¿Adónde va la pedagogía social? Exaptation como modelo pedagógico de desarrollo en la era de la crisis global

Aquest article parteix de la pregunta de quin és el paper de la pedagogia social a la primera meitat del segle XXI i la resposta que pretén mostrar és l’ús del terme exaptation a través de l’educació en tot àmbit de la sociabilitat. L’objectiu és evidenciar i descobrir la possibilitat o la manera de ser diferent a través de l’educació. Es tracta d’apreciar la responsabilitat de saber estar al món en relació amb els altres, en un procés d’adaptació constructiva i creativa que té en compte els vincles i la reciprocitat en la precarietat de la realitat d’avui en dia. El procés que suposa el terme exaptation és activat per la dinàmica de la necessitat i del desig a través de la figura de l’educador. Al llarg del text s’analitzen alguns fenòmens socials en els quals sembla produir-se espontàniament un procés d’exaptation, del qual no hi ha encara un terme comprensiu en el lèxic pedagògic. Precisament perquè es configura com a denominació d’un procés que connota la naturalesa de l’actuació pedagògico-social, es considera que pot contribuir a definir l’estatut epistemològic de la disciplina.This article starts from the question of the role of social pedagogy in the first half of the 21st century, and the response it seeks to show is the use of the term ‘exaptation’ in education in all areas of sociability. The aim is to identify and explore the possibility or the way of being different through education, as a matter of appreciating the responsibility of being in the world in relation to others, in a process of constructive and creative adaptation that takes into account the importance of links and reciprocity in today’s precarious reality. The process described by the term ‘exaptation’ is activated by the dynamics of need and desire through the figure of the educator. The article goes on to analyse a number of social phenomena in which there appears to be a spontaneous process of exaptation, for which there is as yet no comprehensive term in the vocabulary of pedagogy. Precisely because it is configured as a denomination of a process that connotes the nature of the social-pedagogicalaction, we believe it can help to define the epistemological status of the discipline.Este artículo parte de la pregunta de cuál es el papel de la pedagogía social en la primera mitad del siglo XXI y la respuesta que pretende mostrar es el empleo del término exaptation a través de la educación en todo ámbito de la sociabilidad. El objetivo es evidenciar y descubrir la posibilidad o la manera de ser diferente a través de la educación. Se trata de apreciar la responsabilidad de saber estar en el mundo en relación con los demás, en un proceso de adaptación constructiva y creativa que tiene en cuenta los vínculos y la reciprocidad en la precariedad de la realidad de hoy día. El proceso que supone el término exaptation es activado por la dinámica de la necesidad y del deseo a través de la figura del educador. A lo largo del texto se analizan algunos fenómenos sociales en los cuales parece producirse espontáneamente un proceso de exaptation, del cual no existe aún un término comprensivo en el léxico pedagógico. Precisamente debido a que se configura como denominación de un proceso que connota la naturaleza de la actuación pedagógico-social, se considera que puede contribuir a definir el estatuto epistemológico de la disciplina

An Evaluation of Contemporary Community Preservation Education in the U.S. and Recommendations for Strengthening Practices

Community preservation education is a powerful tool for exciting and empowering the public to become motivators and facilitators of preservation within their communities. Such non-formal education is geared towards a general audience and aims to foster greater knowledge, appreciation and involvement within the public. While community preservation education is embedded within modern preservation theory, policy and practice, it is also considered to be amongst the field’s primary weaknesses. Despite such criticism there have been no efforts to critically evaluate current education efforts and identify ways in which they can be improved. This thesis endeavors to instigate such a dialogue. The purpose of the research project was to evaluate the current state of community preservation education in the U.S. The research process included an extensive literature review regarding education and best practices within the preservation, environmental and museum education fields as well as the marketing profession. This information was the lens through which current education programs were evaluated. To gain insight into contemporary education initiatives a survey was disseminated to all local and state public and non-profit preservation organizations. Case studies were also conducted and provided a more in-depth understanding of program development, implementation and execution. Overall, research revealed that there is significant room for improvement in current education efforts. Included in this thesis is a set of recommendations that can be used to inform improvements to overall practice and individual education programs

Towards large-cohort comparative studies to define the factors influencing the gut microbial community structure of ASD patients.

