The aim of the present study was to assess the impact of past traumatic war experiences on preadolescents in the Gaza Strip, which could be useful for psychological intervention with current and future child victims. Participants were 521 preadolescents from United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools, aged 11 and 13 years old. Sections I to IV from Iraqi Version-Arabic of Harvard Trauma Questionnaire was used to assess trauma experiences and Post-Traumatic Stress (...) Disorder (PTSD). The results show that the preadolescents in the Gaza Strip witnessed the destruction of their homes and the murder of family members and friends. A quarter of the individuals assessed either suffered torture or witnessed others undergoing it, including sexual assaults. Almost half of them experienced a lack of food and clean water. The traumatic and torture experiences seriously affected preadolescents’ mental health as 26.29% met criteria for the diagnosis of PTSD. The data analysis revealed two PTSD modalities, with the severity of impact depending on whether social implications were involved. Further research is required to check whether these two modalities fit to PTSD and complex PTSD. Understanding the effects of past wars on preadolescents in Gaza and distinguishing between different PTSD types could enhance comprehension of the impacts of current attacks on child victims. It can also aid in determining the type of intervention needed to minimize the impact on the mental health of Palestinian youth, enhancing their resilience through psychological and social support. (shrink)

Several studies have highlighted that reading comprehension is determined by different linguistic skills: semantics, syntax, and morphology, in addition to one’s own competence in reading fluency. On the other hand, according to the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis, linguistic skills developed in one’s own native language facilitate the development of these skills in a second one. In this study, we wanted to explore the linguistic abilities that determine reading comprehension in Spanish and in English in Secondary Education students. To do this, 73 (...) Secondary Education Students participated in this study. The students carried out a battery of tasks in English and Spanish, all of them related to reading comprehension and different linguistic skills, which included syntactic awareness tasks, synonymy judgment tasks, and morphological awareness tasks. The results indicated a positive correlation between linguistic competencies in both languages, which were determined by school year, with a lower performance in the 1st year than in the 3rd year. Moreover, we found more skills with correlations in English reading comprehension than in Spanish. Finally, reading comprehension in L1 was mainly explained English reading comprehension, while English reading comprehension was predicted by grade, and syntactic awareness, as well as Spanish reading comprehension. This could be explained by the different levels of exposure to L1 and L2 of sample subjects, as the linguistic variables have different influences on the reading comprehension of both languages. (shrink)

Background:The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shortage of qualified nurses in Spain. As a result, the government authorized the hiring of senior students.Objectives:To explore the ethical dilemmas and ethical conflicts experienced by final-year nursing students who worked during the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain.Research design:A qualitative exploratory study was conducted using purposive sampling. Semi-structured interviews were carried out using a question guide. Interviews took place via a private video chat room platform. A thematic, inductive (...) analysis was performed of the information gathered.Participants and research context:Eighteen nursing students were recruited from two universities of Madrid, aged between 18 and 65 years old, enrolled in the fourth year of nursing studies and who were hired under a relief contract for health professionals during the pandemic.Ethical considerations:The present study was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the study was approved by the Local Ethics Committee of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.Results:Three specific themes emerged: (a) coping with patient triage, (b) difficulties in providing end-of-life care, and (c) coping with patient death. Nursing students participated in the process of patient selection for resource allocation and ICU bed occupancy. They were shown how to care for patients who were not admitted to the ICU, in their last moments and were faced with the difficulties of applying end-of-life care. Finally, the nursing students were confronted with the death of their patients, in overwhelming numbers and under adverse conditions.Conclusions:These findings can help shed light on the ethical dilemmas and ethical conflicts faced by novice nursing students, incorporated into the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, it was described that students may normalize the death due to the exhaustion and overwhelmed routine. (shrink)

Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions, and motives, and how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. Maria Alvarez presents a fresh and incisive study of these concepts, centred on reasons and their role in human agency.

In the mid-1970s, the fascist-leaning dictatorships in Spain (1939–1977) and Portugal (1933–1974) fell. Closely linked to the 1973 oil crisis, debates over energy and technology policies became very prominent during the ensuing political redefinition of both countries. Two decades after the first international agreements between the Iberian regimes and the United States for the development of nuclear programs, a myriad of movements of social resistance to nuclear technology emerged in dialogue with anti-nuclear organizations in other European countries. Fun and playfulness (...) have been used for top–down popularization and banalization of nuclear technologies since the 1950s, but here pleasant forms of resistance also played a central role in contesting national energy plans, expert discourses, and vested interests. This article explores what we call “anti-nuclear fun,” the use of amusement, play, and humor as political and epistemic tools to familiarize society with the exceptional and daily risks of the “peaceful atom.”. (shrink)

