We show that in the Gromov space of isometry classes of pointed proper metric spaces, the equivalence relations defined by existence of coarse quasi-isometries or being at finite Gromov–Hausdorff distance cannot be reduced to the equivalence relation defined by any Polish action.

In the sport context, an essential aspect of an athlete’s development and performance happens during the interaction with the coach while receiving information on the aspects of performance that need to be modified. Grounded in the Self-Determination Theory and particularly on the basic psychological needs theory, a structural equation model was tested with the following sequence: perception of the amount of corrective feedback generated by the coach, perceived legitimacy of corrective feedback, satisfaction of basic psychological needs, and vitality in soccer (...) players. Additionally, simple mediation and serial mediation models were also tested. Participants were 377 Mexican soccer players, who completed the instruments that evaluated the study variables. SEM results reported positive and significant variables’ interrelations in the sequence. The analysis of serial mediation model showed that the perceived legitimacy of feedback and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs fully mediated the relationship between the perception of the amount of corrective feedback generated by the coach and the perception of the subjective vitality of Mexican soccer players. Results suggest that coaches have to ensure that athletes accept the corrective feedback provided and meet their basic psychological needs. Based on SDT tenets, this research highlights the importance for coaches to be aware of the athlete’s perceptions when they are providing corrective feedback and their implications for athlete’s technical development and well-being. It is suggested to incorporate those aspects to training programs for coaches. (shrink)

Application of egalitarian and prioritarian accounts of health resource allocation in low‐income countries have both been criticized for implying distribution outcomes that allow decreasing/undermining health gains and for tolerating unacceptable standards of health care and health status that result from such allocation schemes. Insufficient health care and severe deprivation of health resources are difficult to accept even when justified by aggregative efficiency or legitimized by fair deliberative process in pursuing equality and priority oriented outcomes. I affirm the sufficientarian argument that, (...) given extreme scarcity of public health resources in low‐income countries, neither health status equality between populations nor priority for the worse off is normatively adequate. Nevertheless, the threshold norm alone need not be the sole consideration when a country's total health budget is extremely scarce. Threshold considerations are necessary in developing a theory of fair distribution of health resources that is sensitive to the lexically prior norm of sufficiency. Based on the intuition that shares must not be taken away from those who barely achieve a minimal level of health, I argue that assessments based on standards of minimal physical/mental health must be developed to evaluate the sufficiency of the total resources of health systems in low‐income countries prior to pursuing equality, priority, and efficiency based resource allocation. I also begin to examine how threshold sensitive health resource assessment could be used in the Philippines. (shrink)