Differences in the gut microbiota have been reported between individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypical controls, although direct evidence that changes in the microbiome contribute to causing ASD has been scarce to date. Here we summarize some considerations of experimental design that can help untangle causality in this complex system. In particular, large cross-sectional studies that can factor out important variables such as diet, prospective longitudinal studies that remove some of the influence of interpersonal variation in the microbiome (which is generally high, especially in children), and studies transferring microbial communities into germ-free mice may be especially useful. Controlling for the effects of technical variables, which have complicated efforts to combine existing studies, is critical when biological effect sizes are small. Large citizen-science studies with thousands of participants such as the American Gut Project have been effective at uncovering subtle microbiome effects in self-collected samples and with self-reported diet and behavior data, and may provide a useful complement to other types of traditionally funded and conducted studies in the case of ASD, especially in the hypothesis generation phase

The Doctor\u27s Original Face: Watching Doctor Who Episodes As Buddhist Koans

This essay discusses the portrayal and usage of Buddhist themes in the classic era Doctor Who television series (1963-1996). Here we map out specific influences of Buddhism on the construction of Doctor Who’s characters, illustrating how popular culture participates in the religious dialogue contained within everyday life. We will argue that an interpretive lens informed by an understanding of the interplay of different religious and philosophical influences contributes to a more productive conversation about the nature of the Doctor. A survey of serials that explicitly involve Buddhist settings and thematic elements such as the still lost Patrick Troughton-era “The Abominable Snowmen” and many of the Jon Pertwee era, particularly “Planet of the Spiders” is provided. One section of this essay will focus on how writer Christopher Bailey utilized his personal Buddhist beliefs to inform story elements of the Peter Davison-era serials “Kinda” and its sequel, “Snakedance.” We will then proceed to investigate particular Buddhist conceptions of impermanence, change and temporality and relate these to the characterization of the Doctor and how his transformations illustrate the instability of identity, serving as a potential contrast to messianic readings of this science fiction tv show

A multidimensional frailty approach in predicting and preventing dementia

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Accurate Profiling of Microbial Communities from Massively Parallel Sequencing using Convex Optimization

We describe the Microbial Community Reconstruction ({\bf MCR}) Problem, which is fundamental for microbiome analysis. In this problem, the goal is to reconstruct the identity and frequency of species comprising a microbial community, using short sequence reads from Massively Parallel Sequencing (MPS) data obtained for specified genomic regions. We formulate the problem mathematically as a convex optimization problem and provide sufficient conditions for identifiability, namely the ability to reconstruct species identity and frequency correctly when the data size (number of reads) grows to infinity. We discuss different metrics for assessing the quality of the reconstructed solution, including a novel phylogenetically-aware metric based on the Mahalanobis distance, and give upper-bounds on the reconstruction error for a finite number of reads under different metrics. We propose a scalable divide-and-conquer algorithm for the problem using convex optimization, which enables us to handle large problems (with $\sim10^6$ species). We show using numerical simulations that for realistic scenarios, where the microbial communities are sparse, our algorithm gives solutions with high accuracy, both in terms of obtaining accurate frequency, and in terms of species phylogenetic resolution.Comment: To appear in SPIRE 1

UniFrac – An online tool for comparing microbial community diversity in a phylogenetic context

BACKGROUND: Moving beyond pairwise significance tests to compare many microbial communities simultaneously is critical for understanding large-scale trends in microbial ecology and community assembly. Techniques that allow microbial communities to be compared in a phylogenetic context are rapidly gaining acceptance, but the widespread application of these techniques has been hindered by the difficulty of performing the analyses. RESULTS: We introduce UniFrac, a web application available at , that allows several phylogenetic tests for differences among communities to be easily applied and interpreted. We demonstrate the use of UniFrac to cluster multiple environments, and to test which environments are significantly different. We show that analysis of previously published sequences from the Columbia river, its estuary, and the adjacent coastal ocean using the UniFrac interface provided insights that were not apparent from the initial data analysis, which used other commonly employed techniques to compare the communities. CONCLUSION: UniFrac provides easy access to powerful multivariate techniques for comparing microbial communities in a phylogenetic context. We thus expect that it will provide a completely new picture of many microbial interactions and processes in both environmental and medical contexts

