Estructura de la personalidad del menor víctima de maltrato: daños psicológicos y lesiones físicas

[ES] Se aborda la problemática del menor víctima del maltrato desde la perspectiva médica, aludiendo a las lesiones físicas y psíquicas producidas como consecuencia de este tipo de conductas. De esta forma, tras exponer una clasificación sobre las expresiones de maltrato, se profundiza en la violencia física contra el menor, los abusos sexuales y los daños psicológicos, explicando las posibles alteraciones tras este tipo de agresiones.[EU] Tratu txarrak kaltetu adingabetuen gain izaten dituzten eraginak, bai fisikoak baita psikikoak, medikuen ikuspegitik aztertzen dira. Tratu txarren eraginei buruzko zerrenda azaldu ondoren, adingabetuek jasaten duten eraso fisiko, sexual eta psikologikoen azterketa egiten da, eraso hauek ondoriotzat ekartzen dituzten gorabeherak azalduz.[FR] On aborde le problème du mineur victime du mauvais traitement du point de vue médicale, en se rérérant aux lésions physiques et psychiques produites par suite de cette sorte de conduites. De cette façon, et après un exposé de la classification des expressions des mauvais traitements, on approfondit dans la violence physique contre les mineurs, les abus sexuels et les dommages psychologiques, en expliquant les possibles altérations après cette sorte d’agressions.[EN] The problem of minors as maltreatment’s victims is tackled from a medical perspective, referring to the physical and psychical injuries caused as a result of this kind of behaviours. In this way, after classifying the different types of maltreatment, it is studied the physical violence against minors, the sexual abuse and psychological injuries, explaining the possible alterations after this kind of aggressions

Sociedad, familia y aprendizaje: el papel de los contextos hogareños

En este trabajo se aborda el estudio de las relaciones entre sociedad, familia y aprendizaje. Particularmente refiere a las características del contexto alfabetizador hogareño de poblaciones carenciadas y sus repercusiones en las habilidades y conocimientos prelectores de sus hijos. Para examinar dichas relaciones, se seleccionaron aleatoriamente 62 niños de 4/5 años de edad y sus madres. Las madres fueron entrevistadas con una adaptación de una encuesta sobre contexto familiar alfabetizador (Whitehurst, 1992). Los niños fueron evaluados utilizando pruebas específicas que permitieran estimar la dimensión "alfabetización temprana". Los resultados encontrados informan sobre una gran variabilidad en las prácticas y características del contexto hogareño de las familias examinadas y sobre conocimientos y habilidades prelectores infantiles muy incipientes. Las relaciones entre las dos dimensiones bajo estudio, si bien alcanzan significación estadística, muestran valores de bajos a moderados, circunstancia cuya interpretación se discute. Por último, la caracterización de los niños y de los hogares de donde provienen, tiene como finalidad última encontrar indicadores específicos que permitan diseñar estrategias de intervención adecuadas, oportunas y sistemáticas para la prevención de dificultades en el aprendizaje del lenguaje escrito en situaciones que pueden ser consideradas de riesgo.This paper explores the relation between society, family, and learning. In particular, it addresses the features of home literacy environments in low income families and their impact on children's pre-literacy skills and knowledge. Sixty-two four/five-year-old children and their mothers were randomly selected for this study. The mothers were interviewed using an adaptation of a family literacy environment survey (Whitehurst, 1992). The children were assessed with specific tests to examine the scope of their 'early literacy'. The results revealed significant variability in the features and practices of home literacy environments as well as in the children?s emerging pre-literacy skills and knowledge. The correlation between the two variables shows low to moderate statistical significance. The implications of such findings are discussed. Additionally, the purpose of isolating relevant features of the children and their home environments is to identify specific indicators related to the literacy fostering process. Ultimately, the goal is to design adequate, timely, and systematic intervention strategies aimed at preventing difficulties related to written language learning in children that could be considered at risk

Delivery of microRNAs as a remyelination strategy in multiple sclerosis.

