IAMG - Asociación Internacional para las Geociencias Matemáticas

We introduce the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) from its origins to the present and summarize the means by which is fulfilling its mission. The IAMG was set up in Prague in 1968 with the intention of “promoting throughout the world the advancement of mathematics, statistics and informatics in the Geosciences”. It is a non-profit organisation that includes among its members researchers, teachers, professionals and students dedicated to mathematical and statistical Applications in all branches of the earth sciences. The IAMG publishes three major journals and a newsletter and organises a yearly conference, whist at the same time supporting many others. It bestows 4 biannual prizes that recognise outstanding achievements in its field, organises a distinguished lecturer series, and encourages Young researchers by providing Student research and travel funds and promoting Student societies. The IAMG celebrated its 40tn anniversary in Oslo, Norway, in 2008 and continues to be a venue for a vast array of researchers in this broad field by providing a common driving force for their activities

A note on the Lorenz-maximal allocations in the imputation set

In this note we introduce the Lorenz stable set and provide an axiomatic characterization in terms of constrained egalitarianism and projection consistency. On the domain of all coalitional games, we find that this solution connects the weak constrained egalitarian solution (Dutta and Ray, 1989) with their strong counterpart (Dutta and Ray, 1991)

Linear and nonlinear terrain deformation maps from a reduced set of interferometric SAR images

In this paper, an advanced technique for the generation of deformation maps using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is presented. The algorithm estimates the linear and nonlinear components of the displacement, the error of the digital elevation model (DEM) used to cancel the topographic terms, and the atmospheric artifacts from a reduced set of low spatial resolution interferograms. The pixel candidates are selected from those presenting a good coherence level in the whole set of interferograms and the resulting nonuniform mesh tessellated with the Delauney triangulation to establish connections among them. The linear component of movement and DEM error are estimated adjusting a linear model to the data only on the connections. Later on, this information, once unwrapped to retrieve the absolute values, is used to calculate the nonlinear component of movement and atmospheric artifacts with alternate filtering techniques in both the temporal and spatial domains. The method presents high flexibility with respect to the required number of images and the baselines length. However, better results are obtained with large datasets of short baseline interferograms. The technique has been tested with European Remote Sensing SAR data from an area of Catalonia (Spain) and validated with on-field precise leveling measurements.

Gene Set Analysis for improving genetic association studies

Introduction. Genetic epidemiology is focused on the study of the genetic causes that determine health and diseases in populations. To achieve this goal a common strategy is to explore differences in genetic variability between diseased and nondiseased individuals. Usual markers of genetic variability are single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which are changes in just one base in the genome. The usual statistical approach in genetic epidemiology study is a marginal analysis, where each SNP is analyzed separately for association with the phenotype. Motivation. It has been observed, that for common diseases the single-SNP analysis is not very powerful for detecting genetic causing variants. In this work, we consider Gene Set Analysis (GSA) as an alternative to standard marginal association approaches. GSA aims to assess the overall association of a set of genetic variants with a phenotype and has the potential to detect subtle effects of variants in a gene or a pathway that might be missed when assessed individually. Objective. We present a new optimized implementation of a pair of gene set analysis methodologies for analyze the individual evidence of SNPs in biological pathways. We perform a simulation study for exploring the power of the proposed methodologies in a set of scenarios with different number of causal SNPs under different effect sizes. In addition, we compare the results with the usual single-SNP analysis method. Moreover, we show the advantage of using the proposed gene set approaches in the context of an Alzheimer disease case-control study where we explore the Reelin signal pathway.

Llegint Cinema. Anàlisi de la representació de la malaltia mental en el setè art

El present treball és un estudi sobre l'estigma social en la malaltia mental i la representació d'aquest al cinema. Aquesta anàlisi s'ha portat a terme a partir de dues línies de treball. Per una banda amb l'anàlisi interpretativa de dotze pel·lícules utilitzant els indicadors de 'perillositat'; 'incapacitat per a la vida'; 'incurabilitat'; 'pèrdua de rols socials'; 'por al rebuig i/o por a les relacions socials'; i per l'altra banda a partir d'un grup de discussió, en el qual s'han visionat fragments de cinc pel·lícules amb set estudiants del Grau d'Educació Social de la Universitat de Vic. Dels resultats obtinguts es desprèn que la pel·lícula és un mitjà de comunicació mitjançant el qual els estereotips són usats en favor de l'espectacle, estigmatitzant així les persones diagnosticades de malaltia mental. Aquest és un dels motius que fan valorar el cinema com un recurs educatiu a considerar tant en la formació d'educadors i educadores socials com en els projectes d'intervenció socioeducativa.