De los sindicatos a los movimientos sociales, las dinámicas políticas en Sudamérica han seguido un patrón de olas de incorporación

La idea de un "giro a la izquierda" dice poco sobre el ascenso y caída de los partidos de izquierda hoy o en cualquier otro momento de la historia de América Latina. Aunque los actores y las arenas varían con el tiempo, la clave está en comprender las sucesivas oleadas de demandas de los segmentos más pobres de la sociedad, ..

Conciliar agendas múltiples: la lucha de los sindicatos contra el neoliberalismo en Argentina

En el contexto de la globalización neoliberal, el Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA) fue el acuerdo internacio­nal más ambicioso promovido para reducir o eliminar las barreras comerciales internacio­nales en las Américas. Las consecuencias pre­vistas del ALCA provocaron la movilización de los movimientos sociales y los sindicatos en todo el continente. Después de una déca­da de resistencia al ALCA, se podría soste­ner que estos movimientos y sindicatos son parcialmente los responsables de su fracaso en 2005. El papel de los sindicatos plantea una interesante pregunta teórica sobre cómo la participación transnacional de organiza­ciones nacionales influye en su activismo a escala nacional. Este artículo analiza cómo entre 2002 y 2010 un importante sindicato, la Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA), organiza su acción en varias escalas y cómo estas se interrelacionan

Learning to infer structures of network games

Strategic interactions between a group of individuals or organisations can be modelled as games played on networks, where a player’s payoff depends not only on their actions but also on those of their neighbours. Inferring the network structure from observed game outcomes (equilibrium actions) is an important problem with numerous potential applications in economics and social sciences. Existing methods mostly require the knowledge of the utility function associated with the game, which is often unrealistic to obtain in real-world scenarios. We adopt a transformer-like architecture which correctly accounts for the symmetries of the problem and learns a mapping from the equilibrium actions to the network structure of the game without explicit knowledge of the utility function. We test our method on three different types of network games using both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate its effectiveness in network structure inference and superior performance over existing methods

¿Qué papel juegan los partidos políticos en las protestas sociales? Tendencias recientes en Argentina y Chile

Existe un consenso cada vez mayor sobre la naturaleza complementaria de la política institucional y no institucional como medio para impulsar las agendas políticas. Sin embargo, la mayor parte de la investigación tiende a concentrarse en un aspecto de esta relación, a saber, cómo los movimientos sociales influyen en la arena política, por ejemplo, impactando diferentes etapas del proceso de formulación de políticas y creando nuevos partidos políticos. Hay comparativamente menos comprensión de la dinámica inversa: el grado en que los partidos políticos también influyen en el ámbito de la protesta al adoptar y utilizar estrategias y tácticas —comúnmente asociadas con los movimientos sociales— y al conectarse con los manifestantes. Centrándose en Argentina y Chile, dos países que han experimentado oleadas masivas de protestas en los últimos años, este artículo examina la presencia de los partidos políticos en la organización, realización y canalización de manifestaciones. La recepción de los partidos políticos en las manifestaciones está estrechamente ligada a si son bienvenidos o no en el ámbito de la protesta. También analizamos cómo los manifestantes argentinos y chilenos perciben a los partidos políticos y el nivel de identificación que sienten con ellos. Nuestra principal fuente de datos proviene de 1 935 encuestas realizadas como parte de la red Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) entre 2015 y 2017. Encontramos que los partidos políticos en Argentina exhiben vínculos más fuertes con los movimientos sociales en comparación con los de Chile. Buscamos vincular este resultado con patrones divergentes e históricamente arraigados de dinámicas de protesta en ambos países y discutimos las implicaciones de nuestros hallazgos en la conclusión

Educción emocional de un individuo en contextos multimodales en computación afectiva

El presente artículo describe la investigación en desarrollo en el contexto de computación afectiva, específicamente en la educción de emociones de un individuo, mediante la estimulación de los participantes con imágenes y videos de alto contenido emocional. Se describen las interfaces biométricas de lectura del pulso cardíaco, EEG empleando un BMI, la cadencia de tecleo, registro de voz y filmación del rostro del participante. Se presenta el ambiente de educción denominado cámara de inmersión emocional, y el ciclo simplificado de recolección de datos en un contexto multimodal.Eje: Innovación en Sistemas de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

‘Essential’ arterial hypertension: time for a paradigm change

The exclusion of causes of hypertension is not systematically exploited in clinical practice. Therefore, essential hypertension is consistently presented as the most prevalent ‘cause’. The paradox of a condition with unknown causes being described as a common cause of hypertension translates into a diagnosis of essential hypertension in most patients, which precludes the detection of a curable cause of hypertension. The aim of this review is to investigate how the notion of essential hypertension has developed and whether scientific evidence still support the notion of its high prevalence by examining the most recent studies. These studies provided solid scientific evidence that, when systematically sought for, secondary hypertension is quite common and that secondary hypertension is highly prevalent. The increased awareness should lead to a systematic search for, with the goal of curing or achieving a better control of high blood pressure, and ultimately improving patients’ quality of life

A multicenter retrospective clinical study of CD5/CD10-negative chronic B cell leukemias.

