Background: Serious games have shown positive results in increasing motivation, adherence to treatment and strengthening the therapeutic alliance in multiple psychiatric disorders. In particular, patients with impulse control disorders and other disorders in which the patient suffers from inhibitory control deficits have been shown to benefit from serious games.Aim: The aim of this study was to describe the characteristics and to evaluate the usability of a new serious videogame, e-Estesia. This serious videogame was designed to improve emotion regulation in patients (...) with gambling disorder. Preliminary results from a pilot sample are also reported.Method: A pilot sample of 26 patients undergoing treatment for GD was recruited. Participants used e-Estesia on a tablet, which was connected to a thoracic band that sent heart rate and heart rate variability data to the videogame platform in order to provide biofeedback. The System Usability Scale was completed by patients to determine the usability of e-Estesia.Results and Discussion: e-Estesia performed comparatively well for all the explored groups. Around 84.6% of the patients endorsed that it was easy to use. Female patients with GD presented higher HRV during the use of the serious videogame compared to men. (shrink)

The family of discounted Shapley values is analyzed for cooperative games in coalitional form. We consider the bargaining protocol of the alternating random proposer introduced in Hart and Mas-Colell. We demonstrate that the discounted Shapley values arise as the expected payoffs associated with the bargaining equilibria when a time discount factor is considered. In a second model, we replace the time cost with the probability that the game ends without agreements. This model also implements these values in transferable utility games, (...) moreover, the model implements the α\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\alpha $$\end{document}-consistent values in the nontransferable utility setting. (shrink)

We examine the issues concerning the legality and ethicality of the Second Amendment right to bear arms balanced by the employer's duty to provide a safe workplace for its employees. Two court rulings highlight this balancing act: McDonald et al. v. City of Chicago et al. and District of Columbia v. Heller. “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle Doctrine” laws in the recent Trayvon Martin shooting on February 26, 2012 are also applicable. Various ethical frameworks examine the firearms debate by viewing (...) the Second Amendment from three perspectives. These include a pro‐gun perspective drawing upon libertarianism and fundamental rights; a moderate gun perspective drawing upon consequentialism and stakeholder theory; and finally, an anti‐gun perspective drawing upon a Public Health Ethics and peace ethics approach. We explore the issue of gun control from a business perspective as employers face ethical decisions in responding to legislation that allows guns in the workplace and/or in employer parking lots while still being responsible to provide a safe workplace for their employees. We make recommendations regarding how companies should manage by proactively avoiding legal challenges to employees' rights to own and carry guns into the workplace. This includes emphasis on enhanced security, Human Resource policies and monitoring rapidly changing laws. (shrink)

The removal of water from mines was one of the key issues that former miners had to deal with. Roman colonists brought new technology to the Iberian Peninsula that addressed this problem. However, they did not invent this technology because it had already been applied to the growth of other endeavours in the Hellenistic society throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. In the mine, the Archimedes screw, waterwheels, bucket pulleys, and Ctesibius pumps were the primary drainage systems. In this essay, the primary (...) characteristics, and modes of operation of machines are examined. Without leaving out the most significant finds made in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, one of the regions with the longest history of mining exploitation. To serve as a foundation for future research in this field, this work compares the primary mining mechanisms in ancient Huelva on a qualitative and quantitative level by the implementation of a TOPSIS methodology, a multi-criteria decision analysis method. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 7-22.

This research aims to describe how practicing lawyers perceive ‘plain writing’ in the legal field and to conceptualize this notion through the discourse analysis of these specialists. To do so, a qualitative research framed in the interpretive paradigm has been developed. Specifically, 18 practicing lawyers, from different countries and with different specializations in the practicing of Law, were surveyed. After analyzing the discourse of the interviewed lawyers, eight macro categories accounting for plain language both generally and particularly were identified. The (...) audience was identified as a key element in the production of legal texts which facilitate justice to citizens. Based on our analysis, we conclude with a definition of plain writing. (shrink)

