Analysis of the footprint in school age of 8-10 years old

Biomechanical problems in children, is an important subject currently, existing controversy in different areas, for example, the majority of children have a flattened footprint, or the hypermobility joint is linked to a musculoskeletal pain. The objective of the study was to determine what kind of footprint is most frequent in school-age children (8-10 years) in the area of Plasencia. This was taken as a sign 50 children, of whom 28 were males and 22 females. All the subjects in the study underwent an assessment of footprint planted in static as well as an exploration of different parameters through inspection in a standing position (formula digital, rearfoot). The results show that excavated footprint is present in a 72% cases of the population, 16% was belonging to an excavated footprint in which we find a higher percentage of weight related.For the digital formula we find that the most common is the Egyptian foot by 40% of the cases and that the prevalence in the rearfoot, is a normal hindfoot. In relation with the hypermobility joint, we check that it is more common in girls and that none of them presents an association to musculoskeletal pain. As a future line we could establish a more comprehensive study with new techniques and valuingchild’s statics and dynamics, to have a more accurate study of the different variables in the sample population studied.

"The Black Imprint of Sandals in White Mosaic Floors": H.D.'s Mythomystical Poetics

My dissertation examines the traces of inverse (mytho)mysticism, more synchronous with mythical alchemy than transcendent mystery, in H.D.’s mature work (1946-1961). Whereas H.D.’s earliest works respond to a fin de siècle occultism and a collective psyche troubled by the eschatological distress that, as Susan Acheson writes, “was widespread amongst modernist writers grappling with …world events and with the implications of Nietzsche’s inaugural annunciation of modernity in terms of the death of God” (187), her later oeuvre is dedicated to the same work of soul undertaken by the “secret cult of Night” in Vale Ave. Here, her thematic scope faces two ways: backward to ancient Greek mystery cults and their palingenesic rites and forward to depth psychologists searching for the Soul of the World. Vale Ave plays a pronounced role in my study as symbolic guide; in its seventy-four sequences the layering of time in the “trilogy” of past, present, and future that H.D. had explored during the years of the Second World War in order to get behind the fallen walls of cause and effect collapses into two distinct phases of human origin—“meeting” (evolution) and “parting” (involution)—and the poem invites Lilith and Lucifer to be its archetypal guides. My method for the study is imaginal, entering such disciplines as history, philosophy, and theology and bringing psychological understanding to them. John Walsh’s introduction to Vale Ave notes H.D.’s theme “that the human psyche exists in a dimension outside of time and space as well as within them. In Vale Ave, H.D. presents the extremity of this dual-dimensionality: metempsychosis” (vii). However, the concept that H.D. investigates is more than a literary processus of characters who adopt different masks and appear at various junctures in a chronological unwinding of history. I explore H.D.'s works as part of a Modernist tradition of writing “books of the dead” designed not to guide the soul after death, but to draw the gaze upon “a nearer thing,” as H.D. writes in Erige Cor Tuum Ad Me In Caelum, the wisdom intrinsic in the spirit of life itself.