In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo (...) tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI. (shrink)

The notion of the extension of a concept has been used in logic for a long time. It is usually considered to be closely connected to the intuitive notion of a set and thus seems as though it should be embedded into set theory. However, there are significant differences between this “logical” concept of set and the notion of set (class) as defined via standard axiomatic systems of set theory; it may, therefore, be quite misleading to consider the two concepts (...) as being continuous with each other. When we look at the writings of Gottlob Frege and consider the development of his attitude to extensions, we can see what the differences consist in and which of the two notions is more apt to be used in foundations of logic. Frege himself eventually rejected sets entirely. (shrink)

In 1975, the death of dictator Francisco Franco opened the door to a turbulent period known as the “Spanish Transition.” In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, national politics, political violence and social demands were interwoven with international shifts in science and technology and global debates on “energy transitions.” In close dialogue with foreign environmental groups, the anti-nuclear movement in Spain deployed a large repertoire of collective action; it ranged from pleasant activities to violent direct actions against nuclear technologies, (...) but also included the making of technological alternatives. Counter-culture activists and counter-experts opposed nuclear energy and promoted renewable energy as two sides of the same coin. This paper explores the pioneering (and networked) initiatives of an anarchist-oriented group called Self-Managed Radical Alternative Technologies, created in 1976, and a group of young engineers who founded the cooperative Ecotècnia, which was behind the construction of the first commercial wind turbine in Catalonia in 1984. The paper focuses on the transnational circulation of grassroots knowledge, the epistemics of resistance, and the development of wind energy technologies as “technologies of protest.” Technologies of protest illuminate how the social construction of technology is intertwined with what I call the “social destruction of technology.”. (shrink)

ResumenSe trata, en esta investigación, de hacer una aproximación moral, política y filosófica al teatro español del Siglo de Oro a través de dos de sus más paradigmáticos creadores: Lope de Vega y Calderón de la Barca. Me apoyo para ello en una definición política de lo trágico que se encuentra arraigada en la tradición greco-latina del género. Se investigará si en las obras analizadas de Lope y Calderón lo trágico aún se encuentra delimitado por lo político, deduciéndose, como se (...) verá, que en Lope tal relación ha desaparecido, mientras que en Calderón se mantiene, pero eliminándose el enfoque dialéctico debido a la afirmación de los códigos del Honor.Palabras claveTragedia española, tradición clásica, estética, teoría de la literatura, literatura comparadaAbstractThis paper is a moral, philosophical and political approach to the theatre of Spanish Golden Age based on a philosophical and political conception of the tragic literature. We focus our attention on two classic authors: Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. A comparative approach between Greek tragedy and the Spanish plays will help us define if the tragic bias is limited by a political aspect in Lope and Calderon. Finally, we intend to deduce that politics have disappeared in Lope´s plays and still exist in Calderon, although not in a dialectical way due to the code of Honour.KeywordsSpanish Tragedy, classical tradition, Aesthetics, Literary Theory, Comparative Literature. (shrink)

La tensión entre libertad y seguridad, entre los deseos del colectivo frente a los del propio individuo, ha estado vigente desde el nacimiento de las sociedades humanas. Dos elementos antagónicos que se complementan, desde el ámbito político hasta en la psique, dicha lucha de contrarios es constante y difícilmente podemos desligarnos de la misma. La seguridad nace del deseo de salvaguardar la libertad; por lo que al fin y al cabo, se acaba autolimitado a ella misma, paradójicamente. El ser humano (...) ha requerido del surgimiento de la segunda mencionada para poder combatir a los de su propia especie. La combinación de ambas categorías es la clave del éxito. (shrink)

The French bioethics laws of 1994 contain the principles of the anonymity and non commodification of all donations of body parts and products including gametes in medically assisted reproduction. The two revisions of the law, in 2004 and 2011 have upheld the rule. In view of the latest revision process, the French government organized a large public consultation in 2009. Within the event a “consensus conference” was held in Rennes about different aspects of assisted reproduction. In what follows we shall (...) first describe the anonymity clause for gamete donations in the French law and the debates surrounding it. We shall then analyse the procedure used for the 2009 public consultation and the related consensus conference, as well as its upshot concerning the anonymity doctrine. In this respect we shall compare the citizens’ own recommendations on the gamete anonymity issue and its translation in the consultation’s final report drafted by a philosopher mandated by the organizing committee. Whereas the final report cited some fundamental ethical arguments as reason for upholding the provisions of the law—most notably the refusal of the ‘all biological’ approach to reproductive issues—citizens were more careful and tentative in their position although they also concluded that for pragmatic reasons the anonymity rule should continue to hold. We shall argue that the conservative upshot of the public consultation is due to some main underlying presuppositions concerning the citizens’ role and expertise as well as to the specific design of the consensus conference. Our conclusion will be that public consultations and consensus conferences can only serve as an empirical support for devising suitable bioethics norms by using second-order normative assumptions. (shrink)