Introducción: El examen estatal escrito evalúa la competencia del egresado y debe cumplir los requisitos de su confección y de su análisis informar las deficiencias en el proceso docente educativo para su perfeccionamiento. Objetivo: Caracterizar el examen estatal ordinario escrito y los resultados obtenidos en la Facultad de Estomatología. Camagüey durante el período 2011-2012. Métodos: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo del examen estatal ordinario escrito aplicado a 146 estudiantes. Se elaboró una base de datos con las calificaciones obtenidas, índice académico (...) y una guía con las variables tipo de examen, de preguntas, nivel de asimilación, claridad de formulación, correspondencia con los objetivos de la carrera, clave de calificación y cumplimiento de los criterios de Guilbert, analizados por grupo de expertos. Resultados: En los resultados se aproximó la nota de los excelentes (27,4 %) con el índice académico de los altos rendimientos (28,1 %). La mediana general fue de 86,3. Los temas más explorados fueron Endodoncia (18,8 %), Prótesis y Odontopediatría (10,4 %). Las preguntas con más valor fueron de temas curativos. El nivel de asimilación fue reproductivo y el 35,4 % de preguntas tipo selección múltiple complemento agrupado. Existieron dificultades de diseño del examen y autopreparación de los estudiantes. Conclusiones: Los resultados se aproximaron a los rendimientos académicos. No hubo equidad entre el número, valor de las preguntas por temas y nivel de asimilación. Los errores se asociaron en frecuencia al diseño y redacción de algunas preguntas, insuficiente estudio y en menor grado a la falta de sistematicidad en el proceso docente, que permitieron determinar las deficiencias para su intervención. Introduction: The State written exam evaluates the competence of seniors and must meet the requirements of its preparation and analysis in order to report deficiencies in the educational teaching process for its further development. Objective: To characterize the written regular state exam and the results obtained at the Faculty of Stomatology. Camaguey during the period of 2011-2012. Methods: A descriptive study of the written regular state exam was conducted to 146 students. A data base was developed with the grades obtained, academic index and a guide with the exam- type variables, questions, level of assimilation, clarity of formulation, correspondence with the objectives of the career, key qualification and compliance with the criteria of Guilbert, all analyzed by groups of experts. Results: In the results the excellent notes (27.4%) approached to the academic index of high yield (28.1%). The general average was 86,3. The most explored themes were Endodontics (18.8%), Prosthesis and Pediatric Odontology (10.4%). healing topics were the questions with more value. The level of assimilation was reproductive and 35.4% of multiple choice type questions complement clustered. There were difficulties according to the test design and the students' self study. Conclusions: The results were close to academic performance. There was no equality between the number, value of the questions by topic and level of assimilation. Errors were often associated with the design and wording of some questions, insufficient study and in a lesser extent to the lack of systematic fashion in the teaching process, which allowed to determine deficiencies for its intervention. (shrink)

International large-scale assessments have gained much attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century, influencing education legislation in many countries. This includes Spain, where they have been used by successive governments to justify education policy change. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the PISA 2018 reading scores for this country, meaning the OECD refused to initially release the results. Therefore, in this paper we attempt to estimate the likely PISA 2018 reading scores for Spain, and for each region within. The (...) figure finally published by the OECD for Spain – in terms of reading scores – was 476.5 points, which is between the lower and upper bound of the interval we find (475 to 483 test points in 2018). Additionally, we report some robustness checks for the OCED countries participating in PISA 2018, which show that the difference between the actual scores and the ones we found with the imputation methods are quite close. (shrink)

Abstract1 June 2018 marked a historic moment in Spanish politics, when the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) announced a cabinet with the largest proportion of female ministers in the world. This announcement received extensive coverage in the traditional media. The objective of this research was to measure whether the news had an equivalent impact on Twitter users. To this end, we analyzed the reaction to the appointments based on the popularity of the hashtags #GobiernoSanchez (“Sanchez Government”), (...) #GobiernoFeminista (“Feminist Government”) and #ConsejoMinistras (“Council of Female Ministers”). The most significant findings are that women had even less visibility than they were given in traditional media because of what is not retweeted does not exist, and that the extreme polarization of political life and the media in the public sphere appears to extend to the digital environment of Twitter. (shrink)

