Mind the Orthography: Revisiting the Contribution of Prereading Phonological Awareness to Reading Acquisition

published Online First March 21, 2022.Reading acquisition is based on a set of preliteracy skills that lay the foundation for future reading abilities. Phonological awareness—the ability to identify and manipulate the sound units of oral language— has been reported to play a central role in reading acquisition. However, current evidence is mixed with respect to its universal contribution to reading acquisition across orthographies. This longitudinal study examines the development and contribution of phonological awareness to early reading skills in Spanish, a transparent orthography. The results of a comprehensive battery of phonological awareness skills in a large sample of children (Time 1 n = 616, 296 females, mean age 5.6, from middle to high socioeconomic backgrounds; Time 2 n = 397) with no reading experience at study onset suggest that the development of phonological awareness is delayed in Spanish. Furthermore, our results show that phonological awareness does not contribute to the prediction of reading acquisition above and beyond other preliteracy skills. Letter knowledge indexes children’s ability to identify phonemes and thus takes a more central role in the prediction of early reading skills. Therefore, we underscore the need to thoughtfully address the distinctive features of the reading acquisition process across orthographies, which should be taken into account in models of reading and learning to read.This project was funded by ANII FSED_2_2015_1_120741 and ANII FSED_2_2016_1_131230 Grants. Camila Zugarramurdi received a PhD Scholarship from Fundación Carolina

Towards a continuous biometric system based on ECG signals acquired on the steering wheel

Electrocardiogram signals acquired through a steering wheel could be the key to seamless, highly comfortable, and continuous human recognition in driving settings. This paper focuses on the enhancement of the unprecedented lesser quality of such signals, through the combination of Savitzky-Golay and moving average filters, followed by outlier detection and removal based on normalised cross-correlation and clustering, which was able to render ensemble heartbeats of significantly higher quality. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Haar transform features were extracted and fed to decision methods based on Support Vector Machines (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Gaussian Mixture Models – Universal Background Models (GMM-UBM) classifiers, for both identification and authentication tasks. Additional techniques of user-tuned authentication and past score weighting were also studied. The method’s performance was comparable to some of the best recent state-of-the-art methods (94.9% identification rate (IDR) and 2.66% authentication equal error rate (EER)), despite lesser results with scarce train data (70.9% IDR and 11.8% EER). It was concluded that the method was suitable for biometric recognition with driving electrocardiogram signals, and could, with future developments, be used on a continuous system in seamless and highly noisy settings.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A new paradigm for managing crises after Covid-19

Complexidade, Entropia, Incerteza, Intermitência, Exponencialidade. Eis alguns conceitos que têm sido utilizados para caracterizar a crise que vivemos. Neste IDN Brief quisemos perceber em que medida esta situação desafia o atual paradigma da Gestão de Crises a nível internacional, europeu e nacional. Reunimos perspetivas variadas sobre o papel e desempenho dos sistemas de planeamento civil e de emergência e de proteção civil, a coordenação entre atores, o lugar dos cidadãos e da sociedade civil, os ajustamentos necessários para desenvolver resiliência e as lições que se vislumbram para o futuro.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reserva estratégica do medicamento – uma ferramenta (in)vulgar

Como têm respondido as Forças Armadas à emergência COVID-19? Que impactos tem esta crise na organização e nas missões militares? Em que medida afetará os recursos que lhes são alocados, ou o peso relativo de diferentes serviços ou áreas internamente? Que lições para a articulação com outras forças de segurança e organizações civis? Estas são algumas das questões que colocámos aos especialistas convidados neste IDN Brief. Para além de participantes nacionais desafiámos também analistas de França, Reino Unido, Holanda, Canadá e África do Sul que nos trazem reflexões a partir da experiência dos seus países. Os desafios que enfrentamos exigem cada vez mais partilha de informação, aprendizagem cruzada e respostas cooperativas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Heartbeats in the Wild: A Field Study Exploring ECG Biometrics in Everyday Life

This paper reports on an in-depth study of electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics in everyday life. We collected ECG data from 20 people over a week, using a non-medical chest tracker. We evaluated user identification accuracy in several scenarios and observed equal error rates of 9.15% to 21.91%, heavily depending on 1) the number of days used for training, and 2) the number of heartbeats used per identification decision. We conclude that ECG biometrics can work in the wild but are less robust than expected based on the literature, highlighting that previous lab studies obtained highly optimistic results with regard to real life deployments. We explain this with noise due to changing body postures and states as well as interrupted measures. We conclude with implications for future research and the design of ECG biometrics systems for real world deployments, including critical reflections on privacy.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, CHI'2

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5,6,7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8,9,10,11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.13,14,15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Estudio del efecto de la figura en el razonamiento silogístico a través de movimientos oculares

Con las I Jornadas de Psicología del Pensamiento se pretendió llevar a cabo una reunión científica que sirviese de punto de encuentro a profesores e investigadores, de las distintas Universidades españolas, que trabajan eneste área de conocimiento. La reunión tuvo los siguientes objetivos: 1) proporcionar un foro de debate sobre los trabajos de investigación que se está llevando a cabo en nuestro país en torno a los temas relacionados con pensamiento, 2) fomentar la reflexión sobre temas relacionados con la docencia de la asignatura, y 3) favorecer las relaciones personales y propiciar futuras colaboraciones entre los profesionales que se dedican a la Psicología del Pensamiento. Las I Jornadas de Psicología del Pensamiento se celebraron en la Facultad de Psicología, de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, los días 22 y 23 de junio de 1998. Estas jornadas estuvieron coordinadas por el Departamento de Psicología Social y Básica de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela y el Departamento de Psicología Básica de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid