Huge losses and serious threats to ecosystems are common consequences of forest fires. This work describes a forest fire controller based on fuzzy logic and decision-making methods aiming at enhancing forest fire prevention, detection, and fighting systems. In the proposal, the environmental monitoring of several dynamic risk factors is performed with wireless sensor networks and analysed with the proposed fuzzy-based controller. With respect to this, meteorological variables, polluting gases and the oxygen level are measured in real time to estimate the (...) existence of forest fire risks in the short-term and to detect the recent occurrence of fire outbreaks over different forest areas. Besides, the Analytic Hierarchy Process method is used to determine the level of fire spread, and, when necessary, environmental alerts are sent by a Web service and received by a mobile application. For this purpose, integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity of environmental information and alerts are protected with implementations of Lamport’s authentication scheme, Diffie-Lamport signature, and AES-CBC block cipher. (shrink)

The use of wireless sensor networks and the Internet of things to detect forest fire outbreaks may help to reduce the response time and avoid natural disasters. This work proposes the deployment of WSN to enhance the real-time monitoring of dynamic variables such as polluting gases, temperature or the presence of fire flames by infrared. In addition, the activation of forest fire alerts if environmental status may involve evidence of a recent fire outbreak. A fuzzy-based controller is implemented to manage (...) the uncertainty related to estimating forest fire occurrence and dynamic update of fuzzy sets is developed to distinguish usual and unusual environmental conditions of every monitored forest area. Merkle trees, AES and hash functions are considered to protect the integrity of environmental data. (shrink)

La presente investigación pretende hacer un análisis histórico sobre la figura de San José y sus diferentes manifestaciones en la cultura y sociedad hondureña, como consecuencia de su culto, creación artística y devoción popular. Este culto tiene su origen en la época colonial, específicamente en el s. XVI, con los Concilios de Trento (1545 – 1563), Nueva España (1555, 1565, 1585) y Lima, Perú (1556 y 1561), los cuales contribuyeron a expandir el evangelio desde la iconografía hasta la fundación de (...) poblados que adoptaron esta imagen como Santo Patrón. También, se analiza esta imagen en el imaginario hondureño durante la secularización del Estado, su adopción y creación como un ideal de paternidad que simboliza protección, sustento y responsabilidad en la construcción de la organización familiar, finalizando con la vinculación de San José como patrono de la clase obrera en el siglo XX. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than (...) harm.—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

Ciencias sociales : saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos / Edgardo Lander / - Europa modernidad y eurocentrismo / Enrique Dussel / - La colonialidad a lo largo y a lo ancho : el hemisferio occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad / Walter D. Mignolo / - Naturaleza del poscolonialismo : del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo / Fernando Coronil / - El lugar de la naturaleza y la naturaleza del lugar : ¿globalización o postdesarrollo? / Arturo Escobar / - Ciencias sociales, (...) violencia epistémica y el problema de la invención del otro / Santiago Castro-Gómez / - Superar la exclusión, conquistar la equidad : reformas, políticas y capacidades en el ámbito social / Alejandro Moreno / - Abrir, impensar, y redimesionar las ciencias sociales en América Latina y el Caribe. ¿Es posible una ciencia social no eurocéntrica en nuestra región? / Francisco López Segrera / - Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina / Aníbal Quijano. (shrink)

New media (highly interactive digital technology for creating, sharing, and consuming information) affords users a great deal of control over their informational diets. As a result, many users of new media unwittingly encapsulate themselves in epistemic bubbles (epistemic structures, such as highly personalized news feeds, that leave relevant sources of information out (Nguyen forthcoming)). Epistemically paternalistic alterations to new media technologies could be made to pop at least some epistemic bubbles. We examine one such alteration that Facebook has made in (...) an effort to fight fake news and conclude that it is morally permissible. We further argue that many epistemically paternalistic policies can (and should) be a perennial part of the internet information environment. (shrink)

Tomando como pretexto el concepto de libertad como no-dominación acuñado por Philip Pettit en su celebre Republicanismo, este breve artículo discurre mostrando el proyecto walzeriano de una sociedad libre de dominación, en la cual hombres y mujeres no se sientan subyugados bajo ningún poder y en ..