RESUMEN El presente estudio está dirigido a establecer coincidencias entre el pensamiento de José Martí y de Carlos Marx en el terreno filosófico. Ambos representan los más altos exponentes del saber filosófico y humanista de la cultura europea y latinoamericana del siglo XIX, respectivamente, con un alcance genuinamente universal. No fue objetivo en modo alguno convertir a Martí en marxista, del mismo modo que sería absurdo afiliar a Marx a las ideas y las concepciones martianas. Sin embargo, no es posible (...) dejar de subrayar la profundidad del ideario martiano en el terreno filosófico, político, social y económico y sus aproximaciones a las concepciones marxistas o al socialismo científico. ABSTRACT The present study is directed to establish coincidences between the thought of José Martí and Carlos Marx in the philosophical area. Both are represented by the highest exponents of the philosophical and humanist knowledge of the European and Latin-American culture of the 19th century, respectively, with an authentically universal scope. It was not objective in any way to turn Martí into Marxist, in the same way that it would be absurd to affiliate Marx to the ideas and the Martí´s conceptions. Nevertheless, it is not possible to stop underlining the depth of the Martí´s ideology in the philosophical, political, social and economic area and his approaches to the Marxist conceptions or to the scientific socialism. (shrink)

The tree-based data structure of -tree for propositional formulas is introduced in an improved and optimised form. The -trees allow a compact representation for negation normal forms as well as for a number of reduction strategies in order to consider only those occurrences of literals which are relevant for the satisfiability of the input formula. These reduction strategies are divided into two subsets (meaning- and satisfiability-preserving transformations) and can be used to decrease the size of a negation normal form A (...) at (at most) quadratic cost. The reduction strategies are aimed at decreasing the number of required branchings and, therefore, these strategies allow to limit the size of the search space for the SAT problem. (shrink)

What is the role of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the journey to the Fourth Industrial Revolution? What is the impact of these disciplines for the challenges the world faces, supposedly defined by a highly dynamic phase of industrial and social restructuring, where the adaptive capacity of societies needs to be enhanced by specific skills and techno-social dependencies? What is the role of SSH in building cognitive competences, and new professional paths? This paper, part of the special focus of (...) the Annual Review of New Directions in the Humanities, seeks to unveil the importance of SSH disciplines to the major STEM disciplines. Although disciplines and research in Social Sciences and Humanities play a fundamental role in the production of knowledge relevant to society, the last decade of the 20th century has seen a continuous trend towards their devaluation. After a relatively glorious period during the first half of the century, when SSH disciplines still held a relative social influence, the arrival of digital technologies in 1990s, accelerated their decline. This article traces a brief overview of this decline and explores some of the causes as well as the challenges in valuing SSH. Focusing mainly on Europe, the paper presents the attempts, on behalf of the European Commission, to correct this decline. It also outlines some new ideas that could help a true integration and transfer of knowledge across STEM AND STEAM disciplines, such as the creation of specific 'missions'. Precisely, one of the diagnoses of the Horizon 2020 experience in Europe has been that investment in research is not effectively linked to the solution of specific problems. Thus, it is necessary to put in motion co-creation mechanisms among research disciplines and advance in the establishment of intersectoral bridges, bringing SSH research closer to the industry and other social sectors in order to solve the pressing challenges we face. (shrink)

Cross-cultural communication is about generating dialogical positions across cultural barriers. Communication is achieved when participants are able to construct meaning across varied sign systems. Oral communication makes use of a wide range of signs that contribute to make meaning, from eye contact to gestures and speech. In written/printed communication, together with the reproduction of visual images through painting, photography, etc., the most important resource is the textual format. Texts are grounded on a cognitive deictic basis and work alongside the cause-effect (...) relationship that links events in human working memory. This relationship frequently posits a hierarchical dependency between the understanding of visual images, textuality and narrativity. Although texts are vehicles of contextualized information and cultural positions are often presented in a historiographical way, culture is not just about textuality; it is also about multimodality, that is, the use of symbolic forms that employ simultaneously several material-semiotic resources to create a kind of common framework of socially acceptable behaviours and customs which arise both from individual personal experiences and from shared cultural and ethical values. Signs areused to represent these values and, in turn, these representations affect their further emotional interiorization. This creates particular strong moments of remembrance and recollection in human memory. In addition, the production, distribution and reception of culture has always been dependent on changing material formats and technologies, from manuscripts to printed books, from mural painting to photography, and from architecture to virtual recreations on a computer screen. In recent years, the interest in intertextual and intermedial configurations is mostly due to the growth of hypermedia paradigms, and is reflected in the increasing number of disciplinary publications and conferences devoted to the topic. This paper shall explore the reasons behind a renewed interest in intertextual and intermedial manifestations in cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

