A key element of acknowledged consensus in Spanish educational policy: Spanish foreign educational policy

Las perspectivas teóricas del posmodernismo y el poscolonialismo son muy críticas con las acciones de proyección lingüística y cultural llevadas a cabo por emblemáticas instituciones como l’Alliance Française, el Goethe Institut, el British Council y el Instituto Cervantes. No obstante, estas instituciones no solo realizan una labor académicamente excelente, sino que desarrollan una acción encomiable e insustituible en la construcción de sociedades multiculturales y plurilingües reclamadas por la actual era de la globalización. La acción educativa de España en el exterior constituye uno de los elementos más sólidos del precario consenso existente en la sociedad española en política educativa. Dicha política está articulada por un desarrollo normativo coherente y continuado conformado por aportaciones de los dos partidos políticos mayoritarios de nuestro país. La acción educativa de España en el exterior está vertebrada por un conjunto de centros de tipología diversa que poseen la característica común de desarrollar una educación de gran excelencia. Las enseñanzas que vertebran la docencia en el exterior tienen la virtud de difundir la excelencia del patrimonio cultural y lingüístico español. El personal docente español que realiza su labor en el exterior revela unos conocimientos, unas aptitudes y una motivación y disponibilidad que no están presentes en igual medida en la media de los docentes de nuestro país que no participan en estos programas. Se puede concluir que, si las pruebas PISA se hubieran elaborado a partir de nuestros alumnos del exterior, la posición de España en el ranking de países de PISA habría sido muy diferente. La excelencia de la tarea y de los resultados de la acción educativa en el exterior requiere una difusión y una presencia en el debate educativo de la sociedad española muy superiores a los que posee en el presenteThe theoretical approaches of postmodernism and postcolonialism are indeed very critical with the actions of linguistic and cultural projection undertaken by emblematic institutions such as l’Alliance Française, the Goethe Institut, the British Council and the Instituto Cervantes. In spite of these criticisms, it can be stated that those institutions, not only develop an academically excellent task, but also indeed develop an extremely laudable and irreplaceable action in respect of the construction of the global multicultural and plurilingual societies. Spanish foreign educational policy stands as one of the most solid and stable elements of the precaurious consensus of the Spanish society in educational policy. Such policy is articulated by a coherent and stable legislative frame which has been constructed by the two main Spanish political parties. Spanish foreign educational policy is vertebrated by a collection of institutions of diverse kind which hold the common feature of developing an excellent education. The contents of the teachings in those institutions disseminate the excellence of the Spanish cultural and linguistic heritage. The Spanish teachers that teach abroad hold certain knowledge, aptitudes and motivation and readiness which are not equally present in the Spanish teaching forece that does not participate in those programmes. It can be stated that, if PISA assessements had been undertaken on the basis of our pupils abroad, the ranking of Spain in PISA would have been very different. The excellence of the task and performance of the Spanish teaching abroad requires a diffusion and a presence in the educational debate of Spanish society far much higher than the one it has in the present

SOA4 All Integrated Ranking: a Preference-Based, Holistic Implementation

There exist many available service ranking implementations, each one providing ad hoc preference models that offer different levels of expressiveness. Consequently, applying a single implementation to a particular scenario constrains the user to define preferences based on the underlying formalisms. Furthermore, preferences from different ranking implementation’s model cannot be combined in general, due to interoperability issues. in this article we present an integrated ranking implementation that enables the combination of three different ranking implementations developed within the EU FP7 SOA4All project. Our solution has been developed using PURI, a Preference-based Universal Ranking Integration framework that is based on a common, holistic preference model that allows to exploit synergies from the integrated ranking implementations, offering a single user interface to define preferences that acts as a façade to the integrated ranking implementation

Improving Semantic Web Services Discovery Using SPARQL-Based Repository Filtering

Semantic Web Services discovery is commonly a heavyweight task, which has scalability issues when the number of services or the ontology complexity increase, because most approaches are based on Description Logics reasoning. As a higher number of services becomes available, there is a need for solutions that improve discovery performance. Our proposal tackles this scalability problem by adding a preprocessing stage based on two SPARQL queries that filter service repositories, discarding service descriptions that do not refer to any functionality or non-functional aspect requested by the user before the actual discovery takes place. This approach fairly reduces the search space for discovery mechanisms, consequently improving the overall performance of this task. Furthermore, this particular solution does not provide yet another discovery mechanism, but it is easily applicable to any of the existing ones, as our prototype evaluation shows. Moreover, proposed queries are automatically generated from service requests, transparently to the user. In order to validate our proposal, this article showcases an application to the OWL-S ontology, in addition to a comprehensive performance analysis that we carried out in order to test and compare the results obtained from proposed filters and current discovery approaches, discussing the benefits of our proposal

Non-Query-Based Pattern Mining and Sentiment Analysis for Massive Microblogging Online Texts

