The putative Pueyo’s vaccine was a commercial venture that obtained marketing authorization in 1946, a turbulent period of Argentine history. After a few months, health authorities withdrew financial support from the state to buy the vaccine and required patients to sign a written consent to receive that product. An independent investigation did not find any evidence of benefit in non-clinical and clinical evaluation of the putative vaccine.

Drawing on the Agency-Stewardship approach, which suggests that manager profile may range from the agent model to the steward model, this article aims to examine how important CEOs are to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Specifically, this exploratory study proposes the existence of a relationship between manager profile and CSR practices and that this relation is mediated by the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility. After applying a mediated regression analysis using survey information collected from 149 CEOs in Spain, results (...) show that those closer to the steward model are more inclined to attach great importance to ethics and social responsibility, and to implement CSR practices in their companies. Results also provide support for the suggested mediating effect. Thus, this article extends research in understanding top managers as drivers for CSR and suggests new ways to deal with this issue empirically. (shrink)

This paper based on the distinction between the instrumental and normative views of stakeholder management explores how business education and personal moral philosophies may influence the orientation adopted by an individual. A mediated regression analysis using survey information collected from 206 Spanish university students showed that those exposed to management theories were less willing to consider stakeholders when making business decisions if the consequent economic impacts on the firm were omitted. The results also provided support for a negative effect of (...) business education on idealism and a mediating effect of the latter on the relationship between education and stakeholder management orientation. This study thus raises awareness on the influence of business education on individuals’ ethical decision-making processes and suggests some possible changes for business education. (shrink)

The long-enduring coding metaphor is deemed problematic because it imbues correlational evidence with causal power. In neuroscience, most research is correlational or conditionally correlational; this research, in aggregate, informs causal inference. Rather than prescribing semantics used in correlational studies, it would be useful for neuroscientists to focus on a constructive syntax to guide principled causal inference.

The persistent educational challenges that fractions pose call for developing novel instructional methods to better prepare students for fraction learning. Here, we examined the effects of a 24-session, Cuisenaire rod intervention on a building block for symbolic fraction knowledge, continuous and discrete non-symbolic proportional reasoning, in children who have yet to receive fraction instruction. Participants were 34 second-graders who attended the intervention (intervention group) and 15 children who did not participate in any sessions (control group). As attendance at the intervention (...) sessions was irregular (median = 15.6 sessions, range = 1–24), we specifically examined the effect of the number of sessions completed on their non-symbolic proportional reasoning. Our results showed that children who attended a larger number of sessions increased their ability to compare non-symbolic continuous proportions. However, contrary to our expectations, they also decreased their ability to compare misleading discretized proportions. In contrast, children in the Control group did not show any change in their performance. These results provide further evidence on the malleability of non-symbolic continuous proportional reasoning and highlight the rigidity of counting knowledge interference on discrete proportional reasoning. (shrink)

This brief note is more than sufficient for the Author to achieve his purpose of counter-criticizing the epistemological imputation of Sokal’s thoughts, and to establish conceptual and categorical deficits that underlie the formalizing empiricisms of New Yorker scientific language. This is a d..

Si hablamos de derechos humanos en Latinoamérica hoy, los más básicos están comprometidos y desatendidos desde el poder económico y político, cuando no abiertamente violados. La democracia representativa que se impuso sobre las dictaduras militares de los años setentas, estipuló cierto margen de establecimiento de reglas en cuanto respeto a algunas garantías personales y legales elementales: la posibilidad de asociarse, de reunirse, de transitar sin restricciones y de opinar sin abiertas represalias han alcanzado lugar, y es de reconocer que ello (...) no es poco si se lo compara con la desastrosa situación anterior de cercenamiento sistemático de las libertades más básicas. Al respecto, cabe siempre una reflexión: de ninguna manera es comparable la condición de violación de garantías, en cuanto a su magnitud, que se da en casos de dictaduras abiertas con relación a la que se da en las democracias parlamentarias, con las enormes limitaciones que estas últimas pudieran guardar. No nos referimos al repudio ético y político que en ambos casos se concita, por supuesto equiparable; sino al hecho de que en casos de militarización del aparato de gobierno, las violaciones a los derechos se convierten en permanentes, sistemáticas y estructurales, constituyendo ya no una violación de la normativa sino más bien el criterio de establecimiento de la normativa legal misma, la cual se pervierte al ser dictatorial y arbitraria. La democracia parlamentaria muestra sus evidentes sujeciones a ia concentración económica capitalista; pero ello no debe llevar a la conclusión - ciertamente falsa - de que constituye una especie de dictadura pura del capital, y que por ello es comparable con la dictadura a secas. La condición elemental para la existencia de derechos es la presencia de un Estado de derecho: advertir sus límites debe llevar a exigir la ampliación sistemática de los espacios democráticos como búsqueda de fidelidad a la lógica misma de lo democrático, no como su posible abolición. En esto, los latinoamericanos pareciera que estamos de acuerdo, en tanto los regímenes democráticos abiertos en los años ochenta se han consolidado. Palabras clave: derechos; Latinoamérica; democracia; dictaduras. (shrink)

