Alan Everitt's name will always be associated with the remarkable flowering of local history in England from the 1950s onwards. Yet he did not start out as a local historian, and he would readily have admitted his own surprise that he was led that way. But from his earliest days Everitt was instinctively drawn to observing people around him in the finest detail, noting their dress, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies, listening to their accents and small talk at the bus stop, silently (...) capturing fragmentary impressions of others' lives, and coming gradually to realise that everywhere, in country or town, anywhere outside one's own familiar circle, people experienced a different flavour of life from his own. Thus, when Everitt trained as a historian and developed a deep interest in local history, he became a shrewd and original observer. (shrink)

This study examines how our personal values influence our judgment of the morality of some workplace behaviours. Sixty-nine undergraduates were asked to rank order separately Rokeach''s instrumental and terminal values in terms of their importance as guiding principles in their life. Subjects then read four scenarios, each of which described ethically questionable behaviour of the sort that might be encountered in business. They were then asked to rate whether or not the behaviour of the person described in the scenario was (...) ethical, and whether or not they had any intentions to rectify the situation. People with different value hierarchies perceived the targeted behaviours differently. For example, subjects who valued honesty perceived the behaviour as more immoral than subjects who did not value honesty. While the ranking of the instrumental valuehonesty was the best predictor of people''s judgments about the morality of the behaviour, their ranking of the instrumental valueambition was the best predictor of their behavioural intentions. (shrink)

This paper develops a simple, conceptual, mathematical model for the evolution of holobionts. Its purpose is to clarify how holobiont selection may cause evolutionary change in the traits of holobionts.

The management of covid-19 and the so-called "new normality" have brought with a timely debate of ideas about the future of sovereignty. Leaving aside hegemonic and neoliberal technophilia, this debate has generated two mutually exclusive approaches based on controversial statements by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, namely: one that foresees an undemocratic horizon subject to new technologies and another that emphasizes the transversal character and contradictory of these. In this work, by appealing to the theory of techno-economic paradigms, I critically set (...) out the main reasonings of the debate and I reflect on the future of democracy. (shrink)

Evidence shows that outstanding talent is more than the product of determined effort by people of much the same inborn ability. Indications of inborn individual differences come from very early studies of childhood. No randomly selected child has ever reached world-class achievement by practice alone, which, though essential, cannot itself produce greatness.

América Latina ha sido desde siempre objeto de controversia en España, aunque últimamente con mayor intensidad se ha convertido en materia de utilización partidista, especialmente por parte de un bloque conservador que se esfuerza en convertir hechos y procesos latinoamericanos en elementos de confrontación política interna española. También las izquierdas hispanas tienen presente a América latina en su acción política, y padecen una elevada desinformación, mientras mantienen clichés de otra época. El artículo atiende a tres casos en la confrontación derecha/izquierda (...) de los últimos tiempos: Venezuela, ariete conservador contra el Gobierno de Pedro Sánchez; México, como excitante del nacionalismo españolista tras la exigencia de López Obrador; y, finalmente, Bolivia tras la forzada salida del poder de Evo Morales. (shrink)

Three apparently unrelated developmental processes – mammalian myogenesis, the choice of neural fate and sex determination in Drosophila – are controlled by a common mechanism. Most of the genes governing these processes encode transcriptional factors that contain the helix‐loop‐helix (HLH) motif. This domain mediates the formation of homo‐ or heterodimers that specifically bind to DNA through a conserved basic region adjacent to the HLH motif. Dimers differ in their affinity for DNA and in their ability to activate transcription from HLH (...) binding‐site containing promoters. In addition, the activity of HLH proteins is inhibited by dimerization with another class of HLH proteins that lack a basic domain entirely or have an altered one. These structural properties provide a molecular mechanism to explain the synergistic and antagonistic functional relations among the HLH encoding genes that control several developmental pathways. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta una explicación del sentido común moderno a partir de una reconstrucción de lecturas críticas de Marx y Schumpeter. Se defiende que nuestro sentido común está estrechamente relacionado con la tecnología y que esta comporta fetichismo y funcionalidad. El artículo tiene cuatro partes. Primeramente, expongo las consideraciones generales que requiere una aproximación filosófica al sentido común y concreto la filosofía de la historia en la que baso mi análisis. Segundo, argumento que el sentido común moderno es indisociable de (...) la moral y la política y ambas lo son de posibles conflictos de tipo radical en cuanto al ser humano y su historia. Tercero, comento por qué estos posibles conflictos tienen que ver con lo que Marx llama en El capital la maquinaria capitalista y desarrollo esta idea desde la teoría de los paradigmas tecnoeconómicos. Finalmente, sostengo que esta teoría neoschumpeteriana debe ser criticada desde la filosofía, así como adoptada para una teoría y práctica críticas del sentido común moderno, el cual tiene en las gestiones de la COVID-19 un punto culminante. (shrink)

