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Objective: Vojta therapy describes stereotypic widespread motor responses as a pattern of tonic muscle contractions during a peripherical pressure stimulation. The present work proposes to characterize the responses at muscles level to a specific tactile input based on Vojta therapy, assessed by sEMG, compared to a sham stimulation in healthy subjects. Methods: Surface electromyography (sEMG) signal was acquired with dipolar electrodes placed at wrist extensors of both forearms, right tibialis anterior, and top part of rectus abdominus, ground channel placed over the right olecranon. It was amplified and digitized by a 4-channel hub Biosignalsplux device (Plux Wireless Biosignals S.A., Lisboa, Portugal), sampled at 1000 Hz with 16-bit per channel. A continuous 10-minute record of the sEMG signal from the four electrodes were registered. Resting EEG during the first minute before the stimulation period was recorded by 64 active electrodes. Results: Statistically significant differences were showed between sham and experimental group. Experimental group participants were subjected to cluster analysis based on their muscle activation patterns, generating three different models of activation. Differences in the previous resting cortical activity in left superior frontal area were found between clusters that activated limb muscles and the cluster that did not. Conclusions: Vojta specific stimulation area activates innate muscle responses assessed by sEMG in healthy subjects, compared to a sham stimulation. Significance: This characterization might be helpful to the prescription and application of Vojta therapy in an individual-basis for non-neurophysiologically damaged adult subjects.

Introduction: the Wisconsin Gait Scale (WGS) has been shown to be a valid and quick tool for analyzing gait in post-stroke people in the clinical setting. Its widespread use has led to versions of the scale in other languages, but so far there has been no version in Spanish. Objective: to conduct a cross-cultural adaptation of the WGS for use in the Spanish-speaking population and to analyze the content validity. Materials and methods: the Spanish version was obtained using the double translation method and back translation method, followed by a review by an expert committee. This expert committee evaluated the content validity index (CVI) for each item on the version obtained and for the entire scale (scale content validity index (S-CVI)). The item content validity index (I-CIV) was calculated as the number of experts whose score had been 3 or 4 divided by the total number of experts. To obtain the S-CVI, the middle of the I-CVI was calculated for all the items on the scale. Results: the Spanish version of the WGS was obtained after the expert committee evaluation. The CVI was excellent for its general assessment (0.91), excellent for 85.7% of its items (≥0.78), and good for 14.3% of the CVI (≥0.72). Conclusions: the Spanish version of the WGS was developed through a process of cross-cultural adaptation from its original English version, and, according to an expert committee, it had an excellent content validity.

Evidence shows that size matters in terms of productivity. Within this literature, this paper analyses whether corporation tax penalises the productivity growth of smaller enterprises (SEs) (

Background: Brain’s is stimulated by Vojta Therapy through selected body areas activating stored innate motor programs which are exported as coordinate movement and muscle contractions to trunk and limbs. The aim of this pilot study is to know the responses at cortical level to a specific tactile input, assessed by electroencephalography (EEG), compared to a sham stimulation, in healthy subjects. Methods: A randomized-controlled trial was conducted. Participants were randomly distributed into two groups: a non-specific tactile input-group (non-STI-group) (n = 20) and a Vojta specific tactile input-group (V-STI-group) (n = 20). The non-STI-group was stimulated in a non specific area (quadriceps distal area) and V-STI-group was stimulated in a specific area (intercostal space, at the mammillary line between the 7th and 8th ribs) according to the Vojta therapy. Recording was performed with EEG for 10 min considering a first minute of rest, 8 min during the stimulus and 1 min after the stimulus. EEG activity was recorded from 32 positions with active Ag/AgCl scalp electrodes following the 10–20 system. The continuous EEG signal was split into consecutive segments of one minute. Results: The V-STI-group showed statistically significant differences in the theta, low alpha and high alpha bands, bilaterally in the supplementary motor (SMA) and premotor (PMA) areas (BA6 and BA8), superior parietal cortex (BA5, BA7) and the posterior cingulate cortex (BA23, BA31). For the V-STI-group, all frequency bands presented an initial bilateral activation of the superior and medial SMA (BA6) during the first minute. This activation was maintained until the fourth minute. During the fourth minute, the activation decreased in the three frequency bands. From the fifth minute, the activation in the superior and medial SMA rose again in the three frequency bands Conclusions: Our findings highlight that the specific stimulation area at intercostal space, on the mammillary line between 7 and 8th ribs according to Vojta therapy differentially increased bilateral activation in SMA (BA6) and Pre-SMA (BA8), BA5, BA7, BA23 and BA31 in the theta, low and high alpha bands in healthy subjects. These results could indicate the activation of innate locomotor circuits during stimulation of the pectoral area according to the Vojta therapy., The authors would like to thank the volunteers for participating in this study.

