Family diversity in social exclusion situations. Results and reflections on research, teaching and knowledge transfer activities

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the configurations of the families that live in contexts of social exclusion; provide conceptualizations of their operation mode; highlight the formative effects that neighborhood interdisciplinary practices with such families produce in the just graduated psychologists, included on the Extension Program. We wish to contribute to produce systematic knowledge that can account for such family configurations as potential receiver of integration policies. We are also interested on transferring the approach to diversity in the training of young professionals, in order not to be regarded as a deviation from ideal models, but as an expression of different strategies built by members of a community, to resolve children breeding and to bear their existences. This work is the result about reflections on productions inside a research fellowship: The complexities that takes the breeding in families who lives in a social exclusion situation; researches about breeding, carried out from signature Developmental Psychology II, and from de interdisciplinary work with psychologically assisted families in twelve suburbs of the city of La Plata (University Extension Program "Free Legal Offices" (Convention between Law and Social Sciences and Psychology Faculties, U.N.L.P.). From a qualitative methodology and an interdisciplinary participation, the results have arrive at the characterization and proposed conceptualizations of the included families and at the same time determine the benefits that brings with the work that articulates research and extension activities for the training of advanced students and young graduates.

Work in progress - Exploiting videoconferencing possibilities to promote the European convergence process

This paper introduces the experience of using videoconferencing and recording as a mechanism to support courses which need to be promoted or discontinued within the framework of the European convergence process. Our objective is to make these courses accessible as live streaming during the lessons as well as recorded lectures and associated documents available to the students as soon as the lesson has finished. The technology used has been developed in our university and it is all open source. Although this is a technical project the key is the human factor involved. The people managing the virtual sessions are students of the courses being recorded. However, they lack technical knowledge, so we had to train them in audiovisuals and enhance the usability of the videoconferencing tool and platform. The validation process is being carried out in five real scenarios at our university. During the whole period we are evaluating technical and pedagogical issues of this experience for both students and teachers to guide the future development of the service. Depending on the final results, the service of lectures recording will be available as educational resource for all of the teaching staff of our university.

Knowledge Management and Information Systems based on Workflow Technology

Knowledge management is critical for the success of virtual communities, especially in the case of distributed working groups. A representative example of this scenario is the distributed software development, where it is necessary an optimal coordination to avoid common problems such as duplicated work. In this paper the feasibility of using the workflow technology as a knowledge management system is discussed, and a practical use case is presented. This use case is an information system that has been deployed within a banking environment. It combines common workflow technology with a new conception of the interaction among participants through the extension of existing definition languages.

Knowledge Extraction for Question Titling.

This article describes the work performed over the database of questions belonging to the different opinion polls carried during the last 50 years in Spain. Approximately half of the questions are provided with a title while the other half remain untitled. The work and implemented techniques in order to automatically generate the titles for untitled questions are described. This process is performed over very short texts and generated titles are subject to strong stylistic conventions and should be fully grammatical pieces of Spanish

Knowledge representation tool for cognitiveprocesses modeling

In the last decades, neuropsychological theories tend to consider cognitive functions as a result of the whole brainwork and not as individual local areas of its cortex. Studies based on neuroimaging techniques have increased in the last years, promoting an exponential growth of the body of knowledge about relations between cognitive functions and brain structures [1]. However, so fast evolution make complicated to integrate them in verifiable theories and, even more, translated in to cognitive rehabilitation. The aim of this research work is to develop a cognitive process-modeling tool. The purpose of this system is, in the first term, to represent multidimensional data, from structural and functional connectivity, neuroimaging, data from lesion studies and derived data from clinical intervention [2][3]. This will allow to identify consolidated knowledge, hypothesis, experimental designs, new data from ongoing studies and emerging results from clinical interventions. In the second term, we pursuit to use Artificial Intelligence to assist in decision making allowing to advance towards evidence based and personalized treatments in cognitive rehabilitation. This work presents the knowledge base design of the knowledge representation tool. It is compound of two different taxonomies (structure and function) and a set of tags linking both taxonomies at different levels of structural and functional organization. The remainder of the abstract is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the web application used for gathering necessary information for generating the knowledge base, Section 3 describes knowledge base structure and finally Section 4 expounds reached conclusions.

