Treatment with tocilizumab or corticosteroids for COVID-19 patients with hyperinflammatory state: a multicentre cohort study (SAM-COVID-19)

Objectives: The objective of this study was to estimate the association between tocilizumab or corticosteroids and the risk of intubation or death in patients with coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) with a hyperinflammatory state according to clinical and laboratory parameters. Methods: A cohort study was performed in 60 Spanish hospitals including 778 patients with COVID-19 and clinical and laboratory data indicative of a hyperinflammatory state. Treatment was mainly with tocilizumab, an intermediate-high dose of corticosteroids (IHDC), a pulse dose of corticosteroids (PDC), combination therapy, or no treatment. Primary outcome was intubation or death; follow-up was 21 days. Propensity score-adjusted estimations using Cox regression (logistic regression if needed) were calculated. Propensity scores were used as confounders, matching variables and for the inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTWs). Results: In all, 88, 117, 78 and 151 patients treated with tocilizumab, IHDC, PDC, and combination therapy, respectively, were compared with 344 untreated patients. The primary endpoint occurred in 10 (11.4%), 27 (23.1%), 12 (15.4%), 40 (25.6%) and 69 (21.1%), respectively. The IPTW-based hazard ratios (odds ratio for combination therapy) for the primary endpoint were 0.32 (95%CI 0.22-0.47; p < 0.001) for tocilizumab, 0.82 (0.71-1.30; p 0.82) for IHDC, 0.61 (0.43-0.86; p 0.006) for PDC, and 1.17 (0.86-1.58; p 0.30) for combination therapy. Other applications of the propensity score provided similar results, but were not significant for PDC. Tocilizumab was also associated with lower hazard of death alone in IPTW analysis (0.07; 0.02-0.17; p < 0.001). Conclusions: Tocilizumab might be useful in COVID-19 patients with a hyperinflammatory state and should be prioritized for randomized trials in this situatio

Why Not STEM? A Study Case on the Influence of Gender Factors on Students&rsquo; Higher Education Choice

The gender gap in STEM-related job positions is a fact, and it is closely related to the low percentage of women studying STEM degrees. This poses a problem because Europe, as well as the United States and the rest of the developed countries, keep demanding the best engineers and scientists to continue developing innovative products. This problem can thus be approached by answering, firstly, the following question: Why are women not studying STEM degrees? In this paper, we summarize the factors, found in literature, that influence students&mdash;both boys and girls&mdash;to not study STEM, particularly engineering, computer sciences and technology. We study these influence factors in a sample of N = 338 students from a secondary school placed in the south of Spain; we carry out a survey in order to find out if those students fill out the same answers other researchers have found and published in the related literature. Our main conclusions are as follows: The results confirm that the number of women in technical courses decreases when the level of the course increases; the lack of role models is not an impediment for girls to feel comfortable; unlike boys, girls will not choose engineering, even if their scoring in STEM is good; and we found that girls and women see themselves as not capable of studying an engineering degree more than boys and men do. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the situation regarding the gender gap in STEM fields in ages in which both girls and boys must choose their future studies

Why Not STEM? A Study Case on the Influence of Gender Factors on Students’ Higher Education Choice

This research was funded by Junta de Andalucia grant number FQM-147 and by Ministerio Espanol de Economia y Competitividad, project TIN2017-85727-C4-2-P (UGR-DeepBio).The gender gap in STEM-related job positions is a fact, and it is closely related to the low percentage of women studying STEM degrees. This poses a problem because Europe, as well as the United States and the rest of the developed countries, keep demanding the best engineers and scientists to continue developing innovative products. This problem can thus be approached by answering, firstly, the following question: Why are women not studying STEM degrees? In this paper, we summarize the factors, found in literature, that influence students—both boys and girls—to not study STEM, particularly engineering, computer sciences and technology. We study these influence factors in a sample of N = 338 students from a secondary school placed in the south of Spain; we carry out a survey in order to find out if those students fill out the same answers other researchers have found and published in the related literature. Our main conclusions are as follows: The results confirm that the number of women in technical courses decreases when the level of the course increases; the lack of role models is not an impediment for girls to feel comfortable; unlike boys, girls will not choose engineering, even if their scoring in STEM is good; and we found that girls and women see themselves as not capable of studying an engineering degree more than boys and men do. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the situation regarding the gender gap in STEM fields in ages in which both girls and boys must choose their future studies.Junta de Andalucia FQM-147Spanish Government TIN2017-85727-C4-2-

