The area of smart power grids needs to constantly improve its efficiency and resilience, to provide high quality electrical power in a resilient grid, while managing faults and avoiding failures. Achieving this requires high component reliability, adequate maintenance, and a studied failure occurrence. Correct system operation involves those activities and novel methodologies to detect, classify, and isolate faults and failures and model and simulate processes with predictive algorithms and analytics. In this paper, we showcase the application of a complex-adaptive, self-organizing (...) modeling method, and Probabilistic Boolean Networks, as a way towards the understanding of the dynamics of smart grid devices, and to model and characterize their behavior. This work demonstrates that PBNs are equivalent to the standard Reinforcement Learning Cycle, in which the agent/model has an interaction with its environment and receives feedback from it in the form of a reward signal. Different reward structures were created to characterize preferred behavior. This information can be used to guide the PBN to avoid fault conditions and failures. (shrink)

What makes political power legitimate? Without legitimation, subjects will not accept power, and, since religion permeated medieval society, religion became foundational to philosophical legitimations of political power. In 2013, the XIX Annual Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy took place in Alcalá de Henares, one of the medieval centers of political debate within and between Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities. The members of these communities all shared the common belief that God constitutes the remote or (...) proximate cause of legitimation. Yet, beyond this common belief, they differed significantly in their points of departure and how their arguments evolved. For instance, the debate among Western Christians in the conflict between secular power and Papal authority sowed the seeds for a secular basis of legitimacy. The volume reflects the results of the colloquium. Many contributions focus on key Christian thinkers such as Marsilius of Padua, Thomas Aquinas, John Quidort of Paris, Giles of Rome, Dante, and William of Ockham; other studies focus on major authors from the Jewish and Muslim traditions, such as Maimonides and Alfarabi. Finally, several papers focus on lesser-known but no less important figures for the history of political thought: Manegold of Lautenbach, Ptolemy of Lucca, Guido Terrena, John of Viterbo, Pierre de Ceffons, John Wyclif and Pierre de Plaoul. The contributions rely on original texts, giving the readers a fresh insight into these issues. (shrink)

Purpose As part of an international study of knowledge of and attitudes to Snowden’s revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency/Government Communications Headquarters, this paper aims to deal with Mexico, taking its socio-cultural and political environment surrounding privacy and state surveillance into account. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire was answered by 160 Mexican University students. The quantitative responses to the survey were statistically analysed as well as qualitative considerations of free text answers. Findings Snowden’s revelations have had a limited influence (...) over Mexican youngsters’ attitudes toward privacy and state surveillance, although there is a great awareness by Mexican young people of individual rights issues. Practical implications The study results imply a need to build a collective awareness of the importance of the right to privacy and its responsibilities, the available technological options for individuals to exert their own privacy and security and the democratic means to agree and enforce appropriate legal restrictions on state surveillance. Social implications The results of this study based indicate an urgent necessity for providing Mexican youngsters with opportunities to learn more about privacy, liberty, individual autonomy and national security. Originality/value This study is the first attempt to investigate the social impact of Snowden’s revelations on Mexican students’ attitudes toward privacy and state surveillance as part of cross-cultural analyses between eight countries. (shrink)

O presente artigo consiste no registro de memórias de um diretor e de uma diretora que atuaram em escolas públicas de M inas Gerais, e na análise de suas narrativas. O objetivo foi captar suas representações sobre as práticas administrativas e pedagógicas rememoradas dos anos de exercício profissional. Com a metodologia da história oral, nossa investigação buscou construir uma interpretação a respeito de atitudes, posturas e práticas enraizadas nos rituais da escola contemporânea. Pudemos observar que no período estudado havia uma (...) política extremamente centralizada, cujas diretrizes eram difundidas pelos órgãos centrais da administração burocrática. O trabalho de gestão das unidades escolares era pautado, principalmente, pelo controle do cumprimento das normas estabelecidas pela política pública de educação. (shrink)

Vers la fin des années 1750, une Académie de Mathématiques fut créée au sein de l’Académie Militaire de la Garde du Corps à Madrid, dirigée par Pedro Padilla jusqu’à sa fermeture en 1760. En 1753, Padilla commença à publier son Cours Militaire de Mathématiques pour l’usage de cette Académie. Le besoin de textes mathématiques en espagnol dans le domaine militaire a conduit à la création en 1757 de la Société Royale Militaire de Mathématiques à Madrid sous la direction de (...) Pedro de Lucuce, lui aussi directeur de l’Académie Militaire de Mathématiques de Barcelone depuis 1738. Les membres de la Société ont été chargés de l’élaboration d’un cours complet dans lequel les mathématiques étaient considérées comme essentielles à la formation militaire des officiers artilleurs et des ingénieurs militaires. La Société, supprimée en 1760, a réussi à réunir une excellente bibliothèque scientifique et technique servant à son tour à fournir des futures bibliothèques militaires. Le but de cette contribution est d’explorer et de comparer la manière dont l’étude des mathématiques a été abordée dans ces deux cas. Toward the end of 1750, an Academy of Mathematics was established within the Military Academy of Royal Guards of Madrid that was managed by Pedro Padilla until it closed in 1760. In 1753, Padilla authored and published his Military Course of Mathematics for the specific use by this Academy. The further need for mathematical texts in Spanish for military training coursework led to the founding of the Royal Military Society of Mathematics of Madrid in 1757 under the direction of Pedro de Lucuce, the headmaster of the Barcelona Military Academy of Mathematics since 1738. The members of this Society were entrusted with producing a comprehensive course program in which mathematics was considered and presented as essential to training of military engineers and gunners. The Society of Mathematics was dissolved in 1760 but had succeeded in building an extensive scientific and technical book depository that later served as a valuable resource supplying other military libraries. The aim of this contribution is to explore and compare how the study of mathematics was approached in these two cases. (shrink)