Hope in the Most Unlikely Spaces: Thawra and the Contemporary Arabic Novel

In the early to mid-twentieth century, many novelists in the Arab world championed Arab nationalism in their literary reflections on the social and political struggles of their countries, depicting these struggles primarily in terms of spatial binaries that pitted the Arab world against the West, even as they imported Western literary models of progress and modernity into their own work. The intense experience of national awakening that infused their writing often placed these authors at a literary disadvantage, for in their literature, all too often the depth and diversity of Arabic cultures and the complexity of socio-political struggles across the Arab world were undermined by restrictive spatial discourses that tended to focus only on particular versions of Arab history and on a seemingly unifying national predicament. Between the Arab defeat of 1967 and the present day, however, an increasing number of Arab authors have turned to less restrictive forms of spatial discourse in search of a language that might offer alternative narratives of hope beyond the predictable, and seemingly thwarted, trajectories of nationalism. This study traces the ways in which contemporary Arab authors from Egypt and the Sudan have endeavoured to re-think and re-define the Arab identity in ever-changing spaces where elements of the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, interact both competitively and harmoniously. I examine the spatial language and the tropes used in three Arabic novels, viewing them through the lens of thawra (revolution) in both its socio-political and artistic manifestations. Linking the manifestations of thawra in each text to different scenes of revolution in the Arab world today, in Chapter Two, I consider how, at a stage when the Sudan of the sixties was both still dealing with colonial withdrawal and struggling to establish itself as a nation-state, the geographical and textual landscapes of Tayeb Salih‟s Season of Migration to the North depict the ongoing dilemma of the Sudanese identity. In Chapter Three, I examine Alaa iii al-Aswany‟s The Yacoubian Building in the context of a socially diseased and politically corrupt Egypt of the nineties: social, political, modern, historical, local, and global elements intertwine in a dizzyingly complex spatial network of associations that sheds light on the complicated reasons behind today‟s Egyptian thawra. In Chapter Four, the final chapter, Gamal al-Ghitani‟s approach to his Egypt in Pyramid Texts drifts far away from Salih‟s anguished Sudan and al-Aswany‟s chaotic Cairo to a realm where thawra manifests itself artistically in a sophisticated spatial language that challenges all forms of spatial hegemony and, consequently, old and new forms of social, political, and cultural oppression in the Arab world.

La cultura homérica en la Escenografía del Seiscientos: "Il Greco in Troia" y "La caduta del regno dell´Amazzoni"

Sería imposible hacer una enumeración de festejos, espectáculos y representaciones teatrales, que a lo largo de la época moderna, tuvieron como argumento las historias narradas por la literatura homérica. Incontables, pero todas ellas buscaban el don de la elocuencia que tenían desde que en la Antigüedad empezaron a reeditarse. Apenas un iglo después de la recopilación de relatos orales que quedaron hilvanados bajo los títulos de la Iliada y la Odisea –si se acepta la autoría de ese personaje mítico que fue Homero en torno al siglo VIII antes de Cristo–, tiranos y oligarcas atisbaron de forma visionaria las posibilidades que aportaban las tramas en las que se vieron envueltos dioses y héroes. La mitología olímpica no sólo sirvió al propósito de la unificación panhelénica de la nación de naciones que era Grecia, en torno a un mundo de creencias común en el marco de los grandes santuario, sino que además, las vicisitudes de los principales personajes, como Paris, Aquiles, Héctor, Ulises, Pentesilea, Eneas, Agamenón, Andrómaca, Casandra y Helena, proporcionaron un repertorio de modelos de conducta y un protocolo ceremonial en sociedad extremadamente útil. Piedad, fidelidad, excelencia, belleza, sumisión, virtudes morales que habían de “adornar” por igual a gobernantes y a ciudadanos, garantizaban un nuevo orden en la Hélade, constituyendo asimismo las notas distintivas con respecto a los anquilosados y monolíticos Imperios hegemónicos en la zona de Oriente Próximo, Egipcio y Babilónico o Persa, respectivamente. Se propone el análisis de la incidencia iconológica de tales asuntos a partir de la revisión escenográfica de dos libretos para dos representaciones teatrales italianas de finales del Seicento, de los que se encuentran sendos ejemplares en la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid: Il Greco in Troia y La caduta del regno dell´amazzone.

