Background No studies have been conducted in Mexico to ascertain what ethical problems doctors working at hospitals deal with. This article aims to describe the ethical conflicts most commonly identified by Mexican internists and the importance they attribute to each of these conflicts. Methods Voluntary survey to the members of the Internal Medicine Association of Mexico. Results Responses were submitted by 347 internists. Half of those face ethical conflicts almost always or frequently. The most commonplace and relevant conflicts are those (...) resulting from the clinical relationship (communication, confidentiality, informed consent, assessment of mental capacity, decisions involving incapacitated patients, and conflicts with family members), and secondly those problems related with the end of life (palliative care, withholding or withdrawing treatment, and “No CPR orders”). To resolve conflicts they seek support through protocols, Institutional Ethics Committees (IECs), and consultations with colleagues and, occasionally, with bioethics experts. Protocols and IECs are the tools most in demand among them. Conclusions 1) the most frequent and relevant conflicts are those caused by the clinical relationship, above all those due to doctor–patient communication, and secondly those due to problems which arise at the end of life; 2) though nearly all of them have doubts about how to resolve conflicts, the vast majority are satisfied with the way in which they do so; 3) to deal with conflicts, they seek support mainly in protocols, IECs, and consultation with colleagues; and 4) in order to resolve them better, what they most demand are protocols and IECs, but also bioethics consultants. (shrink)

Since 2002, legislation in Spain has allowed for the creation and documentation of end-of-life decisionmaking. Over the intervening years, the actual implementation of such documents is very low. Through extensive analysis of the literature, this article explores the current status of the use of and attitudes toward advance directives in Spain and then proposes strategies for improvement in their implementation.

This thesis is presented from a historical life history, the conscious world of an academic whose thoughts were not dogmatic nor censured, neither within or without the university. It was a dialogue with others who never hesitated to judge him as critical and heuristic. The only way to be authenti..

Throughout the 20th century, market capitalism was defended on parallel grounds. First, it promotes freedom by enabling individuals to exploit their own property and labor-power; second, it facilitates an efficient allocation and use of resources. Recently, however, both defenses have begun to unravel—as capitalism has moved into its “platform” phase. Today, the pursuit of allocative efficiency, bolstered by pervasive data surveillance, often undermines individual freedom rather than promoting it. And more fundamentally, the very idea that markets are necessary to achieve (...) allocative efficiency has come under strain. Even supposing, for argument’s sake, that the claim was true in the early 20th century when von Mises and Hayek pioneered it, advances in computing have rekindled the old “socialist calculation” debate. And this time around, markets—as information technology—are unlikely to have the upper hand. -/- All of this, we argue, raises an important set of governance questions regarding the political economy of the future. We focus on two: How much should our economic system prioritize freedom, and to what extent should it rely on markets? The arc of platform capitalism bends, increasingly, toward a system that neither prioritizes freedom nor relies on markets. And the dominant critical response, exemplified by Shoshana Zuboff’s work, has been to call for a restoration of market capitalism. Longer term, however, we believe it would be more productive to think about how “postmarket” economic arrangements might promote freedom—or better yet, autonomy—even more effectively than markets, and to determine the practical steps necessary to realize that possibility. (shrink)

Many different arguments have been put forward in order to assign the best place for a given element within Mendeleev's Table: its spectroscopy, its chemical activity, the crystalline structure of its solid state, etc. We here propose another criterion; the nature of the few body corrections to the pairwise additive energy. This argument is used here to address a question often brought forward by Eric Scerri in Foundations of Chemistry, namely the rightful place of helium; either above the column of (...) the alkaline earths (beryllium, etc.) or rather above the noble gas elements. (shrink)

