The activism of institutional investors tends more and more toward the supervision and control of the behavior of the managers of big companies. In this article, we present a model based on the creation of an activism index that lets us evaluate such activism's effect on the sensitivity of the investment policies of a company in the face of financial variables and market variables . To test our assertions, we analyze firm-level data for United Kingdom , Germany, France, Denmark, and (...) Spain during the period 1995-2004. Our results point to a significant reduction in the sensitivity of company investment decisions in the face of these variables, especially relative to intangible capital, as a result of the neutralizing effect of activism on the high agency costs of free cash flow and on the information asymmetries of the market. (shrink)

After compulsory secondary education; many teenagers face the process of choosing a university degree. This process involves uncertainties referred to their personal abilities, interests, social expectations and professional future. The present work is aimed at determining whether the reasons behind the selection of a particular university degree differ depending on the chosen degree. Another objective is determining whether these reasons differ significantly according to gender. The sample comprises 983 students belonging to the area of social and legal sciences at the (...) University of Seville. The obtained results reveal the existence of four main reasons behind the selection of university degrees for which significant gender-related differences were observed: easy degree, job opportunities, high wages and provision of social services. Besides, these seven reasons are observed to differ widely in six of the considered degrees. (shrink)

BackgroundScientific literature on posttraumatic growth after terrorist attacks has primarily focused on persons who had not been directly exposed to terrorist attacks or persons who had been directly exposed to them, but who were assessed few months or years after the attacks.MethodsWe examined long-term PTG in 210 adults directly exposed to terrorist attacks in Spain a mean of 29.6 years after the attacks. The participants had been injured by a terrorist attack or were first-degree relatives of people who had been (...) killed or injured by a terrorist attack. They completed diagnostic measures of emotional disorders and measures of PTSD and depression symptomatology, optimism, and PTG.ResultsMultiple regression analyses revealed gender differences and a positive linear relationship between PTG and cumulative trauma after the terrorist attack. Some PTG dimensions were significantly associated with PTSD symptomatology, these associations being linear, not curvilinear. However, PTG was not associated with depression symptomatology, diagnosis of emotional disorders, age, elapsed time since the attack, or optimism. In comparison with survivors assessed 18 years after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Spanish victims of terrorism showed higher levels of appreciation of life, but lower levels of relating to others and spiritual change.ConclusionThe findings underscore the influence of gender on PTG and provide support to the hypothesis that some emotional distress may be a necessary condition of PTG. Future studies on PTG after terrorist attacks should take into consideration the characteristics of the terrorist attack itself and the contexts of violence and threat in which it occurred. The political, social, and cultural characteristics of the community affected by it and the profile and characteristics of other traumatic events suffered after the attack should also be taken into account in further research. (shrink)

We present PhrasIS, a benchmark dataset composed of natural occurring Phrase pairs with Inference and Similarity annotations for the evaluation of semantic representations. The described dataset fills the gap between word and sentence-level datasets, allowing to evaluate compositional models at a finer granularity than sentences. Contrary to other datasets, the phrase pairs are extracted from naturally occurring text in image captions and news headlines. All the text fragments have been annotated by experts following a rigorous process also described in the (...) manuscript achieving high inter annotator agreement. In this work we analyse the dataset, showing the relation between inference labels and similarity scores. With 10K phrase pairs split in development and test, the dataset is an excellent benchmark for testing meaning representation systems. (shrink)

Avoiding whinges from various and potentially conflicting stakeholders is a major challenge for sustainable development and for the identification of sustainability scenarios or policies for biodiversity and ecosystem services. It turns out that independently complying with whinge thresholds and constraints of these stakeholders is not sufficient because dynamic ecological-economic interactions and uncertainties occur. Thus more demanding no whinge standards are needed. In this paper, we first argue that these new boundaries can be endogenously exhibited with the mathematical concepts of viability (...) kernel and viable controls. Second, it is shown how these no whinge kernels have components, such as harvesting of resources, that should remain within safe corridor while some other components, in particular biodiversity, have only lower conservation limits. Thus, using radar charts, we show how this no whinge kernels can take the shape of a tree that we name viability tree. These trees of viability capture the idea that the unbounded renewal potential of biodiversity combined with a bounded use of the different ecosystem services are crucial ingredients for the sustainability of socio-ecosystems and the design of no whinge policies reconciling the different stakeholders involved. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta un itinerario formativo para profesores de secundaria llevado a cabo en un instituto de secundaria Livorno (Italia). Esta formación tenía como finalidad la creación de entornos de aprendizaje híbridos siguiendo las evidencias del neuroaprendizaje y dando especial relevancia al microlearning.La metodología y resultados de nuestra investigación consisten en el diseño y creación de un curso de formación en modalidad Blended learning. Esta propuesta formativa proporciona al profesorado las herramientas necesarias para crear un entorno virtual híbrido mediante el (...) diseño de módulos de microlearning para fomentar el aprendizaje activo. (shrink)

