Pathological tremor is a common but highly complex movement disorder, affecting ~5% of population older than 65 years. Different methodologies have been proposed for its quantification. Nevertheless, the discrimination between Parkinson’s disease tremor and essential tremor remains a daunting clinical challenge, greatly impacting patient treatment and basic research. Here, we propose and compare several movement-based and electromyography-based tremor quantification metrics. For the latter, we identified individual motor unit discharge patterns from high-density surface electromyograms and characterized the neural drive to a (...) single muscle and how it relates to other affected muscles in 27 Parkinson’s disease and 27 essential tremor patients. We also computed several metrics from the literature. The most discriminative metrics were the symmetry of the neural drive to muscles, motor unit synchronization, and the mean log power of the tremor harmonics in movement recordings. Noteworthily, the first two most discriminative metrics were proposed in this study. We then used decision tree modelling to find the most discriminative combinations of individual metrics, which increased the accuracy of tremor type discrimination to 94%. In summary, the proposed neural drive-based metrics were the most accurate at discriminating and characterizing the two most common pathological tremor types. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar lo que las investigaciones realizadas desde el ámbito psicológico señalan sobre cómo se sienten las mujeres que sufren violencia en la pareja e inician un procedimiento judicial, incluso antes de interponer la denuncia. Comenzaremos señalando las dif icultades que para las mujeres conlleva denunciar a quien es o ha sido su pareja afectiva, para seguir con un análisis de lo que esperan conseguir con la denuncia, cómo se sienten tratadas en su (...) contacto con el sistema judicial, cómo viven las primeras respuestas obtenidas, especialmente las que conciernen a las Órdenes de Protección, las emociones y expectativas a lo largo del procedimiento judicial, así como la importancia del acompañamiento y asesoramiento especializado. Para f inalizar, resaltaremos la importancia de la especialización de los y las profesionales que intervienen a lo largo del procedimiento judicial. Con dicho conocimiento sobre los aspectos emocionales y comportamentales de estas mujeres que han sufrido violencia y de los motivos que pueden explicarlos, pretendemos contribuir a una mayor comprensión de las mismas que evite la victimización secundaria y el que las mujeres acaben renunciando por una pérdida de conf ianza en el sistema judicial. (shrink)

La violencia contra la mujer en la pareja es un fenómeno registrado en las sociedades a lo largo de la historia. Con el f in de averiguar cuáles son las causas que favorecen su aparición se han desarrollado teorías desde diferentes perspectivas —psicológica, socioló- gica y feminista, principalmente— que han tratado que determinar cuáles son los factores que aumentan el riesgo de que exista este tipo de violencia. El propósito de este artículo es exponer los postulados de las principales (...) las teorías criminológicas que han tratado el maltrato en la pareja en el ámbito internacional. Conocer las variables de riesgo de esta problemática social puede servir para diseñar políticas publicas de prevención y erradicación de la violencia contra la mujer en la pareja. (shrink)

I argue for the distinction between presuming that p and maintaining that presumably p. In order to make sense of this distinction, I defend a non-inferentialist conception of presumptions and offer an account of the correctness conditions for both presumptions and presumptive inferences. I characterize presumptions as a type of constative speech-act having certain semantic correctness conditions. In turn, regarding presumptive inferences, my strategy is to provide the correctness conditions for the use of an epistemic modal such as “presumably.” This (...) epistemic modal is characterized as a force indicator for speech-acts of concluding in complex speech-acts of arguing involving presumptive inferences. (shrink)

Our aim is to defend the Precautionary Principle (PP) against the main theoretical and practical criticisms that it has raised by proposing a novel conception and a specific formulation of the principle. We first address the theoretical concerns against the idea of there being a principle of precaution by arguing for a distinctively political conception of the PP as opposed to a moral one. Our claim is that the rationale of the PP is grounded in the fact that contemporary societies (...) wish to avoid morally unacceptable risks while at the same time pursuing other goals, aspirations and values. Following this political conception of the PP, we propose a specific formulation in terms of an argumentation scheme—the Argumentation Scheme for Appealing to Precaution—which is meant to solve, in turn, the main practical concerns that the PP has raised. We explain the advantages of our proposal by analysing appeals to precaution in the cases of (1) the European restrictions on the free movement of persons during the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) the discharge of nuclear wastes into the Irish Sea. (shrink)

a recent paper, Fábio Perin Shecaira proposes a defence of Waller’s deductivist schema for moral analogical argumentation. This defence has several flaws, the most important of them being that many good analogical arguments would be deemed bad or deficient. Additionally, Shecaira misrepresents my alternative account as something in between deductivism and non-deductivism. This paper is both an attempt at solving this misunderstanding and an analysis and criticism of Waller and Shecaira’s forms of deductivism.