his paper presents a cognitively inspired qualitative theory, QCharm, which defines five operators for colour combination based on the qualitative colour descriptor (QCD) and applies these operators to recommend palettes of harmonic colours. Machine learning techniques have been applied to learn the QCD colour coordinates in Kobayashi’s colour space, in order to assign the resulting QCharm harmonic-colour palettes to cognitive keywords representing a feeling or a lifestyle. Furthermore, a regression model has been implemented to learn users’ preferences based on the COLOURlovers dataset. The resulting model is used as an additional criterion for recommendation. The resulting cognitive system can recommend (i) colour palettes using keywords on feelings/lifestyle, and (ii) colour palettes using the learnt user’s preference model. As an example of the practical applicability of the model, a web application, the QCharm tool, has been implemented to provide recommendations to users in an interactive way. The QCharm tool can also extract colour palettes from digital images and assign a cognitive adjective to describe colour combinations, to serve as a starting point for the design process. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

In the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) the coordination of subjects presents a challenge and a key factor for students’ learning and competence development. The joint planning of subjects about fundamentals of software engineering and design and implementation of information systems in computer science higher studies provides the students with a comprehensive view of the development of a real information system, from the conception of the idea to the final implementation for actual users. Such coordination aims to boost learning of the specific competences as well as the generic ones, and allows to generate synergies for students to obtain a direct benefit. This paper summarizes how this experience has been designed and carried out. We describe how to implement the coordination and, in addition, we include the results of a survey conducted on students enrolled in the subjects the last academic year.

A method for adapting a colour naming system to specific groups of people is presented.The starting point is a reference parametrisation of a qualitative colour description (QCD) model.The method applies a classifier over data gathered from the target group.The adapted model significantly improves the suitability of the colour naming system for the target group.The elementary colours in the refined QCD wheel are compared to other colour wheels in the literature. Colour naming consists of successfully finding the correspondence between colours as named by humans and the colour coordinates used by machine displays. Its successful implementation is crucial for human-machine interaction tasks, e.g. for the communication between service robots and humans. However, significant variability among human groups makes a general solution to this problem notoriously difficult. Qualitative models are appropriate in this context because they are robust in the presence of such variability. This paper contributes an approach to adapt the qualitative colour description (QCD) model to specific groups of users by gathering experimental data from them using a simple web interface. A classifier based on the geometric mean statistic is applied to adjust the correspondence between colour names and HSL coordinates in order to further approximate the QCD model to the common human colour understanding within the group. The usability of the resulting adapted model is evaluated by naming the predominant colour in a set of images extracted from Google searches. Results show that the refined QCD model can be used successfully to provide reference and grounding in human-machine communication. Finally, the elementary colours in the refined QCD wheel are also compared to other colour wheels in the literature.

