Subjective well-being is a broad category of phenomena that includes people’s emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgments of life satisfaction. This research investigates how schoolchildren’s subjective well-being is affected by the different types of technology use, in personal contexts, and, concurrently, whether these effects are different when the use of technology is problematic. The central hypotheses are as follows: the use of the Internet affects the subjective well-being of schoolchildren negatively only when this use is problematic and the effect (...) on subjective well-being is different according to the type of Internet use. To respond to the objectives of the research, a survey was applied to 15-year-old adolescents, distributed in 330 public schools, beneficiaries of a government program for the delivery of personal computers and Internet for a year. The different uses of the Internet were measured using frequency scales by type of activity. Problematic use scale measured the perception of negative consequences of the intensity of Internet use on a daily basis. Subjective well-being was measured by the Personal Well-Being Index-School Children. Subsequently, for analytical purposes, three simple mediation models were created, whose dependent variable was PWI-SC, while its independent variables were Internet use scales differentiated by purpose and problematic use as a mediating variable, as well as attributes of the subjects and their social environment, which were incorporated as control variables. The main results show that only if Internet use is expressed as problematic does it negatively affect subjective well-being. On the contrary, when the use of the Internet is not problematic, the effect is positive and even greater than the simple effect between these two variables. This finding is relevant, since it allows us to provide evidence that suggests that, when studying the effect that the intensity of the Internet, firstly, one must consider the mediating effect exerted by the network’s problematic use and, secondly, that not all types of use have the same impact. Therefore, it is useful to enrich the discussion on subjective well-being and social integration of schoolchildren in the digital age. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

In this paper we present the authors’ experience of teaching a course in Ethics for Engineers, which has been delivered four times in three different universities in Spain and Chile. We begin by presenting the material context of the course, and especially the intellectual background of the participating students, in terms of their previous understanding of philosophy in general, and of ethics in particular. Next we set out the objectives of the course and the main topics addressed, as well as (...) the methodology and teaching resources employed to have students achieve a genuine philosophical reflection on the ethical aspects of the profession, starting from their own mindset as engineers. Finally we offer some results based on opinion surveys of the students, as well as a more personal assessment by the authors, recapitulating the most significant achievements of the course and indicating its underlying Socratic structure. (shrink)

In this paper, we review three influential theories of imagination in order to understand how the dynamics of imagination acts could be modeled using formal languages. While reviewing them, we notice that they are not detailed enough to account for all the mechanisms involved in creating and developing imaginary worlds. We claim those theories could be further refined into what we call the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, which defines a framework that can be used to study the dynamics of (...) imagination using formal languages, and we support our claim by showing how the framework allows to model certain imagination acts step by step. Then, we introduce the Rhombus of Imagination, which is a visual tool that can be used in conjunction with our framework to study the procedural structure of different kinds of imagination acts and identify their dynamic properties. (shrink)

In this paper, we review three influential theories of imagination in order to understand how the dynamics of imagination acts could be modeled using formal languages. While reviewing them, we notice that they are not detailed enough to account for all the mechanisms involved in creating and developing imaginary worlds. We claim those theories could be further refined into what we call the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, which defines a framework that can be used to study the dynamics of (...) imagination using formal languages, and we support our claim by showing how the framework allows to model certain imagination acts step by step. Then, we introduce the Rhombus of Imagination, which is a visual tool that can be used in conjunction with our framework to study the procedural structure of different kinds of imagination acts and identify their dynamic properties. (shrink)

In this paper, we review three influential theories of imagination in order to understand how the dynamics of imagination acts could be modeled using formal languages. While reviewing them, we notice that they are not detailed enough to account for all the mechanisms involved in creating and developing imaginary worlds. We claim those theories could be further refined into what we call the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, which defines a framework that can be used to study the dynamics of (...) imagination using formal languages, and we support our claim by showing how the framework allows to model certain imagination acts step by step. Then, we introduce the Rhombus of Imagination, which is a visual tool that can be used in conjunction with our framework to study the procedural structure of different kinds of imagination acts and identify their dynamic properties. (shrink)

