The Betrayal at the Battle of Hilarión

On a bitter winter night, our protagonist, the brave and innocent hero Pedro Zarquillo, couldn’t sleep. Between cold sweats and old nightmares, he woke. Somber, he reached over and switched on the desk lamp.

As he sifted through the stacks of papers he kept for his studies and research, he suddenly found an old manuscript he didn’t recognize. Startled, he moved to the living room and lit the fireplace to examine this mysterious document he’d stumbled upon so unexpectedly among the rest. It was a letter from the twelfth century:

Why am I not expected to express my sadness?

COVID-19 Pandemic
(2020-2023)

As usual, I will start by the beginning of the story, though I will try to go straightforward to what I really want to say. This is a true conversation I had some weeks ago with a good person that I would like to share with you.

Some days ago, I was infected by the COVID-19 virus. My wife was infected, too. Therefore, both of us were infected. We suppose we were infected by this COVID-19 infection at some visit to the hospital due to some medical check some days before. We kept staying home those days, although this is not mandatory by the medical authorities anymore ... or at least from around 2023, at the end of the Pandemic, until today.

Which was our blame? Personal testimonies of 11-M

On March 11, 2004, a series of terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid changed the lives of thousands of people forever. The following is a compilation of representative and moving testimonies of that day, with special attention to the experiences of university students and the reflections of young people who were between 20 and 25 years old in 2004. Included are accounts from students who did not go to class that day (in many cases due to a university strike call in Madrid), testimonies from professors and academic staff, stories of people who were saved by chance, and generational reflections on the emotional, social, and political impact of 11-M. Each testimony is presented with its context (author, date, source) and a summary of its key points or salient quotes.

1st Workshop on Evaluation of Qualitative Aspects of Intelligent Software Assistants (EQUISA)

1st Workshop on Evaluation of Qualitative Aspects

of Intelligent Software Assistants (EQUISA)

- Call for Papers -

Co-located with EASE 2025

June 17–20, 2025, Istanbul, Turkey

https://conf.researchr.org/home/ease-2025/equisa-2025

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: March 16th, 2025 March 28th, 2025.
• Notification to authors: April 13th, 2025.
• Camera-ready due: April 26th, 2025.
• Early registration deadline for authors: May 5th, 2025.
• Workshop date: 20th June 2025.

Concerning suicide

Suicidal behaviors are only reproduced after much suffering by the people who end up committing this misfortune. These people are victims of a social massacre. This suffering they undergo is developed by factors that access the interior of these people from the outside; that is to say, they are external factors to them. These external factors can include societal pressures, discrimination, and lack of support systems. Suicide is not part of human nature.

The Quest for the Hidden Treasure of The Oak's Castle

Pedro Zarquillo, once the mad candidate for Knight Templar, had long since adapted to the 21st century. But one night, as he sat at his desk writing stories of what might have been, the old voice returned, a whisper from the past.

"Pedro, your journey is not yet over. You must retrieve The Oak's Castle's hidden treasure. Dark forces guard it, and only you can defeat them."

Logo de la serie
'Se ha escrito un crimen' (1984)

Pedro felt the call. With a determination that could not be swayed, armed only with his wits, he mounted Luciérnaga, his now inactive but always faithful white horse, and rode westward toward the Castle.

Understanding Don Quixote

Don Quixote (1605)

Don Quixote is a book full of wisdom and funny situations that cause people's attraction. But it seems that really few readers perceive the intense power of the intelligent characterization of this knight-errant in the sad figure of a madman with horrific hallucinations. I reckon that in those times when it was published, firstly after having read it and laughed a lot and enjoyed commenting on it, people began to feel ashamed to perform acts of bravery and to fear that the rest might laugh at them too. Thus, this book filled the brave souls of some people with the main antidote to courage: insecurity.

Automated generation and correction of diagram-based exercises for Moodle

One of the most time-consuming task for teachers is creating and correcting exercises to evaluate students. This is normally performed by hand, which incurs high time costs and is error-prone. A way to alleviate this problem is to provide an assistant tool that automates such tasks. In the case of exercises based on diagrams, they can be represented as models to enable their automated model-based generation for any target environment, like web or mobile applications, or learning platforms like Moodle. 

Wodel-Edu: A tool for the generation and evaluation of diagram-based exercises

 Highlights

• Our solution, Wodel-Edu, automates the generation and evaluation of online exercises.

• Wodel-Edu supports seven kinds of domain-independent diagram-based exercises.

• The system synthesizes exercises for the Moodle platform, the web, Android and iOS applications.

Automated engineering of domain-specific metamorphic testing environments

Context.