The QArt-Learn approach for style painting categorization based on Qualitative Color Descriptors (QCD), color similarity (SimQCD), and quantitative global features (i.e. average of brightness, hue, saturation and lightness and brightness contrast) is presented in this paper. k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and support vector machine (SVM) techniques have been used for learning the features of paintings from the Baroque, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism styles. Specifically two classifiers are built, and two different parameterizations have been applied for the QCD. For testing QArt-Learn approach, the Painting-91 dataset has been used, from which the paintings corresponding to Velazquez, Vermeer, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh and Gauguin were extracted, resulting in a set of 252 paintings. The results obtained have shown categorization accuracies higher than 65%, which are comparable to accuracies obtained in the literature. However, QArt-Learn uses qualitative color names which can describe style color palettes linguistically, so that they can be better understood by non-experts in art since QCDs are aligned with human perception.

A century of research in human brain parcellation has demonstrated that different brain areas are associated with functional tasks. New neuroscientist perspectives to achieve the parcellation of the human brain have been developed to know the brain areas activation and its relationship with different stimuli. This descriptive study aimed to compare brain regions activation by specific tactile input (STI) stimuli according to the Vojta protocol (STI-group) to a non-STI stimulation (non-STI-group). An exploratory functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was performed. The 2 groups of participants were passively stimulated by an expert physical therapist using the same paradigm structure, although differing in the place of stimulation. The stimulation was presented to participants using a block design in all cases. A sample of 16 healthy participants, 5 men and 11 women, with mean age 31.31 ± 8.13 years was recruited. Indeed, 12 participants were allocated in the STI-group and 4 participants in the non-STI-group. fMRI was used to map the human brain in vivo while these tactile stimuli were being applied. Data were analyzed using a general linear model in SPM12 implemented in MATLAB. Differences between groups showed a greater activation in the right cortical areas (temporal and frontal lobes), subcortical regions (thalamus, brainstem, and basal nuclei), and in the cerebellum (anterior lobe). STI-group had specific difference brain activation areas, such as the ipsilateral putamen. Future studies should study clinical implications in neurorehabilitation patients. Sin financiación 1.870 JCR (2018) Q2, 69/160 Medicine, General & Internal 0.784 SJR (2018) Q2, 824/2894 Medicine (miscellaneous) No data IDR 2018 UEM

Research question: Several studies report modelling relating countries’ medal shares at the Olympics to population and per capita income (host status and political system are typically included as controls). This paper uses a similar model but disaggregates to the level of the individual sport to ask questions such as whether some sports have a less steep relationship with income levels than others and whether hosting effects are more pronounced in some sports than others. Research methods: Employing a random effects tobit model, data on medal shares are modelled across 15 sports at six editions of the Games (1992–2012). Marginal effects, calculated for the case of cycling, illustrate how far many poor countries are from reasonable expectation of achieving medals. Results and findings: Income is influential on outcomes in all sports, its effects most pronounced in sports with substantial requirements for specific capital equipment; the distribution of medals is less unequal in sports practised in multi-sports venues. Gains from hosting vary in magnitude, performance tending to be elevated most in sports with outcomes strongly influenced by judges. Implications: For poorer countries, the paper identifies a small group of sports on which it would be most realistic to focus resources. For Games organisers, who must decide which sports to include, it provides information relevant to the goal of spreading success more evenly across countries. For example, proposals to exclude wrestling are shown to have been potentially harmful to medal prospects of poorer countries.

In this paper qualitative colours are named by defining intervals on reference systems built on the Hue Saturation and Lightness (HSL) colour space. The new model for Qualitative Colour Description (QCD) distinguishes rainbow colours, pale , light , dark colours and colours in the grey scale. For comparing the qualitative colours described, a similarity measure based on interval distances ( SimQCDInt ) is introduced. HSL intervals for each colour label have been defined experimentally using data obtained in a user survey. Preliminary experiments have also been conducted in order to check that the proposed approach is consistent with human appreciations of colour similarity and complementarity.