Estudio del krausismo, m s que como una determinada doctrina filos fica, como una modalidad cultural. Para el autor tiene mayor inter s lo que un cierto tipo de espa ol haya cre do encontrar en esa actitud espiritual, que el valor intr nseco de la doctrina de Krause, ep gono del idealismo alem n, o que lo que Sanz del R o se propuso al incorporarla a la vida intelectual de Espa a.

Este trabajo tiene por objeto el estudio de la agravante de discriminación por razón de género recogida en el art. 22.4ª del C.P, por la Ley Orgánica 1/2015, de 30 de marzo. Nos vamos a centrar en el estudio del fundamento y elementos de la circunstancia agravante. Se prosigue, con el análisis de su compatibilidad con otras agravantes genéricas y su régimen de comunicabilidad a los partícipes del delito. Sin olvidar, el examen de las sentencias dictadas por el Tribunal Supremo.

Die Untersuchungen betreffen die Rezeption von kantischem Denken in der Hispanidad. Es handelt sich um Akten eines Kongresses, der 1983 an der Universitat zu Koln stattfand. Die verschiedenen Reaktionen (positive wie auch kritische) auf das kantische Denken von Autoren wie M. Nieto Serrano, J.M. Rey y Heredia, K.C.F. Krause, J. Sanz del Rio, J. Zubiri und R. Torretti werden thematisiert.".

Indirect observation is a recent concept in systematic observation. It largely involves analyzing textual material generated either indirectly from transcriptions of audio recordings of verbal behavior in natural settings (e.g., conversation, group discussions) or directly from narratives (e.g., letters of complaint, tweets, forum posts). It may also feature seemingly unobtrusive objects that can provide relevant insights into daily routines. All these materials constitute an extremely rich source of information for studying everyday life, and they are continuously growing with the burgeoning (...) of new technologies for data recording, dissemination, and storage. Narratives are an excellent vehicle for studying everyday life, and quantitization is proposed as a means of integrating qualitative and quantitative elements. However, this analysis requires a structured system that enables researchers to analyze varying forms and sources of information objectively. In this paper, we present a methodological framework detailing the steps and decisions required to quantitatively analyze a set of data that was originally qualitative. We provide guidelines on study dimensions, text segmentation criteria, ad hoc observation instruments, data quality controls, and coding and preparation of text for quantitative analysis. The quality control stage is essential to ensure that the code matrices generated from the qualitative data are reliable. We provide examples of how an indirect observation study can produce data for quantitative analysis and also describe the different software tools available for the various stages of the process. The proposed method is framed within a specific mixed methods approach that involves collecting qualitative data and subsequently transforming these into matrices of codes (not frequencies) for quantitative analysis to detect underlying structures and behavioral patterns. The data collection and quality control procedures fully meet the requirement of flexibility and provide new perspectives on data integration in the study of biopsychosocial aspects in everyday contexts. (shrink)

Krause, C. F. Concepto subjetivo-objetivo de lo bello.--Krause, K. C. F. [y] Sanz del Río, J. El arte y la poesía.--Fernández y González, F. Lo bello y la naturaleza.--Paula Canalejas, F. de. Del carácter de las pasiones en la tragedia y en el drama.--Giner de los Ríos, F. El arte y las artes.--Giner de los Ríos, F. Consideraciones sobre el desarrollo de la literatura moderna.--Revilla, M. de la. El naturalismo en el arte.--Revilla, M. de la. La tendencia docente en (...) la literatura contemporánea.--González Serrano, U. Consideraciones sobre el arte y la poesía.--Alas, L. Benito Pérez Galdós. (shrink)

