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Abstract The effectiveness of noninvasive respiratory support in severe COVID-19 patients is still controversial. We aimed to compare the outcome of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia and hypoxemic respiratory failure treated with high-flow oxygen administered via nasal cannula (HFNC), continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) or noninvasive ventilation (NIV), initiated outside the intensive care unit (ICU) in 10 university hospitals in Catalonia, Spain. We recruited 367 consecutive patients aged ≥ 18 years who were treated with HFNC (155, 42.2%), CPAP (133, 36.2%) or NIV (79, 21.5%). The main outcome was intubation or death at 28 days after respiratory support initiation. After adjusting for relevant covariates and taking patients treated with HFNC as reference, treatment with NIV showed a higher risk of intubation or death (hazard ratio 2.01; 95% confidence interval 1.32–3.08), while treatment with CPAP did not show differences (0.97; 0.63–1.50). In the context of the pandemic and outside the intensive care unit setting, noninvasive ventilation for the treatment of moderate to severe hypoxemic acute respiratory failure secondary to COVID-19 resulted in higher mortality or intubation rate at 28 days than high-flow oxygen or CPAP. This finding may help physicians to choose the best noninvasive respiratory support treatment in these patients. Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT04668196.

Early Career Members of Assembly 2 (Respiratory Intensive Care) attended the 2022 European Respiratory Society (ERS) International Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The conference covered acute and chronic respiratory failure. Sessions of interest to our Assembly members and to those interested in respiratory critical care included the state-of-the-art session on respiratory critical care, the journal session (ERS/Lancet) on acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) phenotyping into precision medicine, and sessions on specificity of coronavirus disease 2019 ARDS and its post-critical care. A symposium on treatment of acute respiratory failure in patients with COPD and innovations in mechanical ventilation either in the intensive care unit or at home were also reported upon. These sessions are summarised in this article.

This article proposes a comparative analysis of the relationships between vision and passionate devices inscribed in narrative sentences. The critical tools of visual culture (Mitchell) and semiotics (Greimas) are applied for the study of space descriptions and character’s passionate states, in two literary works by Anna Maria Ortese and Lalla Romano. In their description, the scopic device that creates the vision (image according to Mitchell) is deconstructed, and a new, alternative and re-contextualized point of view is installed to create real figures of place (pictures according to Mitchell). This new point of view can range from simple emotional involvement to the physical involvement of the body. In a specular way, the reader follows the same involvement of characters.

Con la dicitura “revisionismo cognitivo”, intendo un processo di rilettura della storia culturale alla luce delle recenti acquisizioni degli studi cognitivi, sia metodologiche che conoscitive. Una carica revisionistica è presente nella maggior parte degli orientamenti cognitivi, soprattutto quelli connessi con gli studi narrativi o più specificamente letterari, tesa sia a integrare le conoscenze pregresse mostrando lati nuovi della storia culturale e del potenziale comunicativo della letteratura, sia a smascherare atteggiamenti della critica ritenuti fallaci alla luce delle nuove conoscenze. Nel presente lavoro metto a confronto il revisionismo storico e quello cognitivo rispetto allo studio del neorealismo novecentesco dell’Italia meridionale. Nella prima parte illustro il caso studio: la critica agli intellettuali che orbitavano intorno alla rivista «Sud» nel capitolo finale di Il mare non bagna Napoli. Nella seconda parte, descrivo l’operazione di revisionismo storico realizzata con la pubblicazione delle lettere di Anna Maria Ortese a Pasquale Prunas, direttore della rivista, e descrivo la stretta relazione tra la poetica di Ortese e quella di «Sud» alla luce di in confronto col realismo socialista proposto dal PCI. Nella terza parte, propongo un approccio revisionistico di tipo cognitivo, utilizzando come premessa generale l’ipotesi secondo la quale la lettura di narrativa incrementa la ToM (Hutto, Zunshine, Kidd-Castano), e analizzando il realismo visionario di Ortese sulla base degli indici di coinvolgimento fisico del narratore nell’ambiente, sulla scorta della teoria conosciuta come embodied mind. Lo studio condotto mette in evidenza alcuni limiti del revisionismo storico, e della literary politics, nella valutazione del realismo come pratica politica, ed enfatizza il ruolo che le metodologie cognitive possono svolgere nel processo revisionistico dei materiali letterari, grazie alla loro capacità di analizzare la poetica indipendentemente dalle intenzioni comunicative dichiarate o apparenti. With the term "cognitive revisionism", I mean a process of re-reading cultural history in light of recent acquisitions of cognitive studies. A revisionist approach is present in most cognitive schools, especially those related to narrative or more specifically literary studies, aimed to integrating past knowledge by showing new sides in cultural history, as well as by exposing critical attitudes considered fallacious in the light of new knowledge. In this paper, I compare historical and cognitive revisionism in the study of the neorealism in the twentieth century of southern Italy. In the first part I illustrate the case study: criticism of intellectuals who orbited around the magazine "South" by Anna Maria Ortese. In the second part, I describe the operation of historic revisionism made with the publication of the letters by Anna Maria Ortese to Pasquale Prunas, editor of the magazine, and describe the close relationship between Ortese's poetry and that of "South", in the light of comparison With the socialist realism proposed by the PCI. In the third part, I propose a cognitive revisionistic approach, using hypothesis of relation between reading and increasing of ToM (Hutto, Zunshine, Kidd-Castano) as a premise, and analyzing the visionary realism of Ortese on the basis of the physical involvement of the narrator in the environment (embodied mind). The study underlined some limitations of historical revisionism and literary politics in evaluating realism as a political practice, and emphasizes the role that cognitive methodologies can play in the revisionist process of literary materials, thanks to their ability to analyze poetics without taking into account the declared or apparent communication intentions.