Vers la fin des années 1750, une Académie de Mathématiques fut créée au sein de l’Académie Militaire de la Garde du Corps à Madrid, dirigée par Pedro Padilla (1724-1807?) jusqu’à sa fermeture en 1760. En 1753, Padilla commença à publier son Cours Militaire de Mathématiques (1753 -1756) pour l’usage de cette Académie. Le besoin de textes mathématiques en espagnol dans le domaine militaire a conduit à la création en 1757 de la Société Royale Militaire de Mathématiques à Madrid sous (...) la direction de Pedro de Lucuce (1692-1779), lui aussi directeur de l’Académie Militaire de Mathématiques de Barcelone depuis 1738. Les membres de la Société ont été chargés de l’élaboration d’un cours complet dans lequel les mathématiques étaient considérées comme essentielles à la formation militaire des officiers artilleurs et des ingénieurs militaires. La Société, supprimée en 1760, a réussi à réunir une excellente bibliothèque scientifique et technique servant à son tour à fournir des futures bibliothèques militaires. Le but de cette contribution est d’explorer et de comparer la manière dont l’étude des mathématiques a été abordée dans ces deux cas. Toward the end of 1750, an Academy of Mathematics was established within the Military Academy of Royal Guards of Madrid that was managed by Pedro Padilla (1724-1807?) until it closed in 1760. In 1753, Padilla authored and published his Military Course of Mathematics (1753-1756) for the specific use by this Academy. The further need for mathematical texts in Spanish for military training coursework led to the founding of the Royal Military Society of Mathematics of Madrid in 1757 under the direction of Pedro de Lucuce (1692-1779), the headmaster of the Barcelona Military Academy of Mathematics since 1738. The members of this Society were entrusted with producing a comprehensive course program in which mathematics was considered and presented as essential to training of military engineers and gunners. The Society of Mathematics was dissolved in 1760 but had succeeded in building an extensive scientific and technical book depository that later served as a valuable resource supplying other military libraries. The aim of this contribution is to explore and compare how the study of mathematics was approached in these two cases. (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

Brian Cutter objected to the consequence argument due to its dependence on the principle that miracle workers are metaphysically impossible. A miracle worker is someone who has the ability to act in a way such that the laws of nature would be violated. While there is something to the thought that agents like us do not have this ability, Cutter claims that there is no compelling reason to regard miracle workers as metaphysically impossible. However, the paper contends that miracle workers (...) are indeed impossible according to well-known theories concerning the laws of nature. This result highlights the reliance of the consequence argument on a plausible premise, which is widely accepted by proponents of non-Humean views of laws. The paper also provides a way to explain away the intuition that miracle workers are possible, but this has the upshot that a recent, two-dimensional formulation of the consequence argument is unsound. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naturalism and morality and to assess their compatibility. Naturalism is defined as respect for science, for its methods and results. From this respect for science, one can infer two distinct philosophical naturalisms: the methodological and the metaphysical. The relationship between these forms of naturalism and morality depends on the correct conception of morality. This paper differentiates between objectively realistic conception and all other conceptions and argues that while other conceptions (...) can easily fit morality into a naturalistic worldview, objectively realistic conception faces theoretical challenges, including the challenge of explaining how moral facts and concepts play an explanatory role and the challenge of bridging the is/ought gap. The paper focuses on Railton's ethical naturalism as a prominent naturalistic theory of morality and evaluates its ability to overcome these challenges. The conclusion is that, so long as we consider a theory like Railton's, naturalism and realistically conceived morality are incompatible. (shrink)

L'oeuvre de ce Catalan s'inscrit à la rencontre de Saint-Augustin, Saint Anselme, Saint Bernard... Sebond parvient à définir une sorte de "socratisme chrétien". Dans son "Liber creaturarum" il apparaît à la fois comme théologien, philosophe humaniste et apologiste de la foi.

Estudio sobre el Derecho Penal agrupandolos en tres apartados, uno general, otro destinado a la función de la pena y un tercero dedicado a aspectos centrales de la teoría del delito.

