The role of technological actors in the privatization of higher education in a pandemic context: immediate responses to major transformations

Este artículo contribuye al debate sobre los efectos de la pandemia en la educación superior. Se analizan las diferentes alianzas público-privadas que involucran a agentes tecnológicos comerciales para dar respuesta a la continuidad de la enseñanza en las universidades de la región de América Latina y el Caribe. Además, se analiza el papel que tienen organismos internacionales y los agentes tecnológicos globales en la construcción del discurso de la “gran oportunidad de innovación” que pone en cuestión el modelo de universidad presencial dominante en América Latina. Desde una perspectiva teórica que contempla la complejidad del fenómeno de la privatización educativa y que reconoce que en estos procesos impulsados por diversos actores globales, tienen un rol central los estados nacionales y los diferentes gobiernos a la hora de materializar estas tendencias. El estudio se basó en un análisis documental que supuso relevar discursos y acciones de diferentes actores que asumieron centralidad en el contexto de pandemia en el nivel universitario.This article contributes to the debate on the effects of the pandemic on higher education. It analyses the different public-private alliances that involve technological commercial agents to respond to the continuity of teaching in universities from Latin American and Caribbean region. It also analyses the role that international organisms and technological agents have in the construction of “big opportunity of innovation” discourse that challenges the in-person university model dominant in Latin America. It starts from a theoretical perspective that contemplates the complexity of educational privatization phenomenon and recognizes that, in these processes driven by various global actors, national states and different governments play a central role when it comes to materialize this trends. The study was based on a documentary analysis that involved gathering discourses and actions from different actors that assumed centrality in the context of the pandemic at the university level.Dossier: Narrar la experiencia: enseñanza universitaria en pandemiaEspecialización en Docencia Universitari

Work Hard, Play Hard: Collecting Acceptability Annotations through a 3D Game

Corpus-based studies on acceptability judgements have always stimulated the interest of researchers, both in theoretical and computational fields. Some approaches focused on spontaneous judgements collected through different types of tasks, others on data annotated through crowd-sourcing platforms, still others relied on expert annotated data available from the literature. The release of CoLA corpus, a large-scale corpus of sentences extracted from linguistic handbooks as examples of acceptable/non acceptable phenomena in English, has revived interest in the reliability of judgements of linguistic experts vs. non-experts. Several issues are still open. In this work, we contribute to this debate by presenting a 3D video game that was used to collect acceptability judgments on Italian sentences. We analyse the resulting annotations in terms of agreement among players and by comparing them with experts{'} acceptability judgments. We also discuss different game settings to assess their impact on participants{'} motivation and engagement. The final dataset containing 1,062 sentences, which were selected based on majority voting, is released for future research and comparisons

Galectin 1-A Key Player between Tissue Repair and Fibrosis

Galectins are ten family members of carbohydrate-binding proteins with a high affinity for β galactose-containing oligosaccharides. Galectin-1 (Gal-1) is the first protein discovered in the family, expressed in many sites under normal and pathological conditions. In the first part of the review article, we described recent advances in the Gal-1 modulatory role on wound healing, by focusing on the different phases triggered by Gal-1, such as inflammation, proliferation, tissue repair and re-epithelialization. On the contrary, Gal-1 persistent over-expression enhances angiogenesis and extracellular matrix (ECM) production via PI3K/Akt pathway activation and leads to keloid tissue. Therefore, the targeted Gal-1 modulation should be considered a method of choice to treat wound healing and avoid keloid formation. In the second part of the review article, we discuss studies clarifying the role of Gal-1 in the pathogenesis of proliferative diabetic retinopathy, liver, renal, pancreatic and pulmonary fibrosis. This evidence suggests that Gal-1 may become a biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of tissue fibrosis and a promising molecular target for the development of new and original therapeutic tools to treat fibrosis in different chronic diseases

Thermal plasticity in Drosophila melanogaster: A comparison of geographic populations

BACKGROUND: Populations of Drosophila melanogaster show differences in many morphometrical traits according to their geographic origin. Despite the widespread occurrence of these differences in more than one Drosophila species, the actual selective mechanisms controlling the genetic basis of such variation are not fully understood. Thermal selection is considered to be the most likely cause explaining these differences. RESULTS: In our work, we investigated several life history traits (body size, duration of development, preadult survival, longevity and productivity) in two tropical and two temperate natural populations of D. melanogaster recently collected, and in a temperate population maintained for twelve years at the constant temperature of 18°C in the laboratory. In order to characterise the plasticity of these life history traits, the populations were grown at 12, 18, 28 and 31.2°C. Productivity was the fitness trait that showed clearly adaptive differences between latitudinal populations: tropical flies did better in the heat but worse in the cold environments with respect to temperate flies. Differences for the plasticity of other life history traits investigated between tropical and temperate populations were also found. The differences were particularly evident at stressful temperatures (12 and 31.2°C). CONCLUSION: Our results evidence a better cold tolerance in temperate populations that seems to have been evolved during the colonisation of temperate countries by D. melanogaster Afrotropical ancestors, and support the hypothesis of an adaptive response of plasticity to the experienced environment