Surgical “buy-in” is an “informal contract between surgeon and patient in which the patient not only consents to the operative procedure but commits to the post-operative surgical care anticipated by the surgeon.”1 Surgeons routinely assume that patients wish to undergo treatment for operative complications so that the overall treatment course is “successful,” as in the treatment of a post-operative infection. This article examines occasions when patients buy-in to a treatment course that carries risk of complication, yet refuse treatment when complications (...) arise. We coin this counter-phenomenon “cashing-out.” Cashing-out may elicit negative feelings among careproviders. We question why patients or families may wish to cash-out. One reason may be the changing epistemological position of patients as they experience a complication. The shift from the hypothetical discussion of complications during the initial informed-consent process to the experience of having a complication represents new knowledge. Patients and families may use this knowledge as the basis to revoke consent for some or all of the remaining treatment course. This article seeks to understand cashing-out in terms of the patients’ experiences. We hope to prompt recognition of this phenomenon across medical contexts and to provide impetus for further work to understand why patients may wish to cash-out. (shrink)

This paper introduces an extension A of Kleene's axiomatization of Brouwer's intuitionistic analysis, in which the classical arithmetical and analytical hierarchies are faithfully represented as hierarchies of the domains of continuity. A domain of continuity is a relation R(α) on Baire space with the property that every constructive partial functional defined on {α : R(α)} is continuous there. The domains of continuity for A coincide with the stable relations (those equivalent in A to their double negations), while every relation R(α) (...) is equivalent in A to ∃αA(α, β) for some stable A(α, β) (which belongs to the classical analytical hierarchy). The logic of A is intuitionistic. The axioms of A include countable comprehension, bar induction, Troelstra's generalized continuous choice, primitive recursive Markov's Principle and a classical axiom of dependent choices proposed by Krauss. Constructive dependent choices, and constructive and classical countable choice, are theorems, A is maximal with respect to classical Kleene function realizability, which establishes its consistency. The usual disjunction and (recursive) existence properties ensure that A preserves the constructive sense of "or" and "there exists.". (shrink)

This note explores the common core of constructive, intuitionistic, recursive and classical analysis from an axiomatic standpoint. In addition to clarifying the relation between Kleene’s and Troelstra’s minimal formal theories of numbers and number-theoretic sequences, we propose some modified choice principles and other function existence axioms which may be of use in reverse constructive analysis. Specifically, we consider the function comprehension principles assumed by the two minimal theories EL and M, introduce an axiom schema CFd asserting that every decidable property (...) of numbers has a characteristic function, and use it to describe a precise relationship between the minimal theories. We show that the axiom schema AC00 of countable choice can be decomposed into a monotone choice schema AC00m (which guarantees that every Cauchy sequence has a modulus) and a bounded choice schema BC00. We relate various (classically correct) axiom schemas of continuous choice to versions of the bar and fan theorems, suggest a constructive choice schema AC1/2,0 (which incidentally guarantees that every continuous function has a modulus of continuity), and observe a constructive equivalence between restricted versions of the fan theorem and correspondingly restricted bounding axioms \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${AB_{1/2,0}^{2^{\mathbb{n}}}}$$\end{document}. We also introduce a version WKL!! of Weak König’s Lemma with uniqueness which is intermediate in strength between WKL and the decidable fan theorem FTd. (shrink)

La introducción de videotutoriales interactivos (VTI) en las clases prácticas de laboratorio de grados en ciencias e ingenierías como complemento a los tradicionales protocolos experimentales escritos ha sido analizada mediante encuestas de satisfacción al alumnado. Los resultados muestran un alto grado de aceptación en el uso de los vídeos y la mejora del aprendizaje autónomo, pero también reflejan una percepción del aumento de la carga de trabajo debido a la inclusión de preguntas en los vídeos, que es valorado de forma (...) muy negativa por parte del alumnado. (shrink)