I. INTRODUCTION Fiscal decentralization (hereafter: FD) is a political economy trend in both developing and developed countries. According to the World Bank (1999), some 95% of democracies now have elected subnational governments, and countries everywhere are devolving political, fiscal, and administrative powers to subnational tiers of government below the national level. In developed countries the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada have revived debates on FD or devolution (Xie, Zou, and Davoodi 1999). In recent years, the U.S. Congress has been contemplating how to devolve more expenditure responsibility to State and local governments. FD has also become a key issue in Japan because the law for the promotion of fiscal decentralization was enacted in 1995. These efforts at devolution in a number of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are accompanied by the emergence of a new top layer of government in the European Union (EU). Stegarescu (2009) finds that European integration has favored the fiscal decentralization process by increasing market size and the benefits of decentralized provision of public goods in accordance with comparative advantage and the inter-regional division of labor. The rise of the regional level of government in Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom are examples of this decentralization process in the EU. The movement toward FD is often justified by the widespread belief that it is an effective tool for increasing the efficiency of public expenditures and competition among subnational governments in delivering public services. This may also be a reaction to the failure of large centralized bureaucracies in developing and transitional countries (Martinez-Vazquez and McNab 2003). The World Bank (1999), for example, has argued that alongside globalization, localization--the increasing demand for local autonomy--is the main force shaping the world in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In this article, we focus on a specific debate in the FD literature--namely that it improves economic growth performance. We summarize a number of the relevant arguments in Section II, and then review the existing empirical evidence on the FD-growth relationship in Section III. We argue that the existing literature is deficient in a number of respects, for example by rarely testing simultaneously for revenue and expenditure decentralization. Section IV presents our data and empirical methodology, and Section V tests for an effect of FD on economic growth rates in OECD countries over the period 1972-2005. Section VI checks the robustness of our findings to alternative econometric techniques to deal with endogeneity, and alternative measures of fiscal decentralization. Section VII summarizes the main conclusions. II. ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST FISCAL DECENTRALIZATION The basic argument in favor of fiscal decentralization is that it improves the efficiency of the public sector and promotes long-term economic development (Oates 1972). The mainstream theory of fiscal federalism, referred to by Oates (2005) as "first-generation" theory argues that decentralization enhances economic efficiency because local governments have better knowledge of local conditions and preferences in the provision of public goods than national governments due to their physical and institutional proximity. These informational advantages allow local governments to deliver public goods and services that better match local preferences and/or deliver the same public goods and services at lower cost. These arguments are reinforced where public good characteristics are local in nature (e.g., sharing economies or nonexcludability aspects are geographically restricted). The first-generation theory contends that if some local outputs can produce inter-jurisdictional spillover effects, then central governments should provide matching grants to decentralized government that would internalize the benefits. …

The first part of this article explores whether convergence has occurred in technology and income across EU regions during the period 1990–2002. The second part evaluates whether these two processes of convergence are related to each other. With respect to the first question, we find that all R&D indicators and patents have converged among regions during the 1990s and this has ran parallel to a real convergence in income per capita levels. Regarding the second question, we have identified a strong relationship between the distribution of technology indicators and the distribution of regional income in Europe. Our main result is that convergence in business R&D leads to convergence in patents, which in turn leads to convergence in income per capita. Although, we identify a role for government R&D and higher education spending in this process, the policy implications for these two variables are less clear.

The ‘compensation’ and ‘efficiency’ hypotheses propose that globalization affects both the total, and composition of, public expenditures in different ways. Under the former, economic insecurity leads to expanding public sectors and social expenditures, whereas under the efficiency hypothesis, demands for lower taxes encourage smaller public sectors, and especially ‘privately productive’ spending. We test these hypotheses for a sample of OECD countries from 1980–1997. Using both the inward stock of FDI and openness as measures of globalization we find no effect on the size of government, but FDI significantly shifts the expenditure composition towards social spending, favouring the compensation hypothesis.

