Herramientas para la mejora de las organizaciones educativas y su relación con el entorno

Mejorar la vinculación de las organizaciones educativas con el entorno supone un aspecto sumamente importante para el desarrollo socioeducativo de las comunidades en las que éstas se insertan. De hecho, impulsar y potenciar la relación entre las organizaciones educativas y el entorno es, en cierto modo, un ejercicio de responsabilidad que debe concretarse a través de actuaciones y herramientas favorecedoras del desarrollo de organizaciones capaces de aprender y promover la participación activa del entorno para conseguir sus metas. Esta aportación aborda propuestas como el trabajo en red, los planes educativos de entorno, la colaboración entre escuelas, municipio y familias, la planificación estratégica y las cartas de servicios, que posibilitan una mejor relación entre las organizaciones educativas y el entorno. A pesar de las particularidades que cada una de ellas puede presentar, toma relevancia el que todas compartan planteamientos de integración, contextualización, transferibilidad, transversalidad, formación cívica, participación, equidad y redistribución de recurso

Telework and Social Services in Spain during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper analyses teleworking in social services during the state of alarm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. It has a double objective: To analyse the profile of the professional who teleworked in social services and, on the other hand, to analyse the perception of teleworkers of working conditions during this period, as well as the degree to which they have been affected by them depending on whether they work face-to-face or telematically. To this end, a questionnaire was administered to Spanish social service professionals working, obtaining a sample of 560 professionals in the sector. The profile obtained in relation to teleworking may be especially useful when considering the progressive incorporation of more non-presential activity in social services, and the results show that, although teleworking has been perceived as an efficient way of overcoming the limitations to face-to-face work arising from the pandemic, both the positive and negative consequences of the implementation of this modality of work should be carefully assessed

GANimation: one-shot anatomically consistent facial animation

The final publication is available at link.springer.comRecent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for the task of facial expression synthesis. The most successful architecture is StarGAN (Choi et al. in CVPR, 2018), that conditions GANs’ generation process with images of a specific domain, namely a set of images of people sharing the same expression. While effective, this approach can only generate a discrete number of expressions, determined by the content and granularity of the dataset. To address this limitation, in this paper, we introduce a novel GAN conditioning scheme based on action units (AU) annotations, which describes in a continuous manifold the anatomical facial movements defining a human expression. Our approach allows controlling the magnitude of activation of each AU and combining several of them. Additionally, we propose a weakly supervised strategy to train the model, that only requires images annotated with their activated AUs, and exploit a novel self-learned attention mechanism that makes our network robust to changing backgrounds, lighting conditions and occlusions. Extensive evaluation shows that our approach goes beyond competing conditional generators both in the capability to synthesize a much wider range of expressions ruled by anatomically feasible muscle movements, as in the capacity of dealing with images in the wild. The code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/albertpumarola/GANimation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Dos generaciones en busca de psicoterapia

Professionals who have been practicing psychotherapy for many years have been able to see how global changes were taking place in all the people who request to start psychotherapy. Such changes affect the therapeutic demand and the characteristics of the people who come to it. The article deals with the comparison between two generations, and of the applicants before and after the pandemic confinement, in order to understand these changes and provoke reflections to adapt the own model and work style to them. The work has been carried out by comparing the responses to the questionnaire filled out by the person requesting therapy in a private health center (specifically the Erich Fromm Institute of Integrative Humanist Psychotherapy of Barcelona). For this comparison, responses have been taken from 70 people requesting therapy in the last year and those from another 70 people who requested it 29 years before, and also from 35 people who requested it immediately after ending the confinement.Los profesionales que llevan muchos años ejerciendo la psicoterapia, han podido ir comprobando cómo se iban produciendo cambios globales en el conjunto de las personas que solicitan iniciar una psicoterapia. Tales cambios afectan a la demanda terapéutica y a las características de las personas que a ella acuden. En el artículo se aborda la comparación entre dos generaciones, y de los solicitantes anteriores y posteriores al confinamiento pandémico, con la finalidad de comprender esos cambios y suscitar reflexiones para adaptar el propio modelo y estilo de trabajo a ellos. El trabajo se ha realizado a través de la comparación de las respuestas al cuestionario que rellena la persona que solicita terapia en un centro sanitario privado (en concreto el Instituto Erich Fromm de Psicoterapia Integradora Humanista de Barcelona). Para dicha comparación, se han tomado respuestas de 70 personas solicitantes de terapia en el último año y las de otras 70 personas que lo solicitaron 29 años antes, e igualmente de 35 personas que la solicitaron inmediatamente después de acabar el confinamiento

COVID-19 and social services in Spain

During the state of alarm declared in Spain by COVID-19 due to the pandemic, the country's authorities declared Social Services and their workers to be essential, considering that the activity of these professionals with the vulnerable population was crucial and that services should continue to be provided to guarantee the well-being of users in this exceptionally serious situation. This article analyzes the impact that the COVID-19 and the state of alarm has had on Spanish social service professionals. An ad hoc questionnaire was used, administered on-line, individually, voluntarily and anonymously to 560 professionals working in social services, both in the public and private sectors, based throughout Spain. This questionnaire has five different parts: socio-demographic profiling, impact that the health crisis has had on the practice of professional functions, degree of knowledge of the measures imposed to guarantee the protection and safety of professionals and users, impact that it has had on the professional and personal development of social services professionals and, the fifth and last part, degree of adaptation of the measures aimed at the care of the vulnerable population. These results are discussed based on the situation in which professionals working in this sector find themselves in the face of the changes they are experiencing in the development of their work, and we are able to determine the profile of the workers who have felt most affected by the situation, with the consequent and foreseeable mental and emotional affectation that this implies. These professionals tend to value more negatively the set of measures developed to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on Spanish social services

