample preparation in organic analysis, found its way to speciation analysis of organometals. SPE/SPME is the most popular sample preconcentration method for its simplicity, high enrichment factor, low or no consumption of organic solvents and feasibly to be automated. On the other hand, the exploration of new materials, especially nanometer sized materials, as the support phase is another active research area in SPE/SPME for mercury determination. The use of nanoparticles leads to higher extraction capacity/efficiency and rapid dynamics of extraction originated from the higher surface area to volume ratio and short diffusion route. In this work, a new enrichment nanosorbent functionalized with 1,5 bis (2-pyridyl) methylene thiocarbohidrazide was synthesized and characterized. From the study of its adsorption capacity toward metal ions, Hg2+ was observed to be one of the most retained 173.1 µmol g-1 at pH 5. Thus, a flow injection solid phase extraction and cold vapor generation method for its determination and speciation based on the use of this new chelating nanosorbent was optimized. The method developed has showed to be useful for the automatic pre-concentration and sequential speciation of mercury and methylmercury in environmental and biological samples. The system was based on chelating retention of the analytes onto a mini-column filled with the new nanosorbent and their sequential elution by using two different eluents, 0.2 % HCl for CH3Hg+ and 0.1 % thiourea in 0.5 % HCl for Hg2+. The determination was performed using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Under the optimum conditions and 120 s preconcentration time, the enrichment factors were 4.7 and 11.0; the detection limits (3σ) were 0.002 and 0.004 µg L-1; the determination limits (10σ) were 0.011 and 0.024 µg L-1; and the precisions (calculated for 10 replicate determinations at a 2 µg L-1 standard of both species) were 2.8 and 2.6 % (RSD); for CH3Hg+ and Hg2+, respectively. Linear calibration graphs were obtained for both species from the determination limits to at least 70 µg L-1. For the quality control of the analytical performance and the validation of the newly developed method, the analysis of two certified samples, LGC 6016 estuarine water and SRM 2976 mussel tissue were addressed. The results showed good agreement with the certified values. The method was successfully applied to the speciation of mercury in sea-water samples collected in the Málaga Bay.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Role of microRNA in epithelial to mesenchymal transition and metastasis and clinical perspectives

The microRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small, 20–22 nucleotides in length, endogenously expressed noncoding RNAs that regulate multiple targets posttranscriptionally. Interestingly, miRNAs have emerged as regulators of most physiological and pathological processes, including metastatic tumor progression, in part by controlling a reversible process called epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). The activation of EMT increases the migratory and invasive properties fundamental for tumor cell spread while activation of the reverse mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition is required for metastasis outgrowth. The EMT triggering leads to the activation of a core of transcription factors (EMT-TFs) – SNAIL1/SNAIL2, bHLH (E47, E2-2, and TWIST1/TWIST2), and ZEB1/ZEB2 – that act as E-cadherin repressors and, ultimately, coordinate EMT. Recent evidence indicates that several miRNAs regulate the expression of EMT-TFs or EMT-activating signaling pathways. Interestingly, some miRNAs and EMT-TFs form tightly interconnected negative feedback loops that control epithelial cell plasticity, providing self-reinforcing signals and robustness to maintain the epithelial or mesenchymal cell status. Among the most significant feedback loops, we focus on the ZEB/miR-200 and the SNAIL1/miR-34 networks that hold a clear impact in the regulation of the epithelial-mesenchymal state. Recent insights into the p53 modulation of the EMT-TF/miRNA loops and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms in the context of metastasis dissemination will also be discussed. Understanding the regulation of EMT by miRNAs opens new avenues for the diagnosis and prognosis of tumors and identifies potential therapeutic targets that might help to negatively impact on metastasis dissemination and increasing patient survivalAC is funded by grants of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, formerly Innovation and Sciences, (SAF2010-21143; Consolider-Ingenio CSD2007-00017) and Association for International Cancer Research (grant 12-1057). GMB is funded by SAF2010-20175, AECC-2011 and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) PI13/00132. GMB and AC are funded by the Community of Madrid (S2010/BMD-2303) and the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (RETIC-RD12/0036/0007). ADL is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Sara Borrell program (ISCIII)

Reducción del impacto acústico producido por grupos electrógenos diesel en zonas residenciales

