Vocational guidance in people with special educational needs as the result of visual impairment during the transition stage from high school to advanced education

This work proposes to seek for the factors related to the choices that people with special educational needs make as the result of the visual impairment, during the transition stage from high school to advanced education. Therefore, we have taken into consideration that Vocational Guidance and the transition towards adulthood get specific characteristics in case of visually impaired young people, particularly in what's related to continue with advanced education. The focus of this work is to be able to clarify the existence of factors that make this transition stage easier or harder, through the observation of visually impaired and blind people who complete high school. This matter has aroused interest and concern about the strategies to follow to ensure the successful entrance and remaining in the selected advanced education. However, if we don?t know the factors involved in the described fact, it's difficult to design an appropriate intervention strategy. Then, in order to take acknowledge about the specific issues of visually impaired young people who complete high school, we chose a special school for this disability and some students who will join this project

Vocational guidance in people with special educational needs as the result of visual impairment during the transition stage from high school to advanced education

This work proposes to seek for the factors related to the choices that people with special educational needs make as the result of the visual impairment, during the transition stage from high school to advanced education. Therefore, we have taken into consideration that Vocational Guidance and the transition towards adulthood get specific characteristics in case of visually impaired young people, particularly in what's related to continue with advanced education. The focus of this work is to be able to clarify the existence of factors that make this transition stage easier or harder, through the observation of visually impaired and blind people who complete high school. This matter has aroused interest and concern about the strategies to follow to ensure the successful entrance and remaining in the selected advanced education. However, if we don?t know the factors involved in the described fact, it's difficult to design an appropriate intervention strategy. Then, in order to take acknowledge about the specific issues of visually impaired young people who complete high school, we chose a special school for this disability and some students who will join this project

Tough as a rock-boring urchin: adult Echinometra sp. EE from the Red Sea show high resistance to ocean acidification over long-term exposures

Ocean acidification, a process caused by the continuous rise of atmospheric CO2 levels, is expected to have a profound impact on marine invertebrates. Findings of the numerous studies conducted in this field indicate high variability in species responses to future ocean conditions. This study aimed at understanding the effects of long-term exposure to elevated pCO2 conditions on the performance of adult Echinometra sp. EE from the Gulf of Aqaba (Red Sea). During an 11-month incubation under high pCO2 (1,433 µatm, pHNBS 7.7) and control (435 µatm, pHNBS 8.1) conditions, we examined the urchins' somatic and gonadal growth, gametogenesis and skeletal microstructure. Somatic and gonadal growths were exhibited with no significant differences between the treatments. In addition, all urchins in the experiment completed a full reproductive cycle, typical of natural populations, with no detectable impact of increased pCO2 on the timing, duration or progression of the cycle. Furthermore, scanning electron microscopy imaging of urchin tests and spines revealed no signs of the usual observed effects of acidosis, such as skeletal dissolution, widened stereom pores or non-smoothed structures. Our results, which yielded no significant impact of the high pCO2 treatment on any of the examined processes in the urchins studied, suggest high resistance of adult Echinometra sp. EE to near future ocean acidification conditions. With respect to other findings in this area, the outcome of this study provides an example of the complicated and diverse responses of echinoids to the predicted environmental changes.

Asymmetric amplification in amino acid sublimation involving racemic compound to conglomerate conversion

A straightforward unprecedented sublimation protocol that reveals both conversion of a racemic compound into a racemic conglomerate and subsequent enantioenrichment has been developed for the proteinogenic amino acid valine. The phenomenon has been observed in closed and open systems, providing insight into asymmetric amplification mechanisms under presumably prebiotic conditions

Tools in Spanish Universities to facilitate the transmission from High School to University and their assessment.

Incoming students in the University have education deficiencies, so universities studies require a sound basis of scientific knowledge. In this project are analysed instruments to reinforcing knowledge in those areas related to the studies that students are about to embark on public Spanish universities. There are important differences among universities and, in each university there are great differences among titles. Initial courses (cursos cero) are widespread (in 50% of universities) that selfevaluation instruments (14 % of universities). It is necessary to improve diffusion of those instruments because it is not possible to evaluate them. So are proposed the next actuations: to make regular standard surveys for professors and students; to publish results of surveys; public universities should institutionalize their basic training offer and improve the dissemination of this offer especially through the web. This paper presents a questionnaire to assess student opinion about these tools. To analyze the effectiveness, and make an initial estimate of the evaluation of these tools, we conducted a pilot test of the questionnaire with 68 students at the University of Extremadura. The results of preliminary statistical analysis conducted on the pilot test indicate that the survey results are reliable. A global evaluation of both tools, with a scale of 1 to 5, gave an average score of 3.29 for initial courses and 3.41 for selfevaluation. The 72.9% of the students consider the "self assessment" more effective than the "initial course"

New Constructive Solutions to Improve Energy Efficiency in Existing Buildings and their Economic Viability

The improvement of energy efficiency in existing buildings is always a challenge due to their particular, and sometimes protected, constructive solutions. New constructive regulations in Spain leave a big undefined gap when a restoration is considered because they were developed for new buildings. However, rehabilitation is considered as an opportunity for many properties because it allows owners to obtain benefits from the use of the buildings. The current financial and housing crisis has turned society point of view to existing buildings and making them more efficient is one of the Spanish government’s aims. The economic viability of a rehabilitation action should take all factors into account: both construction costs and the future operative costs of the building must be considered. Nevertheless, the application of these regulations in Spain is left to the designer’s opinion and always under a subjective point of view. With the research work described in this paper and with the help of some case-studies, the cost of adapting an existing building to the new constructive regulations will be studied and Energetic Efficiency will be evaluated depending on how the investment is recovered. The interest of the research is based on showing how new constructive solutions can achieve higher levels of efficiency in terms of energy, construction and economy and it will demonstrate that Life Cycle Costing analysis can be a mechanism to find the advantages and disadvantages of using these new constructive solutions. Therefore, this paper has the following objectives: analysing constructive solutions in existing buildings - to establish a process for assessing total life cycle costs (LCC) during the planning stages with consideration of future operating costs - to select the most advantageous operating system – To determine the return on investment in terms of construction costs based on new techniques, the achieved energy savings and investment payback periods.