Creating replicas of scultural heritage through 3D reconstruction and low cost 3D printer in Education

The process of making replicas of heritage has traditionally been developed by public agencies, corporations and museums and is not commonly used in schools. Currently there are technologies that allow creating cheap replicas. The new 3D reconstruction software, based on photographs and low cost 3D printers allow to make replicas at a cost much lower than traditional. This article describes the process of creating replicas of the sculpture Goslar Warrior of artist Henry Moore, located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. To make this process, first, a digital model have been created using Autodesk Recap 360, Autodesk 123D Catch and Autodesk Meshmixer MarkerBot MakerWare applications. Physical replication, has been reproduced in polylactic acid (PLA) by MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printer. In addition, a cost analysis using, in one hand, the printer mentioned, and in the other hand, 3D printing services both online and local, is included. Finally, there has been a specific action with 141 students and 12 high school teachers, who filled a questionnary about the use of sculptural replicas in education.

Laïcité is what Laïcité does: Rethinking the French cult controversy

France’s distinctive reaction towards “cults” is generally described as a result of laïcité’s consubstantial problems with religious diversity. The aim of this article is to present an alternative way of thinking about the French cult controversy and, ultimately, about the concept of “laïcité” as an explanatory framework for France’s response to religious diversity. It draws on empirical data to look at how notions such as “laïcité” and “cults” are used in official discourses and translated into administrative practice. This approach will underline that laïcité is not a driving force that predetermines a unilateral response to “cults”, but that laïcité is as laïcité does, in other words a highly claimed and contested value, reflecting divergent political and administrative approaches of the cult phenomenon. The framework “laïcité versus religious diversity” is also undermined by another crucial observation. While it sees the cult controversy as primarily a religious issue, it seems that the recent revitalisation of the combat against “cults” was made possible by its partial dissociation from the religious sphere and its extension to a wide range of practices and new areas.

Costs of resistance: genetic correlations and potential trade-offs in an insect immune system

Theory predicts that natural selection will erode additive genetic variation in fitness-related traits. However, numerous studies have found considerable heritable variation in traits related to immune function, which should be closely linked to fitness. This could be due to trade-offs maintaining variation in these traits. We used the Egyptian cotton leafworm, Spodoptera littoralis, as a model system to examine the quantitative genetics of insect immune function. We estimated the heritabilities of several different measures of innate immunity and the genetic correlations between these immune traits and a number of life history traits. Our results provide the first evidence for a potential genetic trade-off within the insect immune system, with antibacterial activity (lysozyme-like) exhibiting a significant negative genetic correlation with haemocyte density, which itself is positively genetically correlated with both haemolymph phenoloxidase activity and cuticular melanization. We speculate on a potential trade-off between defence against parasites and predators, mediated by larval colour, and its role in maintaining genetic variation in traits under natural selection.

Heritability of immune function in the caterpillar Spodoptera littoralis

Phenoloxidase (PO) is believed to be a key mediator of immune function in insects and has been implicated both in non-self recognition and in resistance to a variety of parasites and pathogens, including baculoviruses and parasitoids. Using larvae of the Egyptian cotton leafworm, Spodoptera littoralis, we found that despite its apparent importance, haemolymph PO activity varied markedly between individuals, even amongst insects reared under apparently identical conditions. Sib-analysis methods were used to determine whether individuals varied genetically in their PO activity, and hence in one aspect of immune function. The heritability estimate of haemolymph PO activity was high (h 2 = 0.690 +/- 0.069), and PO activity in the haemolymph was strongly correlated with PO activity in both the cuticle and midgut; the sites of entry for most parasites and pathogens. Haemolymph PO activity was also strongly correlated with the degree to which a synthetic parasite (a small piece of nylon monofilament) was encapsulated and melanized (r = 0.622 +/- 0.142), suggesting that the encapsulation response is also heritable. The mechanism maintaining this genetic variation has yet to be elucidated.

