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This book offers an expert perspective on two key phenomena in the development of the information society, namely digital inclusion and digital exclusion. Despite the intensive digitalization of various areas in human activity, the lack of proper information and communications technology (ICT) literacy, the lack of access to high-speed Internet, and the still unsatisfactory level of e-services are a reality in many regions and countries. This edited book presents a unique overview of research related to the dynamics of digital exclusion and the development of digital competences, as well as an analysis of the most effective educational solutions to foster the digital inclusion of disadvantaged groups. This book is particularly useful for educators dealing with the topic of digital exclusion and inclusion and who are looking for knowledge on enhancing digital competences in disadvantaged groups. It is also helpful for social policy makers involved in designing solutions to minimize various forms of digital exclusion. Finally, this book serves as a reference for academics and students from the disciplines of pedagogy, social policy, new media psychology, media sociology, and cultural anthropology.

CARDIOTRAINER is a multimedia intended for the interactive training of medical and paramedical personnel of urgency systems or any other ones using the biphasic defibrillator-monitor CARDIODEF® 2. The trainer allows the trainee to get acquainted with its main characteristics and its operation procedure. It also includes the safety measures to be applied and the necessary procedures to assist a patient with mortal arrhythmias as ventricular fibrillation or with non-immediately mortal ones. Making use of modern multimedia development tools several drills have been implemented, where the trainee must cardiovert or defibrillate a patient, such as it should be done in a real-life case. Drills can be repeated as many times as required in male or female adult patients or in pediatric patients. In the paper the possibilities of the trainer are illustrated using some of the main screens presented to the trainee, and the application results are presented and discussed. It is concluded that CARDIOTRAINER is a valuable training tool for increase the understanding, proficiency and skill of personnel using CARDIODEF® 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chagas' disease is a tropical illness characterized by the presence of damage in the myocardium during each stage of the disease, ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death are the main causes of mortality due to disease. In this document we study the characterization of cardiac data from chagasic patients through the application of symbolic dynamics, in order to detect patterns that help us predict the risk of sudden death. The process is made evaluating RR intervals (tachograms) taken from high resolution electrocardiograms (ECGHR) pertaining to 2 kinds of chagasic patients: positives (6 subjects) and negatives (19 subjects) with respect to the cardiopathy test. Data series corresponding to each patient are taken by symbolic dynamics algorithms, which allow represent each value of the tachogram through a symbol. Finally, the symbol chain calculated for each signal is evaluated through entropy analysis, studying the frequency of words of length 3. Also, we look at the original signal searching for reduced amplitude zones (RAZ), and checking if its mean and standard deviation have useful information for this research. The results show the great potential of symbolic dynamics in the characterization of ECGHR signals of chagasics patients, constituting itself as a promising alternative to predict their risk of sudden death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edible films are thin materials based on biopolymers. These films are also biodegradable and because of that, these materials have attracted the attention of the food science academic community in the last decades. The main biopolymers used in the edible films production are polysaccharides (Nisperos-Carriedo, 1994) and proteins (Gennadios et al., 1996). The polysaccharide most used in edible film technology is starch, because it is produced abundantly and is inexpensive. But other polysaccharides, such as chitosan and some cellulose derivates, have been also studied. Normally, proteins produced industrially, such as soja and gelatin from mammals, are largely applied in film production. However, some proteins from less conventional sources, such as muscle proteins, gelatin from fish, and feather keratins, have also been studied in the last several years. Thus, this work will present and discuss some aspects of edible and/or biodegradable film technology based on biopolymers from conventional or less conventional resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a first approach to try to determine the weight of a newborn using a set of variables determined uniquely by the mother. The proposed model to approximate the weight is a Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) because it has been successfully applied to many real world problems. The problem of determining the weight of a newborn could be very useful by the time of diagnosing the gestational diabetes mellitus, since it can be a risk factor, and also to determine if the newborn is macrosomic. However, the design of RBFNNs is another issue which still remains as a challenge since there is no perfect methodology to design an RBFNN using a reduced data set, keeping the generalization capabilities of the network. Within the many design techniques existing in the literature, the use of clustering algorithms as a first initialization step for the RBF centers is a quite common solution and many approaches have been proposed. The following work presents a comparative of RBFNNs generated using several algorithms recently developed concluding that, although RBFNNs that can approximate a training data set with an acceptable error, further work must be done in order to adapt RBFNN to large dimensional spaces where the generalization capabilities might be lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Patagonia and Cuyo regions of Argentina, which specialize in temperate fruit production, the Mediterranean fruit fly Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann) occurs mainly in urban areas. Nevertheless, its presence has represented a phytosanitary barrier for exporting fresh fruits to countries free of the pest or with active control programmes. As a result of more than ten years of successful integrated area-wide application of the sterile insect technique (SIT) against this pest, the phytosanitary status of these two regions was redefined, thereby allowing exports without postharvest treatments to previously closed markets. In the north-eastern and north-western regions of Argentina that are mainly citrus-growing areas, there are two main fruit fly species: the Mediterranean fruit fly and the South American fruit fly Anastrepha fraterculus (Wiedemann). In these regions they are present in urban areas, in commercial orchards and in wild host areas. Growers using traditional methods based exclusively on insecticides applied as air or ground sprays actively control these pests. Even so, about 143 000 tons of citrus are lost every year in these regions due to fruit fly pests. The gross value of this lost production is estimated at USD 37 million annually. Against this background and within the framework of the National Plant Health Programme, the National Agri-Food and Animal Health and Quality Service (El Servicio Nacional de Sanidad y Calidad Agroalimentaria - SENASA) has made the expansion of the fight against these pests a priority. The expanded programme plans to become comprehensive, extending suppression of the pest to these other major fruit production regions by applying the area-wide concept, and integrating and adapting different technologies to each particular regional condition. The programme will incorporate the use of the SIT over an additional 90 000 hectares. The main economic impact of the expanded programme is expected to be felt in the citrus- growing areas of the north-eastern region, Monte Caseros (Corrientes) - Colón (Entre Ríos), where 56 200 hectares are used for the production of oranges and tangerines by 2400 growers. In this important production area (932 000 tons of citrus), direct benefits will include increased revenues from the higher volumes and quality of fruit produced due to the absence of damage by fruit flies; these are estimated from the fourth year of the initiation of the expanded programme at USD seven million per year. Reduced surveillance and control costs coupled with reduced environmental impacts arising from lower insecticide use will be additional advantages. KEYWORDS Anastrepha fraterculus, South American fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata, Mediterranean fruit fly, Argentina, area-wide, suppression, fly-free areas, areas of low prevalence [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 18 of Part IV of the book "Progress in Tourism Marketing," edited by Metin Kozak and Luisa Andreu is presented. It explores the impact of price promotions in making up the loyalty of consumers. It highlights the market and price promotions as a tool used for the stimulation of tourist short term sales trips. It notes that in a competitive industry, the promotional effects must perform an analysis beyond the promotional period and is not limited to short term effects.

