Every innovation seeks to become a profitable business, with this considered to be the engine for economic prosperity. When an innovation is revolutionary, its long-term consequences can be revolutionary too. The Haber-Bosh process for ammonia synthesis is arguably the twentieth century’s most significant innovation, and its importance to global food production and its impact on the environment are not expected to diminish over the coming decades. The historical case of the ammonia synthesis process invented by Fritz Haber and the ensuing (...) innovation provides an incomparable opportunity to illustrate the interactions across contemporary needs, prominent scientists, political concerns, moral dilemmas, ethics, governance and environmental implications at a time when the concept of sustainability was still in its infancy. Despite its high economic and environmental costs, no cleaner or more efficient sustainable alternative has so far been found, and so replacing this “old” innovation that still “feeds” a large part of the world’s population does not appear to be on the cards in the near future. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar lo que el medio ambiente y su gestión representa en términos de innovación social; las restricciones que el cuidado del medio ambiente y del planeta plantean, las medidas que se han adoptado, la forma en que las empresas han reaccionado y lo que nos depara todavía el futuro. Lo haremos utilizando dos ejemplos básicos: por un lado, el problema de los Límites al Crecimiento y por otro, el problema del Cambio Climático. Las soluciones que (...) se están proponiendo, desde la mitigación, el uso de incentivos de mercado (precios e impuestos), creación de mercados de derechos de contaminación, soluciones “geo-ingeniereles”, impulso a la innovación tecnológica son claros exponentes de la forma en que la sociedad está enfrentándose al problema. (shrink)

Background: Little is known about what factors may contribute to the growth of a consultation service or how a practice may change or evolve across time. Methods: This study examines data collected from a busy ethics consultation service over a period of more than two decades. Results: We report a number of longitudinal findings that represent significant growth in the volume of ethics consultation requests from 19 in 1990 to 551 in 2013, as well as important changes in the patient (...) population for which ethics help is requested. The findings include (1) a steady growth in requests from primary care providers (e.g., physicians and nurses), as well as increases in ancillary services (e.g., social workers); (2) a decrease in length of stay (days) before ethics help is requested; (3) an increase in the reasons that individuals ask for help from ethics; (4) an upsurge in consults requests from areas outside the intensive care unit (ICU); (5) a decrease in patients that died during hospitalization (e.g., live discharges); and (6) growth in the numbers of patients lacking decision-making capacity. Conclusions: We believe the increases in consult requests reflect appropriate and necessary growth because recent consultations have also been associated with consultations requiring (7) additional interventions and (8) reasonably high time intensity scores. (shrink)

We show that the Axiom of Countable Choice is necessary and sufficient to prove that the existence of a Borel measure on a pseudometric space such that the measure of open balls is positive and finite implies separability of the space. In this way a negative answer to an open problem formulated in Górka (Am Math Mon 128:84–86, 2020) is given. Moreover, we study existence of maximal $$\delta $$ δ -separated sets in metric and pseudometric spaces from the point of (...) view the Axiom of Choice and its weaker forms. (shrink)

(2013). Evolutionary modules and Bayesian facilitation: The role of general cognitive resources. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 27-53. doi: 10.1080/13546783.2012.713177.

Traductor: Jesús María Ayuso Díez. Ediciones Sígueme, Salamanca, 2019.

We performed an EEG graph analysis on data from 31 typical readers (22.27 ± 2.53 y/o) and 24 dyslexics (22.99 ± 2.29 y/o), recorded while they were engaged in an audiovisual task and during resting-state. The task simulates reading acquisition as participants learned new letter-sound mappings via feedback. EEG data was filtered for the delta (0.5–4 Hz), theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–13 Hz), and beta (13–30 Hz) bands. We computed the Phase Lag Index (PLI) to provide an estimate of the (...) functional connectivity between all pairs of electrodes per band. Then, networks were constructed using a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST), a unique sub-graph connecting all nodes (electrodes) without loops, aimed at minimizing bias in between groups and conditions comparisons. Both groups showed a comparable accuracy increase during task blocks, indicating that they correctly learned the new associations. The EEG results revealed lower task-specific theta connectivity, and lower theta degree correlation over both rest and task recordings, indicating less network integration in dyslexics compared to typical readers. This pattern suggests a role of theta oscillations in dyslexia and may reflect differences in task engagement between the groups, although robust correlations between MST metrics and performance indices were lacking. (shrink)

A proposal by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) to identify individuals who are qualified to perform ethics consultations neglects case complexity in candidates’ portfolios. To protect patients and healthcare organizations, and to be fair to candidates, a minimum case complexity level must be clearly and publicly articulated. This proof-of-concept study supports the feasibility of assessing case complexity. Using text analytics, we developed a complexity scoring system, and retrospectively analyzed more than 500 ethics summaries of consults performed at (...) an academic medical center during 2013. We demonstrate its use with seven case summaries that range in complexity from uncomplicated to very complicated. We encourage the ASBH to require a minimum level of case complexity, and recommend that attestation portfolios include several cases of moderate complexity and at least one very complex case. (shrink)