El propósito de este libro es de examinar cuales fueron los órdenes epistemológicos, las prácticas discursivas y los mecanismos disciplinarios que hicieron posible en el siglo XX la construcción de un objeto de conocimiento llamado "Latinoamérica", y de una serie de saberes filosóficos sobre "lo latinoamericano". El autor realiza un ejercicio deconstructivo de aquellas narrativas que, con base a la creación de identidades homogéneas, buscaron presentar a Latinoamérica como lo "otro" de la modernidad occidental, e incluso como el continente llamado (...) a mostrar un camino nuevo de liberación para toda la humanidad. A través de un diálogo con pensadores como Foucault, Said, Rama, Lyotard, Mignolo y Spivak, el autor muestra que los principales temas, registros y motivos esgrimidos a favor de una "exterioridad" latinoamericana con respecto a la modernidad, son en realidad discursos pertenecientes a un orden moderno del saber. (shrink)

Johann Gottfried Herder, like his contemporaries, reflected on language and in 1772 published the Treatise on the Origin of Language, which in the previous year had earned the distinction of the Berlin Academy for best essay. However, even today, much of his thought is unknown, ignoring the fact that some of the modern approaches of contemporary philosophy, philosophical anthropology or even sociobiology are already stated there, namely in the narratives resulting from the enunciation of the four natural laws. More than (...) justifying the origin of language, the philosopher’s essay also allows us to understand human nature, inserting its genesis at the heart of philosophical anthropology and contradicting, if not even confronting in this way, the divine tradition of this attribution. Thus, at first, a generic analysis of the work will be carried out, highlighting the fundamental theses that will allow the establishment of a dialogue with some of the contemporary philosophical approaches. Then, admitting the possibility of a scenario of technological singularity, as stated by Irving John Good, Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil, to verify the plausibility and validity of Herder’s theses regarding the scope of language and human nature and how this could constitute a frontier of resistance. (shrink)

Pothos & Busemeyer's (P&B's) query about whether quantum probability can provide a foundation for the cognitive modeling embodies so many underlying implications that the subject is far from exhausted. In this brief commentary, however, I suggest that the conceptual thresholds of the meaningful learning give rise to a typical Boltzmann's weighting measure, which indicates astatistical verisimilitudeof quantum behavior in the human cognitive ensemble.

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

Naturalistic accounts of culture share the assumption that culture is nothing more than information in people minds/brains and the environment. They do not provide, however, neither a definition nor a theory of information. I address this lacuna adopting a theory of information called “Situation Theory” (Barwise and Perry, 1983). I argue that the notions of constraint and attunement allow to account for cultural information, and, furthermore, that culture is, at a fundamental level, constituted by a set of constraints. Constraints are (...) necessary for information to flow, and attunement to constraints is necessary for an organism to exploit such cultural information. Keywords: Situations, situation theory, naturalistic theories of culture, cultural groups, constraints, conventions. (shrink)

La crisis de representatividad de los partidos políticos de centro izquierda cuestiona la calidad de la democracia chilena y la proyección de los mismos. No obstante, constituyen referentes sociohistóricos con capacidad de adaptación a los cambios sociales y tendencias de época. Nos interesó conocer cual es el potencial de la generación de relevo de los partidos políticos de adaptarse a los cambios sociales y de representar a la nueva sociedad civil a partir del estudio de su condición generacional dentro de (...) campo político partidista. Los resultados indican que la condición intergeneracional, la visión heterocrítica frente a las formas de reproducción del poder político y la necesidad de legitimidad social favorecen la comprensión de formas distintas de hacer política que lo acercan a la nueva sociedad civil. Las prácticas políticas distintivas identificadas se asocian a la democracia de audiencia, la transversalidad de las alianzas y del territorio. (shrink)