The question of detecting pertinent information about an individual from properties of their speech is not a new one. Much research has been done to explore the manifestation of emotions in voice. The work presented in this paper proposes to apply these efforts in the domain of depression assessment using Case Based Reasoning. Cases are constructed using the recordings of responses to a questionnaire from English speaking Males and Females, and Spanish speaking Males and Females. We apply the exemplar and instance approach to classify new test cases. Experimental results show that the construction of cases using sound waveform statistics can be utilized by a case based reasoner to classify new instances correctly. Keywords: Case-Base Reasoning, Speech recognition, Decision Support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several methodologies for function approximation using TSK systems make use of clustering techniques to place the rules in the input space. Nevertheless classical clustering algorithms are more related to unsupervised learning and thus the output of the training data is not taken into account or, simply the characteristics of the function approximation problem are not considered. In this paper we propose a new approach for the initialization of centres in clustering-based TSK systems for function approximation that takes into account the expected output error distribution in the input space to place the fuzzy system rule centres. The convenience of proposed the algorithm comparing to other input clustering and input/output clustering techniques is shown through a significant example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and analyzes the performance of the TaSe-II model, carrying out a statistical comparison among different TSK fuzzy system configurations for function approximation. The TaSe-II model, using a special type of rule antecedents, utilizes the Taylor Series Expansion of a function around a point to provide interpretability to the local models in a TSK approximator using a low number of rules. Here we will review the TaSe model basics and endow it with a full learning algorithm for function approximation from a set of I/O data points. Finally we present an ANOVA analysis about the modification of the different blocks that intervene in a TSK fuzzy model whose results support the use of the TaSe-II model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering techniques have always been oriented to solve classification and pattern recognition problems. This clustering techniques have been used also to initialize the centers of the Radial Basis Function (RBF) when designing an RBF Neural Network (RBFNN) that approximates a function. Since classification and function approximation problems are quite different, it is necessary to design a new clustering technique specialized in the problem of function approximation. In this paper, a new clustering technique it is proposed to make the right initialization of the centers of the RBFs. The novelty of the algorithm is the employment of a possibilistic partition of the data, rather than a hard or fuzzy partition as it is commonly used in clustering algorithms. The use of this kind of partition with the addition of several components to use the information provided by the output, allow the new algorithm to provide better results and be more robust than the other clustering algorithms even if noise exits in the input data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter examines the extent in which social policies in Southern European countries were motivated by the motion of social dumping. Social dumping may be understood as those international practices enhancing competitiveness on the part of national economies by means of reducing or preventing growth of social and employment protection. In older established welfare states, there is much concern about national competitiveness in international markets and the threat from the adoption of a social dumping policy.

We consider a very large class of hierarchies of zero-curvature equations constructed from affine Kac-Moody algebras Ĵ. We argue that one of the basic ingredients for the appearance of soliton solutions in such theories is the existence of "vacuum solutions" corresponding to Lax operators lying in some abelian (up to central term) subalgebra of Ĵ. Using the dressing transformation procedure we construct the solutions in the orbit of those vacuum solutions, and conjecture that the soliton solutions correspond to some special points in those orbits. The generalized tau-function for those hierarchies are defined for integrable highest weight representations of Ĵ, and it applies for any level of the representation and it is independent of its realization. We illustrate our methods with the recently proposed non abelian Toda models coupled to matter fields. A very special class of such theories possess a U (1) Noether charge that, under a suitable gauge fixing of the conformal symmetry, is proportional to a topological charge. That leads to a mechanism that confines the matter fields inside the solitons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Catholic analysis of Protestant missionary efforts among Hispanics in the U. S. Southwest and Spanish America. [ABSTRACT FROM CONTRIBUTOR]