The prevalence of child sexual abuse in community and student samples: A meta-analysis

Background: Studies conducted internationally confirm that child sexual abuse is a much more widespread problem than previously thought, with even the lowest prevalence rates including a large number of victims that need to be taken into account. Objective: To carry out a meta-analysis of the prevalence of child sexual abuse in order to establish an overall international figure. Methods: Studies were retrieved from various electronic databases. The measure of interest was the prevalence of abuse reported in each article, these values being combined via a random effects model. A detailed analysis was conducted of the effects of various moderator variables. Results: Sixty-five articles covering 22 countries were included. The analysis showed that 7.9% of men (7.4% without outliers) and 19.7% of women (19.2% without outliers) had suffered some form of sexual abuse prior to the age of eighteen. Conclusions: The results of the present meta-analysis indicate that child sexual abuse is a serious problem in the countries analysed.

Fundamentos de un programa de tutoría entre iguales en los estudios universitarios de las artes

[spa]En este artículo, se presenta el programa de tutoría entre iguales implantado por el Observatorio sobre la Didáctica de las Artes (ODAS, Universidad de Barcelona) en la Facultad de Bellas Artes durante el curso académico 2010-2011. Sin embargo, en la exposición de su finalidad, objetivos y proceso de implantación, se ha buscado que la descripción y comentario de las particularidades de esta experiencia incorporara también una reflexión más general sobre algunos de los puntos clave de la tutoría entre iguales. En el plano teórico, y a partir de las ideas de Lave y Wenger, el artículo defiende la importancia de la teoría entre iguales en la construcción de la identidad del estudiante como uno de los ejes de la mejora de sus aprendizajes y de su participación en la institución educativa. En este artículo, se presenta el programa de tutoría entre iguales implantado por el Observatorio sobre la Didáctica de las Artes (ODAS, Universidad de Barcelona) en la Facultad de Bellas Artes durante el curso académico 2010-2011. Sin embargo, en la exposición de su finalidad, objetivos y proceso de implantación, se ha buscado que la descripción y comentario de las particularidades de esta experiencia incorporara también una reflexión más general sobre algunos de los puntos clave de la tutoría entre iguales. En el plano teórico, y a partir de las ideas de Lave y Wenger, el artículo defiende la importancia de la teoría entre iguales en la construcción de la identidad del estudiante como uno de los ejes de la mejora de sus aprendizajes y de su participación en la institución educativa.

Improving algorithm speed in PNL mixture separation and Wiener system inversion

This paper proposes a very simple method for increasing the algorithm speed for separating sources from PNL mixtures or invertingWiener systems. The method is based on a pertinent initialization of the inverse system, whose computational cost is very low. The nonlinear part is roughly approximated by pushing the observations to be Gaussian; this method provides a surprisingly good approximation even when the basic assumption is not fully satisfied. The linear part is initialized so that outputs are decorrelated. Experiments shows the impressive speed improvement.

Improving the Quality of EEG Data in Patients With Alzheimers Disease Using ICA

Does Independent Component Analysis (ICA) denature EEG signals? We applied ICA to two groups of subjects (mild Alzheimer patients and control subjects). The aim of this study was to examine whether or not the ICA method can reduce both group di®erences and within-subject variability. We found that ICA diminished Leave-One- Out root mean square error (RMSE) of validation (from 0.32 to 0.28), indicative of the reduction of group di®erence. More interestingly, ICA reduced the inter-subject variability within each group (¾ = 2:54 in the ± range before ICA, ¾ = 1:56 after, Bartlett p = 0.046 after Bonfer- roni correction). Additionally, we present a method to limit the impact of human error (' 13:8%, with 75.6% inter-cleaner agreement) during ICA cleaning, and reduce human bias. These ¯ndings suggests the novel usefulness of ICA in clinical EEG in Alzheimer's disease for reduction of subject variability.

Improving Pitch Tracking Performance in Hard Noise Conditions by a Preprocessing Based on Mathematical Morphology

In this paper we show how a nonlinear preprocessing of speech signal -with high noise- based on morphological filters improves the performance of robust algorithms for pitch tracking (RAPT). This result happens for a very simple morphological filter. More sophisticated ones could even improve such results. Mathematical morphology is widely used in image processing and has a great amount of applications. Almost all its formulations derived in the two-dimensional framework are easily reformulated to be adapted to one-dimensional context

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.