El contenido del capítulo 2 está sujeto a confidencialidad. 258 p.La esclerosis múltiple es una enfermedad del sistema nervioso central para la cual no existen fármacos que promuevan la remielinización. Por ello, la comunidad científica está realizando un gran esfuerzo por desarrollar terapias que fomenten la generación de nueva mielina. En este sentido, los microRNAs, y más concretamente el miR-219a-5p, han sido postulados como eficaces inductores de la remielinización. Sin embargo, su administración al sistema nervioso central plantea ciertas dificultades.En este trabajo, el papel que juega miR-219a-5p en la inducción de la remielinización ha sido reforzado mediante el uso de cultivos de células precursoras de oligodendrocitos, modelos organotípicos de desmielinización y el modelo animal de la enfermedad. Además, se ha analizado y comparado la habilidad de liposomas, nanopartículas y exosomas para administrar el microRNAs concluyendo que los exosomas es el sistema de administración más efectivos

Cryptographic Protocols for Privacy Enhancing Technologies: From Privacy Preserving Human Attestation to Internet Voting

Desire of privacy is oftentimes associated with the intention to hide certain aspects of our thoughts or actions due to some illicit activity. This is a narrow understanding of privacy, and a marginal fragment of the motivations for undertaking an action with a desired level of privacy. The right for not being subject to arbitrary interference of our privacy is part of the universal declaration of human rights (Article 12) and, above that, a requisite for our freedom. Developing as a person freely, which results in the development of society, requires actions to be done without a watchful eye. While the awareness of privacy in the context of modern technologies is not widely spread, it is clearly understood, as can be seen in the context of elections, that in order to make a free choice one needs to maintain its privacy. So why demand privacy when electing our government, but not when selecting our daily interests, books we read, sites we browse, or persons we encounter? It is popular belief that the data that we expose of ourselves would not be exploited if one is a law-abiding citizen. No further from the truth, as this data is used daily for commercial purposes: users’ data has value. To make matters worse, data has also been used for political purposes without the user’s consent or knowledge. However, the benefits that data can bring to individuals seem endless and a solution of not using this data at all seems extremist. Legislative efforts have tried, in the past years, to provide mechanisms for users to decide what is done with their data and define a framework where companies can use user data, but always under the consent of the latter. However, these attempts take time to take track, and have unfortunately not been very successful since their introduction. In this thesis we explore the possibility of constructing cryptographic protocols to provide a technical, rather than legislative, solution to the privacy problem. In particular we focus on two aspects of society: browsing and internet voting. These two events shape our lives in one way or another, and require high levels of privacy to provide a safe environment for humans to act upon them freely. However, these two problems have opposite solutions. On the one hand, elections are a well established event in society that has been around for millennia, and privacy and accountability are well rooted requirements for such events. This might be the reason why its digitalisation is something which is falling behind with respect to other acts of our society (banking, shopping, reading, etc). On the other hand, browsing is a recently introduced action, but that has quickly taken track given the amount of possibilities that it opens with such ease. We now have access to whatever we can imagine (except for voting) at the distance of a click. However, the data that we generate while browsing is extremely sensitive, and most of it is disclosed to third parties under the claims of making the user experience better (targeted recommendations, ads or bot-detection). Chapter 1 motivates why resolving such a problem is necessary for the progress of digital society. It then introduces the problem that this thesis aims to resolve, together with the methodology. In Chapter 2 we introduce some technical concepts used throughout the thesis. Similarly, we expose the state-of-the-art and its limitations. In Chapter 3 we focus on a mechanism to provide private browsing. In particular, we focus on how we can provide a safer, and more private way, for human attestation. Determining whether a user is a human or a bot is important for the survival of an online world. However, the existing mechanisms are either invasive or pose a burden to the user. We present a solution that is based on a machine learning model to distinguish between humans and bots that uses natural events of normal browsing (such as touch the screen of a phone) to make its prediction. To ensure that no private data leaves the user’s device, we evaluate such a model in the device rather than sending the data over the wire. To provide insurance that the expected model has been evaluated, the user’s device generates a cryptographic proof. However this opens an important question. Can we achieve a high level of accuracy without resulting in a noneffective battery consumption? We provide a positive answer to this question in this work, and show that a privacy-preserving solution can be achieved while maintaining the accuracy high and the user’s performance overhead low. In Chapter 4 we focus on the problem of internet voting. Internet voting means voting remotely, and therefore in an uncontrolled environment. This means that anyone can be voting under the supervision of a coercer, which makes the main goal of the protocols presented to be that of coercionresistance. We need to build a protocol that allows a voter to escape the act of coercion. We present two proposals with the main goal of providing a usable, and scalable coercion resistant protocol. They both have different trade-offs. On the one hand we provide a coercion resistance mechanism that results in linear filtering, but that provides a slightly weaker notion of coercion-resistance. Secondly, we present a mechanism with a slightly higher complexity (poly-logarithmic) but that instead provides a stronger notion of coercion resistance. Both solutions are based on a same idea: allowing the voter to cast several votes (such that only the last one is counted) in a way that cannot be determined by a coercer. Finally, in Chapter 5, we conclude the thesis, and expose how our results push one step further the state-of-the-art. We concisely expose our contributions, and describe clearly what are the next steps to follow. The results presented in this work argue against the two main claims against privacy preserving solutions: either that privacy is not practical or that higher levels of privacy result in lower levels of security.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Agustín Martín Muñoz.- Secretario: José María de Fuentes García-Romero de Tejada.- Vocal: Alberto Peinado Domíngue

The Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G): Precise Stellar Mass Distributions from Automated Dust Correction at 3.6 μm

The mid-infrared is an optimal window to trace stellar mass in nearby galaxies and the 3.6μm IRAC band has been exploited to this effect, but such mass estimates can be biased by dust emission. We present our pipeline to reveal the old stellar flux at 3.6 μm and obtain stellar mass maps for more than 1600 galaxies available from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G). This survey consists of images in two infrared bands (3.6 and 4.5μm), and we use the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) method presented in Meidt et al. to separate the dominant light from old stars and the dust emission that can significantly contribute to the observed 3.6μm flux. We exclude from our ICA analysis galaxies with low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N <10) and those with original [3.6]–[4.5] colors compatible with an old stellar population, indicative of little dust emission (mostly early Hubble types, which can directly provide good mass maps). For the remaining 1251 galaxies to which ICA was successfully applied, we find that as much as 10%–30% of the total light at 3.6μm typically originates from dust, and locally it can reach even higher values. This contamination fraction shows a correlation with specific star formation rates, confirming that the dust emission that we detect is related to star formation. Additionally, we have used our large sample of mass estimates to calibrate a relationship of effective mass-to-light ratio (M/L) as a function of observed [3.6]–[4.5] color:log (M/L) = -0.339(±0.057) x [3.6]-[4.5])-0.336(± 0.002). Our final pipeline products have been made public through IRSA, providing the astronomical community with an unprecedentedly large set of stellar mass maps ready to use for scientific applications

Delivery of microRNAs as a remyelination strategy in multiple sclerosis.

El contenido del capítulo 2 está sujeto a confidencialidad. 258 p.La esclerosis múltiple es una enfermedad del sistema nervioso central para la cual no existen fármacos que promuevan la remielinización. Por ello, la comunidad científica está realizando un gran esfuerzo por desarrollar terapias que fomenten la generación de nueva mielina. En este sentido, los microRNAs, y más concretamente el miR-219a-5p, han sido postulados como eficaces inductores de la remielinización. Sin embargo, su administración al sistema nervioso central plantea ciertas dificultades.En este trabajo, el papel que juega miR-219a-5p en la inducción de la remielinización ha sido reforzado mediante el uso de cultivos de células precursoras de oligodendrocitos, modelos organotípicos de desmielinización y el modelo animal de la enfermedad. Además, se ha analizado y comparado la habilidad de liposomas, nanopartículas y exosomas para administrar el microRNAs concluyendo que los exosomas es el sistema de administración más efectivos

Being WISE I: Validating Stellar Population Models and M/L ratios at 3.4 and 4.6 microns

Using data from the WISE mission, we have measured near infra-red (NIR) photometry of a diverse sample of dust-free stellar systems (globular clusters, dwarf and giant early-type galaxies) which have metallicities that span the range -2.2 < [Fe/H] (dex) < 0.3. This dramatically increases the sample size and broadens the metallicity regime over which the 3.4 (W1) and 4.6 micron (W2) photometry of stellar populations have been examined. We find that the W1 - W2 colors of intermediate and old (> 2 Gyr) stellar populations are insensitive to the age of the stellar population, but that the W1 - W2 colors become bluer with increasing metallicity, a trend not well reproduced by most stellar population synthesis (SPS) models. In common with previous studies, we attribute this behavior to the increasing strength of the CO absorption feature located in the 4.6 micron bandpass with metallicity. Having used our sample to validate the efficacy of some of the SPS models, we use these models to derive stellar mass-to-light ratios in the W1 and W2 bands. Utilizing observational data from the SAURON and ATLAS3D surveys, we demonstrate that these bands provide extremely simple, yet robust stellar mass tracers for dust free older stellar populations that are freed from many of the uncertainties common among optical estimators.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Ap