Productivity in Knowledge Worker Teams

The use of Information and Communication Technologies in work pro- cesses has not brought the expected productivity improvement. Some studies even suggest that the always-on model decreases productivity. This article proposes work teams as a new unit for knowledge worker productivity analysis in organizations. Organizations? ability to adopt new analysis measures is analyzed in three case studies.

Motivation Employees in Work Organizations

With the onset of global integration and knowledge of economics, the value of human capital is improving and playing a leading role in enterprise. Motivating employees in the workplace becomes an eternal and challenging subject for today's enterprise. This capstone project identifies and illustrates what motivation is, what effectively motivates employees, and how to motivate employees in the workplace. This project not only talks about individuals' motivation but also motivation in groups and specific organizations. The global workforce, as a special group, is also discovered in this project. The project mainly is based on secondary research. The types of sources come from books, journal articles, blogs, periodicals, and other print materials through the Penrose Library and websites (such as Google Scholar). This project is written for the business leaders and human resources professionals, helping them to increase employees' satisfaction and maintaining the valuable employees in their organizations.

A model driven framework for geographic knowledge discovery

Geographic knowledge discovery (GKD) is the process of extracting information and knowledge from massive georeferenced databases. Usually the process is accomplished by two different systems, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the data mining engines. However, the development of those systems is a complex task due to it does not follow a systematic, integrated and standard methodology. To overcome these pitfalls, in this paper, we propose a modeling framework that addresses the development of the different parts of a multilayer GKD process. The main advantages of our framework are that: (i) it reduces the design effort, (ii) it improves quality systems obtained, (iii) it is independent of platforms, (iv) it facilitates the use of data mining techniques on geo-referenced data, and finally, (v) it ameliorates the communication between different users.

Complex learning: the role of knowledge, intelligence, motivation and learning strategies

This work presents the main theories and models formulated with the purpose of offering a global overview on the acquisition of knowledge and skills involved in the initial development of expert competence. Setting from this background, we developed an empirical work whose main purpose is to define those factors in a complex learning situation such as chapter-sized in a knowledge-rich domain. The results obtained in a sample of Master students reveal that the several variables intervening, such as the qualitative organization of knowledge, intellectual ability, motivation, the deliberate use of strategies, and a rich learning environment, contribute in an independent way to provide an explanation for the acquired knowledge.

A knowledge-based textual entailment approach applied to the QA answer validation at CLEF 2006

The Answer Validation Exercise (AVE) is a pilot track within the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2006. The AVE competition provides an evaluation frame- work for answer validations in Question Answering (QA). In our participation in AVE, we propose a system that has been initially used for other task as Recognising Textual Entailment (RTE). The aim of our participation is to evaluate the improvement our system brings to QA. Moreover, due to the fact that these two task (AVE and RTE) have the same main idea, which is to find semantic implications between two fragments of text, our system has been able to be directly applied to the AVE competition. Our system is based on the representation of the texts by means of logic forms and the computation of semantic comparison between them. This comparison is carried out using two different approaches. The first one managed by a deeper study of the Word- Net relations, and the second uses the measure defined by Lin in order to compute the semantic similarity between the logic form predicates. Moreover, we have also designed a voting strategy between our system and the MLEnt system, also presented by the University of Alicante, with the aim of obtaining a joint execution of the two systems developed at the University of Alicante. Although the results obtained have not been very high, we consider that they are quite promising and this supports the fact that there is still a lot of work on researching in any kind of textual entailment.

Knowledge spirals, situational leadership and informal learning applied on b-learning methodology

The methodology “b-learning” is a new teaching scenario and it requires the creation, adaptation and application of new learning tools searching the assimilation of new collaborative competences. In this context, it is well known the knowledge spirals, the situational leadership and the informal learning. The knowledge spirals is a basic concept of the knowledge procedure and they are based on that the knowledge increases when a cycle of 4 phases is repeated successively.1) The knowledge is created (for instance, to have an idea); 2) The knowledge is decoded into a format to be easily transmitted; 3) The knowledge is modified to be easily comprehensive and it is used; 4) New knowledge is created. This new knowledge improves the previous one (step 1). Each cycle shows a step of a spiral staircase: by going up the staircase, more knowledge is created. On the other hand, the situational leadership is based on that each person has a maturity degree to develop a specific task and this maturity increases with the experience. Therefore, the teacher (leader) has to adapt the teaching style to the student (subordinate) requirements and in this way, the professional and personal development of the student will increase quickly by improving the results and satisfaction. This educational strategy, finally combined with the informal learning, and in particular the zone of proximal development, and using a learning content management system own in our University, gets a successful and well-evaluated learning activity in Master subjects focused on the collaborative activity of preparation and oral exhibition of short and specific topics affine to these subjects. Therefore, the teacher has a relevant and consultant role of the selected topic and his function is to guide and supervise the work, incorporating many times the previous works done in other courses, as a research tutor or more experienced student. Then, in this work, we show the academic results, grade of interactivity developed in these collaborative tasks, statistics and the satisfaction grade shown by our post-graduate students.