This article aims to improve the knowledge on Generation Z as employees within workforce and in the workplace, as well as on the main thematic trends that drive the research on the topic. To this end, and using bibliometric techniques, a sample of 102 publications on this subject from Web of Science between 2009 and 2020 is analyzed. Research discusses the most published and most cited authors and journals to have a broad view of the context of the subject. Later, (...) through a longitudinal view, the study mainly focuses on analyzing the evolution of thematic clusters, to assess the progress of the themes, as well as the network around the principal motor cluster of each period. The obtained results suggest a hardly developed topic, which started to draw attention in 2018, while still having a wide margin for growth. The core of research on the topic has evolved around “Generation-Z” “generations,” “workplace,” “management” and “attitudes,” “leadership,” “career,” or “learning-teaching-education,” although a low keyword stability among periods was noted. There is a need for further development on a variety of aspects regarding this generation and the labor market, as the study shows a clear orientation toward management and generational diversity within the workplace. (shrink)

Electricity is an indicator that shows the progress of a civilization; it is a product that has greatly changed the way we think about the world. Electricity price forecasting became a fundamental task in all countries due to the deregulation of the electricity market in the 1990s. This work examines the effectiveness of using multiple variables for price prediction given the large number of factors that could influence the price of the electricity market. The tests were carried out over four (...) periods using data from Spain and deep learning models. Two different attribute selection methods based on Pearson’s correlation coefficient have been used to improve the efficiency of the training process. The variables used as input to the different prediction models were chosen, considering those most commonly used previously in the literature. This study attempts to test whether using time series lags improves the non-use of lags. The results obtained have shown that lags improve the results compared to a previous work in which no lags were used. (shrink)

The Periodic Table has the column of the noble gas atoms (He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe, Rn) as one of its main pillars. Indeed the inert chemical nature of their closed shell structure is so striking that it is sometimes extended to all such structures. Is it true however that any closed shell, say a closed d-subshell will denote a lack of chemical activity? Take the noble metals for instance, so renowned for their catalytic capacity. Platinum has 10 electrons in (...) its valence shell which makes one of its excited states to be a closed 5d10–6s0 state. Surely this state would not be expected to be crucial to the catalytic activity of platinum, or would it? Or take palladium whose ground state is precisely the 4d10–5s0 state, should we expect that an isolated Pd atom at near zero-point temperature would attack a closed-shell hydrogen molecule efficiently? We shall here show that this is precisely the case; the closed-shell excited states of nickel and platinum are indeed crucial, through symmetry avoided crossings, for their reactivity. Other valuable catalysts as ruthenium depend on their excited states with maximal d-shell occupancy for their activity. The most notable confirmation of this new finding; that closed d-shells are vital to the catalytic activity of noble metals however, is the case of palladium whose closed-shell ground state is indeed capable of attacking hydrogen and hydrocarbon molecules even at temperatures well below 10 K as was predicted theoretically and immediately confirmed experimentally. (shrink)

The generation of synthetic data is becoming a fundamental task in the daily life of any organization due to the new protection data laws that are emerging. Because of the rise in the use of Artificial Intelligence, one of the most recent proposals to address this problem is the use of Generative Adversarial Networks. These types of networks have demonstrated a great capacity to create synthetic data with very good performance. The goal of synthetic data generation is to create data (...) that will perform similarly to the original dataset for many analysis tasks, such as classification. The problem of GANs is that in a classification problem, GANs do not take class labels into account when generating new data, it is treated as any other attribute. This research work has focused on the creation of new synthetic data from datasets with different characteristics with a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network. CGANs are an extension of GANs where the class label is taken into account when the new data is generated. The performance of our results has been measured in two different ways: firstly, by comparing the results obtained with classification algorithms, both in the original datasets and in the data generated; secondly, by checking that the correlation between the original data and those generated is minimal. (shrink)