What is the role of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the journey to the Fourth Industrial Revolution? What is the impact of these disciplines for the challenges the world faces, supposedly defined by a highly dynamic phase of industrial and social restructuring, where the adaptive capacity of societies needs to be enhanced by specific skills and techno-social dependencies? What is the role of SSH in building cognitive competences, and new professional paths? This paper, part of the special focus of (...) the Annual Review of New Directions in the Humanities, seeks to unveil the importance of SSH disciplines to the major STEM disciplines. Although disciplines and research in Social Sciences and Humanities play a fundamental role in the production of knowledge relevant to society, the last decade of the 20th century has seen a continuous trend towards their devaluation. After a relatively glorious period during the first half of the century, when SSH disciplines still held a relative social influence, the arrival of digital technologies in 1990s, accelerated their decline. This article traces a brief overview of this decline and explores some of the causes as well as the challenges in valuing SSH. Focusing mainly on Europe, the paper presents the attempts, on behalf of the European Commission, to correct this decline. It also outlines some new ideas that could help a true integration and transfer of knowledge across STEM AND STEAM disciplines, such as the creation of specific 'missions'. Precisely, one of the diagnoses of the Horizon 2020 experience in Europe has been that investment in research is not effectively linked to the solution of specific problems. Thus, it is necessary to put in motion co-creation mechanisms among research disciplines and advance in the establishment of intersectoral bridges, bringing SSH research closer to the industry and other social sectors in order to solve the pressing challenges we face. (shrink)

It is the contention of this paper that the Merleau-pontynian primacy of perception is compatible with the importance of the imagination and other dimensions of embodied existence. In spite of the fact that these dimensions have important differences, they spring from the same source: the lived body and its operative intentionality. I analyze their implications in the Merleaupontinian conception of the Flesh in order to apply his Phenomenology of the imagination to undertand the current iconic turn.

In ecology, if the considered area or space is large, the spatial distribution of individuals of a given plant species is never homogeneous; plants form different patches. The homogeneity change in space or in time (in particular, the related change-point problem) is an important research subject in mathematical statistics. In the paper, for a given data system along a straight line, two areas are considered, where the data of each area come from different discrete distributions, with unknown parameters. In the (...) paper a method is presented for the estimation of the distribution change-point between both areas and an estimate is given for the distributions separated by the obtained change-point. The solution of this problem will be based on the maximum likelihood method. Furthermore, based on an adaptation of the well-known bootstrap resampling, a method for the estimation of the so-called change-interval is also given. The latter approach is very general, since it not only applies in the case of the maximum-likelihood estimation of the change-point, but it can be also used starting from any other change-point estimation known in the ecological literature. The proposed model is validated against typical ecological situations, providing at the same time a verification of the applied algorithms. (shrink)

In western cultures, when it comes to places of worship and liturgies, music, acoustics and architecture go hand in hand. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether the emotions evoked by music are enhanced by the acoustics of the space where the music was composed to be played on. We explored whether the emotional responses of western naïve listeners to two vocal pieces from the Renaissance, one liturgical and one secular, convolved with the impulse responses of four Christian (...) temples from the United Kingdom, were modulated by the appropriate piece/space matching. In an alternative forced choice task where participants had to indicate their preference for the original recording of the piece (not convolved with any temple-like acoustics) vs. the convolved one, no significant differences were found. However, in the tasks where participants rated their emotional in response to each piece and acoustic condition, the factorial ANCOVA analyses performed on the results revealed significant effects. We observed that, across pieces and spaces, participants found the temple-like acoustics as more transcendent, compared to the acoustics of the original version of the pieces. In addition, they rated the secular piece as more tender and the liturgical piece as more expressive in its original versions, compared to the convolved ones. We conclude that the acoustic signature of the four Christian temples causes an exaltation of certain emotions on listeners, although this effect is not associated to one or another musical piece. (shrink)

