La encíclica Laudato si´ del papa Francisco plantea el vínculo irrompible que hay entre cuestiones ambientales y cuestiones sociales y humanas, a través de la categoría de la «ecología integral» y la apuesta por la «ética del cuidado». Es un excelente ejercicio de diálogo honesto y decidido del pensamiento teológico y filosófico con las aportaciones de las ciencias naturales y sociales, para preservar la supervivencia de la humanidad. Ideas similares movieron a la bioética potteriana hace más de cuarenta años, y (...) hoy, cuando la bioética no parecer atravesar su mejor momento, esta encíclica constituye un valioso impulso para reenfocar la «bioética global» y enfatizar la necesidad del diálogo tanto interdisciplinar como intercultural/interreligioso, de los cuales nuestro mundo no puede prescindir. La injusticia y la desigualdad adoptan nuevas formas en este tiempo de interdependencia global, demandando de la ética una nueva visión social, con la ampliación del campo de la moralidad que incluya a la naturaleza y de una justicia social que alcance lo global y se piense intra e intergeneracionalmente. (shrink)

Este libro trata de moral social, pero no es un tratado sobre la materia. Sí afronta cuestiones como la globalización, los derechos humanos, la caridad, la justicia social, la solidaridad, la opción por los pobres, la ecología, la investigación social o la cultura de la virtualidad real. Y lo hace siempre buscando la clave de la espiritualidad que alimenta y sostiene las opciones cristianas ante tales asuntos. En el tratamiento de esos temas, las encíclicas del Papa Benedicto XVI Deus caritas (...) est y Caritas in veritate ocupan un lugar especialmente destacado, y en la construcción del hogar espiritual de la moral social cuenta sobre todo con la espiritualidad ignaciana y los Ejercicios Espirituales. Si el Concilio Trento puso las bases para la separación entre moral y espiritualidad, el Vaticano II recuperó la relación entre ambas. Desde planteamientos como la llamada universal a la santidad o la tarea de la moral de «mostrar la excelencia de la vocación de los fieles en Cristo y su obligación de producir frutos en la caridad para la vida del mundo», carece de sentido pensar que la Teología espiritual tiene que estudiar el comportamiento positivo de los fieles, relacionado con la gracia de Dios, y que la Teología moral debe centrarse en el comportamiento negativo, asociado a la ley, las normas y el pecado. Al contrario, la vida moral es también expresión práctica de la gracia divina actuando en cada persona, y por eso necesita conectarse con la dimensión teologal y espiritual de horizonte de sentido, donde se alimentan las motivaciones y actitudes básicas. Por su parte, la espiritualidad ha de encontrar los cauces adecuados para interpretar y expresar el compromiso intramundano. Ambas perspectivas son constitutivas y esenciales de la vida y la existencia teologal de las comunidades y de cada uno de los cristianos, y permitir que se encuentren y «conspiren» es una obligación irrenunciable a la que también deben ayudar los teólogos. En eso está esta sencilla obra. JULIO L. MARTÍNEZ, jesuita, es profesor de Teología moral en la Universidad Pontificia Comillas, donde actualmente desempeña además el cargo de Vicerrector de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, y antes fue director de la Cátedra de Bioética y del Instituto de Estudios sobre Migraciones. Su campo de investigación tiene como foco la religión en la vida pública. En esa materia ha escrito sus principales libros, entre los que destacan Consenso público y moral social, Ciudadanía, migraciones y religión y Libertad religiosa y dignidad humana, así como buena parte de sus abundantes artículos. (shrink)

Cells are the fundamental building blocks of organisms and their organization holds the key to our understanding of the processes that control Development and Physiology as well as the mechanisms that underlie disease. Traditional methods of analysis of subcellular structure have relied on the purification of organelles and the painstaking biochemical description of their components. The arrival of high‐throughput genomic and, more significantly, proteomic technologies has opened hereto unforeseen possibilities for this task. Recently two reports(1,2) show how much can be (...) gleaned from the combination of analytical centrifugation, mass spectrometry and advanced statistical techniques focused on a high‐throughput analysis of the content and organization of plant and animal cells. The results reveal intriguing possibilities for the future and the possibility of mapping much of the known proteome onto our current map of the cell. BioEssays 28: 780–784, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Reply to a commentary by Felicitas Holzer and Ignacio Mastroleoon “Models of Consent to Return of Incidental Findings in Genomic Research.”.

