142 research outputs found
The Basque refugee children of the Spanish Civil War in the UK: memory and memorialisation
No full textA vast body of knowledge has been produced in the field of war remembrance, particularly concerning the Spanish Civil War. However, the representation and interpretation of that conflictual past have been increasingly contested within the wider context of ‘recuperation of historical memory’ which is taking place both in Spain and elsewhere. An academic gap has been identified with regard to the part played by the Basque Children (Niños Vascos) who were evacuated to the UK in 1937 as a result of the war. This thesis investigates the impact that forced migration has had on these children’s identity construction, particularly those who settled permanently in the host country.The thesis is a comparative examination of the process of memory construction and memorialisation, across transnational spaces and time. It analyses the nature and development of commemorative practices both in the UK and in the Basque Country, addressing some of the most fundamental issues related to agency and categorisations. My analysis of the social actors goes beyond Jelin’s ‘memory entrepreneurs’ to include those memory profiteers who benefit from a return to the past in order to fulfil their own personal agendas. I introduce the new term ‘conmemoraccionistas’ to refer to them.The central question dealt with here is how identities are constructed and reconstructed in the social and political arenas in which remembrance takes place. By using ethnography and a multimodal approach, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the discourses of the main agents engaged in memory production, and their agendas. It also identifies reasons for disengagement. Finally, it examines the interrelated narratives of those social actors and how they build on interaction with each other in a complex and continually changing social reality, where I argue, identities can no longer be approached from an essentialist polarising and dichotomising perspective. On the contrary, new approaches are needed which see identitarian development as a dynamic and accumulative process in which different actors have an input and identities are displayed according to particular contexts, settings, and audiences
Centre d'Estudis sobre les Èpoques Franquista i Democràtica
No full textSi tratta di approfondire le caratteristiche essenziali della dittatura franchista in Spagna, i caratteri della transizione alla democrazia e confrontare i vari metodi di approccio e di analisi del tema in diversi paesi europei (ed extra europei
Adaptive hybrid robotic system for rehabilitation of reaching movement after a brain injury: A usability study
No full text© The Author(s).[Background]: Brain injury survivors often present upper-limb motor impairment affecting the execution of functional activities such as reaching. A currently active research line seeking to maximize upper-limb motor recovery after a brain injury, deals with the combined use of functional electrical stimulation (FES) and mechanical supporting devices, in what has been previously termed hybrid robotic systems. This study evaluates from the technical and clinical perspectives the usability of an integrated hybrid robotic system for the rehabilitation of upper-limb reaching movements after a brain lesion affecting the motor function.
[Methods]: The presented system is comprised of four main components. The hybrid assistance is given by a passive exoskeleton to support the arm weight against gravity and a functional electrical stimulation device to assist the execution of the reaching task. The feedback error learning (FEL) controller was implemented to adjust the intensity of the electrical stimuli delivered on target muscles according to the performance of the users. This control strategy is based on a proportional-integral-derivative feedback controller and an artificial neural network as the feedforward controller. Two experiments were carried out in this evaluation. First, the technical viability and the performance of the implemented FEL controller was evaluated in healthy subjects (N = 12). Second, a small cohort of patients with a brain injury (N = 4) participated in two experimental session to evaluate the system performance. Also, the overall satisfaction and emotional response of the users after they used the system was assessed.
[Results]: In the experiment with healthy subjects, a significant reduction of the tracking error was found during the execution of reaching movements. In the experiment with patients, a decreasing trend of the error trajectory was found together with an increasing trend in the task performance as the movement was repeated. Brain injury patients expressed a great acceptance in using the system as a rehabilitation tool.
[Conclusions]: The study demonstrates the technical feasibility of using the hybrid robotic system for reaching rehabilitation. Patients’ reports on the received intervention reveal a great satisfaction and acceptance of the hybrid robotic system.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness by the project ASSOCIATE (agreement: DPI2014–58431-C4–1-R) and the HYPERNET network (agreement: DPI2015–71676-REDC)
Hardware-accelerated interactive data visualization for neuroscience in Python.
