BackgroundRespect for confidentiality is important to safeguard the well-being of patients and ensure the confidence of society in the doctor-patient relationship. The aim of our study is to examine real situations in which there has been a breach of confidentiality, by means of direct observation in clinical practice.MethodsBy means of direct observation, our study examines real situations in which there has been a breach of confidentiality in a tertiary hospital. To observe and collect data on these situations, we recruited students (...) enrolled in the Medical Degree Program at the University of Cordoba. The observers recorded their entries on standardized templates during clinical internships in different departments: Internal Medicine; Gynecology and Obstetrics; Pediatrics; Emergency Medicine; General and Digestive Surgery; Maxillofacial Surgery; Plastic Surgery; Orthopedics and Traumatology; Digestive; Dermatology; Rheumatology; Mental Health; Nephrology; Pneumology; Neurology; and Ophthalmology.ResultsFollowing 7138 days and 33157 h of observation, we found an estimated Frequency Index of one breach per 62.5 h. As regards the typology of the observed breaches, the most frequent were related to the consultation and/or disclosure of clinical and/or personal data to medical personnel not involved in the patient’s clinical care, as well as people external to the hospital. As regards their severity, severe breaches were the most frequent, accounting for 46.7 % of all incidents. Most of the reported incidents were observed in public areas, such as corridors, elevators, the cafeteria, stairs, and locker rooms.ConclusionsIn addition to aspects related to hospital organization or infrastructure, we have shown that all healthcare personnel are involved in confidentiality breaches, especially physicians. While most are committed unintentionally, a non-negligible number are severe, repeated breaches, thus suggesting a certain carelessness, perhaps through ignorance about certain behaviors that can jeopardize patient confidentiality. (shrink)

The physician’s duty of confidentiality is based on the observance of the patient’s privacy and intimacy and on the importance of respecting both of these rights, thus creating a relationship of confidence and collaboration between doctor and patient. The main objective of this work consists of analyzing the aspects that are related to the confidentiality of patients’ data with respect to the training, conduct and opinions of doctors from different Clinical Management Units of a third-level hospital via a questionnaire. The (...) present study aimed to define the problem and determine whether the opinions of these professionals correspond to those observed in a previous work conducted at the same center. Of the 200 questionnaires that were collected, 62.5% were from consultants and the rest were from residents with an average of 14.4 ± 12.5 years in professional practice. The respondents noted habitual situations in which confidentiality was breached in the reference hospital. The section on their attitudes and behaviors towards situations related to confidentiality showed a slightly lower average score than that of their medical knowledge; significant differences in these scores were observed between the consultants and residents as well as between the extreme age groups and years of professional practice, thus more inadequate attitudes were consistently noted in younger doctors who had fewer years of experience. Finally, the respondents answered that the training of doctors in the aspects of healthcare law and ethics was the most important measure that the hospital could adopt regarding confidentiality practices. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral distress (MD) is the psychological damage caused when people are forced to witness or carry out actions which go against their fundamental moral values. The main objective was to evaluate the prevalence and predictive factors associated with MD among health professionals during the pandemic and to determine its causes.MethodsA regional, observational and cross-sectional study in a sample of 566 professionals from the Public Health Service of Andalusia (68.7% female; 66.9% physicians) who completed the MMD-HP-SPA scale to determine the level (...) of MD (0-432 points). Five dimensions were used: i) Health care; ii) Therapeutic obstinacy-futility, iii) Interpersonal relations of the Healthcare Team, iv) External pressure; v) Covering up of medical malpractice.ResultsThe mean level of MD was 127.3 (SD=66.7; 95% CI 121.8-132.8), being higher in female (135 vs. 110.3; p<0.01), in nursing professionals (137.8 vs. 122; p<0.01) and in the community setting (136.2 vs. 118.3; p<0.001), with these variables showing statistical significance in the multiple linear regression model (p<0.001; r2=0.052). With similar results, the multiple logistic regression model showed being female was a higher risk factor (OR=2.27; 95% CI 1.5-3.4; p<0.001). 70% of the sources of MD belonged to the dimension "Health Care" and the cause "Having to attend to more patients than I can safely attend to" obtained the highest average value (Mean=9.8; SD=4.9).ConclusionsFemale, nursing professionals, and those from the community setting presented a higher risk of MD. The healthcare model needs to implement an ethical approach to public health issues to alleviate MD among its professionals. (shrink)

Through the mental experiment that I suggest, it is possiblc to demonstrate that Hugh Everett’s quantum interpretation, known as of the “many universes”, is incongruent with the special theory of relativity.