O presente artigo está dedicado ao estudo da modificação das condições económicas, sociais e culturais próprias à época do capitalismo globalizado e da pósmodernidade cultural. Esta é uma época em que predomina a incerteza, a velocidade e a falta de estabilidade da consciência. Assim, o artigo pretende mostrar de que modo estes factores exerceram e exercem ainda um forte impacto na conformação actual das Ciências Sociais, salientando-se sobretudo até que ponto, precisamente na medida em que a teoria dá forma às (...) condições sociais nas quais se produz (Sohn Rethel), as novas condições sociais e culturais obstaculizam as possibilidades de abstracção e de sistematicidade. O resultado é que à complexiftcação do objecto "sociedade" se agregou o abrandamento do sujeito epistémico que a estuda, resultando daí em particular uma perda de vigência epistemolôgica da noção de totalidade, bem como uma crescente falta de rigor epistémico e metodológico, para já não falar da perda de capacitação para a crítica no âmbito ideológico. Segundo o autor do artigo, tudo isto está particularmente explícito quer no apogeu dos cultural studies quer no uso indiscriminado do textualismo e do pós-estruturalismo. /// The present article starts with an exposition of the modification in economic, social and cultural conditions operated with the advent of globalized capitalism and cultural post-modernity. It is stressed that the present time constitutes an epoch in which predominates uncertainty, velocity and the lack of stability in consciousness. But the crucial point is that all this had a strong impact in the epistemic form assumed by the Social Sciences. Hence, assuming that theory gives form to the social conditions in which it is produced (Sohn Rethel), the article shows how the new social and cultural conditions constitute an obstacle for the possibilities of abstraction and systematicity. Indeed, the result of all this is that the growing complexity of the object "society" has been followed by a softening of the epistemic subject that studies it. And the consequence is not only a loss of the epistemic pertinence of the notion of totality, but also a loss of epistemic and methodological rigor, not to mention the loss of a critical standing in the sphere of the ideological. The author of the article sees a proof of all this in the apogee of cultural studies as well as in the indiscriminate use oftextualism and post-structuralism. (shrink)

In this article, we extend the well-known ‘agreeing-to-disagree’ and ‘no-trade’ results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this result might provide one possible explanation for the empirical finding, often referred to as the ‘democratic peace’, that modern democracies rarely go to war with one another. We propose that the informational properties of pluralistic (...) institutions (as opposed to oligarchies or dictatorships) lead to better decision-making by democracies and that democracies are therefore more likely to be the rational actors necessary for the ‘no-war’ result. We discuss empirical evidence in support of this proposition. (shrink)

La obra compuesta de dos (2) partes, permite conocer acerca de los avances de la linguística contemporánea, en diversos aspectos de investigación sobre la mente humana, en que medida la mente y el le nguaje se cosideran fenómenos naturales, profundización en lo supuestos e implicaciones del programa minimalista y temas relacionados.

Socio-economic status and mathematical performance seem to be risk factors of mathematics anxiety in both children and adults. However, there is little evidence about how exactly these three constructs are related, especially during early stages of mathematical learning. In the present study, we assessed longitudinal performance in symbolic and non-symbolic basic numerical skills in pre-school and second grade students, as well as MA in second grade students. Participants were 451 children from 12 schools in Chile, which differed in school vulnerability (...) index, an indicator of SES. We tested an explanatory model of MA that included SES and longitudinal performance in basic numerical skills as predictors. The results showed a direct effect of SES on MA and a mediating effect of performance in symbolic and non-symbolic comparison tasks in pre-school. However, in second grade, only performance in symbolic comparison significantly mediated the SES-MA relationship. These findings suggest that performance in non-symbolic comparison plays an important role in explaining MA at initial stages, but that its influence is no longer significant by the time children reach formal instruction in second grade. By contrast, as children’s formal educational experience in mathematics increases, MA becomes linked primarily to symbolic numerical tasks. In sum, SES affects MA and this is due in part to the effect of SES on the development of numerical learning in pre-school, which in turn has an impact on subsequent, more complex learning, ultimately leading to differences in MA. We discuss the implications of these findings for preventing and acting upon the emergence of MA. (shrink)