The idea of a role in nursing that includes expertise in ethics has been around for more than 30 years. Whether or not one subscribes to the idea that nursing ethics is separate and distinct from bioethics, nursing practice has much to contribute to the ethical practice of healthcare, and with the strong grounding in ethics and aspiration for social justice considerations in nursing, there is no wonder that the specific role of the nurse ethicist has emerged. Nurse ethicists, expert (...) in nursing practice and the application of ethical theories and concepts, are well positioned to guide nurses through complex ethical challenges. However, there is limited discussion within the field regarding the specific job responsibilities that the nurse ethicist ought to have. The recent appearance of job postings with the title “nurse ethicist” suggest that some healthcare institutions have identified the value of a nurse in the practice of ethics and are actively recruiting. Discomfort about the possibility of others defining the role of the nurse ethicist inspired this paper (and special issue). If the nurse ethicist is to be seen as an integral part of addressing ethical dilemmas and ethical conflicts that arise in healthcare, then nurse ethicists ought to be at the forefront of defining this role. In this paper, we draw upon our own experiences as nurse ethicists in large academic healthcare systems to describe the essential elements that ought to be addressed in a job description for a nurse ethicist practicing in a clinical setting linked to academic programs. Drawing upon our experience and the literature, we describe how we perceive the nurse ethicist adds value to healthcare organizations and teams of professional ethicists. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion tends to converge on the view that narratives are at the center of the emotion of grief. In this article, I expand on this kind of view. On the one hand, I argue that key strands of phenomenological and neuroscientific studies suggest that grief consists in a complex emotional process of disconfirmation-and-updating of the narrative self-model. By heuristically drawing on an analogy between binocular rivalry and grief, I show that certain salient aspects of the phenomenology of grief, such (...) as self-alienation and ambiguity, are straightforwardly reflected by this account. On the other hand, I argue that this hierarchical approach has the resources to: (i) show that both narratable and unnarratable experiences of personal loss are both instances of grief; and (ii) differentiate between narratable and unnarratable experiences of grief, without compromising the view that self-constituting narratives are at the center of the phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper is a personal dialogue of maneuvering the landscape of scholarship in the United States as a nurse faculty. The principal thesis of this paper is that a discursive shift from margins to mainstream literature has occurred within nursing discourse during the past 20 years as the result of a growing body of work by nurse philosophers. I utilize my own work in nursing philosophy as an exemplar and provide a narrative situated in a feminist‐critical paradigm. This paper: (1) (...) presents a historical background through a critical‐feminist lens of the discursive shift using my own work and lived experiences as exemplars; (2) examines a contemporary mainstream ‘authoritative’ text as an exemplar of this discursive shift and (3) proposes both potential positive intersections and threats in the future development of nursing philosophy resulting from this discursive shift. (shrink)

In clinical ethics, there remains a great deal of uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for certain patients. Although the issue continues to receive ample attention and various frameworks have been proposed for navigating such cases, most discussions draw heavily on the notion of harm as a central consideration. In the following, I use emerging philosophical literature on the notion of harm to argue that the ambiguities and disagreement about harm create important and oft-overlooked challenges for the (...) ethics of CPR. I begin by elucidating the standard account of harm, called the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). I then show that three challenges to the CCA—preemptive harms, the harm of death, and non-experiential harms—are particularly salient when assessing potential harms for candidates of CPR and likely impact-related decision-making and communication. I extend this argument to explore how the ambiguities of harm might extend to other realms of clinical decision-making, such as the use and limitations of life-sustaining treatments. To address these challenges, I propose two strategies for identifying and minimizing the impact of such uncertainty: first, clinicians and ethicists ought to promote pluralistic conversations that account for different understandings of harm; second, they ought to invoke harm-independent considerations when discussing the ethics of CPR in order to reflect the nuances of such conversations. These strategies, coupled with a richer philosophical understanding of harm, promise to help clinicians and ethicists navigate the prevalent and difficult cases involving patient resuscitation and many other harm-based decisions in the clinical setting. (shrink)

From pre-Christian times until the present day, philosophers have discussed whether, given evil, belief in God can logically be maintained. Theists and non-theists remain unconvinced by one another's arguments. This study re-examines the question of God and evil from a neutral standpoint and claims that neither side has come to adequate grips either with the question itself or with the other side's case, chiefly because of failure to distinguish the kinds of problem raised by evil.

