The comovement between height and some economic development indicators in Spain

This paper investigates the relationship between height and some measures of human welfare in Spain for the period 1850-1978. For that purpose, we employ several filtering methods to measure the correlation between variables such as first order differences, deterministic trends, the Hodrick and Prescott filter, the band-pass filter or den Haan (2000)’s methodology which uses a new set of statistics to characterize the co-movement between variables to capture the dynamic between variables. We always find a strong and positive correlation between height and GDP per cápita, height and the weight of health services in total consumption, and height and openness. By contrast, we have a negative correlation between height and the mortality rate and height and the ratio between the deflator of private consumption and the GDP deflator. By applying den Haan (2000)’s method, we find that the comovement between height and GDP per cápita is always positive, increasing in the medium and long-run. This correlation is higher after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). We also observe that height and mortality rate have a negative correlation in the medium-run. Other health indicators such as the weight of health services in total consumption and the ratio between the deflator of private consumption and the GDP deflator show a positive and negative co-movement in the short-run, respectively. Nevertheless, they change their sign of correlation in the long-run. Finally, we observe a positive co-movement between height and illiteracy rate in the short-run, a negative one in the long-run, and a strong and positive comovement between height and the grade of openness.Height, physical stature, anthropometrics, education, economic development, VAR forecast errors

Asimetría fluctuante como un indicador de estrés ambiental en pequeños mamíferos

La estabilidad del desarrollo de un organismo se refleja en la capacidad que posee de producir una forma “ideal” bajo un conjunto particular de condiciones. Las estructuras bilaterales en organismos con simetría bilateral ofrecen una simetría precisa sobre la cual se pueden comparar desviaciones. La herramienta más utilizada para estimar la estabilidad del desarrollo es la asimetría fluctuante, la cual considera las pequeñas desviaciones aleatorias que ocurren entre los lados derecho e izquierdo de rasgos bilaterales, y es la única asimetría adecuada como indicador de estrés ambiental/genético. Resumimos cuatro décadas de estudios en donde la asimetría fluctuante fue utilizada para evaluar el efecto de estrés ambiental sobre pequeños mamíferos. Este grupo de especies ha sido ampliamente utilizado en estudios ecológicos para inferir perturbaciones ambientales debido a sus variadas características. Se seleccionaron 27 artículos compilados con Google Académico, utilizando “asimetría fluctuante” y “pequeños mamíferos” como palabras claves, escritas en inglés y con objetivos ecológicos. Centramos nuestro análisis en los enfoques utilizados para evaluar la asimetría fluctuante (medidas lineales o morfometría geométrica), el factor de estrés (natural o antropogénico), la región donde se desarrolló el estudio, el número de rasgos utilizado en los estudios y las fuentes de datos (muestras de pellets de lechuza, colecciones científicas y capturas directa de animales). La revisión muestra la importancia de incluir la asimetría fluctuante en estudios ecológicos como un indicador biológico confiable, económico y rápido del efecto del estrés ambiental sobre los mamíferos.The developmental stability of an organism is reflected in its ability to produce an ‘ideal’ form under a particular set of conditions. Bilateral structures in bilaterally symmetrical organisms offer a precise symmetry against which departures may be compared. The tool mostly used to estimate the development stability is fluctuating asymmetry, which considers small random deviations that occur between the left and right sides of a bilateral trait. Fluctuating asymmetry is considered as the only form of asymmetry that can serve as a useful indicator of environmental/genetic stress. We summarized four decades of studies where fluctuating asymmetry was used to assess the effects of environmental stress in small mammals. This group of species has been widely used in ecological studies to infer environmental disturbances because of its wide range of characteristics. We selected 27 articles that were compiled with Google Scholar (Mountain View, CA) using “fluctuating asymmetry” and “small mammals” as key words, written in English and with ecological objectives. We focused our analyses on the approaches used to evaluate fluctuating asymmetry (linear measurements or geometric morphometrics), the stress factor (natural or anthropogenic), the region where the study was developed, the number of traits used in the studies and the data sources, including measures obtained from samples of barn owl pellets, scientific collections and captured animals. The review shows the importance of including fluctuating asymmetry in ecological studies as a reliable, cheap and fast biological indicator of the effect of environmental stress on mammals.Fil: Coda, José Antonio. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicoquímicas y Naturales. Departamento de Ciencias Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Martínez, Juan José. Universidad Nacional de Jujuy. Instituto de Ecorregiones Andinas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Salta. Instituto de Ecorregiones Andinas; ArgentinaFil: Steinmann, Andrea Rosa. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicoquímicas y Naturales. Departamento de Ciencias Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Priotto, Jose Waldemar. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicoquímicas y Naturales. Departamento de Ciencias Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Gomez, Maria Daniela. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicoquímicas y Naturales. Departamento de Ciencias Naturales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Sequential non-rigid structure from motion using physical priors

