This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging (...) from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote. (shrink)

This essay unpacks the Utopian impulse in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's novella Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2009). As speculative fiction that has strong, explicit critiques on labour and globalisation, Lunar Braceros crafts a future-historical and future-present world where racialised forms of labour exploitation are the norm. The novella offers the radical response of worker revolution that can only ever be a potential and desire. The novella does this by presenting an ambivalent labour politics that results in the dismantling of (...) the family as a heteronormative unit and that depend on the figure of the lost radical mother. The intervention this essay makes into Latina/o studies and feminist studies is to rearticulate the figure of motherhood through a specific lens of radicalism that is both queer and proletarian. By thinking about Latina radicalism through the intersections of labour, gender and non-normative sexuality in the novella, we see that the lost mother figure disrupts capitalist patriarchy by offering radical potentiality. (shrink)

This paper traces the concept and phenomenon of generosity from Aristotle to Emannuel Levinas and beyond. The question motivating this investigation is: must the generous act be restricted by a rational calculation of correct, or prudent, giving? Answers to this question vary. Aristotle and Kant would answer in the affirmative, while Emerson and Levinas would not. The bulk of this paper is dedicated to Levinas's characterization of excessive generosity as a condition for the fundamental ethical relation, namely, the generous welcome (...) of the Other. I end by considering the phenomenon of generosity from the point of view of the mid‐20th century Mexican philosopher, Emilio Uranga. (shrink)

Let G be a finite group. We explore the model-theoretic properties of the class of differential fields of characteristic zero in m commuting derivations equipped with a G-action by differential fie...

The expansion of research on deep brain stimulation (DBS) and adaptive DBS (aDBS) raises important neuroethics and policy questions related to data sharing. However, there has been little empirical research on the perspectives of experts developing these technologies. We conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with aDBS researchers regarding their data sharing practices and their perspectives on ethical and policy issues related to sharing. Researchers expressed support for and a commitment to sharing, with most saying that they were either sharing their data (...) or would share in the future and that doing so was important for advancing the field. However, those who are sharing reported a variety of sharing partners, suggesting heterogeneity in sharing practices and lack of the broad sharing that would reflect principles of open science. Researchers described several concerns and barriers related to sharing, including privacy and confidentiality, the usability of shared data by others, ownership and control of data (including potential commercialization), and limited resources for sharing. They also suggested potential solutions to these challenges, including additional safeguards to address privacy issues, standardization and transparency in analysis to address issues of data usability, professional norms and heightened cooperation to address issues of ownership and control, and streamlining of data transmission to address resource limitations. Researchers also offered a range of views on the sensitivity of neural activity data (NAD) and data related to mental health in the context of sharing. These findings are an important input to deliberations by researchers, policymakers, neuroethicists, and other stakeholders as they navigate ethics and policy questions related to aDBS research. (shrink)

In a previous essay we demonstrated that quantum mechanical formalism is incompatible with some necessary principles of the mechanism conception still dominant in the physicist’s community. In this paper we show, based on recent empirical evidence in quantum physics, the inevitability of abandoning the old mechanism conception and to construct a new one in which physical reality is seen as a representation which refers to relations established through operations made by us in a world that we are determining. This change (...) is profound and radical, with immediate consequences on both Ontology and Epistemology. This work is our contribution to try to make more concrete how this new conception of the world might be. (shrink)

El presente trabajo parte del paralelo antitético establecido en torno al par amigo-enemigo que aparece en el “Concepto de lo político” de C. Schmitt para, a continuación, analizar las interesantes propuestas que llevan a cabo distintos autores, entre otros, H. Blumenberg, a las que añadiremos como contrapunto los representantes de la Escuela de J. Ritter, W. Böckenförde y H. Lübbe. En especial señalamos el tránsito que se produce de la neutralidad a la neutralización, a partir de la nueva consideración de (...) la temporalidad que se produjo a comienzos del Siglo XVI. Sin embargo, de esta paradójica constitución surgirán una serie de mitos correlativos a la neutralización que la refuerzan, por lo que nos referimos, finalmente, al status quo y al regreso, que constituyen los ecos metáforicos del moderno binomio progreso-regreso. (shrink)

A processualistic approach is offered in the study of that thinking giving rise to modernism from the historical cultural context in which the phenomenon has arisen and evolves. Built upon two opposing forces, it has collapsed after various centuries of development. Modernism is thus called to heroism and must regenerate, availing itself of its best of qualities: critical thinking, reflection and rational dialogue.