L’almanacco di corte e la guida della città – nota anche come «guida dei forestieri» – rappresentano due delle derivazioni più notevoli degli almanacchi europei del diciottesimo secolo per la loro varietà e consolidamento nel tempo. Questa ricerca si propone di indagare le origini europee di questo particolare segmento editoriale, ponendo l’accento sulle sue derivazioni nel contesto dell’Europa meridionale, in particolare in Spagna, Portogallo e negli stati italiani. L’obiettivo principale è quello di evidenziare le somiglianze tra la produzione spagnola, portoghese (...) e italiana nel Settecento, tenendo conto dei criteri editoriali e testuali. Allo stesso tempo, però, questo studio intende anche mettere in evidenza le caratteristiche specifiche dell’almanacco di corte e della guida della città in ciascuno degli stati, al fine di tracciare un ritratto il più completo possibile di questo oggetto tipografico. (shrink)

Traditionally, political philosophers and theorists (from Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu) not only systematically distinguished a greater number of political regimes than we are accustomed to distinguish today (identifying several varieties of democracy and non-democracy, according to several normative criteria) but also used these distinctions for specifically evaluative purposes: distinctions among political regimes corresponded to the degree to which a political regime facilitated important values (e.g., the common good, the good life, freedom, etc.). Questions of evaluation often took priority over (...) questions of justification. Contemporary political theory, by contrast, with some exceptions, has mostly operated within the restricted distinction between (liberal) democratic and non-democratic regimes, and has failed to attend to the morally significant differences among "imperfect" or "less justified" political regimes. Questions of justification have mostly taken priority over questions of evaluation. In this paper, I explore the possibilities for constructing an evaluative theory of imperfect (or not fully justified) political regimes. I argue that a political regime is a system for the division of the labor of political decisionmaking that can (and has historically been) evaluated from three different perspectives: the perspective of the decisions made through it, the perspective of the interests promoted and protected through it, and the perspective of its stability in regards to the kinds of characters it fosters and through which it is sustained. Each of these perspectives provides their own criteria for evaluation: the idea of a well-organized regime for the "decisions" perspective, the idea of a public-goods producing regime for the "interests" perspective, and the idea of a "resilient" regime for the stability perspective. Nevertheless, I also show that these criteria are not necessarily congruent with one another, and that a fully justified regime need not be ideal along any of these dimensions. I suggest that this problem is unavoidable insofar as political regimes facilitate the pursuit of more than one central value. (shrink)

Se han cumplido cincuenta años desde la publicación de Teoría de la Justicia. Sin duda, la obra de J. Rawls marcó un hito fundamental en la historia del pensamiento político del siglo XX. Nuestro trabajo se pregunta hasta qué punto la justicia como imparcialidad sigue siendo una referencia fundamental en el pensamiento político actual. Para ello abordamos la propuesta de M.C. Nussbaum. Nos planteamos si el enfoque de las capacidades de Nussbaum es realmente una continuación o supone una verdadera ruptura (...) con la propuesta de Rawls. Y a partir de las objeciones de Nussbaum a Rawls, nos interrogamos por el presente y el futuro de una obra que, a nuestro juicio, después de medio siglo, parece tener todos los ingredientes necesarios para ser verdaderamente un clásico del pensamiento político. (shrink)

At this time when the development of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are changing the world around us, philosophers and scientists, first of all, must converge to analyze the present and predict the ethical-social consequences and biological dangers associated with new “living entities” that are not the result of the natural evolutionary process. As synthetic/artificial life forms (xenobots, robots, transgenic organisms, etc.) become more and more abundant and sophisticated, it seems first of all necessary to bring some order to all (...) this new biodiversity, establishing what is alive and what is not, and analyzing the consequences of this incessant creative activity. Here I intend to organize all these human-made entities and clarify their status as living beings or artificial elements, leaving the door open to an uncertain future in which we will be able to see how “the artificial” and “the natural” could merge to originate something different from everything known. Accordingly, I propose the creation of a new domain, Lithbea, which includes all synthetic and artificial entities within a new kingdom called Humade (derived from human-made). I have also included viruses in a new realm, the Viral kingdom, because they were excluded from the classical three-domain tree of life despite playing a fundamental role in the evolution of biodiversity on Earth. Finally, I make a brief comment on the unpredictability of the unknown, the implications of this new landscape of biodiversity, and the uncertain future of all these advances. (shrink)

Media ecology is not the theoretical stream of communication studies and it is not limited to Marshall McLuhan´s work and thinking; however, we focus on McLuhan’s approach to media ecology for this special issue on the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan. Media ecology is a complex and systemic metadiscipline whose object of study is the changes and effects that have occurred in society as a result of the evolution of technology and media throughout history.

