Diversity and health traits of local landraces of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.) from Spain

Diversity and health traits of local landraces of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.) from Spain

Influence of local wind speed and direction on wind power dynamics - Application to offshore very short-term forecasting

Wind power time series usually show complex dynamics mainly due to non-linearities related to the wind physics and the power transformation process in wind farms. This article provides an approach to the incorporation of observed local variables (wind speed and direction) to model some of these effects by means of statistical models. To this end, a benchmarking between two different families of varying-coefficient models (regime-switching and conditional parametric models) is carried out. The case of the offshore wind farm of Horns Rev in Denmark has been considered. The analysis is focused on one-step ahead forecasting and a time series resolution of 10 min. It has been found that the local wind direction contributes to model some features of the prevailing winds, such as the impact of the wind direction on the wind variability, whereas the non-linearities related to the power transformation process can be introduced by considering the local wind speed. In both cases, conditional parametric models showed a better performance than the one achieved by the regime-switching strategy. The results attained reinforce the idea that each explanatory variable allows the modelling of different underlying effects in the dynamics of wind power time series.

Importance of local modes in seismic response of bridges

The paper describes a simple approach to study the importance of local modes in the dimensioning load of bridge columns.

How Can Local Manufacturing Improve Economic Sustainability? Saint Brissant: a case study of local manufacturing in Spain

Fast-fashion retailers and mass production dominate the fashion and apparel industry. Increased globalization, labor intensity and outsourcing to developing countries are fostering the interest in sustainability within the industry. There is a growth of a new movement attempting to offset the demand for fast fashion, "Slow Fashion" movement. Slow fashion is not time-based but quality-based approach in which designers, buyers, retailers and consumers are more aware of the impacts on workers, communities and ecosystems (Fletcher 2007). European Union has also some critical targets to reach by 2020. Spain, specifically, has to meet some requirements in terms of economy and sustainability. This exploratory study analyzed how slow fashion concept, precisely manufacturing locally, could improve economic development. Local manufacturing, its impact on economic development and the challenges of Spanish market are illustrated through a case study of one Spanish fashion brand, Saint Brissant.

Human-computer interaction based on visual hand-gesture recognition using volumetric spatiograms of local binary patterns

A more natural, intuitive, user-friendly, and less intrusive Human–Computer interface for controlling an application by executing hand gestures is presented. For this purpose, a robust vision-based hand-gesture recognition system has been developed, and a new database has been created to test it. The system is divided into three stages: detection, tracking, and recognition. The detection stage searches in every frame of a video sequence potential hand poses using a binary Support Vector Machine classifier and Local Binary Patterns as feature vectors. These detections are employed as input of a tracker to generate a spatio-temporal trajectory of hand poses. Finally, the recognition stage segments a spatio-temporal volume of data using the obtained trajectories, and compute a video descriptor called Volumetric Spatiograms of Local Binary Patterns (VS-LBP), which is delivered to a bank of SVM classifiers to perform the gesture recognition. The VS-LBP is a novel video descriptor that constitutes one of the most important contributions of the paper, which is able to provide much richer spatio-temporal information than other existing approaches in the state of the art with a manageable computational cost. Excellent results have been obtained outperforming other approaches of the state of the art.

Application of global numerical procedures to the analysis of shells

Examples of global solutions of the shell equations are presented, such as the ones based on the well known Levy series expansion. Also discussed are some natural extensions of the Levy method as well as the inherent limitations of these methods concerning the shell model assumptions, boundary conditions and geometric regularity. Finally, some open additional design questions are noted mainly related to the simultaneous use in analysis of these global techniques and the local methods (like the finite elements) to finding the optimal shell shape, and to determining the reinforcement layout.