Are individuals’ attitudes towards globalization consistent with the predictions of the Heckscher–Ohlin (HO) theory? Using newly available data from the Flash Eurobarometer 151b of the European Commission, we find that globalization preferences are significantly and robustly correlated with an individual's relative level of human capital, consistent with the HO theory. The impact of skill on globalization preferences is positive in skill-abundant EU countries and strongly negative in EU countries that are well-endowed with low-skill labour. This study is the first to find a robust and significant negative association between skill and support to globalization in low-skill-abundant countries.

The tremendous popularity of web-based social media is attracting the attention of the industry to take profit from the massive availability of sentiment data, which is considered of a high value for Business Intelligence (BI). So far, BI has been mainly concerned with corporate data with little or null attention to the external world. However, for BI analysts, taking into account the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and the Voice of the Market (VoM) is crucial to put in context the results of their analyses. Recent advances in Sentiment Analysis have made possible to effectively extract and summarize sentiment data from these massive social media. As a consequence, VoC and VoM can be now listened from web-based social media (e.g., blogs, reviews forums, social networks, and so on). However, new challenges arise when attempting to integrate traditional corporate data and external sentiment data. This paper deals with these issues and proposes a novel semantic data infrastructure for BI aimed at providing new opportunities for integrating traditional and social BI. This infrastructure follows the principles of the Linked Open Data initiative “Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad” (Spain) with contract number TIN2011-24147 and TIN2014-55335-R

This study aims at providing an assessment about real convergence across countriesand regions in the EU, focusing more specifically on the four cohesion EU members.The results show that in the course of the last few years a process of convergence hastaken place between the per capita income levels of the EU regions and also, to a largerextent, of the Member States. Nevertheless, advances in real convergence are largelydetermined by the growth strategy implemented by the countries themselves. Lastly,our study suggests that the Community's regional policy has played a significant rolein favor of real convergence between the Member States of the EU. One importantlesson to be drawn is that the accession is likely to contribute significantly to improvingthe possibilities of the current Central and East European countries (CEECs) candidatesin aligning their per capita income levels with those of the EU members.

Research in the Life Sciences depends on the integration of large, dis- tributed and heterogeneous web resources (e.g. data sources and web services). The discovery of which of these resources are the most appropriate to solve a given task is a complex research question, since there are many candidate resources and there is little, mostly unstructured, metadata to be able to decide among them. In this paper we contribute with a semi-automatic approach, based on semantic techniques, to assist researchers in the discovery of the most appropriate web resources to ful ll a set of requirements. The main feature of our approach is that it exploits broad knowledge resources in order to annotate the unstructured texts that are available in the emerging web-based repositories of web resource metadata. The results show that the web resource discovery process bene ts from a semantic- based approach in several important aspects. One of the advantages is that the user can express her requirements in natural language avoiding the use of speci c vocabularies or query languages. Moreover, the discovery exploits not only the categories or tags of web resources, but also their description and documentation.

We study the effect of standardized external tests on students’ academic outcomes. We exploit the fact that only one of the 17 Spanish regions started doing and publishing the results of standardized tests in 2005 and apply a difference-in-difference methodology using outcomes of the PISA study from 2000 to 2009. We later confirm our results using synthetic control methods. Employing data from a single country allows us to minimize biases arising from differences in legal frameworks, social or cultural environments. Our econometric analysis lends plausibility to the hypothesis that this type of test significantly improves student outcomes. A key novelty is that our exams do not have academic consequences for the students, so effects have to come directly from the impact on teachers and administrators., Support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology from grant ECO2012-31985.

Current research in domains such as the Life Sciences depends heavily on the integration of information coming from diverse sources, which are typically highly complex and heterogeneous, and usually require exploratory access. Web services are increasingly used as the preferred method for accessing and processing these sources. Due to the large number of available web services, the sheer complexity of the data and the frequent lack of documentation, discovering the most appropriate web service for a given task is a challenge for the user. In this paper we propose a semi-automatic approach to assist the user in the discovery of which web services are the most appropriate to achieve her requirements. We describe the overall framework of our approach and we provide a detailed description of the techniques used in each phase of our approach. Finally, the usefulness of our approach is demonstrated through a Bioinformatics case study.