Number processing abilities are important for academic and personal development. The course of initial specialization of ventral occipito-temporal cortex sensitivity to visual number processing is crucial for the acquisition of numeric and arithmetic skills. We examined the visual N1, the electrophysiological correlate of vOTC activation across five time points in kindergarten, middle and end of first grade, second grade, and fifth grade. A combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal EEG data of a total of 62 children at varying familial risk for (...) dyslexia were available to form groups of 23, 22, 27, 27, and 42 participants for each of the five time points. The children performed a target detection task which included visual presentation of single digits, false fonts, and letters to derive measures for coarse and fine digit sensitive processing across development. The N1 amplitude analyses indicated coarse and fine sensitivity characterized by a stronger N1 to digits than false fonts across all five time points, and stronger N1 to digits than letters at all but the second time point. In addition, lower arithmetic skills were associated with stronger coarse N1 digit sensitivity over the left hemisphere in second grade, possibly reflecting allocation of more attentional resources or stronger reliance on the verbal system in children with poorer arithmetic skills. To summarize, our results show persistent visual N1 sensitivity to digits that is already present early on in pre-school and remains stable until fifth grade. This pattern of digit sensitivity development clearly differs from the relatively sharp rise and fall of the visual N1 sensitivity to words or letters between kindergarten and middle of elementary school and suggests unique developmental trajectories for visual processing of written characters that are relevant to numeracy and literacy. (shrink)

The neural basis of developmental changes in transitive reasoning in parietal regions was examined, using voxel-based morphometry. Young adolescents and adults performed a transitive reasoning task, subsequent to undergoing anatomical magnetic resonance imaging brain scans. Behaviorally, adults reasoned more accurately than did the young adolescents. Neural results showed less grey matter density in superior parietal cortex in the adults than in the young adolescents, possibly due to a developmental period of synaptic pruning; improved performance in the reasoning task was negatively (...) correlated with grey matter density in superior parietal cortex in the adolescents, but not in the adult group; and the latter results were driven by the more difficult trials, requiring greater spatial manipulation. Taken together, the results support the idea that during development, regions in superior parietal cortex are fine-tuned, to support more robust spatial manipulation, resulting in gre... (shrink)

Atypical structural properties of the brain’s white matter bundles have been associated with failing reading acquisition in developmental dyslexia. Because these white matter properties may show dynamic changes with age and orthographic depth, we examined fractional anisotropy (FA) along 16 white matter tracts in 8- to 11-year-old dyslexic (DR) and typically reading (TR) children learning to read in a fairly transparent orthography (Dutch). Our results showed higher FA values in the bilateral anterior thalamic radiations of DRs and FA values of (...) the left thalamic radiation scaled with behavioral reading-related scores. Furthermore, DRs tended to have atypical FA values in the bilateral arcuate fasciculi. Children’s age additionally predicted FA values along the tracts. Together, our findings suggest differential contributions of cortical and thalamo-cortical pathways to the developing reading network in dyslexic and typical readers, possibly indicating prolonged letter-by-letter reading or increased attentional and/or working memory demands in dyslexic children during reading. (shrink)

Background Clinical ethics consultants are expected to “reduce disparities, discrimination, and inequities when providing consultations,” but few studies about inequities in ethics consultation exist.1 The objectives of this study were (1) to determine if there were racial or gender differences in the timing of requests for ethics consultations related to limiting treatment, and (2) if such differences were found, to identify factors associated with that difference and the role, if any, of ethics consultants in mitigating them. Methods The study was (...) a mixed methods retrospective study of consultation summaries and hospital and ethics center data on 56 age-and gender-matched Caucasian and African American Medicare patients who received ethics consultations related to issues around limiting medical treatment in the period 2011 to 2014. The average age of patients was 70.9. Results Consultation requests for females were made significantly earlier in their stays in the hospital (6.57 days) than were consultation requests made for males (16.07 days). For African American patients, the differences in admission-to-request intervals for female patients (5.93 days) and male patients (18.64 days) were greater than for Caucasian male and female patients. Differences in the timing of a consultation were not significantly correlated with the presence of an advance directive, the specialty of the attending physician, or the reasons for the consult request. Ethics consultants may have mitigated problems that developed during the lag in request times for African American males by spending more time, on average, on those consultations (316 minutes), especially more time, on average, than on consultations with Caucasian females (195 minutes). Most consultations (40 of 56) did result in movement toward limiting treatment, but no statistically significant differences were found among the groups studied in the movement toward limiting treatment. The average number of days from consult to discharge or death were strongly correlated with the intervals between admission to the hospital and request for an ethics consultation. Conclusion Our findings suggest race and gender disparities in the timing of ethics consultations that consultants may have partially mitigated. (shrink)

In set theory without the Axiom of Choice we prove that the assertion “For every metric space (_X_, _d_) with a Borel measure \(\mu \) such that the measure of every open ball is positive and finite, (_X_, _d_) is separable.’ is implied by the axiom of choice for countable collections of sets and implies the axiom of choice for countable collections of finite sets. We also show that neither implication is reversible in Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory weakend to permit the (...) existence of atoms and that the second implication is not reversible in Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. This gives an answer to a question of Dybowski and Górka (Arch Math Logic 62:735–749, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00153-023-00868-4 ). (shrink)