Aberrations introduced by the atmospheric turbulence in large telescopes are compensated using adaptive optics systems, where the use of deformable mirrors and multiple sensors relies on complex control systems. Recently, the development of larger scales of telescopes as the E-ELT or TMT has created a computational challenge due to the increasing complexity of the new adaptive optics systems. The Complex Atmospheric Reconstructor based on Machine Learning is an algorithm based on artificial neural networks, designed to compensate the atmospheric turbulence. During (...) recent years, the use of GPUs has been proved to be a great solution to speed up the learning process of neural networks, and different frameworks have been created to ease their development. The implementation of CARMEN in different Multi-GPU frameworks is presented in this paper, along with its development in a language originally developed for GPU, like CUDA. This implementation offers the best response for all the presented cases, although its advantage of using more than one GPU occurs only in large networks. (shrink)

Neoliberal Techniques of Social Suffering: Political Resistance and Critical Theory from Latin America and Spain is the result of the critical and political commitment of various Latin American and Spanish philosophers who share a critical approach to the global “stealth revolution” in recent decades, where neoliberalism has forced the well-being and reproduction of life to adapt to a system devastating for both humans and non-humans. The authors voice the shared concern of contemporary Spanish and Latin American societies to build new (...) conceptions of the public and the common through mobilizing affects usually disavowed in political theory. If, in Ancient Greece, the idea of strengthening the most vulnerable and weakest was deplored as the art of sophists, this collection edited by Laura Quintana and Nuria Sánchez Madrid explores the other side of our social world to revive grassroots strategies of resistance and emancipation, which are able to bring about new distributions of power, welfare, and discursive legitimation and to extend our goal of creating a radically democratic world. (shrink)

For a standard Finsler F on a manifold M, the domain is the whole tangent bundle T M and the fundamental tensor g is positive-definite. However, in many cases, these two conditions hold in a relaxed form only, namely one has either a psuedo-Finsler metric or a conic Finsler metric. Our aim is twofold. First, we want to give an account of quite a few subtleties that appear under such generalizations, say, for conic pseudo-finsler metrics. Second, we aim to provide (...) some criteria that determine when a pseudo-Finsler metric F obtained as a general homogeneous combination of Finsler metrics and one-forms is again a Finsler-metric -- or, more precisely, that the conic domain on which g remains positive-definite. Such a combination generalizes the known -metrics in different directions. Remarkably, classical examples of Finsler metrics are reobtained and extended, with explicit computations of their fundamental tensors. (shrink)

Las emociones son sin duda un campo de creciente interés y estudio. Sin embargo, son experiencias complejas que incluyen diferentes problemas. Precisamente esta variedad de perspectivas exige mantener el equilibrio de los enfoques y, sobre todo, su orden. La fenomenología ilumina ese orden mediante la descripción de las experiencias emotivas.

This paper shows that, for a large range of parameters, the journal editor prefers to delegate the choice to review the manuscript to the biased referee. If the peer review process is informative and the review reports are costly for the reviewers, even biased referees with extreme scientific preferences may choose to become informed about the manuscript’s quality. On the contrary, if the review process is potentially informative but the reviewer reports are not costly for the referees, the biased reviewer (...) has no incentive to become informed about the manuscript. Furthermore, if the reports are costly for referees but the peer review processes are not potentially informative, the biased reviewers will never become informed. In this paper, we also present a web resource that helps editors to experiment with the review process as a device for information transmission. (shrink)

This research aims to fill a major gap in the relevant literature on small businesses in developing countries, specifically concerning the development of models to better explain economic and environmental performance as a result of environmental compliance, thus moving toward an explanation of the sustainable behavior of these businesses. Data from 186 pottery craft businesses located in three Mexican states (Oaxaca, Puebla and Tlaxcala) reveal that environmental compliance significantly influences economic and environmental performance, with the mediating role of environmental innovation, (...) confirming the Porter hypothesis in the context of small businesses in an emerging economy. Environmental compliance is an important factor in improving the economic and environmental performance of small businesses in emerging economies. (shrink)