En la actualidad existe una gran sensibilidad en cuanto a todo lo que implica generación de ruidos. Por otra parte, la sociedad demanda servicios que conllevan dicha contaminación acústica. En concreto, nos vamos a centrar en controlar la contaminación acústica generada por grupos electrógenos diesel para generación de electricidad. Estos grupos son suministrados por empresas, que en su mayoría se dedican al alquiler de estos equipos. El ámbito de trabajo es variado, desde servicios puntuales hasta usos continuados. Aquí es donde radica la naturaleza del proyecto. Dichos grupos electrógenos, por su naturaleza, generan niveles de contaminación acústica superiores a los permitidos en zonas residenciales, y sobre todo en horarios nocturnos. Por este motivo deriva la necesidad de mitigar esta contaminación. Este proyecto se centra en la construcción de una campana que permita la adecuación de los equipos a la normativa vigente. Para ello se cuenta con la colaboración de una empresa del sector, denominada ¿Electrosilver¿ sobre la que se ha realizado el estudio. Inicialmente se tomarán las medidas necesarias para conocer los niveles de ruido que generan estos equipos y a partir de esta información adecuar una cápsula con todos los elementos necesarios para su buen funcionamiento y una correcta adecuación en una zona de uso residencial.At present there is great sensitivity to anything that involves generation of noise. Furthermore, society demands that services involving noise pollution. Specifically, we focus on controlling noise pollution generated by diesel generators for electricity generation. These groups are provided by companies, mostly involved in renting this equipment. The scope of work is varied, from services point to continued use. Here is where the nature of the project. These sets, by their nature, generate noise levels above those allowed in residential areas, especially at night time. For this reason, hence the need to mitigate this pollution. This project focuses on the construction of a bell that allows the adequacy of equipment regulations. For this purpose, we have the collaboration of a company in the industry, called "Electrosilver" on which the study was performed. This will take the necessary measures to meet the noise levels generated by these sets and with this information will built a capsule which has all the elements necessary to adapt the operation and have proper fitness in a residential area.Martínez Cano, A. (2012). Reducción del impacto acústico producido por grupos electrógenos diesel en zonas residenciales. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/18136Archivo delegad

El incremento del autoconocimiento y la toma de decisiones en alumnos de educación secundaria obligatoria, de Cuenca

ABSTRACTThis research stems from the need of skilled workers successfully integrated in the labour market in today’s society. The key to meet to this demand consists on instructing workers in the professional performances through continuous career guidance. This instruction should specially be conducted in young students between 12 and 18 years old. This stage corresponds to secondary school, when a large number of young people go into the labour market.The theoretic al foundation, considers the latest principles of career guidance as well as the notions of self-knowledge and decision-making, Professor Repetto´s program “TFP”, “Tu Futuro Profesional”.In the research methodology, the TFP program is tested on students of compulsory secondary education from public schools in Cuenca, throughout three academic years (1999/2000, 2000/2001, 2001/2002), with the help of SPSS programme and Student “T”. The students who followed “TFP” proved to have better self-knowledge and decision-making skills. The advantage was significant in both.RESUMENSurge esta investigación por la gran preocupación acerca de la cualificación de los trabajadores en las competencias que exige la sociedad actual. La solución está en la preparación de los trabajadores en dichas competencias profesionales a través de programas de orientación y educación para la carrera a lo largo de la vida.En la Fundamentación Teórica se estudian los avances en la Orientación para la Carrera, los conceptos de Autoconocimiento y de Toma de Decisiones y el Programa “Tu Futuro Profesional”, (TFP) de la Doctora Repetto.La metodología de investigación consiste en la aplicación del Programa “TFP”, en alumnos de ESO, de Centros Públicos de la ciudad de Cuenca, durante tres cursos académicos (1999/2000, 2000/2001 y 2001/2002), con el programa estadístico SPSS y la prueba “T” de Student, para comprobar las diferencias en Autoconocimiento y la Toma de decisiones de los alumnos antes y después de la aplicación del programa “TFP”, encontrándose diferencias significativas en ambos.ABSTRACTThis research stems from the need of skilled workers successfully integrated in the labour market in today’s society. The key to meet to this demand consists on instructing workers in the professional performances through continuous career guidance. This instruction should specially be conducted in young students between 12 and 18 years old. This stage corresponds to secondary school, when a large number of young people go into the labour market.The theoretic al foundation, considers the latest principles of career guidance as well as the notions of self-knowledge and decision-making, Professor Repetto´s program “TFP”, “Tu Futuro Profesional”.In the research methodology, the TFP program is tested on students of compulsory secondary education from public schools in Cuenca, throughout three academic years (1999/2000, 2000/2001, 2001/2002), with the help of SPSS programme and Student “T”. The students who followed “TFP” proved to have better self-knowledge and decision-making skills. The advantage was significant in both