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which consciousness is significant and must allow massive (...) vagueness in conscious experience. I also will argue that a nonreductive theory of the conscious-of relation can easily provide a very satisfying, unified explanation of the ways in which this relation is significant. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new theory of the nature of hypocritical blame and why it is objectionable, arguing that hypocritical blame is a form of dishonest signaling. Blaming provides very important benefits: through its ability to signal our commitments to norms and unwillingness to tolerate norm violations, it greatly contributes to valuable norm-following. Hypocritical blamers, however, are insufficiently committed to the norms or values they blame others for violating. As allowing their blame to pass unchecked threatens the signaling system, our (...) strong interest in maintaining valuable norm-following by tracking who has what commitments justifies objecting to hypocritical blame. This theory has a number of strengths over competing accounts: it delivers intuitive verdicts about when blame is objectionable across a range of cases, it is a naturalistic explanation, it is consistent with a leading theory of the nature of blame, it explains why hypocritical pronouncements that don’t feature blame are similiarly objectionable, it does not rely on contentious analyses of the nature of ‘standing’, and it preserves the common intuition that hypocrites are in some way dishonest. (shrink)

Many favor representationalism about color experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Once you view color experience along these lines, you face a big question: do our color experiences represent the world as it really is? For instance, suppose you see a tomato. Representationalists claim that having an experience with this sensory character is necessarily connected with representing (...) a distinctive quality as pervading a round area out there in external space. Let us call it “sensible redness” to highlight the fact that the representation of this property is necessarily connected with the sensory character of the experience. Is this property, sensible redness, really co-instantiated with roundness out there in the space before you? (shrink)

Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to factory farming than there was when the book was originally written. In this paper, I argue that there may be a technological solution to the problem of animal suffering in intensive factory farming operations. In particular, I suggest that recent research indicates that we may be very close to, if not already at, the point where we (...) can genetically engineer factory-farmed livestock with a reduced or completely eliminated capacity to suffer. In as much as animal suffering is the principal concern that motivates the animal welfare movement, this development should be of central interest to its adherents. Moreover, I will argue that all people concerned with animal welfare should agree that we ought to replace the animals currently used in factory farming with animals whose ability to suffer is diminished if we are able to do so. (shrink)

El movimiento educativo Filosofía para niños y niñas pretende que los estudiantes desde la más tierna infancia sean capaces de pensar por sí mismo de manera efectiva y afectiva. Para ello activamos tres dimensiones del pensamiento: pensamiento crítico, pensamiento creativo, y pensamiento cuidadoso. Palabras clave: filosofía, pensar, autonomía, critico, creativo, cuidadoso.

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...) it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

Reductive intellectualists hold that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. For this thesis to hold water, it is obviously important that knowledge-how and knowledge-that have the same epistemic properties. In particular, knowledge-how ought to be compatible with epistemic luck to the same extent as knowledge-that. It is argued, contra reductive intellectualism, that knowledge-how is compatible with a species of epistemic luck which is not compatible with knowledge-that, and thus it is claimed that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart.

Afrontamos un tema tan particular como el propuesto desde una perspectiva historicista con la voluntad de insertar aquello que podríamos simplemente observar dentro de los textos en una corriente que iría más allá de la mera sincronía o el apunte estético. Pensamos, por lo tanto, que un acercamiento diacrónico a la obra puede poner de relieve un sentido más luminoso y completo. Sería, en este sentido, una corriente evidentemente más ancha y difusa que desembocaría en la posibilidad de crear una (...) obra cuyas características no afloran arbitrariamente, sino que constituyen el producto provisional de un proceso aún activo. Partimos de un hecho evidente: las ciudades han sufrido a lo largo de los últimos doscientos años un proceso de cambio sin precedentes. Sobre esa base, situaremos a Gil de Biedma, voz surgida en una ciudad –conviene recordarlo– cuya vocación europea es para bien y para mal única en España, en una cima virtual sobre cuyas faldas y en diferentes cotas iremos situando distintos textos, ideas diversas. Digo textos y no autores a sabiendas y refiriéndome siempre al estrecho territorio que respecta a la ciudad. (shrink)

I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take ...

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Information Retrieval systems benefit from the use of long queries containing a large volume of search-relevant information. This situation is not common, as users of such systems tend to use very short and precise queries with few keywords. In this work we propose a modification of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique using data from the document collection and its vocabulary for a better representation of short queries. Additionally, a study is carried out on how the modification of the proposed (...) LDA weighted vectors increase the performance using relevant documents as feedback. The work shown in this paper is tested using three biomedical corpora (TREC Genomics 2004, TREC Genomics 2005 and OHSUMED) and one legal corpus (FIRE 2017). Results prove that the application of the proposed representation technique, as well as the feedback adjustment, clearly outperforms the baseline methods (BM25 and non-modified LDA). (shrink)

In this paper, I do a few things. I develop a (largely) empirical argument against naïve realism (Campbell, Martin, others) and for representationalism. I answer Papineau’s recent paper “Against Representationalism (about Experience)”. And I develop a new puzzle for representationalists.