The era of AI-based decision-making fast approaches, and anxiety is mounting about when, and why, we should keep “humans in the loop” (“HITL”). Thus far, commentary has focused primarily on two questions: whether, and when, keeping humans involved will improve the results of decision-making (making them safer or more accurate), and whether, and when, non-accuracy-related values—legitimacy, dignity, and so forth—are vindicated by the inclusion of humans in decision-making. Here, we take up a related but distinct question, which has eluded the (...) scholarship thus far: does it matter if humans appear to be in the loop of decision-making, independent from whether they actually are? In other words, what is stake in the disjunction between whether humans in fact have ultimate authority over decision-making versus whether humans merely seem, from the outside, to have such authority? Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, we build our formal model, enriching the HITL question to include not only whether humans are actually in the loop of decision-making, but also whether they appear to be so. Second, we describe situations in which the actuality and appearance of HITL align: those that seem to involve human judgment and actually do, and those that seem automated and actually are. Third, we explore instances of misalignment: situations in which systems that seem to involve human judgment actually do not, and situations in which systems that hold themselves out as automated actually rely on humans operating “behind the curtain.” Fourth, we examine the normative issues that result from HITL misalignment, arguing that it challenges individual decision-making about automated systems and complicates collective governance of automation. (shrink)

Este artículo va a estar centrado en una cuestión fundamental: ¿pueden compararse las visiones éticas de Dostoievski e Ignacio de Loyola? Haciendo una revisión pormenorizada de las bases existenciales dostoievskianas, podremos comprobar cómo la vida de Ignacio de Loyola parece coincidir con la hoja de ruta que, más tarde, elaboraría Dostoievski en sus obras en busca de una plenitud humana. El hombre pleno propuesto por el autor ruso es un reflejo del San Ignacio que conocemos por su Autobiografía, un personaje (...) que pasó de los confines existenciales más arraigados en el yo a una vida por y para los demás basada en una idea fundamental: «En todo, amar y servir». (shrink)

This paper explores the political awakening of the Chilean people that began in October 2019. It puts forward an alternative reading of the people’s claim for a new constitution. The first section briefly describes the October outcry and provides some context with regards to the nature of the social movement at its root. The two following sections examine two periods in Chilean recent history, the Pinochet regime and the period that has come after its overturn, focusing on two elements: the (...) neoliberal model set up by the dictatorship and the Constitution of 1980, which was designed to block the people’s political agency for the purpose of protecting the model. The final section works with these two elements in order to provide an alternative scheme by which to examine Chile’s awakening, the central question being: what does the claim for a new constitution mean? And critical for these purposes: what constitution is being overturned? Pinochet’s political project distorted constitutional ideas in such a way that only by clarifying the conceptual horizon is it possible to visualize how the concept of constitution and its relationship with the idea of a constituent power of the people can be of help to understand Chile’s constitutional awakening. (shrink)

Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials. To this end we have carried out (...) an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six days during 2009, 2010 and 2011. We provide an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative profile of imperatives in contemporary TV advertising. This includes information on the distribution of imperatives, the most common verbs in imperative clauses, and their discourse function. We are also able to show conclusively that the directive force of imperatives in TV ads is more akin to advice or recommendation than commands, and explain from a discourse-pragmatic perspective why this is so. (shrink)

Assuming that linguistic representation has been studied only by linguists using grammaticality judgments, Branigan & Pickering present structural priming as a novel alternative. We show that their assumptions are incorrect for cognitive-functional linguistics, exposing converging perspectives on form/meaning pairings between generativists and cognitive-functional linguists that we hope will spark the cross-disciplinary discussion necessary to produce a cognitively plausible model of linguistic representation.

