Clinical picture of the amyloid arthropathy in patients with chronic renal failure maintained on haemodialysis using cellulose membranes.

The clinical picture of 15 patients (10 male, five female) with amyloid arthropathy secondary to chronic renal failure treated with haemodialysis has been studied. The average period of haemodialysis was 10.8 years. Joint symptoms appeared between three and 13 years after starting haemodialysis. No patient had renal amyloidosis. Early symptoms were varied and often overlapped: knee swelling (seven patients), painful and stiff shoulders (seven), and carpal tunnel syndrome (six) were the most prominent. Follow up showed extension to other joints. Joint effusions were generally of the non-inflammatory type. Radiologically, geodes and erosions of variable sizes were seen in the affected joints, which can develop into a destructive arthropathy. Amyloid was found in abdominal fat in three of the 12 patients on whom a needle aspiration was performed. Four of 12 patients showed changes compatible with amyloid infiltration in the echocardiogram. One patient had amyloid in the gastric muscular layer, another in the colon mucus, and two of four in rectal biopsy specimens. Amyloid deposits showed the presence of beta 2 microglobulin in 10 patients. The clinical and radiological picture was similar to the amyloid arthropathy associated with multiple myeloma. These patients can develop systemic amyloidosis.

Sharing and Learning= Changing. A real story at the Institute of Public Security of Catalonia

The Institute has professionals with extensive experience in training, specifically with experience in the field of police and emergencies training. Moreover, it also has very talented people. But above all, our institution has public professionals with a desire to serve, who love security and emergency responders and want to provide them with the best knowledge to make them every day better professionals. In the quest for continuous training improvement, its during 2009 when e-learning begins to have a presence at the Institute. Virtual training methodology becomes a facilitator for the training of various professionals, avoiding geographical displacement and easing the class schedule.

IX ASMOSIA International Conference Interdisciplinary Studies on Ancient Stone: Tarragona, 8-13th June 2009 (Book of abstracts)

Aquesta obra recull els resums de les comunicacions orals i pòsters que es van presentar durant el IX Congrés Internacional de l’Association for the Study of Marbles and Other Stones in Antiquity (ASMOSIA), organitzat per l’ICAC en el marc del programa de recerca HAR2008-04600/HIST, amb el suport del programa d’Ajuts ARCS 2008 (referència expedient IR036826) de la Generalitat de Catalunya i del Ministeri de Ciència i Innovació (Accions Complementàries HAR2008-03181-E/HIST), i celebrat a Tarragona entre el 8 i el 13 de juny del 2009.

De ratones y hombres. Maus, de Art Spiegelman

This article analyses the cómic book Maus, by Art Spiegelman (1986-1991), from two angles: as a work of art dealing with the Holocaust, and as a cómic that subverts the fictional tradition of the genre, opening itself up to history and the narration of reality. Maus, the first cómic book to treat the topic of the Holocaust in depth, was written by a second-generation witness. It is a story of both physical survival and enduring trauma in the family. At the same time, an analysis of the stratevival and enduring trauma in the family. At the same time, an analysis of the strateof the traditional cómic reveals how Spiegelman has used the genre to recount, instead of fiction and for the first time, a historically authentic biographical tale

Semantic domain and grammatical class effects in the picture-word interference paradigm

The role of grammatical class in lexical access and representation is still not well understood. Grammatical effects obtained in picture-word interference experiments have been argued to show the operation of grammatical constraints during lexicalization when syntactic integration is required by the task. Alternative views hold that the ostensibly grammatical effects actually derive from the coincidence of semantic and grammatical differences between lexical candidates. We present three picture-word interference experiments conducted in Spanish. In the first two, the semantic relatedness (related or unrelated) and the grammatical class (nouns or verbs) of the target and the distracter were manipulated in an infinitive form action naming task in order to disentangle their contributions to verb lexical access. In the third experiment, a possible confound between grammatical class and semantic domain (objects or actions) was eliminated by using action-nouns as distracters. A condition in which participants were asked to name the action pictures using an inflected form of the verb was also included to explore whether the need of syntactic integration modulated the appearance of grammatical effects. Whereas action-words (nouns or verbs), but not object-nouns, produced longer reaction times irrespective of their grammatical class in the infinitive condition, only verbs slowed latencies in the inflected form condition. Our results suggest that speech production relies on the exclusion of candidate responses that do not fulfil task-pertinent criteria like membership in the appropriate semantic domain or grammatical class. Taken together, these findings are explained by a response-exclusion account of speech output. This and alternative hypotheses are discussed.

Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, a book review

Peer-reviewed

Barcelona Open Ed 2010. Conference abstracts book

Abstracts book of the Open Education Conference 2010 (Barcelona, 2-4 November 2010). In English, Catalan and Spanish.

Greek by Steven Berkoff (1980): The Risky Transformation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex into a Love Story

[eng] Can Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex really be transformed into a love story, as in Steven Berkoff’s drama entitled Greek? This article will show that, although Greek may be viewed by some critics as simply a provocative drama by no means intended to justify incest, directors, actors and critics in the end become enthralled by the powerful love story that ensues between Eddy and his wife and mother. This perspective reveals that Berkoff’s adaptation, intended to portray the social degradation of 1980s Great Britain, is in reality a quite risky proposition since it represents a flat denial of the tragic awareness of contemporary men and women. However, if this is the case, the audience, apart from enjoying the performance of Berkoff’s drama, might question, even from a non-fundamentalist perspective within the classical tradition, to what degree it makes sense to take inspiration from a text by Sophocles that precisely illustrates the great tragic awareness of the ancient Greeks.

Greek de Steven Berkoff (1980): L’arriscada conversió de l’Èdip rei de Sòfocles en una love story

[cat] ¿Podem convertir l’Èdip rei de Sòfocles en una història d’amor com ho fa Berkoff a Greek?. Tot i que alguns crítics llegeixen Greek només com un drama provocador que de cap manera intenta justificar l’incest, directors, actors i crítics resten finalment captivats per la impactant història d’amor entre Eddy i la seva esposa-mare. Això demostraria que l’adaptació de Berkoff, pensada per a il·lustrar la degradació social de la Gran Bretanya dels 80s, esdevé una proposta arriscada, car significa negar de fet la consciència tràgica dels homes i dones contemporanis. Tanmateix, si aquest és el cas, lectors i espectadors, a banda de l’indubtable plaer d’assistir a la representació de Greek, poden preguntar-se, fins i tot des d’una perspectiva no fonamentalista de la tradició clàssica, si té sentit inspirar-se en el text de Sòfocles, el qual mostra precisament la gran consciència tràgica dels grecs.