Rational justification of claims with empirical content calls for empirical and not only normative philosophical investigation. Empirical approaches to bioethics are epistemically valuable, i.e., such methods may be necessary in providing and verifying basic knowledge about cultural values and norms. Our assumptions in moral reasoning can be verified or corrected using these methods. Moral arguments can be initiated or adjudicated by data drawn from empirical investigation. One may argue that individualistic informed consent, for example, is not compatible with the Asian (...) communitarian orientation. But this normative claim uses an empirical assumption that may be contrary to the fact that some Asians do value and argue for informed consent. Is it necessary and factual to neatly characterize some cultures as individualistic and some as communitarian? Empirical investigation can provide a reasonable way to inform such generalizations. In a multi‐cultural context, such as in the Philippines, there is a need to investigate the nature of the local ethos before making any appeal to authenticity. Otherwise we may succumb to the same ethical imperialism we are trying hard to resist. Normative claims that involve empirical premises cannot be reasonably verified or evaluated without utilizing empirical methods along with philosophical reflection. The integration of empirical methods to the standard normative approach to moral reasoning should be reasonably guided by the epistemic demands of claims arising from cross‐cultural discourse in bioethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Defending a Phenomenological–Behavioral Perspective: Culture, Behavior, and ExperienceMarino Pérez-Álvarez (bio), José M. García-Montes (bio), Adolfo J. Cangas (bio), and Louis A. Sass (bio)KeywordsBehavior, contextual phenomenology, culture, experienceWe should like to express our sincere thanks to all the authors for their commentaries on our articles. Given the restrictions of space (a limitation they too had to contend with), we can only respond to a few aspects of their interesting remarks. (...) We shall reply of course on the basis of our own approach—an approach that sets out to integrate culture, behavior, and experience, and that might be termed contextual phenomenology, phenomenological behaviorism, or perhaps most accurately (albeit more awkwardly), the phenomenological–behavioral perspective.In her commentary, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008), referring to the target articles “Phenomenology and behaviorism” (Pérez-Álvarez, Sass, and Cangas 2008) and “The role of superstition in psychopathology” (García-Montes et al. 2008), wonders whether our maintaining of the spirit of Skinner, as well as our recourse to phenomenology, might not themselves represent forms of superstitious behavior. She points out that it is not always a good idea to put new wine in old barrels. For her, the new wine and new barrels would be represented by social constructivism, of which she is reminded by some aspects of our work. But in making her own case, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008) reveals certain common prejudices concerning behaviorism, prejudices that have apparently persisted even after reading our article. Thus, for example, she does not see operant behavior as incorporating intentionality (what, in the target article, is presented in terms of final causality), because she assumes that intentionality would necessarily imply a mentalist and dualist notion involving a supposed internal mental entity that causes behavior. Skinner (1974) himself noted and rejected this very assumption in a passage that clearly distinguishes his own approach from what he calls a “stimulus-response formula”: “Possibly no charge,” he wrote,is more often leveled against behaviorism or a science of behavior than that it cannot deal with purpose or intention. A stimulus-response formula has no answer, but operant behavior is the very field of purpose and [End Page 281] intention. By its nature it is directed toward the future: a person acts in order that something will happen, and the order is temporal.(pp. 55–6)The place Skinner gives to intentionality and purpose is elaborated in our target article.Furthermore, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008) assumes that, on methodological grounds, Skinner rejects all that is not observable, or at least that cannot be operationalized. This, however, is simply incorrect, at least as regards Skinner’s radical behaviorism. As the reader may recall, radical (as opposed to methodological) behaviorism is neither operationalist nor does it reject private or subjective events because of their unobservability. Indeed, Skinner specifically acknowledges that such events are in fact observable—at least for one person: the subject him- or herself. The question for Skinner is to understand how the part of the world that is only observable and experiential for oneself is constructed or formed. In the end, it turns out that radical behaviorism is more radical, in the Aristotelian ontological sense (see Pérez-Alvarez, Sass, and García-Montes 2008), than post-modern constructionism. Indeed, as we remarked, radical behaviorism can still surprise us today. Similarly, phenomenology is starting to be missed in the clinical context (Andreasen 2007). We believe that radical behaviorism and phenomenology, mutually readjusted, are in fact excellent wines for the times we live in—if only we knew how to appreciate them.In their commentary on “Phenomenology and behaviorism: A mutual readjustment,” Fletcher and Hayes (2008) argue that the philosophy and theory of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)/Relational Frame Theory (RFT) already contain the salutary aspects of phenomenology that we highlight in our target article. Their insistence on reducing the affinities we find between phenomenology and behaviorism to ACT/RFT consists, in our view, in a scientific–technical argument that is more scientistic than strictly philosophical in nature. Their insistence on the scientific–technical argument itself implies an unclarified philosophical assumption. On what grounds do experimental data constitute the last word? Has... (shrink)

In this work, we present a new approach to solve the location management problem by using the reporting cells strategy. Location management is a very important and complex problem in mobile computing which aims to minimize the costs involved. In the reporting cells location management scheme, some cells in the network are designated as reporting cells . The choice of these cells is not trivial because they affect directly to the cost of the mobile network. This article is focused on (...) the use of high performance computing to execute a parallel heuristic that places optimally the RCs in a mobile network, minimizing its total cost. The main goal of this work is to demonstrate that the collaborative work of different evolutionary algorithms can obtain very good results. For this reason, we have implemented a parallel heuristic and six evolutionary algorithms that works in a parallel way on a cluster to solve the RCs problem. (shrink)

This work begins by proposing the need for exploring the mode of being of mental disorders. It is a philosophical study in an Aristotelian perspective, with special emphasis on the anthropological–cultural dimension. It is difficult for such an inquiry to be carried out from within psychiatry or clinical psychology, committed as these fields are to their own logic and practical conditions. The issues are, in any case, more ontological than strictly clinical in nature. We therefore turn to Aristotle, and specifically (...) his doctrine of the four “causes,” to flesh out the social and cultural dimensions of mental disorders. In accordance with the present analysis, the material cause of disorders would be found in the contingencies of life; the formal cause would pertain primarily to the way clinical conditions themselves can serve as models of ‘being ill’ in our society; the efficient cause would correspond to the patients themselves, understood as active (albeit less than fully conscious) agents as well as to the pharmaceutical industry and the mass media; the final cause would be found in different adaptive functions served by the disorder. We conclude that the “mode of being” of most (if not all) mental disorders—in particular, their status as mental disorders—can often have more to do with cultural forms than with biological factors. (shrink)

Após a obrigatoriedade da educação sexual (ES) nas escolas portuguesas em 2009, pretendemos conhecer que perspectiva têm os professores ( N = 307) sobre a ES. Através de um questionário on-line , analisado através de estatística descritiva e de análise factorial e inferencial, avaliámos as atitudes ..

v. 1. Filosofía e historia de la ciencia -- v. 2. Lógica y filosofía del lenguaje.