Over the turn of the 21st century, the use of data from large electronic corpora has changed research on Spanish historical syntax, spurring interest in long-range evolutions and the shape of the correspondent diachronic curves. However, general reflections on diffusion and the factors that drive and influence it are still pretty much lacking. In this paper, I reflect on the research possibilities laid open by the availability of such large masses of data, focusing particularly on new knowledge on syntactic change (...) brought about by the study of low-frequency phenomena and of recessive changes, as well as on the exploration of changes conditioned by dialect contact and textual traditions. I conclude with some remarks on the general typology of diffusion in syntactic change. (shrink)

Los desafiantes cambios han impactado el aprendizaje, creando la necesidad de nuevas formas de aprender, como el aprendizaje autorregulado. Este enfoque facilita el desarrollo de competencias al fomentar la metacognición y el aprender a aprender. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar investigaciones sobre el tema para extraer sus contribuciones. Se utilizó una revisión sistemática cualitativa, realizando búsquedas de artículos en Scopus, WOS y PubMed, tanto en inglés como en español, y se seleccionaron 30 documentos. Se evidenció que el aprendizaje (...) autorregulado contribuye de manera integral y significativa al logro de competencias, analizado a través de sus dimensiones cognitiva, metacognitiva, afectivo-emocional, relacional-social y ética. (shrink)

El propósito de este texto es tematizar la precariedad con las herramientas de la filosofía política. Buscaremos equilibrar horizontes conceptuales con prácticas políticas para pensar la acción democrática en nuestro contexto. Nuestro argumento se compone de cuatro premisas. Primero, que elfalso dilema entre teoría y práctica nos permite explorar una relación de tensión creativa entre ambas para conceptualizar la precariedad. Segundo, que la construcción teórica de la precariedad responde tanto a ideas y conceptos como a instituciones y discursos que configuran (...) las vidas de quienes la experimentan. Tercero, que los distintos usos del concepto de precariedad permiten reconocer una fuente común de vulneración de derechos relacionada con la configuración del trabajo en el orden neoliberal. Cuarto, que relacionar la conceptualización de lo plebeyo con la de lo precario nos permite pensar prácticas democráticas renovadas. (shrink)

El palacio arzobispal de Sevilla es hoy un cofre que alberga un rico patrimonio monumental, artístico, cultural y arqueológico. De tiempos de fray Diego de Deza se conserva la capilla pública, identificada en el curso de la rehabilitación llevada a cabo en el inmueble a comienzos de la década de 1990. Asimismo, en otra sala figura su blasón, junto al del rey Fernando el Católico. Nuevas intervenciones arqueológicas han permitido descubrir un pavimento decorativo, con temas relacionados con la capilla, en (...) una sala que debió ser el despacho de este arzobispo. (shrink)

A questão "se uma elocução perde seu significado com a destruição das coisas "surge como uma questão sobre o valor-verdade de declarações com um termo vazio como sujeito, a saber, como um subproblema do sofisma "Se 'omnis homo de necessitate est animal' é verdade quando não há homem algum ". Neste trabalho, trarei as discussões conforme elas se apresentam em "De signis" IV.2 de Roger Bacon, em "Quaestiones logicales", q. 2–3 de Peter John Olivi, no OHNEA de Boethius of Dacia, (...) e no OHNEA de Anonymus Alani. Tais textos nos apresentam quatro modos diversos de nos relacionarmos com a questão sobre significação para OHNEA e, assim, com quatro posições diferentes sobre a relação entre significação e referência vazia. Usarei Anonymus Alani como o fio conductor de minha análise, inserindo outras posições onde tal se fizer relevante.The question 'whether an utterance loses its signification with the destruction of things ' is raised as a question about the truth-value of assertions with an empty term as a subject, namely as a sub-problem of the sophism 'Whether "omnis homo de necessitate est animal" is true when no man exists '. In this paper, I shall introduce the discussions as they are present in Roger Bacon's "De signis" IV.2, Peter John Olivi's "Quaestiones logicales", q. 2–3, Boethius of Dacia's OHNEA, and Anonymus Alani's OHNEA. These texts present us with four different ways of relating the question about signification to OHNEA, and therefore with four different positions regarding the relation between signification and empty reference. I shall use Anonymus Alani as the guiding thread of my analysis, inserting other positions where it is relevant. (shrink)

