A Discussion of Thin Client Technology for Computer Labs

Computer literacy is not negotiable for any professional in an increasingly computerised environment. Educational institutions should be equipped to provide this new basic training for modern life. Accordingly, computer labs are an essential medium for education in almost any field. Computer labs are one of the most popular IT infrastructures for technical training in primary and secondary schools, universities and other educational institutions all over the world. Unfortunately, a computer lab is expensive, in terms of both initial purchase and annual maintenance costs, and especially when we want to run the latest software. Hence, research efforts addressing computer lab efficiency, performance or cost reduction would have a worldwide repercussion. In response to this concern, this paper presents a survey on thin client technology for computer labs in educational environments. Besides setting out the advantages and drawbacks of this technology, we aim to refute false prejudices against thin clients, identifying a set of educational scenarios where thin clients are a better choice and others requiring traditional solutions

c&d-learning implementation architecture: Adapting e-learning to developing countries

From the educational point of view, the most widespread method in developing countries is on-site education. Technical and economic resources cannot support conventional distance learning infrastructures and it is even worse for courses in universities. They usually suffer a lack of qualified faculty staff, especially in technical degrees. The literature suggest that e-learning is a suitable solution for this problem, but its methods are developed attending to educational necessities of the First World and cannot be applied directly to other contexts. The proposed methodology is a variant of traditional e-learning adapted to the needs of developing countries. E-learning for Cooperation and Development (c&d-learning) is oriented to be used for educational institutions without adequate technical or human resources. In this paper we describe the c&d-learning implementation architecture based on three main phases: hardware, communication and software; e.g. computer and technical equipping, internet accessing and e-learning platform adaptation. Proper adaptation of educational contents to c&d-learning is discussed and a real case of application in which the authors are involved is described: the Ngozi University at Burundi

University Networking in Developing Countries based on C4D-Learning

In recent years, the establishment of cooperation networks between universities is one of the most important trends in higher education all over the world. Well recognized local and international university networks have been implemented in most educational institutions. It is common to find associations of various prestigious universities collaborating in a high-­‐technology research project including a very specialized teaching as well. This is the most common cooperation networks among higher education institutions in developed countries. An increasingly common type of networking between developed and developing universities is related to cooperation for development. This is the case of many universities in Africa that are needed for external help in order to improve its capabilities. Numerous memorandums of understanding regarding first world institutions that collaborate with universities in developing countries describe contributions of eventual visiting professors, teaching material and courses. But probably there exist another type of more important, but less explored association, such as networking among developing universities. The new goal, in this case, is not only the excellence but also the mutual development

Evaluación de factores de riesgos ergonómicos en los trabajadores del área de producción de la empresa Azucarera del Norte S.A.A.

El objetivo principal del presente estudio es Analizar los factores de riesgos Ergonómicos a los que están expuestos los trabajadores en el área de producción de una Azucarera del Norte del Perú, para ello se indagaron el entorno laboral de los sigueintes puestos de trabajo que se encuentran en dicha área: controlador de grúa puente, mesa de recepción, controlador de conductor de trapiche, controlador de consola de trapiche, evaporadores, calderas, vacumpanes, centrifugas, calentadores y sedimentador y estibadores. La investigación que se ha desarrollado es de tipo Mixta ya que se recopilaron datos cualitativos y cuantitativos, con un diseño Pre Experimental dado que no existe ningún control sobre la variable independiente y con una muestra de 10 trabajadores. La técnica utilizada es la metodología LEST que comprende 5 dimensiones importantes que son: entorno físico, carga física, carga mental, aspectos psicosociales y tiempo de trabajo, su hoja de campo que tomo el papel de encuesta, en el cual se plasmó los datos obtenidos por cada puesto de trabajo. Los resultados mas resaltantes son que en todos los puestos de trabajo hay una exposición de carácter nociva con relación al entorno físico que contempla las variables de ruido, ambiente térmico, ambiente luminoso y vibración. Por otro lado los puestos de estibador y calentadores son los únicos que tiene una puntuación alta con respecto a la dimensión de Carga física. De esta manera se concluye que efectivamente existen factores de riesgos ergonomicos en todos los puestos de trabajos.Campus Chiclay

