Xarxes virtuals de solidaritat: el cas del grup d'autoajuda Bipolarweb

Per a poder comprendre la dimensió de les possibles transformacions que Internet pot comportar, cal investigar els usos concrets de què es o ha estat objecte. En definitiva, cal realitzar investigacions empíriques que aportin informació sobre qui usa Internet, en quines circumstàncies i amb quins objectius. En aquest context, s’ha iniciat l’anàlisi en profunditat d’un cas específic de comunitat virtual de suport social creada per una persona afectada pel trastorn bipolar. L’objectiu d’una comunitat d’autoajuda virtual és proporcionar informació i recolzament emocional a través d’Internet. Mitjançant una metodologia qualitativa s’ha realitzat l’observació del fòrum virtual que penja de la pàgina web “Bipoloarweb.com”. En les investigacions del fenomen dels grups d’autoajuda a Internet, sovint s’ha destacat que a diferència dels grups ‘presencials’, aquests només poden aportar recolzament emocional i informatiu als seus membres. El tipus de recolzament instrumental o altre tipus d’assistència física, en canvi, no és possible en els casos virtuals. Els primers resultats de la recerca invaliden aquesta afirmació general ja que s’ha pogut observar episodis diferents d’ajut instrumental. En relació a la gestió d’informació i producció de coneixement, ja es pot avançar algunes qüestions interessants. En primer lloc, la quantitat i el detall de la informació que en el fòrum circula sobre el trastorn Bipolar. La majoria d’aquests coneixements, però, sorgeixen directament de compartir l’experiència diària entre els membres del grup. Tot això permet avançar la següent hipòtesi de treball pel futur: a més a més de suport emocional i instrumental, aquest grup ‘empodera’ el seus membres? Si la resposta fos positiva, el nostre cas tindria semblances amb altres fenòmens com son les associacions de malalts.

Fonaments d'un programa informàtic de suport psicològic i superació personal : dels llibres d'autoajuda al software d'autoajuda

Aquest treball descriu els principis de disseny i els components essencials d'un hipotètic programa informàtic que té per finalitat facilitar el procés d'autoajuda i que també pot ser utilitzat com a eina de desenvolupament personal i motivació. Prèviament, l'autor fa una revisió dels mètodes existents, des de l'èxit dels llibres d'autoajuda del segle XX fins al'expansió de la interactivitat impulsada pel desenvolupament de les tecnologiesinformàtiques. A través d'aquest recorregut es constata la pobre implantació de les novestecnologies com a instruments populars d'autoajuda i s'advoca per la creació i ús deprogrames informàtics flexibles i generalistes com a mitjà de suport psicològic.

L'Àrea Bàsica de Serveis Socials de Pineda de Mar : Intervenció des del Suport Social.

Aquesta memòria mostra la intervenció social des del suport social. Se n'han constatat els efectes en la participació en un grup d'autoajuda i s'ha volgut generar en el projecte de creació d'un grup de suport a dones víctimes de la violència de gènere.

Alternation and Cooperation in a Two-party System: Implications for Resource-Based Developing Economies

This paper studies cooperation in a political system dominated by two opportunistic parties competing in a resource-based economy. Since a binding agreement as an external solution might be difficult to enforce due to the close association between the incumbent party and the government, the paper explores the extent to which co-operation between political parties that alternate in office can rely on self-enforcing strategies to provide an internal solution. We show that, for appropriate values of the probability of re-election and the discount factor cooperation in maintaining the value of a state variable is possible, but fragile. Another result is that, in such political framework, debt decisions contain an externality element linked to electoral incentives that creates a bias towards excessive borrowing.

Gambling in Spain: update on experience, research and policy

AIMS: To describe the current situation of gambling in Spain, sketching its history and discussing the regulations and legislation currently in force within the framework of the European Union (EU), and to review the epidemiology of gambling in Spain, the self-help groups and professional treatments available, and their potential effectiveness. METHODS: A systematic computerized search was performed in three databases (EMBASE, PubMed and PsychINFO, including articles and chapters) and the reference lists from previous reviews to obtain some of the most relevant studies published up to now on the topic of pathologic gambling in Spain. RESULTS: Similar to other EU countries, Spain has a high prevalence of pathologic gambling, focused on specific culturally bounded types of gambling. Expenditure in online gaming has risen significantly in the last few years, prompting the Spanish government to draft new legislation to regulate gaming. CONCLUSIONS: The gaming industry is expected to be one of the fastest growing sectors in Spain in the coming years owing to the rise of new technologies and the development of online gaming

Prevalencia de la sintomatología del Síndrome de Asperger y variables asociadas en preescolares españoles

Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) forms part of the whole spectrum of autistic disorders. Until recently it has not been studied in early ages. The aim of this study is to determine the AS’s prevalence of symptoms in general preschool, rural and urban population. In addition, the association of the development areas and symptoms of anxiety and the presence of symptoms of AS was analized. The sample ofthis study consisted in 1104 preschool children between 3-6 years old. The presence of AS’s symptoms was evaluated by a screening tool for psychiatric disorders. This tool was applied to both, preschooler’s parents and their teachers The prevalence of symptoms of AS for parents and teachers was 11.7‰ and 8.1‰, respectively. The presence of AS’s symptoms was associated with language compression delays, general and fine motor coordination, self-help skills and impairment in game activities. In addition, our results showed that the AS has a strong association with specific phobia symptoms and tics. We conclude that an early detection of AS’s symptoms is possible since we found similar prevalence described in other recent researches. Given the impairment associated with AS, its detection is highly recommended

