Peer assessment in ULPGC on line CLIL course 2010-2013

[EN]Introduction to Content Language and Integrated Learning ( CLIL) is a 60 hour on line course offered by Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria within its extracurricular courses. During three years we have had 76 students whose final assessment has been to create a CLIL lesson which was evaluated by their peers. The tool for the peer assessment has been the Moodle platform; forums. The assessment was guided by a list of questions they had to apply when evaluating the lessons, but the replies from the CLIL lesson creators did not have any predetermined structure or guidelines to be followed. We have analysed the assessments and replies by grouping them according to content similarities.

Fast classification in incrementally growing spaces

[EN]The classification speed of state-of-the-art classifiers such as SVM is an important aspect to be considered for emerging applications and domains such as data mining and human-computer interaction. Usually, a test-time speed increase in SVMs is achieved by somehow reducing the number of support vectors, which allows a faster evaluation of the decision function. In this paper a novel approach is described for fast classification in a PCA+SVM scenario. In the proposed approach, classification of an unseen sample is performed incrementally in increasingly larger feature spaces. As soon as the classification confidence is above a threshold the process stops and the class label is retrieved...

Short-term wind power forecast based on cluster analysis and artificial neural networks

[EN]In this paper an architecture for an estimator of short-term wind farm power is proposed. The estimator is made up of a Linear Machine classifier and a set of k Multilayer Perceptrons, training each one for a specific subspace of the input space. The splitting of the input dataset into the k clusters is done using a k-means technique, obtaining the equivalent Linear Machine classifier from the cluster centroids...

Comments on Uncertainty in Groundwater Governance in the Volcanic Canary Islands, Spain

[EN]The uncertainty associated with natural magnitudes and processes is conspicuous in water resources and groundwater evaluation. This uncertainty has an essential component and a part that can be reduced to some extent by increasing knowledge, improving monitoring coverage, continuous elaboration of data and accuracy and addressing the related economic and social aspects involved. Reducing uncertainty has a cost that may not be justified by the improvement that is obtainable, but that has to be known to make the right decisions. With this idea, this paper contributes general comments on the evaluation of groundwater resources in the semiarid Canary Islands and on some of the main sources of uncertainty, but a full treatment is not attempted, nor how to reduce it.