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

Following a Toulmian account of argument analysis and evaluation, I offer a general unitary schema for, so called, deductive and inductive types of analogical arguments. This schema is able to explain why certain analogical arguments can be said to be deductive, and yet, also defeasible.

Both because of the vagueness of the word ‘give’ when speaking about giving reasons, and because we lack an adequate definition of ‘reasons’, there is a harmful ambiguity in the expression ‘giving reasons’. Particularly, straightforwardly identifying argumentation with reasons giving would make of virtually any interplay a piece of argumentation. Besides, if we adopt the mainstream definition of reasons as “considerations that count in favour of doing or believing something”, then only good argumentation would count as argumentation. In this paper, (...) I defend a qualified characterization of argumentation as reasons giving that is shown to be fruitful for shedding light on the practice of giving reasons, and an inferentialist conception of reasons that makes room for speaking of “bad reasons” and, consequently, makes it possible to talk of argumentation as reasons giving even if we are talking about bad argumentation. (shrink)

Both because of the vagueness of the word ‘give’ when speaking about giving reasons, and because we lack an adequate definition of ‘reasons’, there is a harmful ambiguity in the expression ‘giving reasons’. Particularly, straightforwardly identifying argumentation with reasons giving would make of virtually any interplay a piece of argumentation. Besides, if we adopt the mainstream definition of reasons as “considerations that count in favour of doing or believing something”, then only good argumentation would count as argumentation. In this paper, (...) I defend a qualified characterization of argumentation as reasons giving that is shown to be fruitful for shedding light on the practice of giving reasons, and an inferentialist conception of reasons that makes room for speaking of “bad reasons” and, consequently, makes it possible to talk of argumentation as reasons giving even if we are talking about bad argumentation. (shrink)

Teaching mathematics and improving mathematics competence are pending subjects within our educational system. The PEIM (Programa Evolutivo Instruccional para Matemáticas), a constructivist intervention program for the improvement of mathematical performance, affects the different agents involved in math learning, guaranteeing a significant improvement in students’ performance. The program is based on the following pillars: (a) students become the main agents of their learning by constructing their own knowledge; (b) the teacher must be the guide to facilitate and guarantee such a construction (...) by being a great connoisseur of the fundamental aspects of the development of the child’s mathematical thinking; (c) the mathematical contents must be sequenced in terms of the complexity and significance for the student as well as contextualized at all times; and (d) the classroom must have a constructivist climate highlighting cooperative work among students. The implementation of PEIM along with the empirical evaluation conducted in several centers in Madrid and Zaragoza (Spain) confirm how students improve their mathematical competence. Both first- and second-grade students in elementary education were far more effective in solving problems, highlighting the use of more advanced strategies in their resolution and a lower incidence of conceptual errors. Moreover, it was possible to verify how the students proving greater difficulty, experienced an evolution in learning similarly to those who did not present it. The program provides customized education to allow the teacher to know at all times how he should be more influential on the students’ learning through mathematical profiles. Both teaching practice and teachers were observed, being that of the experimental group more prone to analyzing processes and allowing the construction of knowledge by students, due to their psycho-developmental training. As a result, we found several improvements through the implementation of the program that may serve, for upcoming years, as a basis for the necessary changes in the teaching of mathematics. (shrink)

I defend a conception of Logic as normative for the sort of activities in which inferences super-vene, namely, reasoning and arguing. Toulmin’s criticism of formal logic will be our framework to shape the idea that in order to make sense of Logic as normative, we should con-ceive it as a discipline devoted to the layout of arguments, understood as the representations of the semantic, truth relevant, properties of the inferences that we make in arguing and reason-ing.

