Robust Nonlinear Mapping of Soil Contamination Using Support Regression

Spatial data analysis mapping and visualization is of great importance in various fields: environment, pollution, natural hazards and risks, epidemiology, spatial econometrics, etc. A basic task of spatial mapping is to make predictions based on some empirical data (measurements). A number of state-of-the-art methods can be used for the task: deterministic interpolations, methods of geostatistics: the family of kriging estimators (Deutsch and Journel, 1997), machine learning algorithms such as artificial neural networks (ANN) of different architectures, hybrid ANN-geostatistics models (Kanevski and Maignan, 2004; Kanevski et al., 1996), etc. All the methods mentioned above can be used for solving the problem of spatial data mapping. Environmental empirical data are always contaminated/corrupted by noise, and often with noise of unknown nature. That's one of the reasons why deterministic models can be inconsistent, since they treat the measurements as values of some unknown function that should be interpolated. Kriging estimators treat the measurements as the realization of some spatial randomn process. To obtain the estimation with kriging one has to model the spatial structure of the data: spatial correlation function or (semi-)variogram. This task can be complicated if there is not sufficient number of measurements and variogram is sensitive to outliers and extremes. ANN is a powerful tool, but it also suffers from the number of reasons. of a special type ? multiplayer perceptrons ? are often used as a detrending tool in hybrid (ANN+geostatistics) models (Kanevski and Maignank, 2004). Therefore, development and adaptation of the method that would be nonlinear and robust to noise in measurements, would deal with the small empirical datasets and which has solid mathematical background is of great importance. The present paper deals with such model, based on Statistical Learning Theory (SLT) - Support Vector Regression. SLT is a general mathematical framework devoted to the problem of estimation of the dependencies from empirical data (Hastie et al, 2004; Vapnik, 1998). SLT models for classification - Support Vector Machines - have shown good results on different machine learning tasks. The results of SVM classification of spatial data are also promising (Kanevski et al, 2002). The properties of SVM for regression - Support Vector Regression (SVR) are less studied. First results of the application of SVR for spatial mapping of physical quantities were obtained by the authorsin for mapping of medium porosity (Kanevski et al, 1999), and for mapping of radioactively contaminated territories (Kanevski and Canu, 2000). The present paper is devoted to further understanding of the properties of SVR model for spatial data analysis and mapping. Detailed description of the SVR theory can be found in (Cristianini and Shawe-Taylor, 2000; Smola, 1996) and basic equations for the nonlinear modeling are given in section 2. Section 3 discusses the application of SVR for spatial data mapping on the real case study - soil pollution by Cs137 radionuclide. Section 4 discusses the properties of the modelapplied to noised data or data with outliers.

Gestión de la actividad no presencial y autoevaluación de competencias = Management of student learning outside the classroom and the self-evaluation of competences

La asignatura troncal “Evaluación Psicológica” de los estudios de Psicología y delestudio de grado “Desarrollo humano en la sociedad de la información” de laUniversidad de Girona consta de 12 créditos según la Ley Orgánica de Universidades.Hasta el año académico 2004-05 el trabajo no presencial del alumno consistía en larealización de una evaluación psicológica que se entregaba por escrito a final de curso yde la cual el estudiante obtenía una calificación y revisión si se solicitaba. En el caminohacia el Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior, esta asignatura consta de 9 créditosque equivalen a un total de 255 horas de trabajo presencial y no presencial delestudiante. En los años académicos 2005-06 y 2006-07 se ha creado una guía de trabajopara la gestión de la actividad no presencial con el objetivo de alcanzar aprendizajes anivel de aplicación y solución de problemas/pensamiento crítico (Bloom, 1975)siguiendo las recomendaciones de la Agencia para la Calidad del Sistema Universitariode Cataluña (2005). La guía incorpora: los objetivos de aprendizaje, los criterios deevaluación, la descripción de las actividades, el cronograma semanal de trabajos paratodo el curso, la especificación de las tutorías programadas para la revisión de losdiversos pasos del proceso de evaluación psicológica y el uso del foro para elconocimiento, análisis y crítica constructiva de las evaluaciones realizadas por loscompañeros

Autism Support Program Annual Report, December 2015

The Autism Support Program provides funding for applied behavioral analysis services for children under the age of nine who meet certain diagnostic and financial eligibility criteria.