Inception module is one of the most used variants in convolutional neural networks. It has a large portfolio of success cases in computer vision. In the past years, diverse inception flavours, differing in the number of branches, the size and the number of the kernels, have appeared in the scientific literature. They are proposed based on the expertise of the practitioners without any optimization process. In this work, an implementation of population-based incremental learning is proposed for automatic optimization of the (...) hyperparameters of the inception module. This hyperparameters optimization undertakes classification of the MNIST database of handwritten digit images. This problem is widely used as a benchmark in classification, and therefore, the learned best configurations for the Inception module will be of wide use in the deep learning community. In order to reduce the carbon footprint of the optimization process, policies for reducing the redundant evaluations have been undertaken. As a consequence of this work, an evaluation of configurations of the inception module and a mechanism for optimizing hyperparameters in deep learning architectures are stated. (shrink)

Most cells communicate with their immediate neighbors through the exchange of cytosolic molecules such as ions, second messengers and small metabolites. This activity is made possible by clusters of intercellular channels called gap junctions, which connect adjacent cells. In terms of molecular architecture, intercellular channels consist of two channels, called connexons, which interact to span the plasma membranes of two adjacent cells and directly join the cytoplasm of one cell to another. Connexons are made of structural proteins named connexins, which (...) compose a multigene family. Connexin channels participate in the regulation of signaling between developing and differentiated cell types, and recently there have been some unexpected findings. First, unique ionic‐ and size‐selectivities are determined by each connexin; second, the establishment of intercellular communication is defined by the expression of compatible connexins; third, the discovery of connexin mutations associated with human diseases and the study of knockout mice have illustrated the vital role of cell‐cell communication in a diverse array of tissue functions. (shrink)

Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices? Behavioral Economics and Public Health is the first book to apply the groundbreaking insights of behavioral economics to the persisting problems of health behaviors and behavior change. In addition (...) to providing a primer on the behavioral economics principles that are most relevant to public health, this book offers details on how these principles can be employed to mitigating the world's greatest health threats, including obesity, smoking, risky sexual behavior, and excessive drinking. With contributions from an international team of scholars from psychology, economics, marketing, public health, and medicine, this book is a trailblazing new approach to the most difficult and important problems of our time. (shrink)

Within post - Kuhnian, philosophy of science, much effort has been devoted to issues related to conceptual change, such as incommensurability, scientific progress and realism, but mostly in terms of reference, without a fine - grained theory of scientific concepts/senses. Within the philosophy of language and of mind tradition, there is a large body of work on concepts, but the application to scientific concepts has been very tentative. The aim of this paper is to propose a general framework for a (...) theory for the individuation of scientific concepts. The general view about the individuation of concepts favored here is the possession - condition approach: to individuate a concept is to identify its possession conditions. The general metascientific tools for the analysis of scientific theories are model - theoretic, more specifically, structuralist: scientific theories, the entities to which scientifc concepts belong, are model - theoretic theory - nets. The general idea about the content of scientific concepts that inspires this proposal comes from: (i) our grandfathers’ "laws - plus - correspondence rules", (ii) Kuhns "laws applied to exemplars" views and (iii) moderate operationalism. The aim is to show that some clarification can be gained applying the possesion condition appproach to (an expansion of) these three elements using structuralist metascientific tools. First, I briefly present the two main structuralist ideas I shall use: the difference between observability and non - theoreticity, and the notion of theory - net. Second, I informally introduce the five components that come from my reading of the three traditional elements; these components are, or are not, plausible independently of how they will be integrated within a theory of concept - identity. Third, I present the kore of the theory of possession conditions for concept - identity that we shall use for the integration of such components. Finally, I propose the general traits of the possession condition that corresponds to each of these five components, I present some problems and point out some possible ways of dealing with them. (shrink)

Fundamentos de filosofía de la ciencia es una obra de carácter general destinada principalmente a servir de guía a alumnos y profesores en la ensañanza universitaria de esta disciplina, en especial para los estudios de Filosofía, pero también para los de Humanidades y Ciencias Humanas y Naturales. La obra está estructurada en diferentes niveles para facilitar su utilización como libro de texto, tanto en cursos introductorios generales como en seminarios específicos. Aunque el público universitario es su principal destinatario, se ha (...) concebido para que cualquier lector interesado en la disciplina y con determinados conocimientos previos pueda acceder, con provecho, a las diversas partes de la misma. Ha diferencia de la mayoría de introducciones a la Filosofía de la Ciencia, la orientación de esta obra no es histórica sino temática, cubriendo los diferentes ámbitos conceptuales de la disciplina. Su contenido, dado que su finalidad es presentar los fundamentos de la materia, se centra en los grandes temas clásicos de la disciplina. El núcleo temático lo conforma la triada "conceptos-leyes-teorías" en torno a cuyos componentes se presentan los restantes temas: contrastación de hipótesis, medición, explicación, relaciones interteóricas, el problema de la inducción y el cambio teórico. En tanto que introducción general de la disciplina, en esta obra no se pretende ninguna tesis metacientífica o metafilosófica sustantiva, sino exponer de forma clara los principales problemas filosóficos que plantea la actividad científica y discutir las diferentes aproximaciones a los mismos.. (shrink)