Swimming against the tide: contemporary art practices in revolutionary Cuba

Nuestro estudio propone un recorrido que muestre la compleja y desaventajada situación del sujeto homosexual en la Cuba del siglo XXI. Como interesante contrapunto, pondremos en valor la importancia de determinadas manifestaciones artísticas contemporáneas a la hora de visibilizar la homosexualidad en la Isla fuera del estigma y la desigualdad.Our study focuses on the homosexual collective and its disadvantaged situation in revolutionary Cuba. As an interesting counterpoint, we will highlight the important role of Cuban contemporary art in removing sexual prejudices against homosexuality

Reverse Engineering Socialbot Infiltration Strategies in Twitter

Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks, and public perception about people and brands. However, such services are vulnerable to attacks from socialbots $-$ automated accounts that mimic real users $-$ seeking to tamper statistics by posting messages generated automatically and interacting with legitimate users. Potentially, if created in large scale, socialbots could be used to bias or even invalidate many existing services, by infiltrating the social networks and acquiring trust of other users with time. This study aims at understanding infiltration strategies of socialbots in the Twitter microblogging platform. To this end, we create 120 socialbot accounts with different characteristics and strategies (e.g., gender specified in the profile, how active they are, the method used to generate their tweets, and the group of users they interact with), and investigate the extent to which these bots are able to infiltrate the Twitter social network. Our results show that even socialbots employing simple automated mechanisms are able to successfully infiltrate the network. Additionally, using a $2^k$ factorial design, we quantify infiltration effectiveness of different bot strategies. Our analysis unveils findings that are key for the design of detection and counter measurements approaches

Media Brokerage: Agent-Based SLA Negotiation

Media content personalisation is a major challenge involving viewers as well as media content producer and distributor businesses. The goal is to provide viewers with media items aligned with their interests. Producers and distributors engage in item negotiations to establish the corresponding service level agreements (SLA). In order to address automated partner lookup and item SLA negotiation, this paper proposes the MultiMedia Brokerage (MMB) platform, which is a multiagent system that negotiates SLA regarding media items on behalf of media content producer and distributor businesses. The MMB platform is structured in four service layers: interface, agreement management, business modelling and market. In this context, there are: (i) brokerage SLA (bSLA), which are established between individual businesses and the platform regarding the provision of brokerage services; and (ii) item SLA (iSLA), which are established between producer and distributor businesses about the provision of media items. In particular, this paper describes the negotiation, establishment and enforcement of bSLA and iSLA, which occurs at the agreement and negotiation layers, respectively. The platform adopts a pay-per-use business model where the bSLA define the general conditions that apply to the related iSLA. To illustrate this process, we present a case study describing the negotiation of a bSLA instance and several related iSLA instances. The latter correspond to the negotiation of the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for a specific end viewer

Brokerage Platform for Media Content Recommendation

Near real time media content personalisation is nowadays a major challenge involving media content sources, distributors and viewers. This paper describes an approach to seamless recommendation, negotiation and transaction of personalised media content. It adopts an integrated view of the problem by proposing, on the business-to-business (B2B) side, a brokerage platform to negotiate the media items on behalf of the media content distributors and sources, providing viewers, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, with a personalised electronic programme guide (EPG) containing the set of recommended items after negotiation. In this setup, when a viewer connects, the distributor looks up and invites sources to negotiate the contents of the viewer personal EPG. The proposed multi-agent brokerage platform is structured in four layers, modelling the registration, service agreement, partner lookup, invitation as well as item recommendation, negotiation and transaction stages of the B2B processes. The recommendation service is a rule-based switch hybrid filter, including six collaborative and two content-based filters. The rule-based system selects, at runtime, the filter(s) to apply as well as the final set of recommendations to present. The filter selection is based on the data available, ranging from the history of items watched to the ratings and/or tags assigned to the items by the viewer. Additionally, this module implements (i) a novel item stereotype to represent newly arrived items, (ii) a standard user stereotype for new users, (iii) a novel passive user tag cloud stereotype for socially passive users, and (iv) a new content-based filter named the collinearity and proximity similarity (CPS). At the end of the paper, we present off-line results and a case study describing how the recommendation service works. The proposed system provides, to our knowledge, an excellent holistic solution to the problem of recommending multimedia contents