Family Support Subsidy and Children at Home Program SFY 2015, October 30, 2015

The Family Support Subsidy (FSS) program provides a monthly payment to help families with the cost of raising a child with a developmental disability. Parents of children with disabilities were very active in getting state and federal policy makers to look at how they could divert some of the funds going to institutional care. Families with severely disabled children wanted to raise their children at home but were met with a lot of resistance and policy barriers when they tried to get home-based support.

Prospective study of the barriers to nutritional support in a paediatric intensive care unit : P16

Introduction and aim: Children hospitalised in a paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) are mainly fed by nutritional support (NS) which may often be interrupted. The aims of the study were to verify the relationship between prescribed (PEI) and actual energy intake (AEI) and to identify the reasons for NS interruption. Methods: Prospective study in a PICU. PEI and AEI from day 1 to 15, type of NS (enteral, parenteral, mixed), position of the feeding tube, interruptions in NS and reasons for these were noted. Inter - ruptions were classified in categories of barriers and their frequency and duration were analysed. Results: Fifteen children (24 ± 25.2 months) were studied for 84 days. The NS was exclusively enteral (69%) or mixed (31%). PEI were significantly higher than AEI (54.7 ± 32.9 vs 49.2 ± 33.6 kcal/kg, p = 0.0011). AEI represented 93% of the PEI. Ninety-eight interruptions were noted and lasted 189 h, i.e. 9.4% of the evaluated time. The most frequent barriers were nursing procedures, respiratory physiotherapy and unavailability of intravenous access. The longest were caused by the necessity to stop NS for surgery or diagnostic studies, to treat burns or to carry out medical procedures. Conclusion: AEI in PICU were inferior by 7% to PEI, considerably lower than in adult studies. Making these results available to medical staff for greater anticipation and compensation could reduce NS interruptions. Starving protocols should be reconsidered.

Evaluation of the multicriteria approval method for timber-harvesting group decision support

Abstract

Beyond the Net Generation debate: A comparison between digital learners in face-to-face and virtual universities

This paper is based on the hypothesis that the use of technology to support learning is not related to whether a student belongs to the Net Generation, but that it is mainly influenced by the teaching model. The study compares behaviour and preferences towards ICT use in two groups of university students: face-to-face students and online students. A questionnaire was applied to asample of students from five universities with different characteristics (one offers online education and four offer face-to-face education with LMS teaching support).

OpenApp: experiencias y herramientas docentes y de gestión en abierto

La Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) es una universidad en línea que realiza un uso intensivo de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación para proporcionar una educación y aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida. Des de sus inicios la universidad ha desarrollado y testeado metodologías y tecnologías con el objetivo de proporcionar soluciones a los retos de aprendizaje y docentes ofrecidos por la comunidad de estudiantes, académicos y personal de gestión.Fundamentado en este saber hacer, nace la plataforma OpenApps con la finalidad principal de poner a disposición de la comunidad la experiencia acumulada en la UOC durante más de 15 años en docencia, aprendizaje y gestión para que pueda ser aplicado, adaptado o evolucionado por terceros. En este artículo se presentan las características esenciales para que una innovación pueda formar parte de esta plataforma institucional, las especificaciones y usuarios de la plataforma, la finalidad del servicio y las futuras líneas de trabajo.

Open Apps: Opening Teaching Experiences and Applications

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) is an online university that makes extensive use of information and communication technologies to provide education. Ever since its establishment in 1995, the UOC has developed and tested methodologies and technological support services to meet the educational challenges posed by its student community and its teaching and management staff. The know-how it has acquired in doing so is the basis on which it has created the Open Apps platform, which is designed to provide access to open source technical applications, information on successful learning and teaching experiences, resources and other solutions, all in a single environment. Open Apps is an open, online catalogue, the content of which is available to all students for learning purposes, all IT professionals for downloading and all teachers for reusing.To contribute to the transfer of knowledge, experience and technology, each of the platform¿s apps comes with full documentation, plus information on cases in which it has been used and related tools. It is hoped that such transfer will lead to the growth of an external partner network, and that this, in turn, will result in improvements to the applications and teaching/learning practices, and in greater scope for collaboration.Open Apps is a strategic project that has arisen from the UOC's commitment to the open access movement and to giving knowledge and technology back to society, as well as its firm belief that sustainability depends on communities of interest.