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.We propose a new approach to simultaneously recover camera pose and 3D shape of non-rigid and potentially extensible surfaces from a monocular image sequence. For this purpose, we make use of the Extended Kalman Filter based Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (EKF-SLAM) formulation, a Bayesian optimization framework traditionally used in mobile robotics for estimating camera pose and reconstructing rigid scenarios. In order to extend the problem to a deformable domain we represent the object's surface mechanics by means of Navier's equations, which are solved using a Finite Element Method (FEM). With these main ingredients, we can further model the material's stretching, allowing us to go a step further than most of current techniques, typically constrained to surfaces undergoing isometric deformations. We extensively validate our approach in both real and synthetic experiments, and demonstrate its advantages with respect to competing methods. More specifically, we show that besides simultaneously retrieving camera pose and non-rigid shape, our approach is adequate for both isometric and extensible surfaces, does not require neither batch processing all the frames nor tracking points over the whole sequence and runs at several frames per second.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Real-time 3D reconstruction of non-rigid shapes with a single moving camera

© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This paper describes a real-time sequential method to simultaneously recover the camera motion and the 3D shape of deformable objects from a calibrated monocular video. For this purpose, we consider the Navier-Cauchy equations used in 3D linear elasticity and solved by finite elements, to model the time-varying shape per frame. These equations are embedded in an extended Kalman filter, resulting in sequential Bayesian estimation approach. We represent the shape, with unknown material properties, as a combination of elastic elements whose nodal points correspond to salient points in the image. The global rigidity of the shape is encoded by a stiffness matrix, computed after assembling each of these elements. With this piecewise model, we can linearly relate the 3D displacements with the 3D acting forces that cause the object deformation, assumed to be normally distributed. While standard finite-element-method techniques require imposing boundary conditions to solve the resulting linear system, in this work we eliminate this requirement by modeling the compliance matrix with a generalized pseudoinverse that enforces a pre-fixed rank. Our framework also ensures surface continuity without the need for a post-processing step to stitch all the piecewise reconstructions into a global smooth shape. We present experimental results using both synthetic and real videos for different scenarios ranging from isometric to elastic deformations. We also show the consistency of the estimation with respect to 3D ground truth data, include several experiments assessing robustness against artifacts and finally, provide an experimental validation of our performance in real time at frame rate for small mapsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Chloroplast damage induced by the inhibition of fatty acid synthesis triggers autophagy in chlamydomonas

Fatty acids are synthesized in the stroma of plant and algal chloroplasts by the fatty acid synthase complex. Newly synthesized fatty acids are then used to generate plastidial lipids that are essential for chloroplast structure and function. Here, we show that inhibition of fatty acid synthesis in the model alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii activates autophagy, a highly conserved catabolic process by which cells degrade intracellular material under adverse conditions to maintain cell homeostasis. Treatment of Chlamydomonas cells with cerulenin, a specific fatty acid synthase inhibitor, stimulated lipidation of the autophagosome protein ATG8 and enhanced autophagic flux. We found that inhibition of fatty acid synthesis decreased monogalactosyldiacylglycerol abundance, increased lutein content, down-regulated photosynthesis, and increased the production of reactive oxygen species. Electron microscopy revealed a high degree of thylakoid membrane stacking in cerulenin-treated cells. Moreover, global transcriptomic analysis of these cells showed an up-regulation of genes encoding chloroplast proteins involved in protein folding and oxidative stress and the induction of major catabolic processes, including autophagy and proteasome pathways. Thus, our results uncovered a link between lipid metabolism, chloroplast integrity, and autophagy through a mechanism that involves the activation of a chloroplast quality control system.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad BFU2015-68216-PJunta de Andalucía CVI-7336, BIO2015-74432-JI

Multi-temporal evaluation of soil moisture and land surface temperature dynamics using in situ and satellite observations

Soil moisture (SM) is an important component of the Earth’s surface water balance and by extension the energy balance, regulating the land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET). Nowadays, there are two missions dedicated to monitoring the Earth’s surface SM using L-band radiometers: ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP). LST is remotely sensed using thermal infrared (TIR) sensors on-board satellites, such as NASA’s Terra/Aqua MODIS or ESA & EUMETSAT’s MSG SEVIRI. This study provides an assessment of SM and LST dynamics at daily and seasonal scales, using 4 years (2011–2014) of in situ and satellite observations over the central part of the river Duero basin in Spain. Specifically, the agreement of instantaneous SM with a variety of LST-derived parameters is analyzed to better understand the fundamental link of the SM–LST relationship through ET and thermal inertia. Ground-based SM and LST measurements from the REMEDHUS network are compared to SMOS SM and MODIS LST spaceborne observations. ET is obtained from the HidroMORE regional hydrological model. At the daily scale, a strong anticorrelation is observed between in situ SM and maximum LST (R ˜ -0.6 to -0.8), and between SMOS SM and MODIS LST Terra/Aqua day (R ˜ - 0.7). At the seasonal scale, results show a stronger anticorrelation in autumn, spring and summer (in situ R ˜ -0.5 to -0.7; satellite R ˜ -0.4 to -0.7) indicating SM–LST coupling, than in winter (in situ R ˜ +0.3; satellite R ˜ -0.3) indicating SM–LST decoupling. These different behaviors evidence changes from water-limited to energy-limited moisture flux across seasons, which are confirmed by the observed ET evolution. In water-limited periods, SM is extracted from the soil through ET until critical SM is reached. A method to estimate the soil critical SM is proposed. For REMEDHUS, the critical SM is estimated to be ~0.12 m3/m3 , stable over the study period and consistent between in situ and satellite observations. A better understanding of the SM–LST link could not only help improving the representation of LST in current hydrological and climate prediction models, but also refining SM retrieval or microwave-optical disaggregation algorithms, related to ET and vegetation status.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Structural and adhesion properties of waterborne polyurethane adhesives containing nanosilica dispersion obtained with different physical mixing procedures