The Birkhoff-Maltsev problem asks for a characterization of those lattices each of which is isomorphic to the lattice L(K) of all subquasivarieties for some quasivariety K of algebraic systems. The current status of this problem, which is still open, is discussed. Various unsolved questions that are related to the Birkhoff-Maltsev problem are also considered, including ones that stem from the theory of propositional logics.

This article looks at some of the salient analyses of moderation in the ancient Greek and the Islamic traditions and uses them to develop a contemporary view of the matter. Greek ethics played a huge role in shaping the ethical views of the Muslim philosophers and theologians, and thus the article starts with an overview of the revival of contemporary western virtue ethics--in many ways an extension of Platonic-Aristotelian ethics--and then looks at the place of moderation or temperance in Platonic-Aristotelian (...) ethics. This sets the stage for an exposition of the position taken by Ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali, which is then used as a backdrop for suggesting a revival of the Quran's virtue ethics. After outlining a basis for its virtue ethics, the Quranic view of wasatiyya or moderation is discussed briefly. (shrink)

In this work we study the behavior of a time discrete multiregional stochastic model for a population structured in age classes and spread out in different spatial patches between which individuals can migrate. The dynamics of the population is controlled both by reproduction-survival and by migration. These processes take place at different time scales in the sense of the latter being much faster than the former. We incorporate the effect of demographic stochasticity into the population, which results in both dynamics (...) being modelled by multitype Bienaymé–Galton–Watson branching processes. We present a multitype global model that incorporates the effect of both processes and, making use of the existence of different time scales for demography and migration, build a reduced model in which the variables correspond to the total population in each age class. We extend previous results that relate the behavior of the original and the reduced model showing that, given a large enough separation of time scales between demography and migration, we can obtain information about the behavior of the multitype global model through the study of the simpler reduced model. We concentrate on the case where the two systems are supercritical and therefore the expected number of individuals grows to infinity, and show that we can approximate the asymptotic structure of the population vector and the asymptotic population size of the original system through the study of the reduced model. (shrink)

We motivate and introduce a new method of abduction, Matrix Abduction, and apply it to modelling the use of non-deductive inferences in the Talmud such as Analogy and the rule of Argumentum A Fortiori. Given a matrix $${\mathbb {A}}$$ with entries in {0, 1}, we allow for one or more blank squares in the matrix, say a i,j =?. The method allows us to decide whether to declare a i,j = 0 or a i,j = 1 or a i,j =? (...) undecided. This algorithmic method is then applied to modelling several legal and practical reasoning situations including the Talmudic rule of Kal-Vachomer. We add an Appendix showing that this new rule of Matrix Abduction, arising from the Talmud, can also be applied to the analysis of paradoxes in voting and judgement aggregation. In fact we have here a general method for executing non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

This article proposes an alternative approach to social epistemology – a comprehensive approach. It argues that the dominant approaches to social epistemology, which it identifies as communitarian and veritistic, are inadequate. It observes that the nature of the emphasis that the communitarian approach places on the epistemic community foster mindless tolerance in epistemology, which makes the pursuit of the cognitive goal of truth difficult to attain. It also observes that the veritistic approach that seeks to refocus social epistemology on the (...) pursuit of the cognitive goal of obtaining truth does this at the expense of the affective goals of social epistemology. To overcome the inadequacies of the communitarian and the veritistic approaches and to ensure that social epistemology effectively pursues its cognitive and affective goals, this article offers the comprehensive approach. This approach absorbs the virtues of the communitarian and the veritistic approaches while avoiding their errors. Hence, it thrives on a view of truth that posits an objective and a subjective dimension of truth. The objective dimension ensures that the community only fosters and never impedes social epistemological projects such that social epistemology continues to pursue the cognitive goal of truth. The subjective dimension guarantees that the concern for truth does not lead to the neglect or abandonment of the pursuit of the affective goals of social epistemology. The rationale behind this approach is that for social epistemological projects and practices to remain truly epistemological and social, they must always take into consideration the cognitive and affective features of knowledge and knowers. (shrink)