En El sentido de la filosofía, Antonio Zirión se propone analizar, entre otras cosas, el papel y la función que cumple la fenomenología en la obra y el pensamiento de José Gaos. En mi comentario abordo, en primer lugar, el contraste entre los conceptos de fenomenología y método fenomenológico de Husserl y Gaos. En segundo lugar, recupero la discusión acerca de los límites entre fenomenología y metafísica al interior del pensamiento de Gaos, lo que desemboca en un concepto más amplio (...) de fenomenología, vinculado a la idea de una filosofía científica. En tercer lugar, propongo otro acercamiento posible a los motivos fenomenológicos en Gaos. (shrink)

O ensaio propõe a leitura de duas estórias de Guimarães Rosa, “A terceira margemdo rio”, de Primeiras estórias, e “Desenredo”, de Tutameia, as quais, em algum momento, serãocotejadas com Bartleby, o escrivão, de Melville. Partindo dos títulos rosianos, deduzir-se-ãoduas potências, uma neutralizadora que abdica de tudo, a outra, também neutralizadora, quequer tudo, propondo, por fim, uma ideia de leitura que se encerra nas estórias.

The existence of shoulder abduction (SA) and finger extension (FE) movement capacity shortly after stroke onset is an important prognostic factor, indicating favorable functional outcome for the hemiparetic upper limb. Here we asked whether variation in lesion topography affects these two movements in a similar or a distinct way, and whether lesion impact is similar or distinct for left and right hemisphere damage. SA and FE movements were examined in 77 chronic post-stroke patients using relevant items of the Fugl-Meyer test. (...) Lesion effects were analyzed separately for left and right hemispheric damage (LHD, RHD) patient groups using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. In the LHD group, SA and FE were affected only by damage to the cortico-spinal tract in its passage through the corona radiata. In contrast, following RHD, these two movements were affected not only by cortico-spinal tract damage but also by damage to white matter association tracts, the putamen and the insular cortex. In both groups, voxel clusters have been found where damage affected SA and also FE, along with voxels where damage affected only one of the two movements. The capacity to execute SA and FE movements following stroke is affected significantly by damage to shared and distinct voxels in the cortico-spinal tract in LHD patients and by damage to shared and distinct voxels in a larger array of cortical and subcortical regions in RHD patients. (shrink)

The empirical relationship between a firm’s social performance and its financial performance is still not well established in the literature. Despite more than 30 years of research and more than 100 empirical studies on the issue, the results are still mixed. We argue that the heterogeneous results found in previous studies are not due exclusively to problems related with the measurement instruments or the samples used. Instead, we posit that a more fundamental problem related with the endogeneity of social strategic (...) decisions could be driving most of the empirical findings. We show that, using a panel data of 658 firms from 1991 to 2005, how some of the results found in previous research change, and some are even reversed when endogeneity is properly taken into account. (shrink)

This paper takes the view that compensated donation and altruism are not incompatible. In particular, it holds that the arguments against giving compensation stand on weak rational grounds: the charge that compensation fosters “commodification” has neither been specific enough to account for different types of monetary transactions nor sufficiently grounded in reality to be rationally convincing; although altruism is commendable, organ donors should not be compelled to act purely on the basis of altruistic motivations, especially if there are good reasons (...) to believe that significantly more lives can be saved and enhanced if incentives are put in place, and offering compensation for organs does not necessarily lead to exploitation—on the contrary, it may be regarded as a necessity in efforts to minimise the level of exploitation that already exists in current organ procurement systems. (shrink)

Life in the text and the text in life: here we would place an “ethos of reading”. To sustain this, the categories of “subject” and “object” are rethought; the process of ethic liberation of sensibility and pleasure encouraged by Kant are described; the independence of taste with respect to knowle..

In _Sociocybernetics and Political Theory in a Complex World_, Roberto Mancilla offers new takes on known ideas of political and constitutional theory; the advent of information technology and globalization puts them in crisis, as many stem from centuries past.

I propose a deductive-nomological model for mathematical scientific explanation. In this regard, I modify Hempel’s deductive-nomological model and test it against some of the following recent paradigmatic examples of the mathematical explanation of empirical facts: the seven bridges of Königsberg, the North American synchronized cicadas, and Hénon-Heiles Hamiltonian systems. I argue that mathematical scientific explanations that invoke laws of nature are qualitative explanations, and ordinary scientific explanations that employ mathematics are quantitative explanations. I analyse the repercussions of this deductivenomological model (...) on causal explanations. (shrink)

Mark Rowlands develops a novel account of remembering in which episodic memories survive in a mutated form after their content has been long forgotten. He dubs this account “Rilkean memories.” I draw from this account to argue that episodic memories of past epistemic harms resulting from Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice, can persist as embodied behavioral or bodily dispositions that have negative epistemic and practical consequences long after these episodic memories have been forgotten. The way that others judge us (...) as epistemic agents—as people with the capacity to know or the ability to contribute to the pool of knowledge—and following this judgment, treat or fail to treat us as epistemic agents can cause us to adopt attitudes or behaviors with consequences to our epistemic agency. When embodied as Rilkean memories, these attitudes or behaviors raise new difficulties and become quite difficult to eradicate. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo investigar como Michel Foucault e Roland Barthes analisaram a obra dos pintores Édouard Manet e Cy Twombly guiados pela idéia de que, na modernidade, a obra de arte não pode mais ser interpretada meramente como a expressão da subjetividade de seu autor e, sim, em virtude da relação que ela mantém com a cultura e com a história da arte anterior a ela, bem como o de avaliar o quanto esta abordagem se aproxima do formalismo.

Political solutions to problems like global warming and social justice are often stymied by an inability to productively communicate in everyday conversations. Motivated by these communication problems, the paper considers the role of the virtuous listener in conversations. Rather than the scripted exchanges of information between individuals, we focus on lively, intra-active conversations that are mediating events. In such conversations, the listener plays a participatory role by contributing to the content and form of the conversation. Unlike Miranda Fricker’s negative virtue (...) of testimonial justice, which neutralizes the listener’s identity-prejudices in their credibility judgments of the speaker’s testimony, we consider the positive virtues of a good listener. These positive virtues enable listeners to productively contribute to the conversation by helping create the fertile epistemic space of a non-adversarial, caring relationship that facilitates critical and creative thinking. (shrink)

Este estudo tem como objetivo geral discorrer de forma sucinta e crítica sobre os principais desafios enfrentados pelas pessoas negras, em especial as mulheres, na sociedade brasileira. E como objetivos específicos, analisar, a partir da concepção do feminismo, as problemáticas que englobam o racismo, sexismo, democracia racial, estética do racismo e como estes também acabam servindo de base para o justificar o epistemicídio da intelectualidade negra feminina, no qual esses desafios são herdados de opressões do colonialismo imposto ao território brasileiro. (...) Com isso, dissertaremos também a respeito de diversas categorias dessas opressões, e como elas se relacionam ao cenário político cultural brasileiro e de que maneira essas opressões atingem, em específico, os corpos das mulheres negras, que sofrem um processo constante de epistemicídio e sexualização extrema. Por fim, este trabalho tem como apoio teórico o pensamento da filósofa Lélia Gonzalez, que percebe na criação de um espaço de beleza negra feminina, que suas vozes podem ser ouvidas e sua filosofia exaltada. Não obstante, o texto também contém como suporte teórico complementar análises de autoras como Bell Hooks, Djamila Ribeiro, Sueli Carneiro. (shrink)