Multi-Word Expressions in spoken language: PoliSdict

The term multiword expressions (MWEs) is referred-to a group of words with a unitary meaning, not inferred from that of the words that compose it, both in current use and in technical-specialized languages. In this paper, we describe PoliSdict an Italian electronic dictionary composed of multi-word expressions (MWEs) automatically extracted from a multimodal corpus grounded on political speech language, currently being developed at the "Maurice Gross" Laboratory of the Department of Political Sciences, Social and Communication of the University of Salerno, thanks to a loan from the company Network Contacts. We introduce the methodology of creation and the first results of a systematic analysis which considered terminological labels, frequency labels, recurring syntactic patterns, further proposing an associated ontology.Con il termine polirematica si fa generalmente riferimento ad un gruppo di parole con significato unitario, non desumibile da quello delle parole che lo compongono, sia nell’uso corrente sia in linguaggi tecnico-specialistici. In questo contributo viene presentato PoliSdict un dizionario elettronico in lingua italiana composto da espressioni polirematiche occorrenti nel parlato spontaneo estratte a partire da un corpus multimodale di dominio politico in lingua italiana in corso di ampliamento presso il Laboratorio “Maurice Gross” del Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Sociali e della Comunicazione dell’Università degli Studi di Salerno, grazie a un finanziamento della società Network Contacts. Viene presentata la metodologia di creazione ed i primi risultati di un'analisi sistematica che ha considerato etichette terminologiche, marche d'uso e pattern ricorrenti, proponendo infine un’ontologia associata

Cellular and Molecular Mechanism of Pulmonary Fibrosis Post-COVID-19: Focus on Galectin-1, -3, -8, -9

Pulmonary fibrosis is a consequence of the pathological accumulation of extracellular matrix (ECM), which finally leads to lung scarring. Although the pulmonary fibrogenesis is almost known, the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its post effects added new particularities which need to be explored. Many questions remain about how pulmonary fibrotic changes occur within the lungs of COVID-19 patients, and whether the changes will persist long term or are capable of resolving. This review brings together existing knowledge on both COVID-19 and pulmonary fibrosis, starting with the main key players in promoting pulmonary fibrosis, such as alveolar and endothelial cells, fibroblasts, lipofibroblasts, and macrophages. Further, we provide an overview of the main molecular mechanisms driving the fibrotic process in connection with Galactin-1, -3, -8, and -9, together with the currently approved and newly proposed clinical therapeutic solutions given for the treatment of fibrosis, based on their inhibition. The work underlines the particular pathways and processes that may be implicated in pulmonary fibrosis pathogenesis post-SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. The recent data suggest that galectin-1, -3, -8, and -9 could become valuable biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of lung fibrosis post-COVID-19 and promising molecular targets for the development of new and original therapeutic tools to treat the disease

dMyc Functions Downstream of Yorkie to Promote the Supercompetitive Behavior of Hippo Pathway Mutant Cells

Genetic analyses in Drosophila epithelia have suggested that the phenomenon of “cell competition” could participate in organ homeostasis. It has been speculated that competition between different cell populations within a growing organ might play a role as either tumor promoter or tumor suppressor, depending on the cellular context. The evolutionarily conserved Hippo (Hpo) signaling pathway regulates organ size and prevents hyperplastic disease from flies to humans by restricting the activity of the transcriptional cofactor Yorkie (yki). Recent data indicate also that mutations in several Hpo pathway members provide cells with a competitive advantage by unknown mechanisms. Here we provide insight into the mechanism by which the Hpo pathway is linked to cell competition, by identifying dMyc as a target gene of the Hpo pathway, transcriptionally upregulated by the activity of Yki with different binding partners. We show that the cell-autonomous upregulation of dMyc is required for the supercompetitive behavior of Yki-expressing cells and Hpo pathway mutant cells, whereas the relative levels of dMyc between Hpo pathway mutant cells and wild-type neighboring cells are critical for determining whether cell competition promotes a tumor-suppressing or tumor-inducing behavior. All together, these data provide a paradigmatic example of cooperation between tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes in tumorigenesis and suggest a dual role for cell competition during tumor progression depending on the output of the genetic interactions occurring between confronted cells