In this paper I describe a novel application of contemplative techniques to software engineering with the goal of augmenting the intellectual capabilities of knowledge workers within the field in four areas: flexibility, attention, creativity, and trust. The augmentation of software engineers’ intellectual capabilities is proposed as a third complement to the traditional focus of methodologies on the process and environmental factors of the software development endeavor. I argue that these capabilities have been shown to be open to improvement through the (...) practices traditionally used in spiritual traditions, but now used increasingly in other fields of knowledge work, such as in the medical profession and the education field. Historically, the intellectual capabilities of software engineers have been treated as a given within any particular software development effort. This is argued to be an aspect ripe for inclusion within software development methodologies. (shrink)

This chapter discusses central problems and prospects for ethical naturalism. Section 1 explains what is meant by “ethical naturalism” and surveys different versions of the view. Section 2 discusses the central philosophical challenge to ethical naturalism, viz., the “Normativity Objection.” Section 3 offers a battery of responses to it on behalf of the ethical naturalist. Section 4 explores a promising and novel approach to ethical naturalism, viz., a moral nativist theory that that combines a Chomskian approach to moral competence with (...) a structuralist metaphysics. (shrink)

Recent advancements in developmental biology enable the creation of embryo-like structures from human stem cells, which we refer to as human embryo-like structures (hELS). These structures provide promising tools to complement—and perhaps ultimately replace—the use of human embryos in clinical and fundamental research. But what if these hELS—when further improved—also have a claim to moral status? What would that imply for their research use? In this paper, we explore these questions in relation to the traditional answer as to why human (...) embryos should be given greater protection than other (non-)human cells: the so-called Argument from Potential (AfP). According to the AfP, human embryos deserve special moral status because they have the unique potential to develop into persons. While some take the development of hELS to challenge the very foundations of the AfP, the ongoing debate suggests that its dismissal would be premature. Since the AfP is a spectrum of views with different moral implications, it does not need to imply that research with human embryos or hELS that (may) have ‘active’ potential should be completely off-limits. However, the problem with determining active potential in hELS is that this depends on development passing through ‘potentiality switches’ about the precise coordinates of which we are still in the dark. As long as this epistemic uncertainty persists, extending embryo research regulations to research with specific types of hELS would amount to a form of regulative precaution that as such would require further justification. (shrink)

Falsafat wa-ḥayāt Abī Hāshim al-Jubbāʼī wa-madrasatuh -- al-Tawallud ʻinda al-Muʻtazilah.

The Greeks and Romans have been charged with destroying the ecosystems within which they lived. In this book, however, M. D. Usher argues rather that we can find in their lives and thought the origin of modern ideas about systems and sustainability, important topics for humans today and in the future. With chapters running the gamut of Greek and Roman experience – from the Presocratics and Plato to Roman agronomy and the Benedictine Rule – Plato's Pigs brings together unlikely bedfellows, (...) both ancient and modern, to reveal surprising connections. Lively prose and liberal use of anecdotal detail, including an afterword about the author's own experiments with sustainable living on his sheep farm in Vermont, add a strong authorial voice. In short, this is a unique, first-of-its-kind book that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in Classics, environmental studies, philosophy, ecology, or the history of ideas. (shrink)

Like the Copernican revolution which initiated the Modern project, there has been a thermodynamic revolution in the empirical sciences in the last two centuries. The aim of this paper is to show how we might draw from this revolution to make new and startling metaphysical and ethical claims concerning the nature and value of reality. To this end, this paper employs Aristotle’s account of the relation of the various philosophies and sciences to one another to show how we might assert (...) a new theory of being, moral value, and practical action from the primacy of entropic decay asserted in the contemporary mathematical sciences. This paper proceeds to show how, from what the contemporary sciences have concluded concerning the primacy of entropic decay within reality, unbecoming might be forwarded as a new account of the essence of existence: i.e., the first cause and motivating principle of reality’s formal, material, efficient, and final nature. The paper concludes by arguing that a new and surprising account of universal ethical value and normative duty can be deduced from such a metaphysics of decay. (shrink)

Wexler and Specker (2023) offer a review of criticisms directed against what they describe as the relatively new field of neuroethics and offer as solution the development of a more “integrated, in...

In this article, I will argue that ethical veganism can be understood as a form of quietism, as a quiet retreat from a world burdened by human moral failings and animal suffering. I will also show how this retreat, although quiet in nature, is both a legitimate and valuable form of genuine resistance to animal oppression. Positing ethical veganism as a form of sociopolitical resistance to animal exploitation is not new, but thinking of it as a quietist retreat and a (...) legitimate and valuable form of quiet resistance is a different matter. (shrink)