Selenium Characterization in the Global Rice Supply Chain

For up to 1 billion people worldwide, insufficient dietary intake of selenium (Se) is a serious health constraint Cereals are the dominant Se source for those on low protein diets, as typified by the global malnourished population. With crop Se content constrained largely by underlying geology, regional soil Se variations are often mirrored by their locally grown staples. Despite this, the Se concentrations of much of the world's rice, the mainstay of so many, is poorly characterized, for both total Se content and Se speciation. In this study, 1092 samples of market sourced polished rice were obtained. The sampled rice encompassed dominant rice producing and exporting countries. Rice from the U.S. and India were found to be the most enriched, while mean average levels were lowest in Egyptian rice: similar to 32-fold less than their North American equivalents. By weighting country averages by contribution to either global production or export, modeled baseline values for both were produced. Based on a daily rice consumption of 300 g day(-1), around 75% of the grains from the production and export pools would fail to provide 70% of daily recommended Se intakes. Furthermore, Se localization and speciation characterization using X-ray fluorescence (mu-XRF) and X-ray absorption near edge structure (mu-XANES) techniques were investigated in a Se-rich sample. The results revealed that the large majority of Se in the endosperm was present in organic forms.

Shifting Ground:Beyond National Architecture

The Irish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 charts a position for Irish architecture in a global culture where the modes of production of architecture are radically altered. Ireland is one of the most globalised countries in the world, yet it has developed a national culture of architecture derived from local place as a material construct. We now have to evolve our understanding in the light of the globalised nature of economic processes and architectural production which is largely dependent on internationally networked flows of products, data, and knowledge. We have just begun to represent this situation to ourselves and others. How should a global architecture be grounded culturally and philosophically? How does it position itself outside of shared national reference points?
heneghan peng architects were selected as participants because they are working across three continents on a range of competition-winning projects. Several of these are in sensitive and/or symbolic sites that include three UNESCO World Heritage sites, including the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Giants Causeway Visitor Centre in Northern Ireland, and the new Rhine Bridge near Lorelei.
Our dialogue led us to discussing the universal languages of projective geometry and number are been shared by architects and related professionals. In the work of heneghan peng, the specific embodiment of these geometries is carefully calibrated by the choice of materials and the detailed design of their physical performance on site. The stone facade of the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre takes precise measure of the properties of the volcanic basalt seams from which it is hewn. The extraction of the stone is the subject of the pavilion wall drawings which record the cutting of stones to create the façade of the causeway centre.
We also identified water as an element which is shared across the different sites. Venice is a perfect place to take measure of this element which suggests links to another site – the Nile Valley which was enriched by the annual flooding of the River Nile. An ancient Egyptian rod for measuring the water level of the Nile inspired the design of the Nilometre - a responsive oscillating bench that invites visitors to balance their respective weights. This action embodies the ways of thinking that are evolving to operate in the globalised world, where the autonomous architectural object is dissolving into an expanded field of conceptual rules and systems. The bench constitutes a shifting ground located in the unstable field of Venice. It is about measurement and calibration of the weight of the body in relation to other bodies; in relation to the site of the installation; and in relation to water. The exhibit is located in the Artiglierie section of the Arsenale. Its level is calibrated against the mark of the acqua alta in the adjacent brickwork of the building which embodies a liminal moment in the fluctuating level of the lagoon.
The weights of bodies, the level of water, changes over time, are constant aspects of design across cultures and collectively they constitute a common ground for architecture - a ground shared with other design professionals. The movement of the bench required complex engineering design and active collaboration between the architects, engineers and fabricators. It is a kind of prototype – a physical object produced from digital data that explores the mathematics at play – the see-saw motion invites the observer to become a participant, to give it a test drive. It shows how a simple principle can generate complex effects that are difficult to predict and invites visitors to experiment and play with them.

Counter-Revolution by Ideology? Law and development's vision(s) for post-revolutionary Egypt

Law and development, as both movement and practice, has led a tumultuous life: a hurried zenith cut short by a fatal critique followed by an opportunistic resurrection. The name alone is su?cient to trigger a range of reactions, extending from the complimentary to the condemnatory. In this article I track law and development’s evolution via an examination of its role in the remodelling of Egyptian society in the post-Nasser era. While the 2011 revolution has encouraged institutions such as USAID to hasten their legal reform e?orts, I argue that these are more akin to counter-revolution by ideology than genuine revolution by law. Nevertheless, rather than relegate the movement to the annals of imperial intrigue, I conclude by proposing the use of legal pluralism to revive, and possibly ignite, law and development’s emancipatory potential.