The first contribution of this article is a politico-philosophical map that, drawing upon two common sets of arguments against modern natural rights, might help to explain the prevailing neo-republican position on natural rights. Under the label ‘abstraction argument’, we explore the view that natural rights are a metaphysical construct that usually ends in a violent application of speculative principles to society. Under ‘self-interest argument’, we discuss the notion that natural rights endorse an atomistic and selfish conception of the human being. (...) Second, we show how Cold War authors replicated these two arguments, conveying a biased, largely anti-republican and anti-democratic view of natural rights to the twentieth century. Third, drawing on these two arguments, we critically assess the narrow view of natural rights inherited by neo-republican scholars. (shrink)

Research on grammatical gender processing has generally assumed that grammatical gender can be treated as a uniform construct, resulting in a body of literature in which different gender classes are collapsed into single analyses. The present work reviews linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic research on grammatical gender from different methodologies and across different profiles of Spanish speakers. Specifically, we examine distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, the resulting biases in gender assignment, and the consequences of these assignment strategies on (...) gender expectancy and processing. We discuss the implications of the findings for the design of future gender processing studies and, more broadly, for our understanding of the potential differences in the processing reflexes of grammatical gender classes within and across languages. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es proporcionar algunas claves históricas y conceptuales para comprender la historia del socialismo británico libertarian y su relación con la concepción fiduciaria del poder político y del poder económico. Las expresiones de este socialismo no son homogéneas, convivieron con otras ideas rivales llegando en ocasiones a mezclarse con ellas; y fueron formuladas siempre como respuestas concretas ante los problemas que planteaba cada momento histórico. Desde el socialismo republicano de algunos seguidores de Robert Owen hasta los (...) desafíos que planteó la New Left, las teorías fiduciarias encontraron hueco para abrirse paso en los escritos de estos socialistas libertarian. The objective of this paper is to provide some historical and conceptual keys to understand the history of libertarian British socialism, and its relationship with the fiduciary conception of political power and economic power. The expressions of this libertarian socialism are not homogeneous, they coexisted with other rival conceptions, sometimes mixing with them. Those articulations were always formulated as concrete responses to the problems laid out by different historical moments. From the republican socialism of some Robert Owen’s followers to the challenges exposed by the New Left, fiduciary theory found room to break through in the writings of these libertarian socialists. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

The distinctive security features of the Spanish electronic national identity card, known as Documento Nacional de Identidad electrónico, allow us to propose the usage of this cryptographic smart card in an authentication framework that can be used during the registration and login phases of internet services where the validation of the user’s age and real identity are key elements, as it is the case for example of the so-called social networks. Using this mechanism with NFC-capable devices, the identity and age (...) of the potential user can be determined, allowing or denying the access to the service based on that information. (shrink)

La Meditacion. Luis Mojica Sandoz. Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico 1979, Apartado de Correos X, Rio Piedras, P. R. 00931.

The aim of this article is to analyse the internal mechanisms of corporate governance (board of directors and ownership structure), which influence voluntary disclosure of intangibles. The results appear to corroborate the view that an increase in institutional investor shareholding has a negative effect on voluntary disclosure, supporting the hypothesis of entrenchment, whereas an excessive ownership by institutional investors may have adverse effects on strategic disclosure decisions. The results also indicate that an increase in the number of members of the (...) board to up to 15 has a beneficial effect on the disclosure of intangibles. However, as this number increases, the effect inverts and becomes adverse to improving the capacity for supervision and control in the decision-making process regarding the voluntary disclosure of intangibles. The findings endorse the recommendation of the most of the Corporate Governance Codes regarding an advisable maximum of 15 members on a board to ensure its effectiveness and internal cohesion. (shrink)

This paper is going to explore the adverse effects of exposure to combat death on medics’ holistic well-being, which, if ignored could decrease individual readiness and negatively impact the mission. We rely on the experience of United States Air Force Special Operation Surgical Teams (AF SOST) whose exposure to mass casualty scenarios in austere environments could serve as approximations of conditions of future battlefields. Over the past two decades, the ability to deliver advanced medical care on and off the battlefield (...) along with a rapid casualty evacuation platform has allowed for unprecedented survival rates exceeding 90%. While laudable, these medical achievements have also set up a casualty management paradigm in which medical decision-making singularly focuses on life-saving care. Confronting peer-peer adversaries in large scale combat operations (LSCO) on a multi-domain battlefield will make casualty management frighteningly more complex by introducing major infrastructural, personnel, and resource constraints. When considering the high number of casualties expected in LSCO alongside enormous limitations in medical resource and resupply capability, the current casualty management paradigm will not be sustainable. The resource constrained environment in LSCO will shift medical decision-making away from a singular focus on life-saving care to triage, which hinges on the ability to determine futile medical interventions—a skill that has been lost in the past two generation of combat medics. As such, a broad ethical challenge that arises in preparation for LSCO is the need to set new expectations concerning dying and death. However, medical decision-making focused on death and dying has not been explicitly addressed in military medical training, research, or policy. Relying on a body of literature known as terror management theory (TMT) and ethnographic data from our study with AF SOST medics, we are going to argue that it is important to expose medics to death in mass casualty and triage training. (shrink)