Effect of litter mixtures of invader species on herbaceous understory in riverine areas

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of riverine invasive tree species in the presence and growth of herbaceous understory species. The experiment simulated scenarios in which seeds of grasses, legumes and forbs species were germinated and grown in the presence of leaf litter of tree species, both exotic and native. The effect of one species litter or various species litter mixtures that more closely represent ecosystem natural conditions were considered. The results indicate a negative effect of both native and exotic tree species litter in the growth of herbaceous species. These effects are different depending on the target species. The combination of litter modifies the responses of the target species to the presence of litter.Depto. de Biodiversidad, Ecología y EvoluciónFac. de Ciencias BiológicasTRUEMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN)Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Manchapu

The uncertainty quandary: a study in the context of the evolutionary optimization in games and other uncertain environments

In many optimization processes, the fitness or the considered measure of goodness for the candidate solutions presents uncertainty, that is, it yields different values when repeatedly measured, due to the nature of the evaluation process or the solution itself. This happens quite often in the context of computational intelligence in games, when either bots behave stochastically, or the target game possesses intrinsic random elements, but it shows up also in other problems as long as there is some random component. Thus, it is important to examine the statistical behavior of repeated measurements of performance and, more specifically, the statistical distribution that better fits them. This work analyzes four different problems related to computational intelligence in videogames, where Evolutionary Computation methods have been applied, and the evaluation of each individual is performed by playing the game, and compare them to other problem, neural network optimization, where performance is also a statistical variable. In order to find possible patterns in the statistical behavior of the variables, we track the main features of its distributions, skewness and kurtosis. Contrary to the usual assumption in this kind of problems, we prove that, in general, the values of two features imply that fitness values do not follow a normal distribution; they do present a certain common behavior that changes as evolution proceeds, getting in some cases closer to the standard distribution and in others drifting apart from it. A clear behavior in this case cannot be concluded, other than the fact that the statistical distribution that fitness variables follow is affected by selection in different directions, that parameters vary in a single generation across them, and that, in general, this kind of behavior will have to be taken into account to adequately address uncertainty in fitness in evolutionary algorithms

Dynamic and telecolaborative classrooms: development and strengthening of technological competences for the improvement of teaching quality

Se intenta proponer un modelo pedagógico de aula invertida, que plantea el objetivo de transferir el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje y extrapolarlo fuera del aula, a fin de implementar el tiempo de docencia en pro del aprendizaje significativo. Este proyecto se fundamenta en un marco teórico consistente y riguroso, que se focaliza en el formato tele-colaborativo, pero que también integra la metodología Flipped Classroom, el aprendizaje significativo, aprender haciendo y el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje colaborativo, abriendo así los roles tradicionales que se han venido consensuando hasta la sociedad del momento y donde los alumnos de nuestras aulas tienen un papel de mero espectador pasivo.An attempt is made to propose an inverted classroom pedagogical model that aims to transfer the teaching-learning process and extrapolate it outside the classroom in order to implement teaching time based on meaningful learning. This project is based on a consistent and rigorous theoretical framework, which focuses on the tele-collaborative format, but also integrates the Flipped Classroom methodology, meaningful learning, learning by doing and the collaborative teaching-learning process, thus opening the roles Traditional that have been consensuando until the society of the moment and where the students of our classrooms have a role of mere passive spectator.Depto. de Estudios EducativosFac. de EducaciónFALSEsubmitte