Las identidades transitorias: estrategias de socialización de los residentes europeos en la Comunidad Valenciana

El artículo plantea un análisis en torno a las claves explicativas del proceso de formación de capital social y las estrategias de inserción en la sociedad civil española de los extranjeros europeos residentes en la Comunidad Valenciana. La hipótesis de trabajo plantea la existencia de dos discursos diferenciados (integración y coexistencia). Los resultados muestran cómo las variables “edad” y “posición laboral” determinan en gran medida la adscripción a uno u otro discurso, manteniendo sin embargo elementos comunes, como son la concepción individual del proceso de inserción en la sociedad civil y la consideración instrumental de la nacionalidad. Esto revela que el proceso de construcción de capital social de los extranjeros europeos compone un paradigma explicativo diferente al de los procesos de inmigración extracomunitaria. El artículo finaliza con un análisis dimensional de diferentes elementos propios del capital social vinculado a la realidad de la población estudiada.

Going beyond traditional QA systems: challenges and keys in opinion question answering

The treatment of factual data has been widely studied in different areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, processing subjective information still poses important challenges. This paper presents research aimed at assessing techniques that have been suggested as appropriate in the context of subjective - Opinion Question Answering (OQA). We evaluate the performance of an OQA with these new components and propose methods to optimally tackle the issues encountered. We assess the impact of including additional resources and processes with the purpose of improving the system performance on two distinct blog datasets. The improvements obtained for the different combination of tools are statistically significant. We thus conclude that the proposed approach is adequate for the OQA task, offering a good strategy to deal with opinionated questions.

Principios éticos y código de conducta para personas y entidades mediadoras

En este artículo se propone un código ético a modo de principios inspiradores de la intervención en procesos de gestión de conflictos y, en especial, en mediación. Esta propuesta combina la trayectoria del movimiento internacional en el desarrollo de procesos de calidad en la resolución de conflictos, con cuestionamientos prácticos que genera la intervención directa en la realidad española. Se ofrecen pautas de actuación para desarrollar el buen hacer de la persona mediadora, identificando una serie de situaciones excepcionales en las que, según el contexto y el rol profesional, se cuestionan tales principios y se anima a la adaptación a las necesidades de cada conflicto y a la evolución social.

Simultaneous environmental and economic process synthesis of Isobutane Alkylation

This multidisciplinary study concerns the optimal design of processes with a view to both maximizing profit and minimizing environmental impacts. This can be achieved by a combination of traditional chemical process design methods, measurements of environmental impacts and advanced mathematical optimization techniques. More to the point, this paper presents a hybrid simulation-multiobjective optimization approach that at once optimizes the production cost and minimizes the associated environmental impacts of isobutane alkylation. This approach has also made it possible to obtain the flowsheet configurations and process variables that are needed to manufacture isooctane in a way that satisfies the above-stated double aim. The problem is formulated as a Generalized Disjunctive Programming problem and solved using state-of-the-art logic-based algorithms. It is shown, starting from existing alternatives for the process, that it is possible to systematically generate a superstructure that includes alternatives not previously considered. The optimal solution, in the form a Pareto curve, includes different structural alternatives from which the most suitable design can be selected. To evaluate the environmental impact, Life Cycle Assessment based on two different indicators is employed: Ecoindicator 99 and Global Warming Potential.

Phosphorylated α-synuclein-immunoreactive retinal neuronal elements in Parkinson's disease subjects

Visual symptoms are relatively common in Parkinson's disease (PD) and optical coherence tomography has indicated possible retinal thinning. Accumulation of aggregated α-synuclein is thought to be a central pathogenic event in the PD brain but there have not as yet been reports of retinal synucleinopathy. Retinal wholemounts were prepared from subjects with a primary clinicopathological diagnosis of PD (N = 9), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB; N = 3), Alzheimer's disease (N = 3), progressive supranuclear palsy (N = 2) as well as elderly normal control subjects (N = 4). These were immunohistochemically stained with an antibody against α-synuclein phosphorylated at serine 129, which is a specific molecular marker of synucleinopathy. Phosphorylated α-synuclein-immunoreactive (p-syn IR) nerve fibers were present in 7/9 PD subjects and in 1/3 DLB subjects; these were sparsely distributed and superficially located near or at the inner retinal surface. The fibers were either long and straight or branching, often with multiple en-passant varicosities along their length. The straight fibers most often had an orientation that was radial with respect to the optic disk. Together, these features are suggestive of either retinopetal/centrifugal fibers or of ganglion cell axons. In one PD subject there were sparse p-syn IR neuronal cell bodies with dendritic morphology suggestive of G19 retinal ganglion cells or intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells. There were no stained nerve fibers or other specific staining in any of the non-PD or non-DLB subjects. It is possible that at least some of the observed visual function impairments in PD subjects might be due to α-synucleinopathy.