Secreto y monopolio En Venecia: El gremio del vidrio muranés

During the Middle Ages, the Republic of Venice developed a strong monopoly on the art of glass until the 17<sup>th</sup> century. This social and political control over the guild of glassmakers created a new model of guild based on the protection of the secret knowledge and counterintelligence. It was one of the most important causes of the development of the Venetian intelligence service, the most important in Europe in the early Modern Age. This article analyses the Venetian Republic control over the glass secret and how it affected the glassmakers guild in Venice and Murano.<br><br>Durante los siglos centrales de la Edad Media la República de Venecia desarrolló un monopolio sobre el negocio del vidrio que se prolongó hasta mediados del siglo XVII. Este control del arte del vidrio en todos los aspectos provocó que el gremio de los vidrieros de Murano evolucionara legal y socialmente a un modelo específico basado en la protección de la información y en la contrainteligencia, que influyó de forma decisiva en la consolidación de la estructura de espionaje e inteligencia veneciana, la más importante en la baja Edad Media y principios de la Modernidad. Este artículo pretende analizar el control que la República veneciana desarrolló sobre el secreto del vidrio y cómo éste afectó al modelo de gremio desarrollado primero en Venecia y después en Murano

Years of sunlight exposure and cataract: a case-control study in a Mediterranean population.

BACKGROUND: We aimed to investigate the relation between sunlight exposure and risk of cataract. METHODS: We carried out a frequency-matched case-control study of 343 cases and 334 controls attending an ophthalmology outpatient clinic at a primary health-care center in a small town near Valencia, Spain. All cases were diagnosed as having a cataract in at least one eye based on the Lens Opacification Classification system (LOCS II). Controls had no opacities in either eye. All cases and controls were interviewed for information on outdoor exposure, "usual" diet, history of severe episodes of diarrhea illness, life-style factors and medical and socio-demographic variables. Blood antioxidant vitamin levels were also analyzed. We used logistic regression models to estimate sex and age-adjusted odds ratios (ORs) by quintiles of years of occupational outdoor exposure, adjusting for potential confounders such as smoking, alcohol consumption, serum antioxidants and education. RESULTS: No association was found between years of outdoor exposure and risk of cataract. However, exploratory analyses suggested a positive association between years of outdoor exposure at younger ages and risk of nuclear cataract later in life. CONCLUSION: Our study does not support an association with cataract and sunlight exposure over adult life

Angiofibroma en un individuo de época medieval (s. XII-XIII)

X Congreso Nacional de Paleopatología. Univesidad Autónoma de Madrid, septiembre de 200

Plant phenology supports the multi-emergence hypothesis for ebola spillover events

Ebola virus disease outbreaks in animals (including humans and great apes) start with sporadic host switches from unknown reservoir species. The factors leading to such spillover events are little explored. Filoviridae viruses have a wide range of natural hosts and are unstable once outside hosts. Spillover events, which involve the physical transfer of viral particles across species, could therefore be directly promoted by conditions of host ecology and environment. In this report we outline a proof of concept that temporal fluctuations of a set of ecological and environmental variables describing the dynamics of the host ecosystem are able to predict such events of Ebola virus spillover to humans and animals. We compiled a dataset of climate and plant phenology variables and Ebola virus disease spillovers in humans and animals. We identified critical biotic and abiotic conditions for spillovers via multiple regression and neural networks based time series regression. Phenology variables proved to be overall better predictors than climate variables. African phenology variables are not yet available as a comprehensive online resource. Given the likely importance of phenology for forecasting the likelihood of future Ebola spillover events, our results highlight the need for cost-effective transect surveys to supply phenology data for predictive modelling efforts

Is the future development of wind energy compromised by the availability of raw materials?

The installation of new electrical power plants from renewable sources is key in the transition towards a low-carbon economy. An important amount of diverse raw materials is required for this development. Due to its current prominence among renewable energy sources, we assess the expected development of wind energy towards the availability of the required raw materials up to 2050. Wind power is found to be in a favourable position, over solar thermal and photovoltaic power. Among the two main wind turbine technologies, the installation of direct drive turbines with permanent magnets faces a more challenging future. Recycling is an important strategy to simultaneously reduce risks and costs

A supervised classification approach for note tracking in polyphonic piano transcription

In the field of Automatic Music Transcription, note tracking systems constitute a key process in the overall success of the task as they compute the expected note-level abstraction out of a frame-based pitch activation representation. Despite its relevance, note tracking is most commonly performed using a set of hand-crafted rules adjusted in a manual fashion for the data at issue. In this regard, the present work introduces an approach based on machine learning, and more precisely supervised classification, that aims at automatically inferring such policies for the case of piano music. The idea is to segment each pitch band of a frame-based pitch activation into single instances which are subsequently classified as active or non-active note events. Results using a comprehensive set of supervised classification strategies on the MAPS piano data-set report its competitiveness against other commonly considered strategies for note tracking as well as an improvement of more than +10% in terms of F-measure when compared to the baseline considered for both frame-level and note-level evaluations.This research work is partially supported by Universidad de Alicante through the FPU program [UAFPU2014–5883] and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through project TIMuL [No. TIN2013–48152–C2–1–R, supported by EU FEDER funds]. EB is supported by a UK RAEng Research Fellowship [grant number RF/128]

El carácter social del lenguaje y su función vertebradora del pensamiento: la transposición didáctica traducida en el Taller de Lengua y Literatura.

El lenguaje es algo tan familiar para las personas, que, tal vez por ello, no se detienen a reflexionar sobre la importancia del mismo. Desde este artículo se trata de exponer su carácter social y su labor como elemento vertebrador del pensamiento humano, estos dos axiomas influyen de un modo notable en el modo de vida de las personas y, en consecuencia, en el tipo de sociedad que éstas conforman. Partiendo de la hipótesis de que a un mayor desarrollo de las destrezas ungúisticas de las personas, se construirá una sociedad más avanzada, se busca un modelo de enseñanza acorde con tal premisa. Ese modelo lo hallamos en la enseñanza crítica y, concretamente, en la transposición didáctica que suponen los Talleres de Lengua y Literatura. A través de su análisis, justificaremos nuestro posicionamiento

Towards HPC-Embedded Case Study: Kalray and Message-Passing on NoC

Today one of the most important challenges in HPC is the development of computers with a low power consumption. In this context, recently, new embedded many-core systems have emerged. One of them is Kalray. Unlike other many-core architectures, Kalray is not a co-processor (self-hosted). One interesting feature of the Kalray architecture is the Network on Chip (NoC) connection. Habitually, the communication in many-core architectures is carried out via shared memory. However, in Kalray, the communication among processing elements can also be via Message-Passing on the NoC. One of the main motivations of this work is to present the main constraints to deal with the Kalray architecture. In particular, we focused on memory management and communication. We assess the use of NoC and shared memory on Kalray. Unlike shared memory, the implementation of Message-Passing on NoC is not transparent from programmer point of view. The synchronization among processing elements and NoC is other of the challenges to deal with in the Karlay processor. Although the synchronization using Message-Passing is more complex and consuming time than using shared memory, we obtain an overall speedup close to 6 when using Message-Passing on NoC with respect to the use of shared memory. Additionally, we have measured the power consumption of both approaches. Despite of being faster, the use of NoC presents a higher power consumption with respect to the approach that exploits shared memory. This additional consumption in Watts is about a 50%. However, the reduction in time by using NoC has an important impact on the overall power consumption as well