In “Deductivism as an Interpretative Strategy: A Reply to Groarke’s Defense of Reconstructive Deductivism,” David Godden distinguished two notions of deductivism. On the one hand, as an interpretative thesis, deductivism is the view that all-natural language argumentation must be interpreted as being deductive. On the other hand, as an evaluative thesis, deductivism is the view that for a conclusion to follow, it has to follow of necessity from the premises—or, in other words, that being a good inference implies being deductive. (...) The main goal of this paper is to show that evaluative deductivism is wrong. (shrink)

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

I argue that conductions are a special type of inference indeed, but that this does not mean that we need to develop novel standards of inference goodness or specific argument schemes for properly assessing them. Following LNMA’s theoretical framework, I provide a semantic account of conductions and explain the interesting pragmatic properties of a certain type of conductions in terms of the rhetorical dimension of the speech-act of arguing.

The current training model being used in higher education advocates the acquisition of competences aimed at providing students with all-round training that will enable them to tackle their future work responsibilities effectively. This encompasses a number of different competences, most notably the transversal kind, especially in view of the important role they play in shaping the profile of any professional individual. The active learning methods applied to group work have shown to be the most suitable for achieving these competences. From (...) this perspective, and considering their relevance, we present the results of a study that addresses the perceptions held by students from Education Degrees regarding the extent to which transversal competences are acquired by implementing active learning methods. The students perceive group work as a dynamic that teaches them how to be more self-critical and committed to group-oriented tasks, thus encouraging communication skills, personal relationships and motivation. However, a lesser degree of acquisition has been recorded in other equally important competences. As such, it is necessary to promote these learning methods from the start, carefully designing and planning the curriculum structure as well as the tasks to be performed in order to avoid any negative implications that may arise. (shrink)

How should automated vehicles react in emergency circumstances? Most research projects and scientific literature deal with this question from a moral perspective. In particular, it is customary to treat emergencies involving AVs as instances of moral dilemmas and to use the trolley problem as a framework to address such alleged dilemmas. Some critics have pointed out some shortcomings of this strategy and have urged to focus on mundane traffic situations instead of trolley cases involving AVs. Besides, these authors rightly point (...) out the political nature of the most interesting debates involving AVs. However, in our view, they do not offer an adequate account of the distinction between ethics and politics and still see their proposals as contributions to the ethics of AVs. We argue that many of the interesting questions about how AVs should behave, both in emergency and other situations, are of political, and not moral, nature. This view is based on a conception of politics and political normativity that we have developed elsewhere and that we call “political minimalism.” Additionally, we show that this proposed perspective has significant consequences for the design, management, and regulation of transport systems. (shrink)

In The Uses of Argument, Toulmin proposed a distinction between fielddependent and field-invariant standards for argument appraisal that gave rise to a relativistic understanding of his theory. The main goal of this paper is to show that epistemological relativism is not a necessary consequence ofToulmin's model of argument. To this end, I will analyze the role that fields are to play within this model, given a certain conception of one of its key elements: the warrant of an argument.

Cohesion is established in S‐phase through the action of key replisome factors as replication forks engage cohesin molecules. By holding sister chromatids together, cohesion critically assists both an equal segregation of the duplicated genetic material and an efficient repair of DNA breaks. Nonetheless, the molecular events leading the entrapment of nascent chromatids by cohesin during replication are only beginning to be understood. The authors describe here the essential structural features of the cohesin complex in connection to its ability to associate (...) DNA molecules and review the current knowledge on the architectural‐functional organization of the eukaryotic replisome, significantly advanced by recent biochemical and structural studies. In light of this novel insight, the authors discuss the mechanisms proposed to assist interfacing of replisomes with chromatin‐bound cohesin complexes and elaborate on models for nascent chromatids entrapment by cohesin in the environment of the replication fork. (shrink)

The present research study focuses on how the language of instruction has an impact on the mathematical thinking development as a consequence of using a language of instruction different from the students’ mother tongue. In CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) academic content and a foreign language are leant at the same time, a methodology that is widely used in the schools in the present times. It is, therefore, our main aim to study if the language of instruction in second (...) language immersion programs influences the development of the first formal mathematical concepts. More specifically, if the learning of mathematical concepts in the early ages develops in a similar way if it is taught in the students’ mother tongue and is not influenced by the language used for teaching. Or else, if it can influence the development of the first skills only in the students’ general performance or in certain areas. The results of both the analysis of variance and multiple regression confirm how influencing the language of instruction is when mathematical thinking is developed teaching formal contents in a non-coincidence language. The second language is affecting the resolution of daily life problems, being more competent those students in 1st grades whose language of instruction matched with their mother tongue. (shrink)