Latin American "free-trade unionism" and the cold War: an analysis based on educational policies

The political education of workers and their leaders was viewed as a strategic concern in the cold war period’s bipolar world. This article discusses how this issue was dealt with by Latin American reformist trade unions grouped together in the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT, for its Spanish acronym), analyzing the educational policies promoted by its Inter-American Institute for Labor Studies (IIES), focusing specifically on its educational program for trade union instructors. We argue that the nature of the education provided changed, shifting from a rationale based on explicit ideological confrontation to a more focalized technical type of training. We claim that this shift started in the early 1960s, when the Alliance for Progress was launched.Fil: Scodeller, Gabriela Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

CMB anisotropies from acausal scaling seeds

We investigate models where structure formation is initiated by scaling seeds: We consider rapidly expanding relativistic shells of energy and show that they can fit current CMB and large scale structure data if they expand with super-luminal velocities. These acausally expanding shells provide a viable alternative to inflation for cosmological structure formation with the same minimal number of parameters to characterize the initial fluctuations. Causally expanding shells alone cannot fit present data. Hybrid models where causal shells and inflation are mixed also provide good fits.Comment: 9 pages,13 figures, revised version accepted for publication in PR

La formación político-sindical de los trabajadores socialcristianos en la Argentina de los años '60

En este artículo nos centraremos en las actividades sistematizadas de formación político-sindical desarrolladas por aquellos grupos gremiales y/o intelectuales vinculados al socialcristianismo. Describiremos algunos institutos surgidos durante la década del ´60 en Argentina. Nos interesa conocer sus concepciones, objetivos, métodos de trabajo y materiales producidos. Señalaremos ciertas continuidades y rupturas entre las distintas experiencias y los equipos de formadores, advirtiendo distintos matices en el modo de pensar la relación formación-lucha. Finalmente, buscamos poner en relación dichas experiencias con la intensa actividad que en materia de educación obrera desarrolló en América Latina.In this article we will focus on political training, specifically systematic activities, developed by unions and/or intellectual groups linked to socialchristianism. We will describe some institutes that emerged during the ‘60s in Argentina. We are interested in their ideas, objectives, working methods and the materials they produced. We will point out certain continuities and ruptures between the different experiences and the groups that carried them out, pointing some distinctions in the way the relationship between training and struggle was understood. Finally, we seek to relate these experiences to the intense activity in the field of labour education developed by the Latin American Confederation of Christian Trade Unionists (CLASC) in Latin America.Fil: Scodeller, Gabriela Noemi. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Masking versus removing point sources in CMB data: the source corrected WMAP power spectrum from new extended catalogue

In (Scodeller et al.) a new and extended point source catalogue obtained from the WMAP 7-year data was presented. It includes most of the sources included in the standard WMAP 7-year point source catalogues as well as a large number of new detections. Here we study the effects on the estimated CMB power spectrum when taking the newly detected point sources into consideration. We create point source masks for all the 2102 sources that we detected as well as a smaller one for the 665 sources detected in the Q, V and W bands. We also create WMAP7 maps with point sources subtracted in order to compare with the spectrum obtained with source masks. The extended point source masks and point source cleaned WMAP7 maps are made publicly available. Using the proper residual correction, we find that the CMB power spectrum obtained from the point source cleaned map without any source mask is fully consistent with the spectrum obtained from the masked map. We further find that the spectrum obtained masking all 2102 sources is consistent with the results obtained using the standard WMAP 7-year point source mask (KQ85y7). We also verify that the removal of point sources does not introduce any skewness.Comment: 26 pages and 11 figures; accepted version, published in Ap

Political training and social change in the 1960s and 1970s: The educational activities of the Latin American central of workers (CLAT)

This article reconstructs the educational policies of the Latin American Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (CLASC)—the name of which was later changed to the Latin American Central of Workers (CLAT) —in the context of the Latin American Cold War. It provides an empirical description of its pedagogical praxis, showing how it was shaped in constant dialogue with the region's conflictive context. It explores how they viewed political training in relation to both their organizing efforts and struggles, applying a conception that brought together “action, organization and training” as integrated elements, in the run to foster class awareness, build up a “new society,” and “workers’ organized power”.Fil: Scodeller, Gabriela Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Exploring Audio Compression as Image Completion in Time-Frequency Domain

