Although the influence of the picaresque genre has given rise to countless works that have enabled us to reinterpret Cervantes’poetics, it remains impossible to provide a systematic characterisation of his reappropriation of the lives of picaros. Starting from this observation, we will examine three types of integration of picaresque material in Don Quixote and the Exemplary Novels, ranging from the playful to the more serious. We will then address a more obscure case of dialogue with the ideas of Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache, focusing on the grim fate of Licencia Vidriera.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Spain
Jorge Castillo-Mateo, Alan E. Gelfand, Zeus Gracia-Tabuenca
et al.
Record-breaking temperature events are now very frequently in the news, viewed as evidence of climate change. With this as motivation, we undertake the first substantial spatial modeling investigation of temperature record-breaking across years for any given day within the year. We work with a dataset consisting of over sixty years (1960-2021) of daily maximum temperatures across peninsular Spain. Formal statistical analysis of record-breaking events is an area that has received attention primarily within the probability community, dominated by results for the stationary record-breaking setting with some additional work addressing trends. Such effort is inadequate for analyzing actual record-breaking data. Effective analysis requires rich modeling of the indicator events which define record-breaking sequences. Resulting from novel and detailed exploratory data analysis, we propose hierarchical conditional models for the indicator events. After suitable model selection, we discover explicit trend behavior, necessary autoregression, significance of distance to the coast, useful interactions, helpful spatial random effects, and very strong daily random effects. Illustratively, the model estimates that global warming trends have increased the number of records expected in the past decade almost two-fold, 1.93 (1.89,1.98), but also estimates highly differentiated climate warming rates in space and by season.
Among Italy, Spain, and Japan, the age distributions of COVID-19 mortality show only small variation even though the number of deaths per country shows large variation. To understand the determinant for this situation, we constructed a mathematical model describing the transmission dynamics and natural history of COVID-19 and analyzed the dataset of mortality in Italy, Spain, and Japan. We estimated the parameter which describes the age-dependency of susceptibility by fitting the model to reported data, including the effect of change in contact patterns during the epidemics of COVID-19, and the fraction of symptomatic infections. Our study revealed that if the mortality rate or the fraction of symptomatic infections among all COVID-19 cases does not depend on age, then unrealistically different age-dependencies of susceptibilities against COVID-19 infections between Italy, Japan, and Spain are required to explain the similar age distribution of mortality but different basic reproduction numbers (R0). Variation of susceptibility by age itself cannot explain the robust age distribution in mortality by COVID-19 infections in those three countries, however it does suggest that the age-dependencies of (i) the mortality rate and (ii) the fraction of symptomatic infections among all COVID-19 cases determine the age distribution of mortality by COVID-19.
Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Maria Biedma-Ferrer, Maria Bogren
The study of work-family conflict (WFC) and work-family policies (WFP) and their impact on the well-being of employees in the tourism sector is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers. To overcome the adverse effects of WFC, managers should promote WFP, which contribute to increased well-being at work and employees' commitment. This paper aims to analyze the impact of WFP accessibility and organizational support on well-being directly and by mediating the organizational commitment that these policies might encourage. In addition, we also study whether these relationships vary according to gender and employee seniority. To test the hypotheses derived from this objective, we collected 530 valid and completed questionnaires from workers in the tourism sector in Spain, which we analyzed using structural equation modeling based on the PLS-SEM approach. The results show that human resource management must consider the importance of organizational support for workers to make WFP accessible and generate organizational commitment and well-being at work.
The paper re-examines the principal methodological questions, arising in the debate over the cosmological standard model's postulate of Dark Matter vs. rivalling proposals that modify standard (Newtonian and general-relativistic) gravitational theory, the so-called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and its subsequent extensions. What to make of such seemingly radical challenges of cosmological orthodoxy? In the first part of our paper, we assess MONDian theories through the lens of key ideas of major 20th century philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan), thereby rectifying widespread misconceptions and misapplications of these ideas common in the pertinent MOND-related literature. None of these classical methodological frameworks, which render precise and systematise the more intuitive judgements prevalent in the scientific community, yields a favourable verdict on MOND and its successors -- contrary to claims in the MOND-related literature by some of these theories' advocates; the respective theory appraisals are largely damning. Drawing on these insights, the paper's second part zooms in on the most common complaint about MONDian theories, their ad-hocness. We demonstrate how the recent coherentist model of ad-hocness captures, and fleshes out, the underlying -- but too often insufficiently articulated -- hunches underlying this critique. MONDian theories indeed come out as severely ad hoc: they do not cohere well with either theoretical or empirical-factual background knowledge. In fact, as our complementary comparison with the cosmological standard model's Dark Matter postulate shows, with respect to ad-hocness, MONDian theories fare worse than the cosmological standard model.
Amber Hartman Scholz, Jens Freitag, Christopher H. C. Lyal
et al.
Ensuring international benefit-sharing from sequence data without jeopardising open sharing is a major obstacle for the Convention on Biological Diversity and other UN negotiations. Here, the authors propose a solution to address the concerns of both developing countries and life scientists.
Berta Serrano, Manel Mendoza, Paula Garcia‐Aguilar
et al.
Abstract Introduction The association between preeclampsia and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) is under study. Previous publications have hypothesized the existence of shared risk factors for both conditions or a deficient trophoblastic invasion as possible explanations for this association. The primary aim of this study was to examine baseline risk factors measured in the first‐trimester combined screening for preeclampsia in pregnant women with COVID‐19 compared with the general population. A secondary aim of this study was to compare risk factors among patients with mild and severe COVID‐19. Material and Methods This was an observational retrospective study conducted at Vall d'Hebron Hospital Campus (Catalonia, Spain). Study patients were 231 pregnant women undergoing the first‐trimester screening for preeclampsia and positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 between February 2020 and September 2021. The reference cohort were 13 033 women of the general population from six centers across Catalonia from May 2019 to June 2021. Based on the need for hospitalization, patients were classified in two groups: mild and severe COVID‐19. First‐trimester screening for preeclampsia included maternal history, mean arterial blood pressure, mean uterine artery pulsatility index (UtAPI), placental growth factor (PlGF), and pregnancy‐associated plasma protein‐A (PAPP‐A). Results The proportion of cases at high risk for preeclampsia was significantly higher among the COVID‐19 group compared with the general population (19.0% and 13.2%, respectively; p = 0.012). When analyzing risk factors for preeclampsia individually, women with COVID‐19 had higher median body mass index (25.2 vs 24.5, p = 0.041), higher UtAPI multiple of the median (MoM) (1.08 vs 1.00, p < 0.001), higher incidence of chronic hypertension (2.8% vs 0.9%, p = 0.015), and there were fewer smokers (5.7% vs 11.6%, p = 0.007). The MoMs of PlGF and PAPP‐A did not differ significantly between both groups (0.96 vs 0.97, p = 0.760 and 1.00 vs 1.01, p = 0.432; respectively). Conclusions In patients with COVID‐19, there was a higher proportion of women at high risk for preeclampsia at the first‐trimester screening than in the general population, mainly because of maternal risk factors, rather than placental signs of a deficient trophoblastic invasion.
Chromatic dispersion is a common problem to degrade the system resolution in optical coherence tomography (OCT). This study is to develop a deep learning network for automated dispersion compensation (ADC-Net) in OCT. The ADC-Net is based on a redesigned UNet architecture which employs an encoder-decoder pipeline. The input section encompasses partially compensated OCT B-scans with individual retinal layers optimized. Corresponding output is a fully compensated OCT B-scans with all retinal layers optimized. Two numeric parameters, i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric computed at multiple scales (MS-SSIM), were used for objective assessment of the ADC-Net performance. Comparative analysis of training models, including single, three, five, seven and nine input channels were implemented. The five-input channels implementation was observed as the optimal mode for ADC-Net training to achieve robust dispersion compensation in OCT
About fifty years after the work that astronomer Tycho Brahe carried out while living on the island of Hven had made him world famous, King Christian IV of Denmark built the Trinity Buildings in Copenhagen. The Tower observatory was opened in 1642, and it housed the astronomers from the University of Copenhagen until 1861 when a new, modern observatory was built at Østervold in the eastern part of the city. In 1996, all the University astronomers from the observatories at Østervold and the small town of Brorfelde were relocated to the Rockefeller Buildings at Østerbro, and the two observatories were closed. In this paper we focus on the library at the observatory in Østervold, and its subsequent fate following the close-down of that observatory.
This article presents a new model to predict the evolution of infective diseases under uncertainty or low-quality information, just as it has happened in the initial scenario during the CoVid-19 spread in China and Europe. The model has been used to predict the death rate in Spain but can be used to predict the demand of ICUs or mechanical ventilators under different restraint policies. The main novelty of the model is that it keeps track of the date of infection of a single individual and uses stochastic distributions to aggregate individuals who share the same date of infection. In addition, it uses two types of infections, mild and serious, with a different recovery time. These features are implemented in a set of differential equations which determine the number of Carriers, Infections, Recoveries, Hospitalized and Deaths. Comparison with real data shows good agreement.
In this paper, we describe the results of analyzing a large-scale survey, called the Covid19Impact survey, to assess citizens feedback on four areas related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain: social contact behavior, financial impact, working situation and health status. A total of 24 questions cover the areas of demographics, their home situation, social contact behavior, personal economic impact, their workplace situation and their health. The survey was responded to by 156,614 participants between the evening of March 28th and April 2nd, 2020. Such a large response enables us to gain new insights, as well as an unprecedented glimpse at respondents personal experiences and concerns during the current COVID-19 pandemic. From the analysis, we draw several implications for the design of public policies related to the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All Hamiltonian complexity results to date have been proven by constructing a local Hamiltonian whose ground state -- or at least some low-energy state -- is a "computational history state", encoding a quantum computation as a superposition over the history of the computation. We prove that all history-state Hamiltonians must be critical. More precisely, for any circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping that maps quantum circuits to local Hamiltonians with low-energy history states, there is an increasing sequence of circuits that maps to a growing sequence of Hamiltonians with spectral gap closing at least as fast as O(1/n) with the number of qudits n in the circuit. This result holds for very general notions of history state, and also extends to quasi-local Hamiltonians with exponentially-decaying interactions. This suggests that QMA-hardness for gapped Hamiltonians (and also BQP-completeness of adiabatic quantum computation with constant gap) either require techniques beyond history state constructions. Or gapped Hamiltonians cannot be QMA-hard (respectively, BQP-complete).
The purpose of this article is to determine the building process of Burmese Marxism and its relation to other ideologies of the anticolonial movement, and the consequences of the founding of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). We will analyze the formative period of the PCB and its difficulties to consolidate its ideology in a complex political, social and cultural environment and how its actions during World War II will permit the party to become the country’s main political force. But the opportunity of having absolute power in its hands will be missed and will mark the beginning of his political decline.
Aquest article és la segona part d’un assaig panoràmic sobre el catalanisme en tots els seus vessants i formes a la Catalunya del Nord que els autors havien dut a terme anteriorment. Una vegada coneguts i exposats els perquès i les evolucions del procés intel·lectual i polític a la Catalunya del Nord, amb les seves pròpies característiques en el context europeu, aquest treball evoca ara l’evolució del «catalanisme» de manera sintètica entre la postguerra dels anys vint i els anys setanta. Es tracta d’etapes ben diferents en què el procés s’accelera, així com les transformacions polítiques, socials i culturals. Un dels principals objectius del treball és donar a conèixer la projecció pròpia del nord tenint en compte una realitat limítrof, però alhora diferenciada, en un altre Estat i amb perspectives entrecreuades amb el sud. Novament, es tracta d’un esbós analític que prova d’alimentar alguns aspectes sovint omesos o poc entenedors des del Principat i la resta de territoris catalans; i fins i tot dins del mateix espai nord-català.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Spain
We have been congratulated on the stage by a Nobel laureate (he was our curtain raiser), played our music in planetariums, museums, observatories throughout Spain and at the end of the meeting of the ESO telescopes time allocation committee, shocked audiences in rock concerts, written monthly on Musica Universalis, made the second concert in 3D in Spain after Kraftwerk and broadcasted it live in Radio 3, mixed our music with poetry read aloud by scientists, composed the soundtracks of CARMENES, QUIJOTE, ESTRACK and the Gaia first data release, made a videoclip on how computer simulates the formation of stars... All those moments will not be lost in time like tears in rain, but put together in Bilbao during the 2016 meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society.
Harufumi Tamazawa, Akito Davis Kawamura, Hisashi Hayakawa
et al.
Recent studies of radioisotopes in tree rings or ice cores suggest that extreme space weather events occurred in the pre-telescope age. Observational records of naked-eye sunspots and low-latitude auroras in historical documents in pre-telescopic age can provide useful information on past solar activity. In this paper, we present the results of a comprehensive survey of records of sunspots and auroras in Chinese official histories from the 6th century to the 10th century, in the period of Suí, Táng, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. These official histories contain records of continuous observations with well-formatted reports conducted under the policy of the government. A brief comparison of the frequency of observations of sunspots and auroras with the observations of radioisotopes as an indicator of solar activity during the corresponding periods is provided. Based on our data, we survey and compile the records of sunspots and auroras in historical documents from variouslocations and in several languages, and ultimately provide these as open data to the scientific community.
We propose and demonstrate experimentally a scheme to create entangled history states of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) type. In our experiment, the polarization states of a single photon at three different times are prepared as a GHZ entangled history state. We define a GHZ functional which attains a maximum value $1$ on the ideal GHZ entangled history state and is bounded above by $1/16$ for any three-time history state lacking tripartite entanglement. We have measured the GHZ functional on a state we have prepared experimentally, yielding a value of $0.656\pm 0.005$, clearly demonstrating the contribution of entangled histories.