El humanismo no protege: Las memorias escolares de Alfred Andersch

Se interpretan dos fuentes de memorias escolares, los recuerdos del escritor Alfred Andersch, que los condensa en su novela «El padre de un asesino», y las memorias personales del autor. Ambientadas ambas memorias en el mismo instituto de educación secundaria en Múnich, constituyen un material idóneo para realizar una comparación histórica, sobre todo en referencia al contexto entre estructuras de instituciones educativas, la personalidad de sus profesores y acontecimientos históricos. Aunque algunos elementos del autoritarismo del año 1928 y de la época dictatorial posterior seguían vivos en 1978, se puede constatar que el paso del tiempo había tenido sus efectos sobre las normas que determinaban el comportamiento de los profesores, en el sentido de que las acciones agresivas de profesores contra sus alumnos en 1978 fueron más limitadas que en 1928. Además, queda la sensación de que las condiciones de una sociedad enferma se reflejan en su sistema escolar y de que los fenómenos de autoritarismo, antisemitismo y frustración social, presentes en 1928, constituyeron un caldo de cultivo para originar la catástrofe histórica del holocausto.Two sources of school memoirs are interpreted, the records of the writer Alfred Andersch, who condenses them in his novel “The Father of a Murderer”, and the personal memoirs of the author.Both memoirs refer to the same secondary school in Munich and constitute an ideal material for a historical comparison, above of all in reference to the context between the structure of educational institutions, the personality of their teachers and historical events. Even though some elements of the authoritarianism in 1928 and the following dictatorship were still alive in 1978, the course of time had had its impact on the rules, which determined the teachers’ behaviour, in the sense that aggressive actions of teachers against their students were more limited in 1978 than in 1928. Furthermore, the impression remains that the conditions of a sick society are reflected in its school system and that the phenomena of authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and social frustration, which were present in 1928, constituted a fertile soil in order to cause the historical catastrophe of the holocaust

Bone Densitometry of the Femoral Midshaft the Protein-Deprived Rat

Densitometric assessment of radiographs of the femoral midshafts in protein-deprived and age-matched control rats, has shown a significant loss of total bone density in the protein-deprived group. This reduction is no greater than can be accounted for by the loss of cortical bone surface area, suggesting that while bone mass is reduced as a result of protein deprivation, the mineral composition of the residual bone is likely to be normal. These findings are supported by data on the ash content of extirpated bone in the same group of animals.S. Afr. Med. J., 47, 1 (1973

Polarized consensus-based dynamics for optimization and sampling

In this paper we propose polarized consensus-based dynamics in order to make consensus-based optimization (CBO) and sampling (CBS) applicable for objective functions with several global minima or distributions with many modes, respectively. For this, we ``polarize'' the dynamics with a localizing kernel and the resulting model can be viewed as a bounded confidence model for opinion formation in the presence of common objective. Instead of being attracted to a common weighted mean as in the original consensus-based methods, which prevents the detection of more than one minimum or mode, in our method every particle is attracted to a weighted mean which gives more weight to nearby particles. We prove that in the mean-field regime the polarized CBS dynamics are unbiased for Gaussian targets. We also prove that in the zero temperature limit and for sufficiently well-behaved strongly convex objectives the solution of the Fokker--Planck equation converges in the Wasserstein-2 distance to a Dirac measure at the minimizer. Finally, we propose a computationally more efficient generalization which works with a predefined number of clusters and improves upon our polarized baseline method for high-dimensional optimization.Comment: Added mean-field convergence theore

Las nuevas tecnologías de la información y comunicación en la planificación y realización de un curso virtual de máster universitario

