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.

El apoyo a la investigación en las bibliotecas universitarias españolas

Los cambios sufridos por los modelos de comunicación científica hacen que las bibliotecas universitarias se vean obligadas a dar nuevos servicios. Para adecuarse al investigador los bibliotecarios están desarrollando habilidades, colaborando con cada vez más estamentos y sustentando el acceso abierto. Apoyándose en una lista de posibles servicios, basada en la literatura especializada, este trabajo pretende cuantificar y evaluar el apoyo a la investigación desde las bibliotecas universitarias españolas. El sondeo demuestra la aparición de nuevos servicios e infraestructuras. Pero estas asistencias no suelen sistematizarse, difundirse ni evaluarse. Y, por otra parte, las consecuentes inversiones en personal y TIC han generado una brecha entre universidades

The origins of the control of information in war coverage

The conflict’s coverage, since its inception, has been closely linked to the relationship that both the military and the media have. The freedom they maintained during their first conflicts, although not without problems, though they suffered strict censorship suffered during World War I, and lastly the straitjacket treatment that they have endured during recent wars. The Vietnam War marked a turning point in this relationship, and after the invasion of Grenada, the military would launch new information guidelines, called Department of Defense National Media Pool. The lack of clear guidance of both control and space, has made for a complicated relationship between media and military, so the rules have evolved after every conflict shaping the future of press coverage and thus, war reporting.

Education in J.J. Rousseau: a methodological antecedent of competence based teaching

Taking into account the huge repercussion and influence that J.J. Rousseau has had on modern pedagogy, the recent tercentenary of his birth is a good opportunity to think about his outstanding relevance nowadays. This paper is a theoretical and educative research developed with an analytic and comparative hermeneutical method. The main objective is to show how some concepts of his philosophy of education have a great similarity with certain changes that the present competency based teaching is demanding, so it could be considered its methodological background. In order to achieve this objective this exposure has been divided in three parts. The first part is an analysis of Rousseau's educational theory as developed in the first three books of the Emilio, in which one of the main themes is self experience-based learning, fostering self-sufficiency, curiosity and the motivation for learning. Rousseau proposed as a method the negative education, which requires, among other conditions, a constant monitoring of the learner by the tutor. In the second part, a brief summary of the most relevant changes and characteristics of competency-based teaching is developed, as well as its purpose. The student’s participation and activity are highlighted within their own learning process through the carrying out of tasks. The new educational model involves a radical change in the curriculum, in which it is highlighted the transformation of the methodology used in the classroom as well as the role of the teacher. Finally, the aim of the third part is to offer a comparative synthesis of both proposals grouping the parallelisms found in 4 topics: origin of the two models, its aims, methodology, and change in the teaching roles.

How teachers of Geography and History of Secondary Education assess?

The purpose of this article is to analyse the assessment procedures and instruments used by teachers of Geography and History of Compulsory Secondary School (ESO) in the Region of Murcia (Spain). The data have been extracted implementing a survey technique proceeded by a descriptive analysis. The results show that teachers generally have a traditional conception of assessment, reflected in the fact that they think that assessment should not change when teaching strategies are changed or when they innovate. On the other hand, although they consider that is necessary to employ a variety of instruments to assess well and to prevent school failure, they still use exams as the most objective and essential instrument in the assessment, while they don’t apply continuous assessment, only tests in a continuous way. The implementation of similar research in other areas or in other subjects shows the existence of contrasts in teacher assessment practices.

The conflict between realism and abstraction in the field of spanish art as an iteration of la "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes"

Based on the analysis model favored by the study of the conditions in which the seventeenth century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes took place, we examine the case of confrontation between realism and abstraction, which occurred in the context of Spanish art in the nineties of the twentieth century. Connections are established with other aesthetic conflicts which are considered part of a genealogy whose most explicit antecedent could be placed in the before mentioned complaint, such as the confrontation between realism and abstraction in the American art scene, which occurred in the fifties of the last century, and the more recent controversy on pluralism and the end of art.

The politics of ethical foreign policy::A responsibility to protect whom?

Ethical foreign policy persists as a problem of international relations, especially regarding humanitarian intervention. However, despite apparent international upheavals, the debate about the ethics of humanitarian intervention has remained fundamentally unchanged. To escape the limits of this debate, this article deconstructs British claims to ethical foreign policy since 1997, reading these claims against themselves and against contemporary humanitarian intervention literature. It finds that Britain’s ethical framework, the ‘doctrine of international community’, which justifies interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, is undone by the anomalous, yet exemplary, invasion of Iraq. This demonstrates the politics of ethical foreign policy: first, that any intervention, no matter how ‘ethical’ or ‘right’, produces suffering and death; and, second, that we cannot know for sure whether we are doing the right thing by intervening. Embracing, rather than effacing, the political nature of ethical foreign policy opens up a more intellectually honest and positive potential future for relating to the foreign in a responsible manner.