El artículo es una aportación al estudio de la antropología política del protohumanismo florentino, centrado en la obra y la figura del maestro de retórica de Dante, el notario Brunetto Latini. Nos ocupamos de exponer la conexión existente entre el desarrollo del gobierno comunal en la península italiana del Duecento y la difusión de una prosa marcadamente pragmática, extendida especialmente entre jueces y notarios, que preconiza la prelacía de la filosofía práctica con respecto a la teoría y la teología. Se (...) toman también en consideración aquellos factores que manifiestan la ruptura del Convivio y de la Commedia de Dante con los supuestos doctrinales de Latini, subrayando la apuesta de Alighieri por una teología poética, que contrasta con la forma de vida inmanente proyectada por la visión enciclopédica del notario, recogida en sus escritos retóricos y políticos. (shrink)

This study examines personal and emotional metaphors of prospective economics teachers about the roles they themselves as teachers and their pupils would play by analysing their drawings and responses to open questions. This is a longitudinal study that analyses the evolution of future instructors using two periods: before and after their teaching practicum. Metaphors are categorised into four classes: behaviourist/transmissive, cognitivist/constructivist, situative/socio-historical, and self-referential. The categories for emotions are primary or social and positive, negative, or neutral. The results show that (...) the highest percentage of metaphors for the teacher’s role in both questionnaires were cognitivist/constructivist. Comparison of the findings before and after the teaching practicum revealed no changes in most of the participants’ metaphors and associated models. The analysis also reveals that among those who change, the tendency is to evolve towards more pupil-centred metaphors and associated models. The most common pupil metaphors are behaviourist and cognitivist, increasing after the practicum. Finally, most of the emotions expressed are positive and social, also increasing after the practicum. (shrink)

Drawing on sixteenth-century Protestant discourse on marriage and sexuality, this essay examines the anxieties permeating Spenser’s two poetical celebrations of his courtship and wedding with Elizabeth Boyle. Though the Reformers’ departure from Rome included an embrace of clerical marriage and an advocacy for the virtues of companionate marriage, revulsion at the sinfulness of sex remained. Through the sonnets of the Amoretti and the stanzas of the Epithalamion, an idea of mutual love is disrupted by a Protestant-tinged sense of innate and (...) pervasive depravity. Special attention is given to sonnets #58 and #84, and to the Epithalamion passages on Maia and Alcema. (shrink)

Organ transplantation offers many people who suffer from organ failure a chance to live longer. The Catholic Church, which has endorsed organ donation if it is practiced in an ethically acceptable manner, requires that unpaired vital organs be donated only after the donor is certainly dead. In an effort to increase the number of viable organs, a procedure called donation after cardiac death was introduced in the 1990s. This procedure violates the Roman Catholic moral teaching on the dignity of human (...) life because it violates the dead donor rule and undermines the dignity of the dying person. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.1 (Spring 2012): 55–65. (shrink)

Aunque se ha caracterizado el pensamiento liberal-democrático como la última ideología propia del fin de la historia, en este texto se considera que tal apreciación no es correcta pues ese pensamiento se apoya fundamentalmente en dos pilares, la democracia y la defensa de unos derechos humanos, que se encuentran en una tensión, que lejos de mostrar signos de agotamiento ideológico, constituye el núcleo teórico de la reflexión jurídico-política a lo largo del siglo veinte. La prueba más evidente de tal afirmación (...) la constituye el pensamiento de autores como Kelsen, Hart y Habermas, desde el que se ha intentado lograr la armonización entre el principio de la soberanía popular y el reconocimiento de una serie de límites al ejercicio del principio de las mayorías. (shrink)

A través de los recursos esenciales de la semantica de los mundos posibles se comparan y relacionan, por un lado, la dimensión científica y filosófica, y por otro, la dimensión tecnica y la utópica, utilizándose para ello las relaciones entre composibilidad (o compatibilidad) y existencia, y entre el mundo actual, en el que opera la técnica, y mundos posibles, hacia los que se proyecta la utopía. En esta tarea resulta de interés prestar atención a la problematica clasica acerca de los (...) poliedros posibles e imposibles, en relación con el problema de la afectación, exclusión o ajuste de los “monstruos” de la lógica o de la razón.Through the essential means of the semantics of possible worlds, some dimensions are compared and related: firstly, the scientific and philosophical dimension, and secondly the technical and utopian dimension. For that purpose the relationship between compossibility (or compatibility) and existence are used as well as that between the real world, in which technique works, and possible worlds, towards utopia is oriented. In this task it is interesting to pay attention to the classic issue of possible and impossible polyhedrons, concerning affectation, exclusion or fitting of “monsters” of logic or of reason. (shrink)

El autor de este trabajo expone un diagnóstico crítico de Europa apoyándose en la lectura de tres libros diferentes. El triunfo del nihilismo se levantaría, a su juicio, sobre el olvido de tres fundamentos íntimamente conectados entre sí: la Filosofía, el Cristianismo y Europa.