Endothelial damage, inflammation and immunity in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients have an accelerated atherosclerosis, increased risk of thrombotic-ischemic complications, and excessive mortality rates when compared with the general population. There is also evidence of an endothelial damage in which the proinflammatory state, the enhanced oxidative stress, or the accumulation of toxins due to their reduced renal clearance in uremia play a role. Further, there is evidence that uremic endothelial cells are both involved in and victims of the activation of the innate immunity. Uremic endothelial cells produce danger associated molecular patterns (DAMPS), which by binding to specific pattern recognition receptors expressed in multiple cells, including endothelial cells, induce the expression of adhesion molecules, the production of proinflammatory cytokines and an enhanced production of reactive oxygen species in endothelial cells, which constitute a link between immunity and inflammation. The connection between endothelial damage, inflammation and defective immunity in uremia will be reviewed here

Adipose tissue knockdown of lysozyme reduces local inflammation and improves adipogenesis in high-fat diet-fed mice

Chronic systemic low-level inflammation in metabolic disease is known to affect adipose tissue biology. Lysozyme (LYZ) is a major innate immune protein but its role in adipose tissue has not been investigated. Here, we aimed to investigate LYZ in human and rodents fat depots, and its possible role in obesity-associated adipose tissue dysfunction. LYZ mRNA and protein were identified to be highly expressed in adipose tissue from subjects with obesity and linked to systemic chronic-low grade inflammation, adipose tissue inflammation and metabolic disturbances, including hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia and decreased markers of adipose tissue adipogenesis. These findings were confirmed in experimental models after a high-fat diet in mice and rats and also in ob/ob mice. Importantly, specific inguinal and perigonadal white adipose tissue lysozyme (Lyz2) gene knockdown in high-fat diet-fed mice resulted in improved adipose tissue inflammation in parallel to reduced lysozyme activity. Of note, Lyz2 gene knockdown restored adipogenesis and reduced weight gain in this model. In conclusion, altogether these observations point to lysozyme as a new actor in obesity-associated adipose tissue dysfunction. The therapeutic targeting of lysozyme production might contribute to improve adipose tissue metabolic homeostasis

Prevalence and Characterization of Psychological Trauma in Patients with Fibromyalgia: A Cross-Sectional Study

Preliminary evidence suggests that psychological trauma, especially childhood trauma, is a risk factor for the onset of fibromyalgia (FM).The main objective of this study consisted of evaluating the prevalence and detailed characteristics of psychological trauma in a sample of patients with FM, the chronology of trauma across the lifespan, and its clinical symptoms. We also calculated whether childhood trauma could predict the relationship with different clinical variables.Eighty-eight females underwent an interview to assess sociodemographic data, psychiatric comorbidities, level of pain, FM impact, clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression, insomnia, quality of life, and psychological trauma.The majority of participants (71.5%) met the diagnostic criteria for current post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Participants reported having suffered traumatic events throughout their lifespan, especially in childhood and early adolescence, in the form of emotional abuse, emotional neglect, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. Traumatic events predict both poor quality of life and a level of pain in adulthood. All patients showed clinically relevant levels of anxiety, depression, insomnia, suicidal thoughts, and pain, as well as somatic comorbidities and poor quality of life. Pain levels predicted anxiety, depression, dissociation, and insomnia symptoms. 84% of the sample suffered one or more traumatic events prior to the onset of pain.Our data highlight the clinical complexity of patients with FM and the role of childhood trauma in the onset and maintenance of FM, as well as the high comorbidity between anxiety, depression, somatic symptoms, and FM. Our data also supports FM patients experiencing further retraumatization as they age, with an extremely high prevalence of current PTSD in our sample. These findings underscore the need for multidisciplinary programs for FM patients to address their physical pain and their psychiatric and somatic conditions, pay special attention to the assessment of psychological trauma, and provide trauma-focused interventions. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04476316. Registered on July 20th, 2020.Copyright © 2022 Itxaso Gardoki-Souto et al

Accuracy Assessment of Digital Terrain Model Dataset Sources for Hydrogeomorphological Modelling in Small Mediterranean Catchments

Digital terrain models (DTMs) are a fundamental source of information in Earth sciences. DTM-based studies, however, can contain remarkable biases if limitations and inaccuracies in these models are disregarded. In this work, four freely available datasets, including Shuttle Radar Topography Mission C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SRTM C-SAR V3 DEM), Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer Global Digital Elevation Map (ASTER GDEM V2), and two nationwide airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-derived DTMs (at 5-m and 1-m spatial resolution, respectively) were analysed in three geomorphologically contrasting, small (3-5 km(2)) catchments located in Mediterranean landscapes under intensive human influence (Mallorca Island, Spain). Vertical accuracy as well as the influence of each dataset's characteristics on hydrological and geomorphological modelling applicability were assessed by using ground-truth data, classic geometric and morphometric parameters, and a recently proposed index of sediment connectivity. Overall vertical accuracyexpressed as the root mean squared error (RMSE) and normalised median deviation (NMAD)revealed the highest accuracy for the 1-m (RMSE = 1.55 m;NMAD = 0.44 m) and 5-m LiDAR DTMs (RMSE = 1.73 m;NMAD = 0.84 m). Vertical accuracy of the SRTM data was lower (RMSE = 6.98 m;NMAD = 5.27 m), but considerably higher than for the ASTER data (RMSE = 16.10 m;NMAD = 11.23 m). All datasets were affected by systematic distortions. Propagation of these errors and coarse horizontal resolution caused negative impacts on flow routing, stream network, and catchment delineation, and to a lower extent, on the distribution of slope values. These limitations should be carefully considered when applying DTMs for catchment hydrogeomorphological modelling