Propuestas para reducir los daños por exposición a los contaminantes de aire, ruido, niveles de radiación solar y estrés térmico en los trabajadores de la empresa Proserla SAC, Jayanca

En un mundo industrializado y globalizado, la contaminación ha ido en aumento y pone en riesgo sobre todo a las personas que trabajan con químicos, maquinaria o expuestos a radiación solar. En este contexto se observó reportes de tópico sobre problemas de salud en el personal de una agrícola dedicada a la siembra de uva, lo que motivó el desarrollo del presente estudio. El objetivo general fue Establecer las propuestas para reducir los daños por exposición a los contaminantes de aire, ruido, radiación solar y estrés térmico en los trabajadores de la empresa PROSERLA SAC. La investigación realizada fue descriptiva propositiva, con diseño no experimental, de tipo transversal y de enfoque mixto, realizando la medición de concentración o niveles de contaminantes, encontrando que los gases no superan el ECA de aire cumpliendo la norma, así como el estrés térmico, sin embargo, en el caso del ruido y radiación solar sí superan el LMP. Posteriormente, a una muestra de 200 trabajadores se les aplicó una encuesta encontrando daños por ruido y radiación solar. Se realizaron matrices IPERC y los PETS, por lo que se concluye que, con la aplicación correcta de las medidas de control, se puede disminuir los riesgos significativos de ruido y radiación solar, logrando riesgos poco significativos y así evitar enfermedades ocupacionales o accidentes en el personal.In an industrialized and globalized world, pollution has been increasing and puts at risk above all people who work with chemicals, machinery or exposed to solar radiation. In this context, topical reports on health problems were observed in the personnel of an agricultural company dedicated to planting grapes, which motivated the development of the present study.The general objective was to establish proposals to reduce damage due to exposure to air pollutants, noise, solar radiation and thermal stress in the workers of the company PROSERLA SAC. The research carried out was proactive descriptive, with a non-experimental design, cross-sectional and mixed approach, measuring the concentration or levels of pollutants, finding that the gases do not exceed the ECA of air, complying with the norm, as well as thermal stress, however, in the case of noise and solar radiation they do exceed the LMP. Subsequently, a survey was applied to a sample of 200 workers, finding damage due to noise and solar radiation. IPERC and PETS matrices were made, so it is concluded that, with the correct application of control measures, the significant risks of noise and solar radiation can be reduced, achieving insignificant risks and thus avoiding occupational diseases or accidents in the workplace. personal.Campus Chiclay

A New Method to Retrieve, Cluster And Annotate Clinical Literature Related To Electronic Health Records

The access to medical literature collections such as PubMed, MedScape or Cochrane has been increased notably in the last years by the web-based tools that provide instant access to the information. However, more sophisticated methodologies are needed to exploit efficiently all that information. The lack of advanced search methods in clinical domain produce that even using well-defined questions for a particular disease, clinicians receive too many results. Since no information analysis is applied afterwards, some relevant results which are not presented in the top of the resultant collection could be ignored by the expert causing an important loose of information. In this work we present a new method to improve scientific article search using patient information for query generation. Using federated search strategy, it is able to simultaneously search in different resources and present a unique relevant literature collection. And applying NLP techniques it presents semantically similar publications together, facilitating the identification of relevant information to clinicians. This method aims to be the foundation of a collaborative environment for sharing clinical knowledge related to patients and scientific publications

La metodología probabilística: la respuesta a la seguridad estructural de forma explícita

Como técnicos de edificación deberíamos poder dar respuesta a determinar la seguridad que posee una estructura. ¿Podemos determinar la seguridad que posee una estructura, de una forma explícita, teniendo en consideración la cantidad de variables intervinientes sobre esta? La respuesta es SÍ. Es una tarea compleja debido a la poca iniciativa de tales técnicos en nuestro país, pero es posible y todas las bases se recogen en normativas de carácter internacional. La metodología de cálculo basada en la fiabilidad estructural, se lleva utilizando a lo largo de la historia reciente para proyectos de ingeniería compleja, ejemplos como métodos de evaluación de riesgos en aviones o en centrales nucleares, puentes, túneles, etc. en edificación, utilizamos esta metodología de forma implícita en nuestra normativa, buscando la comodidad del determinismo, la comodidad de utilizar lo que se nos dice sin saber muy bien en base a qué y de donde viene, añadiendo además coeficientes de seguridad que nos hacen sentir optimistas en nuestros cálculos “por si las moscas”, pero pocas veces y sin dar solución a nuestra pregunta, nos cuestionamos ¿y por qué no se cae esto?, de ahí la verificación estructural, el probabilismo intenta dar respuesta a la verificación estructural más real y por tanto más segura

