26 research outputs found
Response of wheat to additional nitrogen fertilizer application after pig slurry on over-fertilized soils
Pig slurry is a valuable nutrient resource but constitutes a waste disposal problem in areas of high animal density. In the semiarid
area of Pla d’Urgell, in the Ebro Valley, North-East Spain, irrigated crops receive large amounts of nutrients in the form of manure and mineral fertilizers. We studied the effect of pig slurry and additional side-dress mineral fertilizers on irrigated wheat, Triticum aestivum L., on a coarse
loam soil, with high soil P and K levels. Yields increased by 62.3% when using pig slurry. The application of ammonium sulfate nitrate sidedress did not significantly increase wheat production. The average apparent recoveries were higher for potassium (88.7%) than for nitrogen (51.3%)
and phosphorus (36.3%). Greater amounts of soil NO3-N were measured over the four growing seasons, which was consistent with the amount of N applied. Macronutrient and micronutrient uptake was significant higher for pig slurry treatments, but only small differences were found between the pig slurry and pig slurry plus ammonium sulfate nitrate treatments. The unfertilized treatment showed significantly lower soil P,
K, Cu and Zn content than pig slurry treatments; 34%, 21%, 34%, and 26% respectively. These findings could be used to develop a nutrient management plan based on knowledge of soil test results and crop nutrient removal. This could help to improve the use of pig slurry and mineral
fertilizers on limited available land areas and prevent the accumulation of potentially toxic elements in soils and the export of nutrients through agricultural drainage
Challenges And Opportunities In Analytic-Predictive Environments Of Big Data And Natural Language Processing For Social Network Rating Systems
Social Media is playing a key role in today's society. Many of the events that are taking place in diverse human activities could be explained by the study of these data. Big Data is a relatively new parading in Computer Science that is gaining increasing interest by the scientific community. Big Data Predictive Analytics is a Big Data discipline that is mostly used to analyze what is in the huge amounts of data and then perform predictions based on such analysis using advanced mathematics and computing techniques. The study of Social Media Data involves disciplines like Natural Language Processing, by the integration of this area to academic studies, useful findings have been achieved. Social Network Rating Systems are online platforms that allow users to know about goods and services, the way in how users review and rate their experience is a field of evolving research. This paper presents a deep investigation in the state of the art of these areas to discover and analyze the current status of the research that has been developed so far by academics of diverse background
Deep-Sync: A novel deep learning-based tool for semantic-aware subtitling synchronisation
Subtitles are a key element to make any media content accessible for people who suffer from hearing impairment and for elderly people, but also useful when watching TV in a noisy environment or learning new languages. Most of the time, subtitles are generated manually in advance, building a verbatim and synchronised transcription of the audio. However, in TV live broadcasts, captions are created in real time by a re-speaker with the help of a voice recognition software, which inevitability leads to delays and lack of synchronisation. In this paper, we present Deep-Sync, a tool for the alignment of subtitles with the audio-visual content. The architecture integrates a deep language representation model and a real-time voice recognition software to build a semantic-aware alignment tool that successfully aligns most of the subtitles even when there is no direct correspondence between the re-speaker and the audio content. In order to avoid any kind of censorship, Deep-Sync can be deployed directly on users' TVs causing a small delay to perform the alignment, but avoiding to delay the signal at the broadcaster station. Deep-Sync was compared with other subtitles alignment tool, showing that our proposal is able to improve the synchronisation in all tested cases.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education under TIN2017-85727-C4-3-P grant (DeepBio) and Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid under S2018/TCS-4566 grant (CYNAMON). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan V GPU used for this research
Portal de Difusión de la Firma Digital mediante recursos audiovisuales accesibles
Este trabajo ha consistido en la realización de una actuación multimedia
para promover el uso de las tecnologías de la información, concretamente la
firma electrónica. Mediante escenificaciones de situaciones cotidianas presentadas
en formato de telecomedia se resuelven de forma sencilla y amena aquellas
dudas e inquietudes que se pueden tener en relación con la firma electrónica y
las ventajas que su uso puede proporcionar. La actuación es completamente
accesible ya que consta de subtitulado y audiodescripción y ha sido publicada
en la Web a través de un portal accesible. Los colectivos a los que va dirigido
el programa, personas con discapacidades auditivas o visuales, tienen, por lo
tanto, garantizado el acceso a la información en igualdad de condiciones
From Geometry to Numerics: interdisciplinary aspects in mathematical and numerical relativity
This article reviews some aspects in the current relationship between
mathematical and numerical General Relativity. Focus is placed on the
description of isolated systems, with a particular emphasis on recent
developments in the study of black holes. Ideas concerning asymptotic flatness,
the initial value problem, the constraint equations, evolution formalisms,
geometric inequalities and quasi-local black hole horizons are discussed on the
light of the interaction between numerical and mathematical relativists.Comment: Topical review commissioned by Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Discussion inspired by the workshop "From Geometry to Numerics" (Paris, 20-24
November, 2006), part of the "General Relativity Trimester" at the Institut
Henri Poincare (Fall 2006). Comments and references added. Typos corrected.
Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit
Radiation and Dust Sensor for Mars Environmental Dynamic Analyzer Onboard M2020 Rover
32 pags., 26 figs., 3 tabs. -- This article belongs to the Section Remote SensorsThe Radiation and Dust Sensor is one of six sensors of the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer onboard the Perseverance rover from the Mars 2020 NASA mission. Its primary goal is to characterize the airbone dust in the Mars atmosphere, inferring its concentration, shape and optical properties. Thanks to its geometry, the sensor will be capable of studying dust-lifting processes with a high temporal resolution and high spatial coverage. Thanks to its multiwavelength design, it will characterize the solar spectrum from Mars' surface. The present work describes the sensor design from the scientific and technical requirements, the qualification processes to demonstrate its endurance on Mars' surface, the calibration activities to demonstrate its performance, and its validation campaign in a representative Mars analog. As a result of this process, we obtained a very compact sensor, fully digital, with a mass below 1 kg and exceptional power consumption and data budget features.This work has been funded with the help of the Spanish National Research, Development
and Innovation Program, through the grants RTI2018-099825-B-C31, ESP2016-80320-C2-1-R and
ESP2014-54256-C4-3-R. DT acknowledges the financial support from the Comunidad de Madrid
for an “Atracción de Talento Investigador” grant (2018-T2/TIC10500). ASL is supported by Grant
PID2019-109467GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and by Grupos Gobierno
Vasco IT1366-19. The US co-authors performed their work under sponsorship from NASA’s Mars
2020 project, from the Game Changing Development program within the Space Technology Mission
Directorate, and from the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate.Peer reviewe
Treatment with tocilizumab or corticosteroids for COVID-19 patients with hyperinflammatory state: a multicentre cohort study (SAM-COVID-19)
Objectives: The objective of this study was to estimate the association between tocilizumab or corticosteroids and the risk of intubation or death in patients with coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) with a hyperinflammatory state according to clinical and laboratory parameters.
Methods: A cohort study was performed in 60 Spanish hospitals including 778 patients with COVID-19 and clinical and laboratory data indicative of a hyperinflammatory state. Treatment was mainly with tocilizumab, an intermediate-high dose of corticosteroids (IHDC), a pulse dose of corticosteroids (PDC), combination therapy, or no treatment. Primary outcome was intubation or death; follow-up was 21 days. Propensity score-adjusted estimations using Cox regression (logistic regression if needed) were calculated. Propensity scores were used as confounders, matching variables and for the inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTWs).
Results: In all, 88, 117, 78 and 151 patients treated with tocilizumab, IHDC, PDC, and combination therapy, respectively, were compared with 344 untreated patients. The primary endpoint occurred in 10 (11.4%), 27 (23.1%), 12 (15.4%), 40 (25.6%) and 69 (21.1%), respectively. The IPTW-based hazard ratios (odds ratio for combination therapy) for the primary endpoint were 0.32 (95%CI 0.22-0.47; p < 0.001) for tocilizumab, 0.82 (0.71-1.30; p 0.82) for IHDC, 0.61 (0.43-0.86; p 0.006) for PDC, and 1.17 (0.86-1.58; p 0.30) for combination therapy. Other applications of the propensity score provided similar results, but were not significant for PDC. Tocilizumab was also associated with lower hazard of death alone in IPTW analysis (0.07; 0.02-0.17; p < 0.001).
Conclusions: Tocilizumab might be useful in COVID-19 patients with a hyperinflammatory state and should be prioritized for randomized trials in this situatio
Contrasting responses of photosynthesis and carbon metabolism to low temperatures in tall fescue and clovers.
Growth, photosynthesis and carbohydrate metabolism in plants of two grassland
species, clover (Trifolium subterra neum L. cv. Areces and Gaitan) and tall fescue
(Festuca arundinacea Schreb.), shifted from 25 to 12°C for 1 day or developed at 12°C
were compared with controls kept at 25°C. Cold development produced a larger
inhibition of growth in fescue than in clovers. In contrast, transferring plants from high
to low temperature inhibited photosynthesis to a lesser extent in fescue than in clovers,
this difference being associated with an increase in the activation state of Calvin cycle
enzymes in fescue, but not in the clovers, a decreased cytosolic fructose-1,6-
bisphosphatase (cFBPase, EC 3.1.3.11) activity in clovers, and an accumulation of
hexose phosphates only in fescue. Development at 12°C partly relieved the inhibition of
photosynthesis in clovers, in contrast with fescue, which correlated with increases in
total ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (Rubisco, EC 4.1.1.39) activity
only in clovers, and with greater increases in total stromal FBPase (sFBPase) activity in
clovers than in fescue. The activity of sucrose synthesis enzymes was increased in the
two clovers and fescue developed in the cold, while carbohydrate accumulation was
much bigger in cold-developed fescue than in clovers because of a 5-fold increase in
fructan contents in the former. The contents of phosphorylated intermediates increased
in clovers but decreased in fescue grown at 12°C. Our results suggest that restricted
ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate (RuBP) regeneration limited the recovery of photosynthetic
capacity in cold-developed fescue.Dionisio González and Angel Verdejo provided skillful
technical assistance. This work was funded by the Junta de Castilla y León.Peer reviewe