Pattern mining has been widely studied in the last decade given its great interest for research and its numerous applications in the real world. In this paper the definition of query and non-query based systems is proposed, highlighting the needs of non-query based systems in the era of Big Data. For this, we propose a new approach of a non-query based system that combines association rules, generalized rules and sentiment analysis in order to catalogue and discover opinion patterns in the social network Twitter. Association rules have been previously applied for sentiment analysis, but in most cases, they are used once the process of sentiment analysis is finished to see which tokens appear commonly related to a certain sentiment. On the other hand, they have also been used to discover patterns between sentiments. Our work differs from these in that it proposes a non-query based system which combines both techniques, in a mixed proposal of sentiment analysis and association rules to discover patterns and sentiment patterns in microblogging texts. The obtained rules generalize and summarize the sentiments obtained from a group of tweets about any character, brand or product mentioned in them. To study the performance of the proposed system, an initial set of 1.7 million tweets have been employed to analyse the most salient sentiments during the American pre-election campaign. The analysis of the obtained results supports the capability of the system of obtaining association rules and patterns with great descriptive value in this use case. Parallelisms can be established in these patterns that match perfectly with real life events.COPKIT Project, through the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme 786687Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness TIN2015-64776-C3-1-RAndalusian Government, through Data Analysis in Medicine: from Medical Records to Big Data Project P18-RT-2947Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport FPU18/00150University of Granad

On User Preferences and Utility Functions in Selection: A Semantic Approach

Discovery tasks in the context of Semantic Web Services are generally performed using Description Logics. However, this formalism is not suited when non-functional, numerical parameters are involved in the discovery process. Furthermore, in selection tasks, where an optimization algorithm is needed, DLs are not capable of computing the optimum. Although there are DLs extensions that can handle numerical parameters, they bring decidability problems. Other solutions, as hybrid approaches which use DLs in functional discovery and other formalisms in non-functional selection, do not provide a semantic framework to describe user preferences based on non-functional properties. In this work, we propose to semantically describe user preferences, so they can be used to perform selection within a hybrid solution. By using semantically described utility functions in order to define user preferences, our proposal enables interoperability between service offers and demands, while providing a high level of expressiveness in these preferences and including them within SWS descriptions.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2006-0047

NOFACE: A new framework for irrelevant content filtering in social media according to credibility and expertise

Social networks have taken an irreplaceable role in our lives. They are used daily by millions of people to communicate and inform themselves. This success has also led to a lot of irrelevant content and even misinformation on social media. In this paper, we propose a user-centred framework to reduce the amount of irrelevant content in social networks to support further stages of data mining processes. The system also helps in the reduction of misinformation in social networks, since it selects credible and reputable users. The system is based on the belief that if a user is credible then their content will be credible. Our proposal uses word embeddings in a first stage, to create a set of interesting users according to their expertise. After that, in a later stage, it employs social network metrics to further narrow down the relevant users according to their credibility in the network. To validate the framework, it has been tested with two real Big Data problems on Twitter. One related to COVID-19 tweets and the other to last United States elections on 3rd November. Both are problems in which finding relevant content may be difficult due to the large amount of data published during the last years. The proposed framework, called NOFACE, reduces the number of irrelevant users posting about the topic, taking only those that have a higher credibility, and thus giving interesting information about the selected topic. This entails a reduction of irrelevant information, mitigating therefore the presence of misinformation on a posterior data mining method application, improving the obtained results, as it is illustrated in the mentioned two topics using clustering, association rules and LDA techniques.European Commission 786687Andalusian government FEDER operative program P18-RT-2947 B-TIC-145-UGR18University of Granada's internal plan PPJIB2021-04Spanish Government FPU18/0015

An E-pHEMT self-biased and self-synchronous class E rectifier

In this paper, the design of a self-biased and self-synchronous class E rectifier, based on an Enhancement-mode Pseudomorphic High Electron Mobility Transistor (E-pHEMT), is proposed. Characterized by a small value of the switch-mode time-constant (the on-state resistance times the output capacitance), high power efficiency figures may be obtained when forcing zero-voltage and zero-voltage-derivative switching conditions (ZVS and ZVDS). The self-synchronous operation, made possible by the device gate-to-drain coupling capacitance, leads to a compact design, while the gate-to-source Schottky junction allows self-biasing the gate terminal in order to improve the efficiency versus input power profile. Simulations, based on an extracted simplified non-linear model, are combined with measured results for implementations at 900 MHz and 2.45 GHz. Efficiency values as high as 76% and 64% have been estimated at power levels of -4 dBm and -1 dBm, respectively, with peak figures of 88% and 77%.This work was supported by MINECO through projects TEC2011-29126-C03-01, co-funded with FEDER, and Consolider CSD2008-0006