No full textLarge datasets are becoming more and more common in science, particularly in neuroscience where experimental techniques are rapidly evolving. Obtaining interpretable results from raw data can sometimes be done automatically; however, there are numerous situations where there is a need, at all processing stages, to visualize the data in an interactive way. This enables the scientist to gain intuition, discover unexpected patterns, and find guidance about subsequent analysis steps. Existing visualization tools mostly focus on static publication-quality figures and do not support interactive visualization of large datasets. While working on Python software for visualization of neurophysiological data, we developed techniques to leverage the computational power of modern graphics cards for high-performance interactive data visualization. We were able to achieve very high performance despite the interpreted and dynamic nature of Python, by using state-of-the-art, fast libraries such as NumPy, PyOpenGL, and PyTables. We present applications of these methods to visualization of neurophysiological data. We believe our tools will be useful in a broad range of domains, in neuroscience and beyond, where there is an increasing need for scalable and fast interactive visualization
Adaptive hybrid robotic system for rehabilitation of reaching movement after a brain injury: a usability study
No full textBACKGROUND: Brain injury survivors often present upper-limb motor impairment affecting the execution of functional activities such as reaching. A currently active research line seeking to maximize upper-limb motor recovery after a brain injury, deals with the combined use of functional electrical stimulation (FES) and mechanical supporting devices, in what has been previously termed hybrid robotic systems. This study evaluates from the technical and clinical perspectives the usability of an integrated hybrid robotic system for the rehabilitation of upper-limb reaching movements after a brain lesion affecting the motor function.
METHODS: The presented system is comprised of four main components. The hybrid assistance is given by a passive exoskeleton to support the arm weight against gravity and a functional electrical stimulation device to assist the execution of the reaching task. The feedback error learning (FEL) controller was implemented to adjust the intensity of the electrical stimuli delivered on target muscles according to the performance of the users. This control strategy is based on a proportional-integral-derivative feedback controller and an artificial neural network as the feedforward controller. Two experiments were carried out in this evaluation. First, the technical viability and the performance of the implemented FEL controller was evaluated in healthy subjects (N = 12). Second, a small cohort of patients with a brain injury (N = 4) participated in two experimental session to evaluate the system performance. Also, the overall satisfaction and emotional response of the users after they used the system was assessed.
RESULTS: In the experiment with healthy subjects, a significant reduction of the tracking error was found during the execution of reaching movements. In the experiment with patients, a decreasing trend of the error trajectory was found together with an increasing trend in the task performance as the movement was repeated. Brain injury patients expressed a great acceptance in using the system as a rehabilitation tool.
CONCLUSIONS: The study demonstrates the technical feasibility of using the hybrid robotic system for reaching rehabilitation. Patients’ reports on the received intervention reveal a great satisfaction and acceptance of the hybrid robotic system
Finding Needles in the Haystack: A Search for AM CVn Systems Using the Palomar Transient Factory
No full textThe AM CVn systems are a rare class of ultra-compact astrophysical binaries. With orbital periods of under an hour and as short as five minutes, they are among the closest known binary star systems and their evolution has direct relevance to the type Ia supernova rate and the white dwarf binary population. However, their faint and rare nature has made population studies of these systems difficult and several studies have found conflicting results.
I undertook a survey for AM CVn systems using the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) astrophysical synoptic survey by exploiting the "outbursts" these systems undergo. Such events result in an increase in luminosity by a factor of up to two-hundred and are detectable in time-domain photometric data of AM CVn systems. My search resulted in the discovery of eight new systems, over 20% of the current known population. More importantly, this search was done in a systematic fashion, which allows for a population study properly accounting for biases.
Apart from the discovery of new systems, I used the time-domain data from the PTF and other synoptic surveys to better understand the long-term behavior of these systems. This analysis of the photometric behavior of the majority of known AM CVn systems has shown changes in their behavior at longer time scales than have previously been observed. This has allowed me to find relationships between the outburst properties of an individual system and its orbital period.
Even more importantly, the systematically selected sample together with these properties have allowed me to conduct a population study of the AM CVn systems. I have shown that the latest published estimates of the AM CVn system population, a factor of fifty below theoretical estimates, are consistent with the sample of systems presented here. This is particularly noteworthy since my population study is most sensitive to a different orbital period regime than earlier surveys. This confirmation of the population density will allow the AM CVn systems population to be used in the study of other areas of astrophysics.</p
Rehabilitation of Reaching Movement After Stroke Using a Hybrid Robotic System and Paired with the Motor Intent
No full text
A study of intermittency in Hadronic Z Decays
No full textA study on the modifications of the relation between author and lector due to the translation from text to hypertex
EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF THE TRIPLE-GLUON VERTEX
No full textIn four-jet events from e+e- –> Z0 –> multihadrons one can separate the three principal contributions from the triple-gluon vertex, double gluon-bremsstrahlung and the secondary quark-antiquark production, using the shape of the two-dimensional angular distributions in the generalized Nachtmann-Reiter angle theta-NR* and the opening angle of the secondary jets. Thus one can identify directly the contribution from the triple-gluon vertex without comparison with a specific non-QCD model. Applying this new method to events taken with the DELPHI-detector we get for the ratio of the colour factor N(C) to the fermionic Casimir operator C(F): N(C)/C(F) = 2.55 +/- 0.55(stat.) +/- 0.4(fragm. + models) +/- 0.2(error in bias) in agreement with the value 2.25 expected in QCD from N(C) = 3 and C(F) = 4/3
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