There is currently a consensus among comparative psychologists that nonhuman animals are capable of some forms of mindreading. Several philosophers and psychologists have criticized this consensus, however, arguing that there is a “logical problem” with the experimental approach used to test for mindreading in nonhuman animals. I argue that the logical problem is no more than a version of the general skeptical problem known as the theoretician’s dilemma. As such, it is not a problem that comparative psychologists must solve before (...) providing evidence for mindreading. (shrink)

A commentary on “The Ethics of Anonymous Gamete Donation: Is There a Right to Know One's Genetic Origins?” by Inmaculada de Melo‐Martín, in the March‐April 2014 issue.

In 2009, an influential and remarkable report to the French highest health authorities written by Claire Compagnon, a patients' advocate, and Véronique Ghadi, a legal scholar, has brought to public attention a phenomenon that had gone unnoticed in medical ethics: the report's authors called it "ordinary abuse".1 They argue that the term describes a widespread and invisible form of mistreatment in the hospital setting, which they distinguish from abuse proper, a phenomenon, they argue, which is far less common and controversial. (...) "Ordinary abuse," they write, occurs for example when patients have to accept "interminable and inexplicable... (shrink)

Two arguments are offered here for postulating individual essences of concrete individuals on top of their sortal essences. One is the explanatory gap argument, the other draws on the analogy with the individual essences of events presupposed in single causal explanations. These arguments support qualitative individual essences with explanatory goals as opposed to hybrid impure relational essences accounting for origin and numerical identity. It is highlighted why origin properties as parts of impure relational essences do not yield genuine de re (...) constructions. The distinction between the two types of individual essences is traced back to the ambiguity of the very notion of individuation. (shrink)

Plato's Republic VII suggests that if we ask someone to philosophize when they are too young, they can become corrupted (537e–539d). Republic VII also suggests that to avoid this corruption, we must not expose youth to argument (539a–b). This is not a reasonable option outside of Kallipolis, so a question arises: does Plato describe how to correct corruption if we do not manage to prevent it? This paper shows that a parallel between this passage from Republic VII and a passage (...) from Laws X suggests that he does. Laws X describes an impious man who is corrupted in the same way as the youth exposed to philosophy prematurely in Republic VII. While we leave the youth to his corruption in Republic, the impious man is helped to overcome his corruption in Laws with a refutation followed by a myth (also called a charm). This paper analyses these steps in terms of Plato's psychology, showing that both corruption and correction require a destabilization of the soul, which in these passages is brought about through refutation. This destabilization allows for a reconfiguration, which, with something that can restabilize the soul (for example with myth), can be a reconfiguration for the better. (shrink)

This paper presents a restructured set of axioms for categorical logic. In virtue of it, the syllogistic with indefinite terms is deduced and proved, within the categorical logic boundaries. As a result, the number of all the conclusive syllogisms is deduced through a simple and axiomatic methodology. Moreover, the distinction between immediate and mediate inferences disappears, which reinstitutes the unity of Aristotelian logic.

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)

En la historia intelectual de América Latina existe una laguna respecto a la producción de las mujeres en el género de ensayo. Son los ensayos de identidad criolla, de hechura masculina, los que construyen el canon respecto a las temáticas y a las maneras de ser abordado. Los ensayos de género que las escritoras han realizado se articulan como respuesta a esta visión dominante de los procesos sociales, políticos y culturales de los países latinoamericanos. Revelan un fuerte descontento con la (...) construcción de la identidad femenina, una preocupación por la construcción de una ciudadanía plena y representan una respuesta a las demandas sociales políticas y culturales de las mujeres y otros grupos marginales. Las intelectuales debatieron, discutieron y polemizaron con las propuestas que al respecto portaban los discursos dominantes y el ensayo de género se vuelve el “arma de combate”. Lo que aquí se presenta, tiene como objetivo la recuperación de este corpus de conocimiento en la historia literaria de Cuba, Puerto Rico y República Dominicana. Una labor de arqueología literaria de temas, obras y autoras a partir del siglo XX. Se brinda, a partir del libro Mujeres ensayistas del Caribe Hispano: Hilvanando el silencio (2007) deAnna Freire Ashbaugh, Lourdes Rojas y Raquel Romeu, una visión panorámica del conjunto de ensayistas de cada país. Otras investigadoras como Catharina Vallejo, Ivette Sóñora, Carmen Dolores Hernández y Consuelo Meza Márquez ampliaran ese corpus y señalan algunos rasgos temáticos de la obra ensayística de autoras como Luisa Campuzano, Mirta Yáñez, Nara Araujo, Marta Núñez Sarmiento y Zaida Capote Cruz de Cuba; Concha Meléndez, Rosario Ferré, Norma Valle Ferrer, Nara Negrón Marreño y Silvia Álvarez Curbelo de Puerto Rico; y, de República Dominicana, Camila Henríquez Ureña, Carmita Landestoy, Carmen Durán y Rosa Inés Curiel Pichardo. (shrink)