Modelization of a molten salt thermal energy storage for concentrated solar power

A numerical model for studying a storage tank for concentrated solar power is presented. The model consists of solving the heat equation for the solid part made from ceramic materials, a one-dimensional model for the molten salt circulating inside the solid, and a coupling between them. Then, some results are presented for a reference case with some typical parameters for the storage system.This work has been carried out in the framework of the Newcline project, which is supported under the umbrella of CSP-ERA.NET 1st Cofund Joint Call, and by the following National Agencies: AEI (Spain), CDTI (Spain), Jülich (Germany), SFOE (Switzerland). CSP-ERA.NET is supported by the European Commission within the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation HORIZON 2020 (Cofund ERA-NET Action, N° 838311). J. Vera has been financially supported by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC), Spain, (FPI grant PRE2018-084017).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

SNOMED2HL7: a tool to normalize and bind SNOMED CT concepts to the HL7 Reference Information Model

[Abstract] BACKGROUND: Current clinical research and practice requires interoperability among systems in a complex and highly dynamic domain. There has been a significant effort in recent years to develop integrative common data models and domain terminologies. Such efforts have not completely solved the challenges associated with clinical data that are distributed among different and heterogeneous institutions with different systems to encode the information. Currently, when providing homogeneous interfaces to exploit clinical data, certain transformations still involve manual and time-consuming processes that could be automated. OBJECTIVES: There is a lack of tools to support data experts adopting clinical standards. This absence is especially significant when links between data model and vocabulary are required. The objective of this work is to present SNOMED2HL7, a novel tool to automatically link biomedical concepts from widely used terminologies, and the corresponding clinical context, to the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM). METHODS: Based on the recommendations of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), the SNOMED Normal Form has been implemented within SNOMED2HL7 to decompose and provide a method to reduce the number of options to store the same information. The binding of clinical terminologies to HL7 RIM components is the core of SNOMED2HL7, where terminology concepts have been annotated with the corresponding options within the interoperability standard. A web-based tool has been developed to automatically provide information from the normalization mechanisms and the terminology binding. RESULTS: SNOMED2HL7 binding coverage includes the majority of the concepts used to annotate legacy systems. It follows HL7 recommendations to solve binding overlaps and provides the binding of the normalized version of the concepts. The first version of the tool, available at http://kandel.dia.fi.upm.es:8078, has been validated in EU funded projects to integrate real world data for clinical research with an 88.47% of accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: This paper presents the first initiative to automatically retrieve concept-centered information required to transform legacy data into widely adopted interoperability standards. Although additional functionality will extend capabilities to automate data transformations, SNOMED2HL7 already provides the functionality required for the clinical interoperability community.Instituto de Salud Carlos III; PI13/0202

An energy-preserving unconditionally stable fractional step method on collocated grids

Preservation of energy is fundamental in order to avoid the introduction of unphysical energy that can lead to unstable simulations. In this work, an energy-preserving unconditionally stable fractional step method on collocated grids is presented as a method which guarantees both preservation of energy and stability of our simulation. Using an algebraic (matrix-vector) representation of the classical incompressible Navier-Stokes equations mimicking the continuous properties of the differential operators, conservation of energy is formally proven. Furthermore, the appearence of unphysical velocities in highly distorted meshes is also adressed. This problem comes from the interpolation of the pressure gradient from faces to cells in the velocity correction equation, and can be corrected by using a proper interpolation.This work has been financially supported by the project RETOtwin [PDC2021-120970-I00] funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union Next Generation EU/PRTR. D. Santos acknowledges a FI AGAUR-Generalitat de Catalunya fellowship (2020FI B 00839). The authors thankfully acknowledge these institutions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version