The main objective of this study is to propose, from a theoretical approach, an alternative model of the communication process that includes intentionality, interest, identification, and exchange as part of the internal process of decoding the message experienced by the receiver. The proposal includes the subdivision of the responses offered by the receiver into two possible categories: one simple, which can mean the programmed response to a specific code; and another complex, which can mean a change and/or significant transformation in (...) different aspects associated with the recipient. Through a qualitative methodology, with emphasis on documentary review, and inferential and deductive reasoning, the proposed theoretical model has been developed and explained, highlighting the added value that it could offer to the understanding of communication. (shrink)

This study explores the rationality behind firms’ decision to admit or deny their involvement in bribery when responding to confidential surveys conducted by international agencies. Specifically, we posit that firms’ reluctance to provide accurate information about their engagement in bribery is at least to some extent contingent on certain situational factors. In other words, we claim that this behavior is context dependent. The paper uses the notions provided by the theory of planned behavior to understand the way in which the (...) corruption of the legal environment, the intensity of market competition, and identification risk influence firms’ decision to lie about their involvement in bribery. To test these notions, we use databases from the fifth wave of the EBRD-World Bank Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, country-level data from the Kauffman Foundation and macroeconomic information from the World Bank database. We run ordinary least squares with geographic region-clustered standard errors on data from 30 countries and 6122 individual firms during the period 2012–2013. Consistent with our expectations, the results indicate that firms operating within more corrupt legal environments, facing more competition, and bearing a higher risk of being identified are less likely to deny their involvement in bribery. We conclude that not all firms have the same incentives to lie about their participation in bribery, and therefore, identifying the drivers of this heterogeneity may help policymakers better assess the reliability of bribery information collected through confidential surveys. (shrink)

La Filosofía para Niños y Niñas de M. Lipman, promueve una praxis de la vida que considera la libertad como el auténtico proyecto de realización individual y social, que debe ser asumido desde la infancia. Propiciar una experiencia investigativa y dialógica que le permita a los niños y las niñas problematizar filosóficamente la realidad, es decir, indagar acerca del sentido de cualquier acción, acto, praxis tiene su punto de origen en un interrogar-se por la libertad como experiencia que hace posible (...) el desarrollo de la sensibilidad y la racionalidad. La conciencia de ser y estar libres, depende de la autonomía de una voluntad para decidir y del deseo para elegir el sentido que debe orientar la vida en su presente y proyección futura. Niños y niñas estimulados con experiencias de este tipo, podrán llegar a ser ciudadanos y ciudadanas capaces de lograr la transformación de la sociedad desde una justicia, bien, equidad y paz, compartida por todos. (shrink)

La filosofía alcanza reflexivamente al conjunto de las actividades que se dan en la enseñanza. Este libro demuestra que lejos de ser un saber superior, la filosofía se limita a ser un saber impertinente que fuerza a continuar reflexionando. La obra se organiza en torno a tres núcleos; qué es el saber filosófico, en qué consiste el hecho de educar y qué dirección imprimir a la actividad educadora.

La comprensión lectora de las personas con discapacidad es una cuestión escasamente estudiada y a día de hoy esta línea de investigación no ha profundizado en la comprensión específica de textos especializados. Consecuentemente, a pesar de existir ciertos procedimientos para facilitar la comprensión, como la lectura fácil, no se han analizado las dificultades que presentan determinados textos para las personas con dificultad intelectual. Ejemplo de ello son los textos sobre Historia. En el presente artículo pretende detectar los principales problemas de (...) comprensión que rodean a estos textos y formulas posibles soluciones para facilitar su comprensión. (shrink)