La muerte resulta problemática para la contemporaneidad. El existencialismo es una corriente filosófica que presenta la facticidad de la mortalidad como propia de la vida. El pensador Albert Camus articula los pilares fundamentales de su filosofía en torno a la experiencia de la muerte, que lleva al absurdo, del que debe partir la acción rebelde. En esta investigación se analizan algunas dinámicas que, pretendiendo huir de la muerte, solo han conseguido hacernos débiles frente a ella. Presentaremos a Sísifo y Rieux, (...) dos de los personajes de sus escritos, como aquellos paradigmas de conducta que pueden contribuir a hacernos más conscientes del absurdo y poder, de este modo, vivir, amar y luchar. (shrink)

Esta investigación forma parte de un Proyecto de Innovación Docente de la Universidad de Málaga (PIE19-179) que se inició en 2019 y que continuó en 2022 con el grupo de investigación PROCING de la Universidad de Huila-CORHUILA. El objetivo era tratar de desarrollar en el alumnado universitario el pensamiento crítico a través de la lectura crítica y la metodología Scrum como estrategias. La recopilación de datos se llevó a cabo con un cuestionario dividido en cuatro dimensiones y compuesto por 68 (...) ítems. Si bien los resultados del post-test en ambas universidades no son significativos, hubo un aumento en las respuestas a «siempre» en un 4% para los participantes de la Universidad de Málaga (España) y de un 6% en los estudiantes de la Universidad de Huila-CORHUILA (Colombia). (shrink)

In this article there is a criticism of the thesis that defines the Spanish political transition as a successful attempt to put an end to the "law of the pendulum" that had been governing our constitutional history. On the one hand, this thesis underestimates the conditions of the Spanish situation of 1978, marked by the transit between two worlds, the modern one that inherited and the emerging postmodern, which would become an unquestionable reality from 1989. In addition, the Spanish Constitution (...) of 1978 was drafted at a time when the political-normative conceptual assumptions of the dominant constitutional paradigm in Europe after World War II were declining. Likewise, the thesis ignores the specific spanish differential feature: the civil war of 1936-1939 and the subsequent rupture and radical separation of Spanish modernity into two distinct historical sections: one initiated with the French Revolution and culminated in the most absolute destruction of the pre-existing political and social order; and another that starts in 1939, since the construction of zero of a radically new pattern of society and culture, with which the Spaniards encountered in December 1975 when they assumed their full political protagonism in a situation unprecedented and completely devoid of precedents in our national constitutional tradition. (shrink)

Carnap described ways to test scientific hypotheses. However, Carnap acknowledged that confirmation can never be definite. This left open the issue about the criteria to accept hypotheses. On the other hand, Wang has developed a computer program working without sufficient knowledge or resources, which makes the action of the program akin to the manner the human mind thinks. Wang’s program includes quantitative indicators that can be assigned to the frequency and the confidence of sentences. The present paper tries to link (...) both approaches. The goal is to show how quantitative indicators such as those in Wang’s program can also be attributed to scientific hypotheses. Those indicators can help make decisions about the acceptance of the hypotheses. All of this allows proposing general characteristics for a possible algorithm to decide whether a particular hypothesis is admissible. (shrink)

The concept of mental privacy can be defined as the principle that subjects should have control over the access to their own neural data and to the information about the mental processes and states that can be obtained by analyzing it. Our aim is to contribute to the current debate on mental privacy by identifying the main positions, articulating key assumptions and addressing central arguments. First, we map the different positions found in current literature. We distinguish between those who dismiss (...) concerns about mental privacy and those who endorse them. In this latter group, we establish a further disagreement between conservative and liberal strategies to protect mental privacy. Then, we address the first discussion by articulating and criticizing different skeptical views on mental privacy. Finally, we try to identify what are the unique features of neural data and examine how they may be connected to the ways in which neurotechnological mindreading could put mental privacy at risk. We suggest that even if neural data is unique, it may not require new strategies to protect people from its misuse. However, identifying the special features and risks of neurotechnological mind-reading is necessary for the second discussion on mental privacy to properly take off. (shrink)

Este artículo es una discusión con el concepto platónico de diálogo entendido como comedia, Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language (Ewegen, 2014. No hay traducción al español) fue usado como el recurso central de este artículo, el cual provee la base para diferentes interpretaciones en América Latina como las que defiende la profesora Buarque (2011) en nuestra región y, de manera mucho más general Gregorio Lury et al. (2018) en Ibero America. Sumado a ello, a diferencia del trabajo mencionado, este (...) trabajo lleva a cabo una comparación con la obra de Platón usando una metodología de carácter hermenéutico basado en los escritos de Platón y sus múltiples referencias a la risa a través de su reflexión escrita; se toma como punto de referencia la consigna hermenéutica de tomar la clara interpretación como un todo. El presente trabajo tiende entonces, a diferencia de la propuesta de Ewegen, a establecer el esfuerzo platónico mucho más próximo a a la tragedia que a la comedia como género de interpretación. Aunque existan secciones referidas enteramente a asuntos graciosos en los cuales el humor se aprecia, esta no puede ser la clave para la interpretación platónica como lo sostiene el enfoque de Ewegen. La forma del diálogo platónico debe ser entendida en un proyecto educativo, es decir de transformación. (shrink)