Historia mínima de Israel, publicado por El Colegio de México en el 2017, debe recibirse como un acontecimiento editorial raro, ya que son pocos los libros académicos en lengua española sobre el estado de Israel y la sociedad israelí. O tal vez sea más acertado afirmar que son pocas las obras de divulgación sobre una realidad tan compleja y dramática, tan densa y cambiante, que se propongan un análisis crítico y reflexivo alejándose de modismos y maniqueísmos que sólo han producido (...) y continúan produciendo lecturas apasionadas, diseminadoras de polémicas falsas e inútiles. (shrink)

Large protein assemblies are usually the effectors of major cellular processes. The intricate cell homeostasis network is divided into numerous interconnected pathways, each controlled by a set of protein machines. One of these master regulators is the CCR4‐NOT complex, which ultimately controls protein expression levels. This multisubunit complex assembles around a scaffold platform, which enables a wide variety of well‐studied functions from mRNA synthesis to transcript decay, as well as other tasks still being identified. Solving the structure of the entire (...) CCR4‐NOT complex will help to define the distribution of its functions. The recently published three‐dimensional reconstruction of the complex, in combination with the known crystal structures of some of the components, has begun to address this. Methodological improvements in structural biology, especially in cryoelectron microscopy, encourage further structural and protein‐protein interaction studies, which will advance our comprehension of the gene expression machinery. (shrink)

The genesis of Feynman's original approach to QED is reviewed. The main ideas of his original presentation at the Pocono Conference are discussed and compared with the ones involved in his action-at-distance formulation of classical electrodynamics. The role of the de Sitter group in Feynman's visualization of space-time processes is emphasized.

Report on the international conference Ethical Thinking: Past and Present entitled Ethics in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

This paper aims to present of the ethics of social consequences (a form of non-utilitarian consequentialism) as a theoretical basis for the examination of teacher ethics and a tool for dealing with practical moral problems of the teaching profession. Teachers’ duty is to help students, teach them to recognize the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, show them that they have moral responsibility for their actions and all this can be very well attained on the basis of the (...) ethics of social consequences. (shrink)

The author of the paper deals with teachers’ professional ethics and the current theoretical and practical implementation. She stresses the need for an ethics of teaching to be included in the theoretical and practical training of future teachers. She discusses ethics theories by Slovak and other authors and demonstrates the extent to which they are applied in practice. The author considers that an ethics of teaching should be a tool of the professional and moral practice of each teacher. The current (...) situation in the Slovak educational system is rather unfavourable, and there is often a contradiction between the theoretical knowledge and its practical implementation in the everyday work of the teacher. (shrink)

The question of how society should deal with social conflicts arising from cultural differences persists. Should we adopt an exclusivist approach by excluding reasons based on specific cultural traditions (culture-based reasons) from public debates about social policy, especially because these reasons do not appeal to the public at large? Or should we resort to an inclusivist approach by including reasons based on cultural traditions in public debate to give recognition to the diverse cultural identities of those who practice these traditions? (...) While these two approaches assign different roles to cultural traditions in public debate, both seem to welcome compromise between conflicting parties. This paper reviews contending normative approaches for dealing with conflicts in multicultural societies and explores the place of culture-based reasons in public debates designed to resolve conflicts. (shrink)

A common strategy in comparative cognition is to require that one reject associative learning as an explanation for behavior before concluding that an organism is capable of causal reasoning. In this paper, I argue that standard causal-reasoning tasks can be explained by a powerful form of associative learning: unlimited associative learning (UAL). The lesson, however, is not that researchers should conduct more studies to reject UAL, but that they should instead focus on 1) enriching the cognitive hypothesis space and 2) (...) testing a broader range of information processing patterns—errors, biases and limits, rather than successful problem solving alone. (shrink)