Power laws and scaling of rain events and dry spells in the Catalonia region

We analyze the statistics of rain-event sizes, rain-event durations, and dry-spell durations in a network of 20 rain gauges scattered in an area situated close to the NW Mediterranean coast. Power-law distributions emerge clearly for the dryspell durations, with an exponent around 1.50 ± 0.05, although for event sizes and durations the power-law ranges are rather limited, in some cases. Deviations from power-law behavior are attributed to finite-size effects. A scaling analysis helps to elucidate the situation, providing support for the existence of scale invariance in these distributions. It is remarkable that rain data of not very high resolution yield findings in agreement with self-organized critical phenomena.

A hybrid method for sag source location in power network

The work presented in this paper belongs to the power quality knowledge area and deals with the voltage sags in power transmission and distribution systems. Propagating throughout the power network, voltage sags can cause plenty of problems for domestic and industrial loads that can financially cost a lot. To impose penalties to responsible party and to improve monitoring and mitigation strategies, sags must be located in the power network. With such a worthwhile objective, this paper comes up with a new method for associating a sag waveform with its origin in transmission and distribution networks. It solves this problem through developing hybrid methods which hire multiway principal component analysis (MPCA) as a dimension reduction tool. MPCA reexpresses sag waveforms in a new subspace just in a few scores. We train some well-known classifiers with these scores and exploit them for classification of future sags. The capabilities of the proposed method for dimension reduction and classification are examined using the real data gathered from three substations in Catalonia, Spain. The obtained classification rates certify the goodness and powerfulness of the developed hybrid methods as brand-new tools for sag classification

Is there a connection between the tax administration and the political power?

This paper offers empirical evidence from Spain of a connection between the tax administration and the political power. Firstly, the regional tax administration is not immune to the budgetary situation of regional government, and tends to exert a greater (or lesser) effort in tax collection the greater (or lower) the (expected) public deficit. At the same time, the system of unconditional grants from the central layer of government provokes an ¿income effect¿ which disincentivises the efforts of the tax administration. Secondly, these efforts also decrease when the margin to lose a parliamentary seat in an electoral district is cut, although the importance of this disincentive decreases according to the parliamentary strength of the incumbent

Is there a connection between the tax administration and the political power?

This paper offers empirical evidence from Spain of a connection between the tax administration and the political power. Firstly, the regional tax administration is not immune to the budgetary situation of regional government, and tends to exert a greater (or lesser) effort in tax collection the greater (or lower) the (expected) public deficit. At the same time, the system of unconditional grants from the central layer of government provokes an ¿income effect¿ which disincentivises the efforts of the tax administration. Secondly, these efforts also decrease when the margin to lose a parliamentary seat in an electoral district is cut, although the importance of this disincentive decreases according to the parliamentary strength of the incumbent

Error probability in synchronous digital circuits due to power supply noise

This paper presents a probabilistic approach to model the problem of power supply voltage fluctuations. Error probability calculations are shown for some 90-nm technology digital circuits.The analysis here considered gives the timing violation error probability as a new design quality factor in front of conventional techniques that assume the full perfection of the circuit. The evaluation of the error bound can be useful for new design paradigms where retry and self-recoveringtechniques are being applied to the design of high performance processors. The method here described allows to evaluate the performance of these techniques by means of calculating the expected error probability in terms of power supply distribution quality.

Steady-state global optimization of metabolic non-linear dynamic models through recasting into power-law canonical models

Background: Design of newly engineered microbial strains for biotechnological purposes would greatly benefit from the development of realistic mathematical models for the processes to be optimized. Such models can then be analyzed and, with the development and application of appropriate optimization techniques, one could identify the modifications that need to be made to the organism in order to achieve the desired biotechnological goal. As appropriate models to perform such an analysis are necessarily non-linear and typically non-convex, finding their global optimum is a challenging task. Canonical modeling techniques, such as Generalized Mass Action (GMA) models based on the power-law formalism, offer a possible solution to this problem because they have a mathematical structure that enables the development of specific algorithms for global optimization. Results: Based on the GMA canonical representation, we have developed in previous works a highly efficient optimization algorithm and a set of related strategies for understanding the evolution of adaptive responses in cellular metabolism. Here, we explore the possibility of recasting kinetic non-linear models into an equivalent GMA model, so that global optimization on the recast GMA model can be performed. With this technique, optimization is greatly facilitated and the results are transposable to the original non-linear problem. This procedure is straightforward for a particular class of non-linear models known as Saturable and Cooperative (SC) models that extend the power-law formalism to deal with saturation and cooperativity. Conclusions: Our results show that recasting non-linear kinetic models into GMA models is indeed an appropriate strategy that helps overcoming some of the numerical difficulties that arise during the global optimization task.