El trabajo documenta y comenta críticamente el diseño y la realización de una asignatura completamente virtual titulada "Comunicación, Política y Globalización" en el marco del Máster en Comunicación y Aprendizaje en la Sociedad Digital, destacando sobre todo los procedimientos que se derivaron de la modificación de la modalidad de impartición del curso, que inicialmente estaba previsto como semipresencial. Después de la justificación de una decisión paradigmática a favor de un enfoque didáctico-constructivista, se realiza un análisis de las opciones tecnológicas disponibles con el criterio de la mejor imitación de un proceso de aprendizaje en un espacio académico real. Además del uso de material didáctico tradicional, se introdujo la elaboración de vídeoclases subidas a Youtube y su discusión en diversos foros de la plataforma virtual como innovación metodológica. A pesar de la identificación de algunos puntos débiles en el curso, como la falta de una opción de comunicación en tiempo real o la calidad mejorable en la edición de algunos vídeos, los resultados académicos de esta experiencia novedosa parecen satisfactorios

Representations of the Spanish Civil War in early Francoist history textbooks

Textbooks are effective tools to understand the idiosyncrasies of certain historical time periods as they allow us to examine the ideologies, concepts and values of the social groups in power. Those textbooks which were in use in the areas occupied by the Fascist National troops under the insurgent General Francisco Franco’s command and in all of Spain after his victory permit us to draw conclusions about the characteristics of the Francoist ideology. The analysis of original material collected and classified by the Spanish research project of textbooks (manes), as well as the review of theoretical studies demonstrates that Francoist schoolbooks to a large extent reproduced contents proceeding from the monarchic period before the Second Republic. The representations of the Civil War in these textbooks condense the most important doctrinal principles of the Franco dictatorship and reveal the existing ideological differences between different tendencies represented in the regime. Furthermore, the analysis of these texts shows that the ideological indoctrination through schoolbooks was an essential element of the totalitarian efforts of the Franco regime.Los manuales escolares constituyen unas fuentes idóneas para comprender las idiosincrasias de determinados periodos históricos, porque permiten examinar las ideologías, los conceptos y valores de los grupos sociales en el poder. Los manuales escolares que se utilizaron en las zonas ocupadas por las tropas nacionalistas bajo el comando del general rebelde Francisco Franco y en toda España después de su victoria nos permiten identificar las características de la ideología franquista. El análisis del material original coleccionado y clasificado por el proyecto de investigación manes, así como la revisión de estudios teóricos, demuestran que los manuales escolares franquistas reprodujeron ampliamente contenidos procedentes del periodo monárquico anterior a la Segunda República. Las representaciones de la Guerra Civil en estos manuales condensan los principios doctrinales más importantes de la dictadura franquista y revelan las diferencias ideológicas existentes entre las diferentes tendencias presentes en el régimen. Además, el análisis de los textos muestra que el adoctrinamiento ideológico mediante los manuales escolares fue un elemento esencial en los esfuerzos totalitarios del régimen de Franco

Altered bone metabolism in the protein deprived rat

In contrast to the vast amount of active research and available knowledge on many aspects of protein-calorie malnutrition, surprisingly little attention has been focused on the skeletal effects of this syndrome. As early as the 1920's it was realised that the skeletal metabolism in protein-calorie malnutrition was deranged. Notwithstanding this, there is still to date inadequate understanding of the mechanisms by which these skeletal changes are brought about. This is partly due to the fact that the research workers were "victims of their times" in that the techniques utilised gave limited information and it has only been in the past decade or two that more sophisticated techniques have become available. (Evidence for this will be borne out in the following chapter where the literature is reviewed). It was with this in mind that the work presented in this thesis was undertaken. Part I of the thesis consists of a review of the literature, followed by a dissertation on the normal physiological concepts of calcium metabolism as well as a description of the calcium pools used in kinetic models. Part II includes all the chapters on the various experiments performed. Included in each chapter are the methods used, results obtained as well as a discourse relevant to that particular study, with special reference to similar experiments performed by other authors. Part III encompasses the integrated summary of the results and a discussion theorising the mechanisms involved in those changes. Finally, an appendix which deals with the statistical methods used for analyses, as well as details of those techniques which were used, but were established by other authors