The impact of COVID-19 on chronic pain in non-infected vulnerable South American subjects is unknown. Healthcare workers are at increased risk for CP. During the pandemic, many HCWs with CP kept working. Knowing how cognition is affected by CP in these subjects is an important subject for work safety. The attention domain has a pivotal role in cognition. Previously, the Continuous Visual Attention Test was applied to detect specific attention deficits in fibromyalgia patients. The present investigation described CP prevalence in (...) non-infected Brazilian HCWs during the pandemic and assessed HCWs’ attentional performance with the aid of the CVAT. This study was carried out at a reference University Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. HCWs of both sexes, aged 20 or older, were interviewed from August to December 2020. A 90-second version of the CVAT was performed. The average reaction time to correct responses and the respective intraindividual reaction time variability for correct responses to target was determined. Omission and commission errors were also calculated. Then, for each participant we calculated the Z-scores of the CVAT variables based on the distribution of CVAT performance of 211 healthy subjects. HCWs with Z-scores > 1.64 were classified as significantly impaired. From the 154 selected HCWs, 72 reported CP during the pandemic. Post hoc ANCOVAs showed that the average correct VRT was significantly higher in the CP group than in the non-CP group. The percentage of participants with impaired VRT performance was 30% in the CP group and 16% in the non-CP group. The difference between these two propositions reached significance. As VRT is associated with the sustained-attention subdomain, our data suggest that this subdomain is disrupted in the CP group. (shrink)

The concepts of “good” and “bad” are associated with right and left space. Individuals tend to associate good things with the side of their dominant hand, where they experience greater motor fluency, and bad things with their nondominant side. This mapping has been shown to be flexible: Changing the relative fluency of the hands, or even observing a change in someone else's motor fluency, results in a reversal of the conceptual mapping, such that good things become associated with the side (...) of the nondominant hand. Yet, based on prior studies, it is unclear whether space–valence associations were determined by the experience of fluent versus disfluent actions, or by the mere expectation of fluency. Here, we tested the role of expected fluency by removing motor execution and perceptual feedback altogether. Participants were asked to imagine themselves performing a psychomotor task with one of their hands impaired, after which their implicit space–valence mapping was measured. After imagining that their right hand was impaired, right-handed participants showed the “good is left” association typical of left-handers. Motor imagery can change people's implicit associations between space and emotional valence. Although asymmetric motor experience may be necessary to establish body-specific associations between space and valence initially, neither motoric nor perceptual experience is needed to change these associations subsequently. The mere expectation of fluent versus disfluenct actions can drive fluency-based effects on people's implicit spatialization of “good” and “bad.” These results suggest a reconsideration of the mechanisms and boundary conditions of fluency effects. (shrink)

Cooperative, connected and automated mobility technologies have the potential to revolutionize transportation systems and enhance safety, efficiency and sustainability. However, the increasing reliance on digital technologies also introduces new cybersecurity risks that can compromise the safety and privacy of passengers and the integrity of transportation systems. The purpose of this article is to examine the most important threats, vulnerabilities, risks and challenges related to automated mobility and to review the status of the most promising standardization initiatives on cryptography in a (...) world where quantum computers will soon represent an actual threat. (shrink)

The nonlinear differential equation governing the periodic motion of the one-dimensional, undamped, and unforced cubic-quintic Duffing oscillator is solved exactly by obtaining the period and the solution. The period is given in terms of the complete elliptic integral of the first kind and the solution involves Jacobian elliptic functions. We solve the cubic-quintic Duffing equation under arbitrary initial conditions. Physical applications are provided. The solution to the mixed parity Duffing oscillator is also formally derived. We illustrate the obtained results with (...) concrete examples. We give high accurate trigonometric approximations to the Jacobian function cn. (shrink)

The latest advances in quantum computing forced the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to launch an initiative for selecting quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. One of the best-known proposals is NewHope, an algorithm that was initially designed as a key exchange algorithm. In its original design, NewHope presented a reconciliation mechanism that is complex and represents an entry barrier for potential implementers. This contribution presents equivalent schemes in one, two and three dimensions, which allow anyone to make the transition to (...) the 4D NewHope algorithm easier to undertake. In addition to that, the effect of modifying some of the parameters associated to NewHope’s reconciliation mechanism is studied, which has allowed us to propose different sets of parameters that could increase the security of NewHope implementations. (shrink)

Dogma’s Primrose Path addresses how the perpetual presence of ignorance, poverty, and war is accepted by most people as an inevitable consequence of human life. The author argues that this almost universal acceptance is a dogmatically learned and programmed condition that needs to be overcome through reason and fact.