CD5-negative chronic B cell lymphoproliferative disorders in leukemic phase (B-CLPD) are heterogeneous and relatively uncommon pathologies that often lack a histopathological definition because of the absence of accessible pathological tissue. We describe the clinical features and evolution-related variables of 156 patients with CD5/CD10-negative B-CLPD (median age 66 years, range 25-86). The median follow-up was 51 months (range 6-216), and overall 3- and 5-year survival was respectively 87 and 76%; 50 patients needed therapy at diagnosis, 56 during follow-up, and 50 remained untreated until the last control. A combined clinical, histological, cytomorphological, immunophenotypical, and cytogenetic diagnostic approach allowed the complete classification of only a minority of patients as being affected by splenic marginal zone or lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma; the majority of cases remained unclassifiable. Multivariate analysis showed that the clinicohematological variables adversely related to overall survival were serum LDH levels and age, whereas high serum LDH levels, hemoglobin levels of <11 g/dl, and splenomegaly related to treatment-free time (in "wait and see" cases); only splenomegaly related to time to progression (in treated patients). In conclusion, our retrospective study describes the clinical features and variables related to evolution in a large group of patients with CD5/CD10-negative chronic B-cell lymphoid leukemias and underlines the fact that a probable lymphoplasmacytic or marginal zone normal cell origin can be supposed in such leukemic forms, but never surely demonstrated

Inhibition of HIV-1 replication in macrophages by red blood cell-mediated delivery of a heterodinucleotide of azidothymidine and 9-(R)-2-(phosphono methoxypropyl)adenine.

Monocyte-derived macrophages (M/M) are considered important in vivo reservoirs for different kinds of viruses, including HIV. Hence, therapeutic strategies are urgently needed to protect these cells from virus infection or to control viral replication. In this paper, we report the synthesis, target delivery and in vitro efficacy of a new heterodinucleotide (AZTpPMPA), able to inhibit HIV-1 production in human macrophages. AZTpPMPA consists of two established anti-HIV drugs [zidovudine (AZT) and tenofovir (PMPA)] chemically coupled together by a phosphate bridge. This drug is not able to prevent p24 production when administered for 18 h to M/M experimentally infected with HIV-1 Bal (inhibition 27%), but can almost completely suppress virus production when given encapsulated into autologous erythrocytes (inhibition of p24 production 97%). AZTpPMPA is slowly converted to PMPA, AZT monophosphate and AZT (36 h half-life at 37°C) by cell-resident enzymes. Thus AZTpPMPA should be considered a new prodrug of AZT and PMPA that is able to provide stechiometric amounts of both nucleoside analogues to macrophage cells and to overcome the low phosphorylating activity of M/M for AZT and the modest permeability of PMPA

Relevance of brain lesion location to cognition in relapsing multiple sclerosis

OBJECTIVE: To assess the relationship between cognition and brain white matter (WM) lesion distribution and frequency in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RR MS). METHODS: MRI-based T2 lesion probability map (LPM) was used to assess the relevance of brain lesion location for cognitive impairment in a group of 142 consecutive patients with RRMS. Significance of voxelwise analyses was p<0.05, cluster-corrected for multiple comparisons. The Rao Brief Repeatable Battery was administered at the time of brain MRI to categorize the MS population into cognitively preserved (CP) and cognitively impaired (CI). RESULTS: Out of 142 RRMS, 106 were classified as CP and 36 as CI. Although the CI group had greater WM lesion volume than the CP group (p = 0.001), T2 lesions tended to be less widespread across the WM. The peak of lesion frequency was almost twice higher in CI (61% in the forceps major) than in CP patients (37% in the posterior corona radiata). The voxelwise analysis confirmed that lesion frequency was higher in CI than in CP patients with significant bilateral clusters in the forceps major and in the splenium of the corpus callosum (p<0.05, corrected). Low scores of the Symbol Digit Modalities Test correlated with higher lesion frequency in these WM regions. CONCLUSIONS: Overall these results suggest that in MS patients, areas relevant for cognition lie mostly in the commissural fiber tracts. This supports the notion of a functional (multiple) disconnection between grey matter structures, secondary to damage located in specific WM areas, as one of the most important mechanisms leading to cognitive impairment in MS

Platelet aggregation is affected by nitrosothiols in patients with chronic hepatitis: in vivo and in vitro studies

AIM: To investigate the relationship among the number of platelets and plasma levels of S-nitrosothiols (S-NO), nitrite, total non-protein SH (NPSH), glutathione (GSH), cysteine (CYS), malondialdehyde (MDA), 4-hydroxininenal (4HNE), tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFalpha) and interleukin (IL)-6 in patients with chronic hepatitis C (CH). METHODS: In vitro the aggregation of platelets derived from controls and CH patients was evaluated before and after the addition of adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and collagen, both in basal conditions and after incubation with nitrosoglutathione (GSNO). RESULTS: In vivo, S-NO plasma levels increased significantly in CH patients and they were significantly directly correlated with platelet numbers. Patients with platelet counts 150000/microL. In vitro, the ADP and collagen aggregation time was increased in platelets from patients and not from controls; in addition, platelets from CH patients but not from controls also showed a latency time after exposure to collagen