Si hablamos de derechos humanos en Latinoamérica hoy, los más básicos están comprometidos y desatendidos desde el poder económico y político, cuando no abiertamente violados. La democracia representativa que se impuso sobre las dictaduras militares de los años setentas, estipuló cierto margen de establecimiento de reglas en cuanto respeto a algunas garantías personales y legales elementales: la posibilidad de asociarse, de reunirse, de transitar sin restricciones y de opinar sin abiertas represalias han alcanzado lugar, y es de reconocer que ello (...) no es poco si se lo compara con la desastrosa situación anterior de cercenamiento sistemático de las libertades más básicas. Al respecto, cabe siempre una reflexión: de ninguna manera es comparable la condición de violación de garantías, en cuanto a su magnitud, que se da en casos de dictaduras abiertas con relación a la que se da en las democracias parlamentarias, con las enormes limitaciones que estas últimas pudieran guardar. No nos referimos al repudio ético y político que en ambos casos se concita, por supuesto equiparable; sino al hecho de que en casos de militarización del aparato de gobierno, las violaciones a los derechos se convierten en permanentes, sistemáticas y estructurales, constituyendo ya no una violación de la normativa sino más bien el criterio de establecimiento de la normativa legal misma, la cual se pervierte al ser dictatorial y arbitraria. La democracia parlamentaria muestra sus evidentes sujeciones a ia concentración económica capitalista; pero ello no debe llevar a la conclusión - ciertamente falsa - de que constituye una especie de dictadura pura del capital, y que por ello es comparable con la dictadura a secas. La condición elemental para la existencia de derechos es la presencia de un Estado de derecho: advertir sus límites debe llevar a exigir la ampliación sistemática de los espacios democráticos como búsqueda de fidelidad a la lógica misma de lo democrático, no como su posible abolición. En esto, los latinoamericanos pareciera que estamos de acuerdo, en tanto los regímenes democráticos abiertos en los años ochenta se han consolidado. Palabras clave: derechos; Latinoamérica; democracia; dictaduras. (shrink)

This brief note is more than sufficient for the Author to achieve his purpose of counter-criticizing the epistemological imputation of Sokal’s thoughts, and to establish conceptual and categorical deficits that underlie the formalizing empiricisms of New Yorker scientific language. This is a d..

El autor refiere a los conceptos habituales de las propuestas en economía, y cuestiona que ellas puedan resistir a un cuestionamiento sobre su validez científica. Cuestiona luego la pretendida objetividad de sus portavoces, afirmando que las premisas supuestamente científicas de estos economistas representan en realidad el punto de vista de los económicamente poderosos, de los beneficiados con la globalización capitalista.

Cultural studies, which arose in England and were later moved to the United States, have achieved a strong presence in Latin American social sciences during the last two decades in their local versions, as expressed by authors such as N. Farcía Canclini, R. Ortiz or Jesús M. Barbero. Their pos..

Toda política contiene una dimensión agonística, por lo cual tiene un rasgo populista; pero es notorio que algunas políticas contienen fuertemente ese rasgo y otras no, por lo cual no toda política podría ser tildada de populista. A su vez, el populismo es deconstructor de las instituciones previas,..

Se asume que la filosofía de la liberación (FL) solo existió como tendencia colectiva hasta aproximadamente 1985; y que algunos de sus ítems —tal la polémica de Cerutti con Dussel— perdieron con el tiempo la vigencia de sus términos. Hubo entre 1971 y 1985 diversas tendencias: distinguimos la populista (Cullen, Casalla, Kusch, Fornari) de la marxista (Ardiles, Parisi, Cerutti, Santos) y de la espiritualista cristiana (Scannone y Dussel). La última es la que con fuerza incorporó a Levinas. Un autor que (...) insistió en el otro como expresión del Otro como Infinito, como vehículo de la presencia de Dios. Y que rechazó nociones como las de historia y política como espacios de absorción de la individualidad, a la que concibe “separada” en su singular interioridad. Estos son términos que el psicoanálisis de Lacan refuta claramente, no habiendo “separación” definida con los otros, en tanto ellos son constituyentes de cualquier sujeto. Dussel propone la “exterioridad” a la totalidad, primero la heideggeriana y luego la de la dialéctica marxiana: ello, desde cuando asumía la “analéctica”, que luego abandonó. Pero aún en su posterior apelación al marxismo, Dussel continúa sosteniendo la idea de “exterioridad”, noción de neto corte metafísico que entendemos incompatible con la apelación al análisis científico-social ensayado por el marxismo (que tiene una dimensión filosófica, pero ciertamente antimetafísica). Entendemos a la categoría de “totalidad” como necesaria a la concepción de la dialéctica marxista, de gran utilidad epistémica, y excluyente de la idea de una exterioridad a la inmanencia radical de lo existente. (shrink)

Post-colonial ist theory was produced by authors born in India, and who were living in the United States. After they produced their writings, a new line of thought appeared, which explored Latin America from the same perspective. The pretext is based on Derrida´s works, in which the purpose is to s..

Lo posmoderno se plasmó en Latinoamérica a partir de mediados de los años ochentas y consecuentemente, se convirtió en positividad fáctica. A partir de entonces se ejerció, existió como el humus efectivo de nuestra cultura cotidiana y "de tal manera" dejó de hacerse visible como un elemento externo ..

The persistent educational challenges that fractions pose call for developing novel instructional methods to better prepare students for fraction learning. Here, we examined the effects of a 24-session, Cuisenaire rod intervention on a building block for symbolic fraction knowledge, continuous and discrete non-symbolic proportional reasoning, in children who have yet to receive fraction instruction. Participants were 34 second-graders who attended the intervention (intervention group) and 15 children who did not participate in any sessions (control group). As attendance at the intervention (...) sessions was irregular (median = 15.6 sessions, range = 1–24), we specifically examined the effect of the number of sessions completed on their non-symbolic proportional reasoning. Our results showed that children who attended a larger number of sessions increased their ability to compare non-symbolic continuous proportions. However, contrary to our expectations, they also decreased their ability to compare misleading discretized proportions. In contrast, children in the Control group did not show any change in their performance. These results provide further evidence on the malleability of non-symbolic continuous proportional reasoning and highlight the rigidity of counting knowledge interference on discrete proportional reasoning. (shrink)

The long-enduring coding metaphor is deemed problematic because it imbues correlational evidence with causal power. In neuroscience, most research is correlational or conditionally correlational; this research, in aggregate, informs causal inference. Rather than prescribing semantics used in correlational studies, it would be useful for neuroscientists to focus on a constructive syntax to guide principled causal inference.

In this article, we extend the well-known ‘agreeing-to-disagree’ and ‘no-trade’ results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this result might provide one possible explanation for the empirical finding, often referred to as the ‘democratic peace’, that modern democracies rarely go to war with one another. We propose that the informational properties of pluralistic (...) institutions (as opposed to oligarchies or dictatorships) lead to better decision-making by democracies and that democracies are therefore more likely to be the rational actors necessary for the ‘no-war’ result. We discuss empirical evidence in support of this proposition. (shrink)

El affaire Sokal muestra tener efectos importantes en las ciencias sociales. Sin embargo, estos mismos efectos pueden ser comprendidos adecuadamente por lo que puede ser inferido y lo que no puede serlo. Entre estos últimos podemos contar el fin de los estudios epistemológicos en las ciencias so..

La interdisciplina aparece de nuevo como repetición; pero como toda repetición, diferenciada. En su primer momento se apoyó en la noción marxista de «totalidad», o en la epistemología genética de Piaget, y sus «homologías estructurales» entre disciplinas. Actualmente, tiene el tono posmoderno del abandono de la rigidez y la metodicidad: así aparece en deconstrucción o en «estudios culturales». También en versión pragmática proempresarial (Gibbons). Pero hay que advertir que las disciplinas surgieron por mutua discriminación; y que sus mutuos discursos están (...) en inconmensurabilidad (T.Kuhn). Por ello, la interdisciplina se construye, y lo hace contra el sentido común y la dispersión discursiva, estando muy lejos de una natural confluencia entre disciplinas. (shrink)

Inception module is one of the most used variants in convolutional neural networks. It has a large portfolio of success cases in computer vision. In the past years, diverse inception flavours, differing in the number of branches, the size and the number of the kernels, have appeared in the scientific literature. They are proposed based on the expertise of the practitioners without any optimization process. In this work, an implementation of population-based incremental learning is proposed for automatic optimization of the (...) hyperparameters of the inception module. This hyperparameters optimization undertakes classification of the MNIST database of handwritten digit images. This problem is widely used as a benchmark in classification, and therefore, the learned best configurations for the Inception module will be of wide use in the deep learning community. In order to reduce the carbon footprint of the optimization process, policies for reducing the redundant evaluations have been undertaken. As a consequence of this work, an evaluation of configurations of the inception module and a mechanism for optimizing hyperparameters in deep learning architectures are stated. (shrink)