Validity of bodily-rhythmic coordination field test for obese people

Coordination is one of the most important skills in humans' relationship with the environment, alongside others such as endurance, strength, flexibility, and memory. However, despite there are many tools to measure these latter functional capabilities, the assessment of rhythmic coordination tests require sophisticated and expensive materials, or are specific to certain forms of dance. The purpose of this study is to show a new test for measuring rhythmic coordination in any person, in order to prove its validity and usefulness in the field of physical activity and health. Methods: Twenty women obese participants aged 50.63 ± 11.48 with body mass index (BMI) 38.61 ± 5.19 participated in this study. The test procedures were developed in a square circuit. The test was video recorded with a fixed camera for post-hoc observation purposes. A binary subdivision music track was chose (due to the simplicity beat) and the basic motor skill march was performed in which arms-legs-time musical coordination is important. Results: The results showed a moderate to good reliability and validity for the rhythmic-bodily coordination. These results show that observers had good accuracy in observing and evaluating the rhythmic-bodily coordination. Conclusion: The results obtained show that this test is presented as an objective, valid and reliable tool to assess the rhythmic-bodily coordination for people with obesity.This Study received a financial support from the Predoctoral research grant by Universidad Católica de Valencia

Beam Studies of the Segmented Resistive WELL: a Potential Thin Sampling Element for Digital Hadron Calorimetry

Thick Gas Electron Multipliers (THGEMs) have the potential of constituting thin, robust sampling elements in Digital Hadron Calorimetry (DHCAL) in future colliders. We report on recent beam studies of new single- and double-THGEM-like structures; the multiplier is a Segmented Resistive WELL (SRWELL) - a single-faced THGEM in contact with a segmented resistive layer inductively coupled to readout pads. Several 10$\times$10 cm$^2$ configurations with a total thickness of 5-6 mm (excluding electronics) with 1 cm$^2$ pads coupled to APV-SRS readout were investigated with muons and pions. Detection efficiencies in the 98$$ range were recorded with average pad-multiplicity of $\sim$1.1. The resistive anode resulted in efficient discharge damping, with potential drops of a few volts; discharge probabilities were $\sim10^{-7}$ for muons and $\sim10^{-6}$ for pions in the double-stage configuration, at rates of a few kHz/cm$^2$. Further optimization work and research on larger detectors are underway.Comment: Presented at the $13^{th}$ Vienna Conference on Instrumentation, February 2013 and submitted to its proceeding

Between Time and Heaven: The Mysterious Laws of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge\u27s Poetry

Abstract: The poetry of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge is a continuous attempt to grasp the spirit of the place: a poem is what is retained by the poet after his travels around the world. Avoiding the trap of simply describing his journeys, the poet creates images that reshape historical and geographic realities, that is to say, in his own poems he goes beyond his mere physical presence in a place to find the mysterious laws of poetry. In his poems, he builds homes for the gods so that they will strengthen his words and images. Since the gods know the mysteries that poets want to translate into poetry, the poet follows them, enters the deep sea, searches among ruins, overhears enigmatic dialogues, and travels around the world like an ancient oarsman

Diseño, desarrollo e implementación de un sistema Web para el control y gestión de la empresa Impresora Contacto Ltda.

109 p.Todos conocemos las grandes ventajas que obtienen las empresas al utilizar las tecnologías informáticas, para realizar la gestión y administración de los procesos de producción. En el caso de las medianas empresas donde existe un escaso conocimiento en esta materia, de las posibilidades y ventajas que conlleva computarizar el sistema, y los procesos administrativos se realizan manualmente, es necesario crear un programa que cuente con la posibilidad de adaptar la formula de control y gestión usada actualmente en la empresa. Esta herramienta, debe adaptarse a las necesidades y requerimientos, que ya están interiorizados dentro de la administración de la industria con el objetivo que pueda ser fácilmente adoptada por la empresa, que ayude, agilice y optimice el proceso de ministración y gestión de esta. El no utilizar estos sistemas computacionales se presenta como un problema, sin embargo, su implementación, se convierte en una oportunidad de innovar y en una ventaja competitiva frente a las demás empresas del rubro, desarrollando una nueva forma de realizar el proceso de control y gestión, y asta presentarse como una empresa superior en cuanto a calidad y servicio a las alternativas existentes hoy en el mercado.Es por estas razones que se hace necesaria la creación y ayuda en la implementación de un software a la medida para esta empresa./ABSTRACT: We all know the great advantages that companies get from using cybernetic technologies, from administration to production processing. In the specificase of mid-sized companies, where little or no knowledge of these advantages exist. Usually the administrative processes are done manually, making it necessary to create computer programs that adapt to the administrative necessities and requirements of each company, speeding up and optimizing their management. Not using these computational systems becomes a problem: it's implementation in a company pen opportunities to innovate and get an upper hand before other businesses of the same area. This will allow further development of the company, due to it's newly acquired methods of administration, becoming o ering a superior service, and thus and overall a better quality company compared to it's alternative of the same eld. For these reason is that the creation and implementation of custom software is becoming a necessity for these companies