From Educational Segregation to Transformative Inclusion

Recent studies conducted in Europe using communicative methodology highlight that different ways of grouping students has a direct effect on their academic output. This article analyzes how said research methodology identifies and analyzes those student groupings that provide greater academic success and improve classroom coexistence at Spanish educational centers. Said methodology entails all of the research participants researchers, teachers, families, and students reflecting on the consequences of streaming, mixture, and inclusion for student academic achievement. Following this, our conclusions are compared with the policies and educational practices implemented in Spanish schools, which are not based on scientific knowledge and do not usually lead to academic success. Finally, recommendations are presented for future educational policies with the aim of providing an alternative for teachers and educational managers that would substantially improve student academic success.

Gestión de la actividad no presencial y autoevaluación de competencias = Management of Student Learning Outside the Classroom and the Self-evaluation of Competences

Psychological Assessment is a core subject of Psychology studies, and of the university degree Human development, at the University of Girona and according to the University regulations, had 12 credits. Until the 2005-06 academic years, the student work conducted outside the classroom consisted of undertaking a psychological assessment that was written and handed in at the end of the course. From this the student obtained a qualification and a review if they applied for it In accordance with the European Credits for Higher Education, this subject was reduced to 9 credits, which is the equivalent of a total of 255 hours of in-class work and outside the classroom. In the 2006-07 academic year we created a guide to manage the student’s experiences outside the classroom, with the objective of encouraging the application of problem solving/critical thinking (Bloom, 1975), in line with the recommendations of the Catalonia Agency for University System Quality (2005). The guide includes: learning objectives, evaluation criterions, a description of activities, work week timetable for the whole course, programmed tutorials to review all steps of the psychological assessment process, and the use of a web-based virtual forum for the transfer of knowledge, analysis and constructive critiques of the assessment done by themselves and their colleagues

Improving the performance of the single-dish Cherenkov telescope MAGIC through the use of signal timing

The Cherenkov light flashes produced by Extensive Air Showers are very short in time. A high bandwidth and fast digitizing readout, therefore, can minimize the influence of the background from the light of the night sky, and improve the performance in Cherenkov telescopes. The time structure of the Cherenkov image can further be used in single-dish Cherenkov telescopes as an additional parameter to reduce the background from unwanted hadronic showers. A description of an analysis method which makes use of the time information and the subsequent improvement on the performance of the MAGIC telescope (especially after the upgrade with an ultra fast 2 GSamples/s digitization system in February 2007) will be presented. The use of timing information in the analysis of the new MAGIC data reduces the background by a factor two, which in turn results in an enhancement of about a factor 1.4 of the flux sensitivity to point-like sources, as tested on observations of the Crab Nebula.

Feedback i oportunitats de millora: una avaluació orientada a l"aprenentatge actiu

This paper analyzes an innovative experience of formative assessment aimed at improving the teaching of Statistics, which could be easily extrapolated to other studies. We detail the implementation of the double correction, consisting of correcting students' work twice. With the first correction, carried out by classmates according to a rubric developed by the academic, possible errors or deficiencies are discovered, and students are provided with a feedback that allows them to correct and improve their work before being graded by the teacher; whereas in the second correction of the work, once upgraded, the professor evaluates and grades the work. As a result, there is a significant improvement in the quality of students" works, and an active learning from their own mistakes. Both contents and competencies are reinforced by the experience.

Student Journalism 2.0 : Testing Models for Participatory Learning in the Digital Age

Many educators and educational institutions have yet to integrate web-based practices into their classrooms and curricula. As a result, it can be difficult to prototype and evaluate approaches to transforming classrooms from static endpoints to dynamic, content-creating nodes in the online information ecosystem. But many scholastic journalism programs have already embraced the capabilities of the Internet for virtual collaboration, dissemination, and reader participation. Because of this, scholastic journalism can act as a test-bed for integrating web-based sharing and collaboration practices into classrooms. Student Journalism 2.0 was a research project to integrate open copyright licenses into two scholastic journalism programs, to document outcomes, and to identify recommendations and remaining challenges for similar integrations. Video and audio recordings of two participating high school journalism programs informed the research. In describing the steps of our integration process, we note some important legal, technical, and social challenges. Legal worries such as uncertainty over copyright ownership could lead districts and administrators to disallow open licensing of student work. Publication platforms among journalism classrooms are far from standardized, making any integration of new technologies and practices difficult to achieve at scale. And teachers and students face challenges re-conceptualizing the role their class work can play online.