Ribosomal RNA diversity predicts genome diversity in gut bacteria and their relatives

The mammalian gut is an attractive model for exploring the general question of how habitat impacts the evolution of gene content. Therefore, we have characterized the relationship between 16 S rRNA gene sequence similarity and overall levels of gene conservation in four groups of species: gut specialists and cosmopolitans, each of which can be divided into pathogens and non-pathogens. At short phylogenetic distances, specialist or cosmopolitan bacteria found in the gut share fewer genes than is typical for genomes that come from non-gut environments, but at longer phylogenetic distances gut bacteria are more similar to each other than are genomes at equivalent evolutionary distances from non-gut environments, suggesting a pattern of short-term specialization but long-term convergence. Moreover, this pattern is observed in both pathogens and non-pathogens, and can even be seen in the plasmids carried by gut bacteria. This observation is consistent with the finding that, despite considerable interpersonal variation in species content, there is surprising functional convergence in the microbiome of different humans. Finally, we observe that even within bacterial species or genera 16S rRNA divergence provides useful information about average conservation of gene content. The results described here should be useful for guiding strain selection to maximize novel gene discovery in large-scale genome sequencing projects, while the approach could be applied in studies seeking to understand the effects of habitat adaptation on genome evolution across other body habitats or environment types

La ricerca all'interno della macroarea di Lettere e Filosofia : deduzioni e implicazioni di genere

Il lavoro che segue espone i risultati di un’attività di ricerca attuata all’inter- no del dipartimento di Storia, Patrimonio culturale, Formazione e Società tra il 2018 e il 2020 presso l’università “Tor Vergata” di Roma; lo studio, condot- to con il supporto tecnico del dott. M. Mastrangelo, esperto di Statistica socia- le, per l’elaborazione dei dati, e la collaborazione delle strutture di reclutamen- to di Ateneo, mirava a verificare nel secondo Ateneo di Roma la situazione di genere riguardo il posizionamento accademico, già presentata in un lavoro precedente1. Il secondo obiettivo del lavoro è stata l’analisi qualitativa dei pro- dotti di ricerca all’interno del dipartimento di Storia, Patrimonio culturale, Formazione e Società per verificarne le caratteristiche in un’ottica di genere e valutare se si potesse identificare un carattere femminile nella produzione scien- tifica delle studiose, attraverso un’analisi del contenuto delle parole chiave in- dicate dai partecipanti alla ricerca unitamente alla tipologia del lavoro. I risul- tati della ricerca effettuata suscitano considerazioni pedagogiche e socio-cultu- rali sullo stato di avanzamento dei processi di emancipazione femminile con uno sguardo che vede entrambi i generi coinvolti in una tensione auto-forma- tiva

Più paura di vivere che di morire : introduzione all'opera di don Alfano

La ricerca ricostruisce l’opera del salesiano Alfonso Alfano, che dagli anni Novanta al 2017 aprì a Roma nuovi percorsi di vita per centinaia di minori a rischio, ora nel Centro accoglienza minori del Borgo Ragazzi Don Bosco a Centocelle. La proposta pedagogica di Alfano è stata passione ardente per gli scartati della società. Fondata su di un tripode pedagogico, radicata nella sua personale storia di vita e nel carisma salesiano, riempie di occasioni, contenuti e senso la povertà educativa. Il lavoro pre- senta i contenuti principali della produzione del salesiano e pone in luce le matrici pedagogiche di studiosi a lui contemporanei che, insieme all’influenza del carisma salesiano, si ipotizza ne abbiano influenzato l’opera pedagogica