Linguistic Knowledge of Reality: A Metaphysical Impossibility?

Reality contains information (significant) that becomes significances in the mind of the observer. Language is the human instrument to understand reality. But is it possible to attain this reality? Is there an absolute reality, as certain philosophical schools tell us? The reality that we perceive, is it just a fragmented reality of which we are part? The work that the authors present is an attempt to address this question from an epistemological, linguistic and logical-mathematical point of view.

Knowledge and attitudes of Spanish adolescent girls towards human papillomavirus infection: where to intervene to improve vaccination coverage

Background: HPV vaccine coverage is far from ideal in Valencia, Spain, and this could be partially related to the low knowledge about the disease and the vaccine, therefore we assessed these, as well as the attitude towards vaccination in adolescent girls, and tried to identify independently associated factors that could potentially be modified by an intervention in order to increase vaccine coverage. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted in a random selection of schools of the Spanish region of Valencia. We asked mothers of 1278 girls, who should have been vaccinated in the 2011 campaign, for informed consent. Those that accepted their daughters’ participation, a questionnaire regarding the Knowledge of HPV infection and vaccine was passed to the girls in the school. Results: 833 mothers (65.1%) accepted participation. All their daughters’ responded the questionnaire. Of those, 89.9% had heard about HPV and they associated it to cervical cancer. Only 14% related it to other problems like genital warts. The knowledge score of the girls who had heard about HPV was 6.1/10. Knowledge was unrelated to the number of contacts with the health system (Pediatrician or nurse), and positively correlated with the discussions with classmates about the vaccine. Adolescents Spanish in origin or with an older sister vaccinated, had higher punctuation. 67% of the girls thought that the vaccine prevented cancer, and 22.6% felt that although prevented cancer the vaccine had important safety problems. 6.4% of the girls rejected the vaccine for safety problems or for not considering themselves at risk of infection. 71.5% of the girls had received at least one vaccine dose. Vaccinated girls scored higher knowledge (p = 0.05). Conclusion: Knowledge about HPV infection and vaccine was fair in adolescents of Valencia, and is independent to the number of contacts with the health system, it is however correlated to the conversations about the vaccine with their peers and the vaccination status. An action to improve HPV knowledge through health providers might increase vaccine coverage in the adolescents.

Is video-case an efficient tool to complement the practical learning in real contexts? Effects on satisfaction and performance in Social Work Degree students

Este documento es un artículo inédito que ha sido aceptado para su publicación. Como un servicio a sus autores y lectores, Alternativas. Cuadernos de trabajo social proporciona online esta edición preliminar. El manuscrito puede sufrir alteraciones tras la edición y corrección de pruebas, antes de su publicación definitiva. Los posibles cambios no afectarán en ningún caso a la información contenida en esta hoja, ni a lo esencial del contenido del artículo.

The assessment of the level of knowledge about dietary fibre among the portuguese population

The aim of this work was to assess the degree of knowledge about dietary fibre (DF), as influenced by factors such as age, gender, level of education and living environment. For this, a descriptive cross- sectional study was undertaken by means of a questionnaire and the total number of respondents was 382. The results revealed that the participants had a not satisfying global level of knowledge (3.59 ± 0.64, on a scale from 1 to 5). The overall knowledge was found lower for young adults aged 19 to 30 years, when compared to adults aged over 31 and up to 65 years, being this difference statistically significant (p=0.030). However, no statistical significant differences were found between genders, levels of education or living environments. The low level of knowledge demonstrated by the enquired alerts for the need to plan some additional actions to further inform the Portuguese population about dietary fibre.