Background: The today's public database infrastructure spans a very large collection of heterogeneous biological data, opening new opportunities for molecular biology, bio-medical and bioinformatics research, but raising also new problems for their integration and computational processing. Results: In this paper we survey the most interesting and novel approaches for the representation, integration and management of different kinds of biological data by exploiting XML and the related recommendations and approaches. Moreover, we present new and interesting cutting edge approaches for the appropriate management of heterogeneous biological data represented through XML. Conclusion: XML has succeeded in the integration of heterogeneous biomolecular information, and has established itself as the syntactic glue for biological data sources. Nevertheless, a large variety of XML-based data formats have been proposed, thus resulting in a difficult effective integration of bioinformatics data schemes. The adoption of a few semantic-rich standard formats is urgent to achieve a seamless integration of the current biological resources.

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of childrens health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases., 6 pages; 2 figures. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Ontology content and evaluation in Enterprise

An ontology is a conceptual representation of a domain resulted from a consensus within a community. One of its main applications is the integration of heterogeneous information sources available in the Web, by means of the semantic annotation of web documents. This is the cornerstone of the emerging Semantic Web. However, nowadays most of the information in the Web consists of text documents with little or no structure at all, which makes impracticable their manual annotation. This paper addresses the problem of mapping text fragments into a given ontology in order to generate ontology instances that semantically describe this kind of resources. As a result, applying this mapping we can automatically populate a Semantic Web consisting of text documents that concern with a specific ontology. We have evaluated our approach over a real-application ontology and a text collection both in the Archeology domain. Results show the effectiveness of the method as well as its usefulness.

Globalization and growth-maximizing governments may cause countries to converge towards a similar composition of government expenditures. These convergent forces may be even more intensive in the case of EU Member States engaged in the European integration process. The results obtained, through calculation of a constructed dissimilarity index and by adapting the usual indicators of convergence (b, s and g-convergence), reveal that there has been an harmonization process. In addition, this approach of structures of government expenditures has been greater in the EU than in the Non-EU countries of the OECD. Nevertheless, EU member states are converging towards a different steady state composition of government expenditures.

Building digital libraries from Internet-accessible document repositories is a challenging task, due to the current mismatch between the desired DBMS-like capabilities of the former and the schemeless HTML files stored in web sires. In order to address this problem, we propose a distributed architecture for the extraction of metadata from WWW documents specially suited for repositories of historical publications, like newspapers. In this paper we present an information extraction system based on semi-structured data analysis. Starting from several combinations of the HTML styles that abstract the visual characteristics of documents, the proposed system infers the logical structure and attributes of HTML texts. Additionally, by using context-free grammars the system extracts the overall web structure of the repositories. The system output is a metadata object that contains a concise representation of the corresponding publication and its components.

This paper presents a method for semi-automatically building tailored application ontologies from a set of data acquisition forms. Such ontologies are intended to facilitate the integration of very heterogeneous data generation processes and their linkage to well-known external resources. The resulting tool is being applied to the medical domain, where a wide variety of knowledge and linguistic resources are available. The proposed method consists of first inferring the implicit structure of the forms and then semantically annotating all their textual elements. Finally, by applying a set of patterns over the form inferred structure, the tool generates the ontology axioms that describe it. Our initial results demonstrate that the approach can perform effectively.

In this paper we present and evaluate two approaches for the generation of Semantic Fields, which are used as a tool for resource discovery in the Semantic Web. We mainly concern ourselves with semantic networks that describe their interests and resources by means of ontologies. Semantic Fields are intended to help users to locate these resources by specifying a brief description (also as an ontology). We propose two ways to automatically build Semantic Fields. The first one is used in the KREIOS approach, which is based on the pre-computation of distances between all the ontology pairs. The second one is based on a fast incremental clustering algorithm, which groups together similar ontologies as they are published. These groups constitute a pre-computed set of Semantic Fields.