Nanosilica dispersion was added to waterborne polyurethane dispersion by using three different physical mixing procedures differing in the flow regime (tangential, laminar, radial) and the stirring rate (300–2400 rpm). The influence of the physical mixing procedure on the structural, thermal, rheological, mechanical, surface and adhesion properties of the polyurethanes (PUs) containing 1 wt% nanosilica was evaluated. The nanosilica in the dispersion was functionalized with acrylic moieties and showed high surface tension and negative Z potential values. The PU + nanosilica blend made with higher shear rate and laminar flow regime showed high homogeneous dispersion of the nanosilica particles and greater extent of intercalation between the soft segments of the polyurethane, this led to higher thermal stability. Unexpectedly, the better dispersion of the nanosilica in the PU matrix decreased the wettability of the PU + nanosilica materials due to the migration of acrylic moieties from the nanosilica particles to the surface. As a consequence, a decrease of the final T-peel strength was found. However, the single lap-shear strength did not change by adding nanosilica because of the scarce improvement of the mechanical properties in the PU + nanosilica materials.This study was partially supported by the Research Vice-president Office (Vicerrectorado de Investigación) of the University of Alicante (grant no. AII21-07)

Validade de conteúdo de versão resumida da subescala do Inventário de Ansiedade Traço-Estado (IDATE)

The goal was to describe the content validity of a short version of the state subscale of Spielberger's "State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)", based on the original version adapted to Spanish, in Spanish patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV). The sample consisted of 16 patients receiving IMV at the Alicante Hospital (Spain), who selected the items from the full Spanish version of the STAI-state that were most relevant to them. Items 1, 5, 9, 10, 12 and 20 from the original scale are the most relevant for the Spanish patients receiving IMV and 5 of these are included in the short version of the scale (83.3% agreement). The short scale has shown adequate content validity for Spanish patients receiving IMV.Se tuvo por objetivo describir la validez de contenido de una versión corta de la subescala Estado del State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) de Spielberger, a partir de la versión original adaptada al español, en pacientes españoles con ventilación mecánica invasora (VMI). La muestra fue integrada por 16 pacientes con VMI en el hospital de Alicante (España), que seleccionaron los ítems de la versión española completa del STAI-estado de mayor relevancia para ellos. Los ítems nº: 1,5,9,10,12 y 20 de la escala original son los más relevantes para los pacientes españoles con VMI; siendo que 5 de ellos están incluidos en la versión corta de la escala (83.3% de acuerdo). La escala corta ha demostrado una adecuada validez de contenido para pacientes españoles con VMI.Teve-se como objetivo descrever a validade de conteúdo de uma versão resumida da subescala estado do State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) de Spielberger, a partir da versão original adaptada ao espanhol, em pacientes espanhóis, sob ventilação mecânica invasiva (VMI). A amostra foi composta por 16 pacientes, sob VMI, no hospital de Alicante, Espanha, que selecionaram os itens da versão espanhola completa do Idate-estado de maior relevância para eles. Os itens nº1, 5, 9, 10, 12 e 20 da escala original são os mais relevantes para os pacientes espanhóis sob VMI, e 5 deles estão incluídos na versão resumida da escala (83,3% de concordância). A escala resumida mostrou adequada validade de conteúdo para pacientes espanhóis sob VMI

FAM-1 Borehole: first results from the scientific drilling of the Alhama de Murcia Fault, Betic Cordillera, Spain

We present the preliminary results of the borehole FAM-1 a 175 m depth scientific drilling of the Alhama de Murcia fault. The borehole was drilled close to La Torrecilla rambla three km SW of Lorca where the fault zone shearing is more concentrated and it is dominated by well-developed clay rich fault gouge. To select the drilling point and to perform a prognosis of it, three trenches were excavated crossing the fault zone that allowed us to determine the detailed 3D structure of the fault zone. We have collected more than 100 m of unaltered high quality fault rock to be studied using mineralogical and microtectonic analysis, and geomechanical testing that will improve the knowledge of the influence of tectonic microfabric and mineralogy in the seismogenic behavior of the AMF. The borehole FAM-1 and the seismic monitoring borehole FamSis-1 constitute the first stage of a future geological-geophysical observatory for monitoring the activity of the AMF.This research is part of the INTERGEO project: CGL2013-47412-C2-1-P.Peer Reviewe