Compromising Spatial Quality: Modernity in the Era of National State Building in Cairo

The paper examines the imposition of western ideals of urbanism within colonial Cairo between1882-1952. It looks at the ideologies of capitalism, state control, and utopian idealism, which were vital tools to create modern built environments in the city. The argument is that principles of Western urbanism were at work and deeply influenced the institutional and professional practices of the Egyptian planners, who were mostly educated in Europe; however the outcomes revealed a major shift towards more inflexible solutions described as more open to compromise with the existing conditions. The paper analyses the case of a re-planning scheme drafted in the 1920s by the first Egyptian director of the Ministry of Town Planning under the British occupation. The scheme represented the superimposition of a western-style neighbourhood model on a historically rooted traditional quarter in Cairo. The paper largely relies on original archival materials, maps, documents and accounts to support the historical narrative of urban planning in Cairo. It reports that westernization approaches for planning Cairo were introduced to offer a new imagery representation, which remained central to the development of planning practices in postcolonial Egypt through different practical applications.

The Modern Ordinary: Changing culture of living in Egypt’s traditional quarters at the turn of the twentieth Century

Having experienced social and political structures of the 19th century Europe, Western- educated Egyptian elite used public institutions to force legislative structures and procedures that ruled out traditional housing forms and spatial systems. This essay detects direct and indirect impact of these changes that informed the spatial change of modern living in Egypt in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It offers analysis of socio-spatial practices and change in ordinary Cairenes’ modes of everyday living, using social routine and interaction to explain spatial systems and changing house forms during the first quarter of the 20th century. In doing so, the essay utilized archival documents, accounts, formal decrees, and novels of the time as well as conducting survey of house forms and spatial organizations in Old Cairo.

Habitat-species interactions in a carnivore community

Na maioria das area protegidas nacionais existe uma considerável falta de informação científica relativa aos mamíferos carnívoros. A Reserva Natural da Serra da Malcata, localizada no centro-este de Portugal, tem vindo a desenvolver, desde os últimos 20 anos, estudos de ecologia e esta tese pretende dar seguimento a esse esforço de monitorização, através do desenvolvimento de métodos simples e eficientes, de monitorização de carnívoros, que possam servir como percursores de trabalhos a longo-prazo em áreas relevantes para a conservação. Através do uso de armadilhagem fotográfica, foram estudadas relações espécies-habitats para 5 espécies: gato-bravo (Felis silvestris), fuinha (Martes foina), raposa (Vulpes vulpes), gineta (Genetta genetta), e sacarrabos (Herpestes ichneumon). Foram desenvolvidos métodos para se determinar a densidade absoluta de raposa e gineta e a população de gato-bravo foi estudada em detalhe. As principais conclusões do estudo foram: 1) a ocupação de raposas é uniforme e parece ser independente de variáveis ambientais; 2) a ocupação de fuinha encontra-se relacionada com variáveis de habitat, estrutura paisagística e presas; 3) a ocupação de gineta está relacionada com a cobertura de folhosas e distribuição de presas; 4) para o sacarrabos verificase que a ocupação é influenciada pelas extensões de habitat arbustivos, 5) a população de gato-bravo sofreu um forte declínio durante o trabalho e requer urgentes medidas de conservação. Metodologicamente foi demonstrada a importância da modelação das probabilidades de detecção para espécies para as quais este parâmetros apresenta valores baixos ou é muito variável. Esta tese também demonstrou a grande importância da Serra da Malcata para a conservação de carnívoros e a necessidade do desenvolvimento de técnicas de monitorização padronizadas para uma correcta gestão adaptativa das áreas protegidas.