Background In August 2017, Chile lifted its complete ban on abortion by permitting abortion in three limited circumstances: 1) to save a woman’s life, 2) lethal fetal anomaly, and 3) rape. The new law allows regulated use of conscientious objection in abortion care, including allowing institutions to register as objectors. This study assesses medical and midwifery students’ support for CO, following legal reform. Methods From October 2017 to May 2018, we surveyed medical and midwifery students from seven universities located in (...) Santiago, Chile. Universities included 4 secular and 3 private religiously-affiliated universities; all offering medical degrees with a specialization in obstetrics and gynecology and five offering midwifery degrees. We used generalized estimating equations to identify characteristics associated with student support for CO, intentions to use CO to refuse to care for someone seeking abortion, and support for CO at the institutional level. Results 333 of the 413 eligible students who opened the survey, completed the questions on conscientious objection; 26% were seeking medical degrees with an ob-gyn specialty, 25% were seeking midwifery degrees, and 49% were seeking medical degrees and had not yet decided their specialty. While nearly all endorse requirements for conscientious objecting clinicians to inform and refer abortion-seeking patients, a minority would personally use conscientious objection to avoid caring for a patient seeking abortion. About half of religious-university students and one-fifth of secular-university students support objections at the institutional level. Conclusions Most students support the regulated use of CO which preserves patients’ access to abortion care. Religious-university student views on the use of conscientious objection in abortion care are discordant with those of their institutions which currently support institutional-level objections. (shrink)

An engineer who becomes an educator in a school of software engineering has the mission to teach how to design and construct software systems, therein applying his or her knowledge and expertise. However, due to their engineering background, engineers may forget that educating a person is not the same as designing a machine, since a machine has a well-defined goal, whilst a person is capable to self-propose his or her own objectives. The ethical implications are clear: educating a free person (...) must leave space for creativity and self-determination in his or her own discovery of the way towards personal and professional fulfillment, which cannot consist only in achieving goals selected by others. We present here an argument that is applicable to most fields of engineering. However, the dis-analogy between educating students and programming robots may have a particular appeal to software engineers and computer scientists. We think the consideration of three different stages in the educational process may be useful to engineers when they act as educators. We claim that the three stages are essential to engineering education. In particular, education is incomplete if the third stage is not reached. Moreover, mentoring is incompatible with an educational assessment framework that considers the goals of the engineer are always given by others. In our view, then, an integral education is not only beyond programming the behavior of students, but also beyond having them reach those given goals. (shrink)

Is ethics a computable function? Can machines learn ethics like humans do? If teaching consists in no more than programming, training, indoctrinating… and if ethics is merely following a code of conduct, then yes, we can teach ethics to algorithmic machines. But if ethics is not merely about following a code of conduct or about imitating the behavior of others, then an approach based on computing outcomes, and on the reduction of ethics to the compilation and application of a set (...) of rules, either a priori or learned, misses the point. Our intention is not to solve the technical problem of machine ethics, but to learn something about human ethics, and its rationality, by reflecting on the ethics that can and should be implemented in machines. Any machine ethics implementation will have to face a number of fundamental or conceptual problems, which in the end refer to philosophical questions, such as: what is a human being (or more generally, what is a worthy being); what is human intentional acting; and how are intentional actions and their consequences morally evaluated. We are convinced that a proper understanding of ethical issues in AI can teach us something valuable about ourselves, and what it means to lead a free and responsible ethical life, that is, being good people beyond merely “following a moral code”. In the end we believe that rationality must be seen to involve more than just computing, and that value rationality is beyond numbers. Such an understanding is a required step to recovering a renewed rationality of ethics, one that is urgently needed in our highly technified society. (shrink)

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the (...) ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics. (shrink)