Contrastes de las Culturas Escolares Finlandesa y Española

Las culturas escolares finlandesa y española presentan rasgos diferenciales propios que explican la excelencia específica lograda por cada uno de estos sistemas educativos. Influenciada por Alemania, la Unión Soviética y Suecia, la educación finlandesa revela un notable conservadurismo pedagógico que, unido a la gran madurez del consenso social y a la homogeneidad social y educativa de este país, ha conducido a un éxito sin precedentes del modelo de la escuela comprensiva en este país, a la disposición de una clase docente de gran excelencia, y a elevadas cotas de rendimiento escolar en las destrezas clave. La educación española, por su parte, está aún embarcada en la resolución de algunas cuestiones históricas de índole administrativa y organizativa. Pese a la mayor polaridad social y política existente en nuestro país, la educación española ha conseguido cotas notables en aspectos educativos como la equidad, la gran provisión de educación infantil, la integración escolar, la educación intercultural y, aunque se trata de un ámbito que precisa de mayor difusión y presencia en el debate educativo de la sociedad española, se ha revelado particularmente excelente en los procesos educativos y resultados desarrollados en la red de centros que conforman la denominada acción educativa de España en el exterior.Finnish and Spanish schooling cultures reveal specific and differencial features that explain the particular excellence achieved by each of these educational systems.Influenced by Germany, the Soviet Union and Sweden, Finnish education shows a considerable pedagogical conservadurism that, together with the great maturity of the social consensus and with the social and educational homogeinity of this country, have lead to a great success ofthe model of the comprehensive school in this country, to the development of an excellent teaching force, and to a high student achievement in key skills. Spanish education is still dealing with the resolution of certain historical administrative and organizative issues. In spite of the greatersocial and political polarity present in our country, the Spanish education has achieved notable results in issues such as equity, the extended provision of preschool education,school integration, intercultural education, and has revealed a special excellence in the education and performance of the teaching processes developed in the Spanish foreign educational policy

LA UNIVERSIDAD POSTMODERNA Y LA NUEVA CREACIÓN DEL CONOCIMIENTO

La globalización y su potenciación de la dimensión económica de las sociedades occidentales han favorecido la ascendencia y el influjo de la visión postmoderna de la universidad y del paradigma de la nueva creación del conocimiento por dicha visión propuesto. Los dos modos de creación del conocimiento, Modo 1 y Modo 2, constituyen dos paradigmas opuestos que concretan epistemológicamente los dos modelos, moderno y postmoderno, de universidad que coexisten sin relacionarse en los primeros años del siglo XXI. La masificación de la universidad constituye el argumento más potente de los defensores de la nueva epistemología. Si bien no se puede negar la existencia y el crecimiento de los nuevos desarrollos epistemológicos, quedan aspectos no resueltos del mismo necesitados aún de mucho debate académico. Entre estos destacan dos: la nueva composición de las identidades profesionales, y el presumible déficit democrático del Modo 2 de producción del conocimiento. Abstract Globalisation, and its promotion of the Economic dimension of Western societies, has promoted the upward and influence of the Postmodern vision of the university and of the paradigm of the new knowledge production proposed by such vision. The two modes of knowledge production, Mode 1 and Mode 2, constitute two conflicting paradigms that realize epistemologically the two models of university, Modern and Postmodern, that coexist without relation in the first years of the XXIst century. The massification of the university constitutes the strongest argument of the advocates of the new epistemology. Although the existence and the increase of the new epistemological developments cannot be denied, there remain certain aspects not yet fully resolved of the new knowledge production paradigm which yet need further academic debate. Among such aspects two can be highlighted: the new composition of professional identities, and the presumed democratic deficit of Mode 2 knowledge production

Impacto de la globalización y el postmodernismoen la epistemología de la educación comparada

Los primeros años del siglo XXI se revelan años de tránsito en la epistemología y la metodología de la Educación Comparada debido al impacto en nuestra disciplina de los fenómenos de la globalización y del postmodernismo. No obstante, estos años de cambio también lo son de paradojas y de realidades dicotómicas. Así, frente a las políticas de corte «post- Westfaliana» y la gobernanza típicas de la globalización, la especificidad de la «cultura escolar» de cada país reinvindica la aún especificidad del Estado-nación. Y, frente a la crítica de las metanarrativas modernas y el relativismo postmoderno, académicos como Habermas reclaman la aún vigencia de la Modernidad. La superación de la denunciada «parálisis» de la Educación Comparada reclama el empleo académico de actitudes creativas e innovadoras, pero también el establecimiento de una relación de equilibrio y de transición continuada entre la Modernidad y la Postmodernidad, alejada de planteamientos netamente rupturistas y excluyentes. The first years of the XXIst century are showing to be years of transition in the epistemology and the methodology of Comparative Education due to the impact in our discipline of the phenomena of Globalisation and Postmodernism. Nevertheless, these years of change are also times of paradoxes and of dichotomical realities. Thus, opposite to the ‘post-Westfalian’ policies and the governance typical of globalisation, the specificity of the ‘schooling culture’ of each country claims for the yet specificity of the Nation-State. And, against the critique of the modern metanarratives and the postmodern relativism, academics such as Habermas demand the still validity of Modernity. The overcoming of the denounced ‘paralysis’ of Comparative Education demands the academic use of creative and innovative attitudes, but also the establishment of a relation of balance and continuous transition between Modernity and Postmodernity, far from mainly rupturistic and exclusive approaches