El desarrollo del autoconocimiento y de la toma de decisiones de los alumnos de la educación secundaria obligatoria en la ley orgánica de calidad de la educación

Tesis en españolThis research issues from the need of skilled workers successfully integrated in the labour market in today's society. The key to give an answer to this demand consists on instructing the workers in the professional performances through continuous career guidance. This instruction should specially be conducted in young students between 12 and 18 years old. This phase corresponds to secondary school, when a large number of young people get into the labour market. The research is divided into two parts. The first one, theoretic foundation, regards the early and the lattest principles of career guidance as well as the notions of self-knowledge and decision making, Professor Repetto's program "TFP", "tu futuro profesional" (your professional future) and its applications to career guidance. It also examines the detailed constitution of the Law of Educational Quality. Furthermore, a comparison is made between the aims of TFP program at its first and second levels (12 to 14 and 14 to 18 years old), and the aims of the Law of Educational Quality regarding Secondary School., its subjects (specially Technology), and the subjects of professional training course (Iniciación Profesional). Meaningful similarities are found between them. In the second part, research methodology, the TFP program is tested on secondary education students from public schools in Cuenca (Spain) throughout three academic years (1999/2000, 2000/2001, 2001/2002). The results are examined with the help of SPSS programme and Student "t". In comparison with the control group, the students who followed "TFP" proved to have better self-knowledege and decision taking skills. The advantage was specially significant in decision taking abilities

Synthesis and characterization of a new nanosorbent based on functionalized magnetic nanoparticles and its use in the determination of mercury by FI-CV-ETAAS

In this work, a new chelating sorbent which employs 1,5-bis(di-2-pyridil)methylene thiocarbohydrazide as the functional group and magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) as its support (DPTH-MNP) was synthetized and characterized. The MNPs were prepared by coprecipitation of Fe+2 and Fe+3 with NH3 and then coated with silica in order to easily bind the support and the functionalizing molecule. The aim of the synthesis of this material is applying it as a solid-phase extracting agent and evaluating its potential for the extraction and pre-concentration of trace amounts of analytes present in biological and environmental samples with on-line methods. The MNPs’ magnetic core would allow overcoming the usual backpressure problems that happen in solid-phase extraction methods thanks to the possibility of immobilizing the MNPs by applying an external magnetic field. From the study of its adsorption capacity toward metal ions, mercury and antimony were the most retained. Thus, a flow injection solid phase extraction and cold vapor generation method for mercury determination based on the use of this new chelating nanosorbent was optimized. The greatest efforts were put into the reactor design to minimize compaction and loss of nanosorbent. The knotted reactor shown in Figure 1 was chosen as the best. Then, chemical and flow variables were optimized by Central composite designs (CCDs). The method developed has showed to be useful for the automatic pre-concentration and determination of mercury in environmental and biological samples. The determination was performed using electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ETAAS). Under the optimum conditions, pH 5 and 120 s preconcentration time, the enrichment factor was 5.33; the detection limit (3σ) was 7.8 ng L-1; the determination limit (10σ) was 99 ng L-1; and the precisions (calculated for 10 replicate determinations at a 1 and 5 µg L-1 standards) were 1.7 and 1.9 % (RSD), respectively. Two linear calibration graphs were obtained, from the determination limits to 10 µg L-1 and from 10 to at least 50 µg L-1. From the comparison with other similar methods found in the bibliography, the detection limit and precisions calculated with our method were better. In order to evaluate the accurate and applicability of the method, the analysis of five certified samples LGC 6016 estuarine water, TMDA 54.4 fortified lake water, SRM 2976 mussel tissue, TORT-1 lobster hepatopancreas and DOLT-1 dogfish liver by standard addition and external calibration, were addressed. The results showed good agreement between the certified values, or added amounts of mercury, and the found concentrations. The method was successfully applied to the determination of mercury in sea-water samples collected in the Málaga Bay.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec