Andrea Matus Gonzalez, Anastasia Hughes, Soledad Molina
et al.
Introduction: Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) carry symptom and treatment burden, which together with comorbidities, can impair their ability to engage in life activities. Different values and priorities regarding life participation may vary depending on the population and setting. We aimed to describe the perspectives of life participation in patients with CKD not requiring kidney replacement therapy (KRT) in Latin America. Methods: In April 2024, we conducted a workshop with facilitated breakout groups (small group discussions) involving patients, caregivers, and health care professionals in Spanish language to discuss the impact of CKD on life participation in patients with CKD. Transcripts were analyzed thematically. Results: Sixty-six participants, including 51 patients and caregivers, and 15 health care professionals from 5 countries (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Peru) attended. Five themes were identified as follows: despair and sense of doom (coming to a sudden halt, diminished involvement in social activities with family and friends, paralyzing fear, fragility and vulnerability, and losing mental fortitude); stigmatized and judged (alone in the diagnosis, reprimanded for dietary choices, and discriminated by employers and colleagues); debilitating symptoms (incapacitated by pain and fatigue impairing functioning); threatening life goals (obscuring decision-making around family planning and relinquishing career aspirations); and garnering hope and strengthening resilience (overcoming challenges with family support, finding strength in spirituality, encouraged by clinicians, and physical activity to promote well-being). Conclusion: Patients with CKD experienced despair, hopelessness, loneliness and isolation, debilitating symptoms, and uncertainty about their family and vocational goals, which contributed to impaired life participation. Strategies are needed to address these challenges to enhance the capacity of patients to live well with CKD.
Yanco Amor Torterolo-Orta, Jaione Macicior-Mitxelena, Marina Miguez-Lamanuzzi
et al.
This article presents the experiments and results obtained by the GRESEL team in the IberLEF 2025 shared task PastReader: Transcribing Texts from the Past. Three types of experiments were conducted with the dual aim of participating in the task and enabling comparisons across different approaches. These included the use of a web-based OCR service, a traditional OCR engine, and a compact multimodal model. All experiments were run on consumer-grade hardware, which, despite lacking high-performance computing capacity, provided sufficient storage and stability. The results, while satisfactory, leave room for further improvement. Future work will focus on exploring new techniques and ideas using the Spanish-language dataset provided by the shared task, in collaboration with Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE).
In this paper, we address the necessity of data related to mobile traffic of the legacy infrastructure to extract useful information and perform network dimensioning for 5G. These data can help us achieve a more efficient network planning design, especially in terms of topology and cost. To that end, a real open database of top three Spanish mobile network operators (MNOs) is used to estimate the traffic and to identify the area of highest user density for the deployment of new services. We propose the data acquisition procedure described to clean the database, to extract meaningful traffic information and to visualize traffic density patterns for new gNB deployments. We present the state of the art in Network Data. We describe the considered network database in detail. The Network Data Acquisition entity along with the proposed procedure is explained. The corresponding results are discussed, following the conclusions.
Andrés Fernández García, Javier de la Rosa, Julio Gonzalo
et al.
The ability to summarize long documents succinctly is increasingly important in daily life due to information overload, yet there is a notable lack of such summaries for Spanish documents in general, and in the legal domain in particular. In this work, we present BOE-XSUM, a curated dataset comprising 3,648 concise, plain-language summaries of documents sourced from Spain's ``Boletín Oficial del Estado'' (BOE), the State Official Gazette. Each entry in the dataset includes a short summary, the original text, and its document type label. We evaluate the performance of medium-sized large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on BOE-XSUM, comparing them to general-purpose generative models in a zero-shot setting. Results show that fine-tuned models significantly outperform their non-specialized counterparts. Notably, the best-performing model -- BERTIN GPT-J 6B (32-bit precision) -- achieves a 24\% performance gain over the top zero-shot model, DeepSeek-R1 (accuracies of 41.6\% vs.\ 33.5\%).
Isabel Martínez, S. Murgui, Óscar F. García
et al.
Abstract This study analyzes the parenting styles that could act as risk or protective factors for bullying and cyberbullying victimization in Spain, considering the predisposition to aggression of the adolescents. The protective or risk effect of parenting styles for adolescents' related behavior such as antisocial behavior, school adjustment, and self-esteem was also analyzed. Study sample was 1109 adolescents aged between 12 and 17 years (49.96%, females, M = 13.88, SD = 1.38). A 4 × 2 × 2 × 2 MANOVA was applied for the outcome variables of bullying victimization (traditional bullying and cyberbullying), antisocial behavior, school adjustment, and self-esteem; with parenting style, predisposition to aggression, sex and age as independent variables. The results confirm and extend emergent research in parenting styles, carried out in Spain and other European and Latin-American countries, showing that indulgent parenting, characterized by the use of reasoning and warmth practices, can act as a protective factor for both traditional bullying and cyberbullying victimization. On the contrary, authoritarian parenting, characterized by the use of physical and verbal coercion and privation practices, would act as a risk factor for cyberbullying and traditional bullying victimization. The protective and risk effects of parenting styles over adolescents' adjustment take place irrespective of the adolescents' predisposition to aggression.
Janaína Mendes-Laureano, Jorge A. Gómez-García, Alejandro Guerrero-López
et al.
The screening of Parkinson's Disease (PD) through speech is hindered by a notable lack of publicly available datasets in different languages. This fact limits the reproducibility and further exploration of existing research. To address this gap, this manuscript presents the NeuroVoz corpus consisting of 112 native Castilian-Spanish speakers, including 58 healthy controls and 54 individuals with PD, all recorded in ON state. The corpus showcases a diverse array of speech tasks: sustained vowels; diadochokinetic tests; 16 Listen-and-Repeat utterances; and spontaneous monologues. The dataset is also complemented with subjective assessments of voice quality performed by an expert according to the GRBAS scale (Grade/Roughness/Breathiness/Asthenia/Strain), as well as annotations with a thorough examination of phonation quality, intensity, speed, resonance, intelligibility, and prosody. The corpus offers a substantial resource for the exploration of the impact of PD on speech. This data set has already supported several studies, achieving a benchmark accuracy of 89% for the screening of PD. Despite these advances, the broader challenge of conducting a language-agnostic, cross-corpora analysis of Parkinsonian speech patterns remains open.
We present a computationally-grounded word similarity dataset based on two well-known Natural Language Processing resources; text corpora and knowledge bases. This dataset aims to fulfil a gap in psycholinguistic research by providing a variety of quantifications of semantic similarity in an extensive set of noun pairs controlled by variables that play a significant role in lexical processing. The dataset creation has consisted in three steps, 1) computing four key psycholinguistic features for each noun; concreteness, frequency, semantic and phonological neighbourhood density; 2) pairing nouns across these four variables; 3) for each noun pair, assigning three types of word similarity measurements, computed out of text, Wordnet and hybrid embeddings. The present dataset includes noun pairs' information in Basque and European Spanish, but further work intends to extend it to more languages.
Omar Otoniel Flores-Cortez, Bruno Gonzales Crespin
Freight transport of goods and raw materials is a central part of the supply chain in the commercial exchange in Latin America. Control and monitoring of this activity are vital for an efficient economic flow and, more importantly, without losing money. Most of the problems that generate financial losses occur in cargo freight by land. Losses due to changes in the weight of the payload to be transported or fuel/time losses due to capricious changes by the driver on the scheduled route. This work aims to demonstrate use of Internet of Thing (IoT) techniques to propose a prototype of a telemetry system to monitor in real-time the payload weight and location of a cargo truck and become a technological tool that supports the tasks of monitoring and control of the use of cargo trucks, and together with other logistics measures, leads to minimizing economic losses. The development of this project was based on the IoT architecture reference model: an ATmega32u4 microcontroller was used together with a SIM808 GSM and GPS module as the main component of the IoT Node. In addition, Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools were used as an IoT web platform and cloud data storage. The main result was a prototype of a telemetry system to track a cargo truck via the web; the weight and position data are accessible from any device with internet access through a website. Preliminary field tests have shown the proposed system to be an efficient and low-cost option.
Dutch fascism was marked by an international outlook and character from the outset in the 1920s. Rather than a purely Netherlands affair, it had proponents in multiple countries, particularly Belgium and the East Indies (Indonesia). For many of these, the idea of a Great Netherlands territory uniting all Dutch-speaking nations – Dietsland – was central to their international vision. There were a number of Dutch fascist parties and other organisations spread across the globe which experienced limited success throughout the 1920s, notably Flemish fascists in Belgium, and the reactionary Fatherland Club in the Dutch Indies. The latter was the most important, successfully mobilising the white settler population against perceived weakness in the face of Indonesian nationalism and communism. In the early 1930s they became influenced by fascism. The dominant fascist force of the 1930s however was Anton Mussert’s National Socialist Movement, which became a considerable force in the Netherlands, but proportionally even greater in the East Indies. Permitting mixed-race members in the party, it established integrated branches in the colonies where it became the largest political party. An inclusive culturalist notion of Dietsland was central to the party’s international vision and plans for a future fascist Imperium. It took a broadly positive stance towards the colonial administration, pointing to it as a model of fascist rule. This international Dutch fascism was underpinned by a transnational network of members and colonial administrators and army veterans which moved around the Dutch empire. This had a real impact on the development of party ideology, as leaders had to reckon with the influence of the transnational fascist network. However, ultimately metropolitan chauvinism and white supremacism determined the ultimate failure of Dutch fascism in the Indies and the hollowness of the Dietsland myth.
Joseph P. Vantassel, Brady R. Cox, Liam Wotherspoon
et al.
Wellington's port (CentrePort) experienced significant damage from the $M_w$ 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake as a result of soil liquefaction, lateral spreading, and shaking-induced damage to structures. To investigate these ill effects, and propose mitigation measures to prevent similar damage in future earthquakes, there was a need to quantify the variations in the depth to bedrock, shear stiffness, and fundamental site period ($T_0$) across the port. In order to characterize $T_0$ and develop shear wave velocity (Vs) profiles for use in seismic site response analyses, horizontal-to-vertical (H/V) spectral ratio measurements and active-source and passive-wavefield surface wave testing (i.e., MASW and MAM, respectively) were performed across the port. A site period map developed from 114 H/V spectral ratio measurements indicates several areas of rapidly changing, complex subsurface structure. Deep (200-plus meters) Vs profiles developed at six reference locations across the port were used to estimate the depth to soft (Vs $>$ 760 m/s) and hard (Vs $>$ 1500 m/s) rock. $T_0$ estimates from H/V spectral ratio measurements ($T_{0,H/V}$) at the six reference locations are shown to be related to the depth of hard rock based on linear viscoelastic transfer functions calculated from Vs profiles truncated at several depths. $T_{0,H/V}$ measurements at two ground motion stations near the port are also shown to be in reasonably good agreement with predominant periods of maximum spectral amplification recorded during both the 2016 Kaikōura and 2013 Cook Strait earthquakes, despite these sites also being effected by soil nonlinearity and potential 3D basin edge effects.
Optimizing the reliability and the robustness of a design is important but often unaffordable due to high sample requirements. Surrogate models based on statistical and machine learning methods are used to increase the sample efficiency. However, for higher dimensional or multi-modal systems, surrogate models may also require a large amount of samples to achieve good results. We propose a sequential sampling strategy for the surrogate based solution of multi-objective reliability based robust design optimization problems. Proposed local Latin hypercube refinement (LoLHR) strategy is model-agnostic and can be combined with any surrogate model because there is no free lunch but possibly a budget one. The proposed method is compared to stationary sampling as well as other proposed strategies from the literature. Gaussian process and support vector regression are both used as surrogate models. Empirical evidence is presented, showing that LoLHR achieves on average better results compared to other surrogate based strategies on the tested examples.
We propose an extension of the Davies et al. model, used to describe the London riots of 2011. This addition allows us to consider long travel distances in a city for potential rioting population. This is achieved by introducing public transport networks, which modifies the perceived travel distance between the population and likely targets. Using this more general formulation, we applied the model to the typical Griffin and Ford pattern for population distribution to describe the general features of most large Latin American cities. The possibility of long-range traveling by part of the general population has, for an immediate consequence, the existence of isolated spots more prone to suffer from rioting activity, as they are easier to reach than the rest of the city. These areas finally made it easier to control the eventual disorder by part of police forces. The reason for this outcome is that transport networks turn riots into highly localized and intense events. They are attracting a large police contingent, which will later extinguish the remaining disorder activity on the rest of the city. Therefore, working transport networks in a city effectively reduces the number of police force contingent required to control public disorder. This result, we must remark, is valid only if the model requisites for order forces are satisfied: extra police contingent can be added swiftly as required, and these forces can move around the city with total freedom.
L. Redondo-Flórez, J. Fernández‐Lucas, V. J. Clemente-Suárez
With the aim to explore cultural differences in stress-related psychological, nutrition, physical activity, and oral health factors between Spanish and Latin American professors, we analysed stress-related factors in 598 professors (39.9% male, 60.1% female, 41.3 ± 9.8 years) by a collection of questionnaires, which involved psychological, nutritional, physical activity and oral health items. Results showed how Spanish professors presented significantly (p ≤ 0.05) higher scores than Latin American professors in perceived stress (Spanish: 21.40 ± 4.32 vs. Latin American: 20.36 ± 4.31), teaching stress (Spanish: 6.59 ± 2.28 vs. Latin American: 6.00 ± 2.99) and neuroticism (Spanish: 5.40 ± 2.10 vs. Latin American: 4.58 ± 1.72). Spanish professors also showed healthier nutritional and physical activity habits than their Latin American counterparts, presenting higher consumption of milk products and a higher numbers of meals per day, greater weekly meat and fish consumption and higher weekly resistance training, as well as less eating between hours and snacking consumption. Nevertheless, Spanish professors brushed their teeth less and showed a higher smoking habit than Latin American professors. We concluded that there were cultural differences between Spanish and Latin American professors. In the present research, Spanish professors showed significantly higher burnout levels, teaching stress, perceived stress, and neuroticism than Latin American professors, and several differences were also found around health behaviours. These differences in perceived stress, teaching stress and burnout syndrome may be due to the habituation process of Latin American professors, and probably are associated with a higher stressful and demanding socio-cultural context.
Juan Villoro, consecrated in Latin American Literature as a fiction narrator and prominent author in the Children's Literature publishing market, has developed in parallel a remarkable chronological production that has received little critical attention. The reading of these chronicles in conjunction with interviews given by the author allowed us to notice a self-representation as a chronicler versed in the art of listening. Theme that is the excuse to review part of his production with the focus on his ear attentive to the expressions and manifestations of mass culture. It is interesting to approach chronic listening, a characteristic aspect of its aesthetics, from analyzing the priority place of the voice of the soccer announcer Ángel Fernández, the links with the Mexican counterculture and the construction of a myth of origin that draws on mass culture.
Latin America. Spanish America, French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature
Massive digital data processing provides a wide range of opportunities and benefits, but at the cost of endangering personal data privacy. Anonymisation consists in removing or replacing sensitive information from data, enabling its exploitation for different purposes while preserving the privacy of individuals. Over the years, a lot of automatic anonymisation systems have been proposed; however, depending on the type of data, the target language or the availability of training documents, the task remains challenging still. The emergence of novel deep-learning models during the last two years has brought large improvements to the state of the art in the field of Natural Language Processing. These advancements have been most noticeably led by BERT, a model proposed by Google in 2018, and the shared language models pre-trained on millions of documents. In this paper, we use a BERT-based sequence labelling model to conduct a series of anonymisation experiments on several clinical datasets in Spanish. We also compare BERT to other algorithms. The experiments show that a simple BERT-based model with general-domain pre-training obtains highly competitive results without any domain specific feature engineering.
En la actualidad en Colombia se dice que es tiempo de memoria respecto a la violencia política y el conflicto armado acaecidos en nuestra historia reciente, lo cual ha dado pie al posicionamiento de las narrativas testimoniales en sus distintas variables. En este contexto surgen intereses investigativos respecto a cómo las narrativas testimoniales ayudan a consolidar proyectos para una educación o pedagogías de la memoria que posibiliten acumulados sobre las experiencias en torno al conflicto político y habiliten condiciones a favor de sociedades pos-conflicto. Desde este horizonte en el artículo se abordan, en el marco de una investigación, reflexiones sobre las afectaciones que las vivencias relacionadas con violencia política instituyen en los sujetos y como estas son incorporadas a la historia personal así como sus resonancias en la memoria colectiva, dejando entrever, al mismo tiempo las intersecciones dadas entre historia y política.
History (General) and history of Europe, Latin America. Spanish America