El trabajo se enfoca hacia algunas consideraciones acerca de la posibilidad de entender el género femenino como un género específico de la escritura, con referencia a los subgéneros, y a los temas y a los estilos expre- sivos que corresponden a ello. El articulo toma como referencia los estudios de la Semiótica y la Lingüística textual que le permiten entender el entorno semántico de lo femenino como una “nebulosa de significado” que aún no ha llegado a la ratificación, y que no tiene formas textuales codificadas. El campo semántico de la mujer se plantea por lo tanto como una interpretación de los textos, un punto de vista que se desprende de la práctica de la lectura. Sobre la base de estas consideraciones, el ar- tículo analiza las principales líneas teóricas sobre la lectura de las mujeres, circunscribiendo tres macroáreas: los Estudios de género, la investigación histórica y la investigación sociológica con los análisis estadísticos relacionados con la comercialización del libro. El resultado final parece reforzar la hipótesis que el género femenino se caracteriza por un enfoque sobre la visión y la capacidad de tradu- cir por escrito el mundo perceptible, con atención específica para el contexto de la lectura

This paper discusses the narrative theories on the serial stories and their connections with the temporal order of the story, starting from the approach of interpretative semiotics. The scope of this work is to show how, in the transition from analogical to digital media, the temporal order of the serial stories is changed by the remediation of the characteristics of digital texts in analogical media. The new temporal order is based on the simultaneous structure similar to hypertext. These new serial stories – web literature, web series, high concept and experimental cartoon movie – impose new constraints to cooperation pact between author and reader, and identify a new model reader. He/she is literate in the digital environment, he/she does not identify the series by genre but by narrative modes, he/she can actively participate in the evolution of the plot and – basic feature – he/she does not identify the relationship between the episodes of the series on the basis of a principle of conceptual dependency, but according to a principle of conceptual blending.

In our paper we apply Peirce's model of Arguments (Statistical Deduction, Probabilistic Deduction, Induction and Abduction) to a communication process where negotiating sense and meanings is emphasized. We selected a communication space where everything is planned as a medium of sense (video terminals, screens, lights, etc.) namely the IBM Software Executive Briefing Center in Italy, a workplace used to exchange views, negotiate or transact. It is based in Rome in the same building as the International Development Laboratory of the IBM Software Group. The Software Center is the place where IBM welcomes its potential customers and has the opportunity to show them its technology and offer solutions. This paper focuses on "media space" in the Center which is structured by the seller according to his/her idea of the buyer's interpretive process. This paper analyzes the roles of visual codes in the allocation of functions. It also looks into the relation between the symbolism of the company with its marketing, past history and media space in order to define the buyer's typology of inference (deduction, induction or abduction) in relation to the communication strategy of the media space design. The research is conducted directly in the field by interviewing the Manager of the IBM Center as well as asking people who use it to fill in an anonymous questionnaire, which analyses both the media space and the plan of the building.