A graded BDI agent model to represent and reason about preferences

In this research note, we introduce a graded BDI agent development framework, g-BDI for short, that allows to build agents as multi-context systems that reason about three fundamental and graded mental attitudes (i.e. beliefs, desires and intentions). We propose a sound and complete logical framework for them and some logical extensions to accommodate slightly different views on desires. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Communicating open systems

Just as conventional institutions are organisational structures for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting individuals, electronic institutions provide a computational analogue for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting software agents. In this paper, we argue that open multi-agent systems can be effectively designed and implemented as electronic institutions, for which we provide a comprehensive computational model. More specifically, the paper provides an operational semantics for electronic institutions, specifying the essential data structures, the state representation and the key operations necessary to implement them. We specify the agent workflow structure that is the core component of such electronic institutions and particular instantiations of knowledge representation languages that support the institutional model. In so doing, we provide the first formal account of the electronic institution concept in a rigorous and unambiguous way.

A multiagent network for peer norm enforcement

In a multiagent system where norms are used to regulate the actions agents ought to execute, some agents may decide not to abide by the norms if this can benefit them. Norm enforcement mechanisms are designed to counteract these benefits and thus the motives for not abiding by the norms. In this work we propose a distributed mechanism through which agents in the multiagent system that do not abide by the norms can be ostracised by their peers. An ostracised agent cannot interact anymore and looses all benefits from future interactions. We describe a model for multiagent systems structured as networks of agents, and a behavioural model for the agents in such systems. Furthermore, we provide analytical results which show that there exists an upper bound to the number of potential norm violations when all the agents exhibit certain behaviours. We also provide experimental results showing that both stricter enforcement behaviours and larger percentage of agents exhibiting these behaviours reduce the number of norm violations, and that the network topology influences the number of norm violations. These experiments have been executed under varying scenarios with different values for the number of agents, percentage of enforcers, percentage of violators, network topology, and agent behaviours. Finally, we give examples of applications where the enforcement techniques we provide could be used.

Constraint rule-based programming of norms for electronic institutions

Norms constitute a powerful coordination mechanism among heterogeneous agents. In this paper, we propose a rule language to specify and explicitly manage the normative positions of agents (permissions, prohibitions and obligations), with which distinct deontic notions and their relationships can be captured. Our rule-based formalism includes constraints for more expressiveness and precision and allows to supplement (and implement) electronic institutions with norms. We also show how some normative aspects are given computational interpretation. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Multi-Modal CTL:Completeness, Complexity, and an Application

We define a multi-modal version of Computation Tree Logic (ctl) by extending the language with path quantifiers E and A where d denotes one of finitely many dimensions, interpreted over Kripke structures with one total relation for each dimension. As expected, the logic is axiomatised by taking a copy of a ctl axiomatisation for each dimension. Completeness is proved by employing the completeness result for ctl to obtain a model along each dimension in turn. We also show that the logic is decidable and that its satisfiability problem is no harder than the corresponding problem for ctl. We then demonstrate how Normative Systems can be conceived as a natural interpretation of such a multi-dimensional ctl logic. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Self-disclosure decision making based on intimacy and privacy

Autonomous agents may encapsulate their principals' personal data attributes. These attributes may be disclosed to other agents during agent interactions, producing a loss of privacy. Thus, agents need self-disclosure decision-making mechanisms to autonomously decide whether disclosing personal data attributes to other agents is acceptable or not. Current self-disclosure decision-making mechanisms consider the direct benefit and the privacy loss of disclosing an attribute. However, there are many situations in which the direct benefit of disclosing an attribute is a priori unknown. This is the case in human relationships, where the disclosure of personal data attributes plays a crucial role in their development. In this paper, we present self-disclosure decision-making mechanisms based on psychological findings regarding how humans disclose personal information in the building of their relationships. We experimentally demonstrate that, in most situations, agents following these decision-making mechanisms lose less privacy than agents that do not use them. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

AgentSpeak+: AgentSpeak with Probabilistic Planning

AgentSpeak is a logic-based programming language, based on the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm, suitable for building complex agent-based systems. To limit the computational complexity, agents in AgentSpeak rely on a plan library to reduce the planning problem to the much simpler problem of plan selection. However, such a plan library is often inadequate when an agent is situated in an uncertain environment. In this paper, we propose the AgentSpeak+ framework, which extends AgentSpeak with a mechanism for probabilistic planning. The beliefs of an AgentSpeak+ agent are represented using epistemic states to allow an agent to reason about its uncertain observations and the uncertain effects of its actions. Each epistemic state consists of a POMDP, used to encode the agent’s knowledge of the environment, and its associated probability distribution (or belief state). In addition, the POMDP is used to select the optimal actions for achieving a given goal, even when facing uncertainty.

Plan Selection for Probabilistic BDI Agents

When an agent wants to fulfill its desires about the world, the agent usually has multiple plans to choose from and these plans have different pre-conditions and additional effects in addition to achieving its goals. Therefore, for further reasoning and interaction with the world, a plan selection strategy (usually based on plan cost estimation) is mandatory for an autonomous agent. This demand becomes even more critical when uncertainty on the observation of the world is taken into account, since in this case, we consider not only the costs of different plans, but also their chances of success estimated according to the agent's beliefs. In addition, when multiple goals are considered together, different plans achieving the goals can be conflicting on their preconditions (contexts) or the required resources. Hence a plan selection strategy should be able to choose a subset of plans that fulfills the maximum number of goals while maintaining context consistency and resource-tolerance among the chosen plans. To address the above two issues, in this paper we first propose several principles that a plan selection strategy should satisfy, and then we present selection strategies that stem from the principles, depending on whether a plan cost is taken into account. In addition, we also show that our selection strategy can partially recover intention revision.