This article considers the relationship between phenomenology and behaviorism in a new perspective. First, we present the phenomenological approach of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1883–1953). Ortega’s perspective involves a transformation of classical phenomenology in a direction that emphasizes ‘life as action’ and ‘historical reason’ as a form of explanation. These aspects of Ortega’s approach are of interest to contemporary phenomenology, and enable phenomenology’s relationship with behaviorism to be reconsidered. Second, we present Skinner’s radical behaviorism, the variant of behaviorism (...) most relevant to phenomenology. Of particular importance here is radical behaviorism’s emphasis on final causality and its approach to ‘private events’ in terms of the interpersonal functions served by these events. Third, we propose a mutual correction, both of behaviorism by phenomenology and of phenomenology by behaviorism, in which behaviorism’s notion of the environment may better be conceptualized through the phenomenological notion of the ‘lived-world,’ and phenomenology could adopt radical behaviorism’s dialectical and constructivist perspective. Finally, we discuss several implications for understanding psychopathology. (shrink)

The sweeping changes that have taken place in the Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union have detrimentally impacted an already weak Cuban economy. The establishment of the Special Period (1990-) embodies increasing austerity, especially in the inputs market. Recent economic liberalization policies in Cuba may lead to a more market-oriented economy, the lifting of the U. S. embargo, and commercial relations between the two countries. There is concern on the potential impact that resumption of trade may have on (...) the U. S. and Florida's agricultural economy. This study implies potential costs for the citrus, sugar, horticultural, and seafood industries in Florida, while potential Florida exports unveil trade opportunities of a large magnitude. Further research is needed to quantify potential benefits and costs. Of special importance is the fate of Cuba's recent program on low-input sustainable agriculture once large amounts of inputs become available. (shrink)

Ethical beliefs may vary across cultures but there are things that must be valued as preconditions to any cultural practice. Physical and mental abilities vital to believing, valuing and practising a culture are such preconditions and it is always important to protect them. If one is to practise a distinct culture, she must at least have these basic abilities. Access to basic healthcare is one way to ensure that vital abilities are protected. John Rawls argued that access to all-purpose primary (...) goods must be ensured. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum claim that universal capabilities are what resources are meant to enable. Len Doyal and Ian Gough identify physical health and autonomy as basic needs of every person in every culture. When we disagree on what to prioritize, when resources to satisfy competing demands are scarce, our common needs can provide a point of normative convergence. Need-based rationing, however, has been criticized for being too indeterminate to give guidance for deciding which healthcare services to prioritize and for tending to create a bottomless-pit problem. But there is a difference between needing something (first-order need) and needing to have the ability to need (second-order need). Even if we disagree about which first-order need to prioritize, we must accept the importance of satisfying our second-order need to have the ability to value things. We all have a second-order need for basic healthcare as a means to protect our vital abilities even if we differ in what our cultures consider to be particular first-order needs. (shrink)

Suicidal Thoughts is a compilation of some of the most moving and insightful writing accomplished on the topic of suicide. It presents the thoughts and experiences of fifteen writers who have contemplated suicide-some on a professional level, others on a personal level, and a few, both personally and professionally. Through this collection, the reader is able to bear witness to the struggle between life and death and to the devastating aftermath of suicide. Suicidal Thoughts provides readers with a better understanding (...) of the reasons why some individuals give serious consideration to killing themselves. (shrink)

This article attempts to show the importance of the concept of superstition in understanding a range of psychological problems. With this aim, we critically analyze several constructs that, without actually using the term “superstition,” concern this phenomenon and its role in the development of mental disorders. First we discuss “Thought–Action Fusion” and “magical thinking,” two concepts from the cognitive tradition that view superstition as basically an ideational phenomenon. Second, we look at “Experiential Avoidance,” a post-Skinnerian concept that understands superstition as (...) a type of avoidance behavior for certain private events. Third, we discuss superstition as an emotional phenomenon, in particular, Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of emotions as magical operations. Finally, we review a cultural approach to superstition and its influence on psychopathology. In this perspective, superstition is seen as a cultural form linked to the historical–social context, which is fostered by certain social practices or institutions, including (perhaps surprisingly) certain features of modernity. (shrink)