A similarity index allowing comparisons of human populations has been defined as the common “Percentage of Isoactive Genes” or PIG, which can be calculated from any gene frequency distribution characterizing two populations. The complement to one of this value has been proved to be a distance, a measure which can be used in most techniques of cluster analysis as well as in usual representations of multivariated data (dendrograms, etc...). Furthermore, the formula can be generalized to a set of populations. From (...) a biological point of vue, PIG values are particularly meaningful, whereas other previously defined indices which tend to measure similarity or difference between populations neither have such an advantage, nor can they be expressed by a single and clear number like a percentage. Moreover,comparisons using PIG indices depend at first on the fluctuations of the most frequent genes of a distribution; on the other hand, different measures principally reflect the variations of low frequency genes, which unfortunately are nearly always poorly estimated, due to weak samples of populations.Interestingly, PIG values can be applied to any frequency distribution of any kind of objects. They can also extend to a whole set of distributions by using a mean value. When applying these measures to a series of polymorphic genetical systems such as ABO, Rhesus, MNSs, Gm and HLA, one can account for the variability or the homogeneity particular to the different human groups, with simple and objective criteria. (shrink)

Este estudio pretende poner de manifiesto la situación de desigualdad de la mujer frente al hombre, a la luz de la teoría del patriarcado que explica la constricción estructural sobre la mujer en la organización familiar, y social, y la manera en que se entienden e interpretan las relaciones sociales a la luz de la teoría de las representaciones de género. Acotamos al contexto español de las últimas décadas, aun cuando se haga alguna incursión en datos a otros niveles que (...) nos ubiquen en la dimensión del problema, y en segundo término acotaremos a uno de los aspectos en los que se pone de manifiesto esta desigualdad: el desigual acceso a cotas de poder político de hombres y mujeres.Realizaremos, así, un análisis comparativo en el tiempo y en el espacio de la situación de la mujer española respecto de las relaciones de poder en la política y de cómo se reparte desigualmente la presencia de hombres y de mujeres en los puestos decisionales relacionados con la esfera pública, con el poder político e institucional y con la “calidad” de la presencia de la mujer en las organizaciones.Aquest estudi pretén posar de manifest la situació de desigualtat de la dona enfront l’home, a la llum de la teoria del patriarcat que palesa la constricció estructural sobre la dona a l‘organització familiar, i social, i la forma d’entendre i interpretar les relacions socials a la llum de la teoria de les representacions de gènere. Acotem al context espanyol de les darreres dècades, encara que es faci alguna incursió amb dades a d’altres nivells que ens ubiquin en la dimensió del problema, i en segon terme acotarem a un dels aspectes en els que es palesa aquesta desigualtat, el diferent accés a cotes de poder polític de dones i homes.Realitzarem, així, una anàlisi comparativa en el temps i en l’espai de la situació de la dona espanyola respecte de les relacions de poder a la política i de com es reparteix desigualment la presència d’homes i de dones als llocs de decisió relacionats amb l’esfera pública, amb el poder polític i institucional i amb la “qualitat” de la presència de la dona a les organitzacions. (shrink)

Los procesos migratorios suponen repensar las relaciones, tránsitos y vivencias de las comunidades receptoras. En este sentido, el análisis de los escenarios de convivencia urbana implica redescubrir las historias viejas y nuevas de la inmigración, de la construcción del barrio, de la conformación de sus actores colectivos y de los espacios urbanos comunes. En el análisis de los escenarios de convivencia más conflictivos, encontramos giros discursivos que buscan responsabilizar a la inmigración reciente de problemáticas estructurales que se viven como irremediables. (...) Otros discursos, tendientes a la indiferencia respecto a la convivencia, muestran un potencial conflicto que vuelve inestables estas posturas. El escenario de convivencia social parece construirse desde acciones que buscan la implicación e interrelación entre los actores, desde el conocimiento y reconocimiento de las diferencias y con acento en los derechos comunes. (shrink)

Este artículo, partiendo de un proceso metalingüístico estandarizado, pretende mostrar algunas alternativas psicolingüísticas al aprendizaje conversacional. El desarrollo del estudio corresponde al siguiente esquema: (1) Importancia de la comprensión metalingüística en el perfeccionamiento de una le..