Audio compression is usually achieved with algorithms that exploit spectral properties of the given signal such as frequency or temporal masking. In this paper we propose to tackle such a problem from a different point of view, considering the time-frequency domain of an audio signal as an intensity map to be reconstructed via a data-driven approach. The compression stage removes some selected input values from the time-frequency representation of the original signal. Then, decompression works by reconstructing the missing samples as an image completion task. Our method is divided into two main parts: first, we analyse the feasibility of a data-driven audio reconstruction with missing samples in its time-frequency representation. To do so, we exploit an existing CNN model designed for depth completion, involving a sequence of sparse convolutions to deal with absent values. Second, we propose a method to select the values to be removed at compression stage, maximizing the perceived audio quality of the decompressed signal. In the experimental section we validate the proposed technique on some standard audio datasets and provide an extensive study on the quality of the reconstructed signal under different conditions

Pro-tumorigenic macrophage infiltration in oral squamous cell carcinoma and possible macrophage-aimed therapeutic interventions

In Oral Squamous Cell Carcinomas (OSCC), as in other solid tumors, stromal cells strongly support the spread and growth of the tumor. Macrophages in tumors (tumor-associated macrophages or “TAMs”), can swing between a pro-inflammatory and anti-tumorigenic (M1-like TAMs) state or an anti‐inflammatory and pro-tumorigenic (M2-like TAMs) profile depending on the tumor microenvironment cues. Numerous clinical and preclinical studies have demonstrated the importance of macrophages in the prognosis of patients with different types of cancer. Here, our aim was to review the role of M2-like TAMs in the prognosis of patients with OSCC and provide a state of the art on strategies for depleting or reprogramming M2-like TAMs as a possible therapeutic solution for OSCC. The Clinical studies reviewed showed that higher density of CD163+ M2-like TAMs associated with worse survival and that CD206+ M2-TAMs are involved in OSCC progression through epidermal growth factor (EGF) secretion, underlining the important role of CD206 as a marker of OSCC progression and as a therapeutic target. Here, we provide the reader with the current tools, in preclinical and clinical stage, for depleting M2-like TAMs, re-educating them towards M1-like TAMs, and exploiting TAMs as drug delivery vectors.Fil: Bruna, Flavia Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Medicina y Biología Experimental de Cuyo; ArgentinaFil: Scodeller, Pablo David. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. University of Tartu; Estoni

EDITORIALE / I “CLASSICI” DELLA STORIA DEL DESIGN IN ITALIA

Il numero 11 di AIS/Design. Storia e Ricerche propone la rilettura critica di alcuni testi “classici” della storia del design pubblicati fra gli anni settanta del Novecento e i primi anni duemila che abbiamo ritenuto particolarmente significativi per la metodologia di ricerca, la forma di scrittura adottata e la rilevanza degli argomenti affrontati. Si tratta di volumi editi in Italia, che hanno contribuito a formare l’idea stessa di storia del design nel nostro paese e sono considerabili, a nostro avviso, un punto di partenza per la costruzione di una storiografia nazionale della disciplina (con la sola eccezione finale – il testo Are we human? Notes on an archaeology of design pubblicato dalla zurighese Lars Müller). Gli autori che li hanno riletti e reinterpretati – alcuni su nostro invito, altre scelti dalla call – si sono cimentati su un doppio registro critico: la ricostruzione del “progetto storico” sotteso all’opera analizzata, ovvero ciò che l’autore si propone di scrivere e le ragioni per cui lo scrive, e al contempo, l’individuazione delle motivazioni per cui l’opera può definirsi un “classico”

Targeting tumors using peptides

To penetrate solid tumors, low molecular weight (Mw < 10 KDa) compounds have an edge over antibodies: their higher penetration because of their small size. Because of the dense stroma and high interstitial fluid pressure of solid tumors, the penetration of higher Mw compounds is unfavored and being small thus becomes an advantage. This review covers a wide range of peptidic ligands—linear, cyclic, macrocyclic and cyclotidic peptides—to target tumors: We describe the main tools to identify peptides experimentally, such as phage display, and the possible chemical modifications to enhance the properties of the identified peptides. We also review in silico identification of peptides and the most salient non-peptidic ligands in clinical stages. We later focus the attention on the current validated ligands available to target different tumor compartments: blood vessels, extracelullar matrix, and tumor associated macrophages. The clinical advances and failures of these ligands and their therapeutic conjugates will be discussed. We aim to present the reader with the state-of-the-art in targeting tumors, by using low Mw molecules, and the tools to identify new ligands.Fil: Scodeller, Pablo David. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. University of Tartu; EstoniaFil: Asciutto, Eliana Karina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Escuela de Ciencia y Tecnología; Argentin