Socio-economic status and mathematical performance seem to be risk factors of mathematics anxiety in both children and adults. However, there is little evidence about how exactly these three constructs are related, especially during early stages of mathematical learning. In the present study, we assessed longitudinal performance in symbolic and non-symbolic basic numerical skills in pre-school and second grade students, as well as MA in second grade students. Participants were 451 children from 12 schools in Chile, which differed in school vulnerability (...) index, an indicator of SES. We tested an explanatory model of MA that included SES and longitudinal performance in basic numerical skills as predictors. The results showed a direct effect of SES on MA and a mediating effect of performance in symbolic and non-symbolic comparison tasks in pre-school. However, in second grade, only performance in symbolic comparison significantly mediated the SES-MA relationship. These findings suggest that performance in non-symbolic comparison plays an important role in explaining MA at initial stages, but that its influence is no longer significant by the time children reach formal instruction in second grade. By contrast, as children’s formal educational experience in mathematics increases, MA becomes linked primarily to symbolic numerical tasks. In sum, SES affects MA and this is due in part to the effect of SES on the development of numerical learning in pre-school, which in turn has an impact on subsequent, more complex learning, ultimately leading to differences in MA. We discuss the implications of these findings for preventing and acting upon the emergence of MA. (shrink)

The putative Pueyo’s vaccine was a commercial venture that obtained marketing authorization in 1946, a turbulent period of Argentine history. After a few months, health authorities withdrew financial support from the state to buy the vaccine and required patients to sign a written consent to receive that product. An independent investigation did not find any evidence of benefit in non-clinical and clinical evaluation of the putative vaccine.

Most cells communicate with their immediate neighbors through the exchange of cytosolic molecules such as ions, second messengers and small metabolites. This activity is made possible by clusters of intercellular channels called gap junctions, which connect adjacent cells. In terms of molecular architecture, intercellular channels consist of two channels, called connexons, which interact to span the plasma membranes of two adjacent cells and directly join the cytoplasm of one cell to another. Connexons are made of structural proteins named connexins, which (...) compose a multigene family. Connexin channels participate in the regulation of signaling between developing and differentiated cell types, and recently there have been some unexpected findings. First, unique ionic‐ and size‐selectivities are determined by each connexin; second, the establishment of intercellular communication is defined by the expression of compatible connexins; third, the discovery of connexin mutations associated with human diseases and the study of knockout mice have illustrated the vital role of cell‐cell communication in a diverse array of tissue functions. (shrink)

Traditional modes of system representation as dynamical systems, involving fixed sets of states together with imposed dynamical laws, pertain only to a meagre subclass of natural systems. This reductionistic paradigm leaves no room for final causes; constrained thus are the simple systems. Members of their complementary collection, natural systems having mathematical models that are not dynamical systems, are the complex systems. Complex systems, containing hierarchical cycles in their entailment networks, can only be approximated and simulated, locally and temporarily, by simple (...) ones. Anticipatory systems are, in this specific sense, complex, hence this introductory chapter on Complex Systems in the Handbook of Anticipation. (shrink)

Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices? Behavioral Economics and Public Health is the first book to apply the groundbreaking insights of behavioral economics to the persisting problems of health behaviors and behavior change. In addition (...) to providing a primer on the behavioral economics principles that are most relevant to public health, this book offers details on how these principles can be employed to mitigating the world's greatest health threats, including obesity, smoking, risky sexual behavior, and excessive drinking. With contributions from an international team of scholars from psychology, economics, marketing, public health, and medicine, this book is a trailblazing new approach to the most difficult and important problems of our time. (shrink)

Music reduces pain in fibromyalgia (FM), a chronic pain disease, but the functional neural correlates of music-induced analgesia (MIA) are still largely unknown. We recruited FM patients ( n = 22) who listened to their preferred relaxing music and an auditory control (pink noise) for 5 min without external noise from fMRI image acquisition. Resting state fMRI was then acquired before and after the music and control conditions. A significant increase in the amplitude of low frequency fluctuations of the BOLD (...) signal was evident in the left angular gyrus (lAnG) after listening to music, which in turn, correlated to the analgesia reports. The post-hoc seed-based functional connectivity analysis of the lAnG showed found higher connectivity after listening to music with right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rdlPFC), the left caudate (lCau), and decreased connectivity with right anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), right supplementary motor area (rSMA), precuneus and right precentral gyrus (rPreG). Pain intensity (PI) analgesia was correlated ( r = 0.61) to the connectivity of the lAnG with the rPreG. Our results show that MIA in FM is related to top-down regulation of the pain modulatory network by the default mode network (DMN). (shrink)