Testing is essential to improve the correctness of software systems. Metamorphic testing (MT) is an approach especially suited when the system under test lacks oracles, or they are expensive to compute. However, building an MT environment for a particular domain (e.g., cloud simulation, model transformation, machine learning) requires substantial effort.

This is the story of one of my best friends

I copy here the definition of schizoaffective disorder from the English Wikipedia:

Don Quixote
(1605, first edition)

"Schizoaffective disorder (SZA, SZD, or SAD) is a mental disorder characterized by abnormal thought processes and an unstable mood. The diagnosis is made when the person has symptoms of both schizophrenia (usually psychosis) and a mood disorder-either bipolar disorder or depression. The main criterion for the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis is the presence of psychotic symptoms for at least two weeks without any mood symptoms present. Schizoaffective disorder can often be misdiagnosed when the correct diagnosis may be psychotic depression, psychotic bipolar disorder, schizophreniform disorder, or schizophrenia. It is imperative for providers to accurately diagnose patients, as treatment and prognosis differ greatly for each of these diagnoses.

My wonder years

I have always been fascinated by the 80s of the Twentieth Century. I will share my thoughts on this period in the following paragraphs.

Gorbachev and Reagan
signing the INF Treaty (1987)

The 80s of the Twentieth Century was a period where some of the most powerful political leaders of the world at least tried to solve a few of the most worrying global political issues at the time. I reckon this fact makes this decade a little bit different from the predecessor and successor years. Maybe the two most relevant political leaders who guided the rest of the world during this period were Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. I find that the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1988-1991), and the consequent end of the Cold War (1947-1991) were good news, at least during those years. Although today we may have a slightly different opinion of these facts considering everything that has happened since then. Anyway, I find there was a very positive political climate of peace-making and reconciliation in the 80s, and I find it hard to understand why we have not kept that path during the following years.

Between Spain & Portugal

I copy here the beginning of the entry for 'Hispania' in the English Wikipedia:

Roman provinces of Hispania

Hispania was the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula and its provinces. Under the Republic, Hispania was divided into two provinces: Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior. During the Principate, Hispania Ulterior was divided into two new provinces, Baetica and Lusitania, while Hispania Citerior was renamed Hispania Tarraconensis. Subsequently, the western part of Tarraconensis was split off, first as Hispania Nova, later renamed "Callaecia" (or Gallaecia, whence modern Galicia). From Diocletian's Tetrarchy (AD 284) onwards, the south of remaining Tarraconensis was again split off as Carthaginensis, and probably then too the Balearic Islands and all the resulting provinces formed one civil diocese under the vicarius for the Hispaniae (that is, the Celtic provinces). The name Hispania was also used in the period of Visigothic rule.

On teaching science

In the next few paragraphs, I will try to share my view on the current situation of how our country is carrying out the teaching of science.

John Nash (1928 - 2015)

Currently, we have a serious problem with motivation in the teaching of science. It seems that today's students have very little interest in knowledge, intellectual effort, or education in general. We enter a vicious cycle in which students do not learn due to their lack of motivation, but at the same time, they are not motivated because they do not learn.

On climate change

Today, I would like to talk about the famous TED Talk 'School strike for climate' by Greta Thunberg.

As you may already know, the topic of this talk is that we are in an emergency to act against climate change. In fact, we have been in an emergency for many years, and it seems we have been just letting time pass by.

Things to do in Madrid city

La Latina

Currently, I don’t spend too much time outdoors, therefore my view can be a little bit outdated. However, my impression is that things haven’t changed too much in the last few years, thus you may find this information useful if you come to the city where I'm living.

Instant messaging applications

Since the Internet and email as a means of text communication were established for commercial use (the early 1990s), there have been several tools that have emerged to enable instant messaging, or what is better known as chat. With the emergence of smartphones in the mid-2000s, these instant messaging tools have become ubiquitous. It is easy to observe how every traveler is utterly focused on her/his terminal chatting with one of her/his contacts on some very important topic when one takes public transport.

The haunted time travel of the mad candidate to Knight Templar

Star Wars (1977)

In the 12th Century, deep in Old Castile, there was a young soldier who was preparing to become a Knight Templar. His name was Pedro Zarquillo. From an early age, he followed very carefully every instruction of his masters. But there was a final trial which he had to get through. The night before he was going to be ordained as a Knight Templar, he was asked to leave Old Castile. He was only provided with his white horse ‘Luciernaga’, a bottle of good old Castilian wine, and two pieces of bread. He was told to travel to the west and get as far as he could. Although he didn’t understand anything, he tried not to think too much, as he had always been compliant with every order from his templar masters. Thus, that very night, he left Old Castile.

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