Multilingual number transcription for text-to-speech conversion

This paper describes the text normalization module of a text to speech fully-trainable conversion system and its application to number transcription. The main target is to generate a language independent text normalization module, based on data instead of on expert rules. This paper proposes a general architecture based on statistical machine translation techniques. This proposal is composed of three main modules: a tokenizer for splitting the text input into a token graph, a phrase-based translation module for token translation, and a post-processing module for removing some tokens. This architecture has been evaluated for number transcription in several languages: English, Spanish and Romanian. Number transcription is an important aspect in the text normalization problem.

Fast 2D to 3D conversion using a clustering-based hierarchical search in a machine learning framework

Automatic 2D-to-3D conversion is an important application for filling the gap between the increasing number of 3D displays and the still scant 3D content. However, existing approaches have an excessive computational cost that complicates its practical application. In this paper, a fast automatic 2D-to-3D conversion technique is proposed, which uses a machine learning framework to infer the 3D structure of a query color image from a training database with color and depth images. Assuming that photometrically similar images have analogous 3D structures, a depth map is estimated by searching the most similar color images in the database, and fusing the corresponding depth maps. Large databases are desirable to achieve better results, but the computational cost also increases. A clustering-based hierarchical search using compact SURF descriptors to characterize images is proposed to drastically reduce search times. A significant computational time improvement has been obtained regarding other state-of-the-art approaches, maintaining the quality results.

Overexpression of peptide-methionine sulfoxide reductase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and human T cells provides them with high resistance to oxidative stress

The yeast peptide-methionine sulfoxide reductase (MsrA) was overexpressed in a Saccharomyces cerevisiae null mutant of msrA by using a high-copy plasmid harboring the msrA gene and its promoter. The resulting strain had about 25-fold higher MsrA activity than its parent strain. When exposed to either hydrogen peroxide, paraquat, or 2,2′-azobis-(2-amidinopropane) dihydrochloride treatment, the MsrA overexpressed strain grew better, had lower free and protein-bound methionine sulfoxide and had a better survival rate under these conditions than did the msrA mutant and its parent strain. Substitution of methionine with methionine sulfoxide in a medium lacking hydrogen peroxide had little effect on the growth pattern, which suggests that the oxidation of free methionine in the growth medium was not the main cause of growth inhibition of the msrA mutant. Ultraviolet A radiation did not result in obvious differences in survival rates among the three strains. An enhanced resistance to hydrogen peroxide treatment was shown in human T lymphocyte cells (Molt-4) that were stably transfected with the bovine msrA and exposed to hydrogen peroxide. The survival rate of the transfected strain was much better than its parent strain when grown in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. These results support the proposition that the msrA gene is involved in the resistance of yeast and mammalian cells to oxidative stress.

Molecular characterization of the mosquito vitellogenin receptor reveals unexpected high homology to the Drosophila yolk protein receptor.

The mosquito (Aedes aegypti) vitellogenin receptor (AaVgR) is a large membrane-bound protein (214 kDa when linearized) that mediates internalization of vitellogenin, the major yolk-protein precursor, by oocytes during egg development. We have cloned and sequenced two cDNA fragments encompassing the entire coding region of AaVgR mRNA, to our knowledge the first insect VgR sequence to be reported. The 7.3-kb AaVgR mRNA is present only in female germ-line cells and is abundant in previtellogenic oocytes, suggesting that the AaVgR gene is expressed early in oocyte differentiation. The deduced amino acid sequence predicts a 202.7-kDa protein before posttranslational processing. The AaVgR is a member of the low density lipoprotein receptor superfamily, sharing significant homology with the chicken (Gallus gallus) VgR and particularly the Drosophila melanogaster yolk protein receptor, in spite of a very different ligand for the latter. Distance-based phylogenetic analyses suggest that the insect VgR/yolk protein receptor lineage and the vertebrate VgR/low density lipoprotein receptor lineage diverged before the bifurcation of nematode and deuterostome lines.

Modification of Hematite Electronic Properties with Trimethyl Aluminum to Enhance the Efficiency of Photoelectrodes

The electronic properties of hematite were investigated by means of synchrotron radiation photoemission (SR-PES) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). Hematite samples were exposed to trimethyl aluminum (TMA) pulses, a widely used Al-precursor for the atomic layer deposition (ALD) of Al2O3. SR-PES and XAS showed that the electronic properties of hematite were modified by the interaction with TMA. In particular, the hybridization of O 2p states with Fe 3d and Fe 4s4p changed upon TMA pulses due to electron inclusion as polarons. The change of hybridization correlates with an enhancement of the photocurrent density due to water oxidation for the hematite electrodes. Such an enhancement has been associated with an improvement in charge carrier transport. Our findings open new perspectives for the understanding and utilization of electrode modifications by very thin ALD films and show that the interactions between metal precursors and substrates seem to be important factors in defining their electronic and photoelectrocatalytic properties.

Arbeidsmarktparticipatie van mensen met een migratie-achtergrond in België: hoog tijd om te mainstreamen Issue 2015/2 maart 2015 = Immigrant labour market participation in Belgium - high time to mainstream. IES Policy Brief Issue 2015/2 March 2015.

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