The tree-based data structure of △-tree for propositional formulas is introduced in an improved and optimised form. The △-trees allow a compact representation for negation normal forms as well as for a number of reduction strategies in order to consider only those occurrences of literals which are relevant for the satisfiability of the input formula. These reduction strategies are divided into two subsets (meaning- and satisfiability-preserving transformations) and can be used to decrease the size of a negation normal form A (...) at (at most) quadratic cost. The reduction strategies are aimed at decreasing the number of required branchings and, therefore, these strategies allow to limit the size of the search space for the SAT problem. (shrink)

Emotion can be communicated through multiple distinct modalities. However, an often-ignored channel of communication is posture. Recent research indicates that bodily posture plays an important role in the perception of emotion. However, research examining postural communication of emotion is limited by the variety of validated emotion poses and unknown cohesion of categorical and dimensional ratings. The present study addressed these limitations. Specifically, we examined individuals’ (1) categorization of emotion postures depicting 5 discrete emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust), (2) (...) categorization of different poses depicting the same discrete emotion, and (3) ratings of valence and arousal for each emotion pose. Findings revealed that participants successfully categorized each posture as the target emotion, including disgust. Moreover, participants accurately identified multiple distinct poses within each emotion category. In addition to the categorical responses, dimensional ratings of valence and arousal revealed interesting overlap and distinctions between and within emotion categories. These findings provide the first evidence of an identifiable posture for disgust and instantiate the principle of equifinality of emotional communication through the inclusion of distinct poses within emotion categories. Additionally, the dimensional ratings corroborated the categorical data and provide further granularity for future researchers to consider in examining how distinct emotion poses are perceived. (shrink)

Los Estados confederados proyectan la existencia de un doble sistema normativo: federal y local. Esto provoca el surgimiento de colisiones y contradicciones entre ambos sistemas, lo que se pensaría debería ser resuelto por el derecho internacional, atendiendo el principio de subsidiariedad, no obstante, esto no siempre es así, ya sea porque el derecho internacional no regule ese caso concreto o bien, porque el Estado en cuestión no haya otorgado su consentimiento y la respuesta no le sea vinculante. Estas reflexiones invitan (...) a contrastar la naturaleza de las normas del derecho local y del derecho internacional, pues mientras que las primeras son asociativas, dado que no necesariamente requieren ser consentidas para ser vinculantes, las segundas, aparentemente, sí requieren el consentimiento de los Estados para que tengan efectos vinculantes. En este artículo pretendemos postular una posible solución al problema del conflicto entre los distintos órdenes normativos, partiendo desde una postura cuasi-voluntarista. Las obligaciones cuasi-voluntarias son aquellas que no surgen del consentimiento, pero tampoco completamente de los roles que tienen los Estados en el sistema internacional. Estas obligaciones nacen en el núcleo de grupos dominantes, a los que llamaremos grupos autocontenidos en el ámbito internacional, que tienen como rol la creación y socialización de las normas y obligaciones de derecho internacional, logrando que los otros grupos simplemente las sigan como si tuvieran un deber de hacerlo. Para ello, servirá como referencia el análisis del caso de las disimiles normas migratorias entre California y Texas dentro de Estados Unidos. (shrink)

In our time there is growing interest in developing a systematic approach to oncologic patients and end-of-life care. An important goal within this domain is to identify the values and ethical norms that guide physicians’ decisions and their recourse to technological aids to preserve life. Though crucial, this objective is not easy to achieve.

Taking as its starting point significant similarities between a formal language model—Grammar Systems—and a grammatical theory—Autolexical Syntax—in this paper we suggest the application of the former to the topic of the latter. To show the applicability of Grammar Systems Theory to grammatical description, we introduce a formal-language-theoretic framework for the architecture of natural language grammar: Linguistic Grammar Systems. We prove the adequacy of this model by highlighting its features (modularity, parallelism, interaction) and by showing the similarity between this framework and (...) accepted and well-known grammatical models (e.g. Autolexical Syntax). (shrink)