The use of technologies like artificial intelligence can drive productivity growth, efficiency and innovation. The goal of this study is to develop an anomaly detection method for locating flaws on the surface of sandwich panels using YOLOv5. The proposed algorithm extracts information locally from an image through a prediction system that creates bounding boxes and determines whether the sandwich panel surface contains flaws. It attempts to reject or accept a product based on quality levels specified in the standard. To evaluate (...) the proposed method, a comparison was made with a sandwich panel damage detection method based on a convolutional neural network and methods based on thresholding. The findings show that the proposed method, which is based on an object detector, is more accurate than the alternatives. The characteristics of the model, which can reject or accept a product according to the standard and limit allowable manufacturing flaws to obtain a quality product, also enable this system to improve industrial standards for producing sandwich panels while increasing speed. (shrink)

Why does social injustice exist? What role, if any, do implicit biases play in the perpetuation of social inequalities? Individualistic approaches to these questions explain social injustice as the result of individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and choices. For example, they explain racial injustice as the result of individuals acting on racial stereotypes and prejudices. In contrast, structural approaches explain social injustice in terms of beyond-the-individual features, including laws, institutions, city layouts, and social norms. Often these two approaches are seen as competitors. (...) Framing them as competitors suggests that only one approach can win and that the loser offers worse explanations of injustice. In this essay, we explore each approach and compare them. Using implicit bias as an example, we argue that the relationship between individualistic and structural approaches is more complicated than it may first seem. Moreover, we contend that each approach has its place in analyses of injustice and raise the possibility that they can work together—synergistically—to produce deeper explanations of social injustice. If so, the approaches may be complementary, rather than competing. (shrink)

In this note, my aim is to point out a phenomenon that has not received much attention; a phenomenon that, in my opinion, should not be overlooked in the professional practice of philosophy, especially within feminist efforts for social justice. I am referring to the way in which being a non-native speaker of English interacts with the practice of philosophy.1 There is evidence that non-native speakers are often perceived in prejudiced ways. Such prejudiced perception causes harm and, more importantly, constitutes (...) wrongdoing. As in other cases of prejudiced perception and biased behavior, it would be pretentious and misguided to expect philosophers and the philosophy profession to be free from this vice. There are good reasons to think that this prejudiced perception is bad not only for the persons who are perceived in such a way, but also for the profession, for it might make us miss important things that could improve philosophy in general. I claim we should be more sensitive to this phenomenon, both out of concern for justice, and for the sake of doing better philosophy. (shrink)

Tesis doctoral presentada en el departament de Lògica Història i Filosofia de la Ciencia de la Universitat de Barcelona per optar al títol de Doctor en Filosofia.

abstract The possibility that organ sales by living adults might be made legal is morally distressing to many of us. However, powerful arguments have been provided recently supporting legalisation (I consider two of those arguments: the Consequentialist Argument and the Autonomy Argument). Is our instinctive reaction against a market of organs irrational then? The aim of this paper is not to prove that legalization would be immoral, all things considered, but rather to show, first, that there are some kinds of (...) arguments, offered in favour of legalisation, that are, in an important sense, illegitimate, and second, that even if legalisation might not be wrong all things considered, there are good reasons for our negative moral intuitions. Moreover, identifying these reasons will help highlight some features of moral decisions in non‐ideal situations, which in turn might be relevant to some other moral or policy choices. (shrink)

The Air Quality Index (AQI) shows the state of air pollution in a unique and more understandable way. This work aims to forecast the AQI in Algeciras (Spain) 8 hours in advance. The AQI is calculated indirectly through the predicted concentrations of five pollutants (O3, NO2, CO, SO2 and PM10) to achieve this goal. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), sequence-to-sequence long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) and a newly proposed method combing a rolling window with the latter (LSTMNA) are employed as the (...) forecasting techniques. Besides, two input approaches are evaluated: using only the data from the own time series of the pollutant in the first case or adding exogenous variables in the second one. Several window sizes are employed (24, 28 and 72 hours) with ANNs and LSTMNAs. Additionally, several feature ranking methods are applied in the exogenous approach to select the most relevant lagged variables to feed the models. Results show how the proposed exogenous approach increases the performance of the prediction models. Besides, the newly proposed method LSTMNA provides the best performances in most of the cases evaluated. Hence, it constitutes an exciting alternative to standard LSTMs and ANNs to predict pollutants concentrations and, consequently, the AQI. (shrink)

We examine the expressive power of probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs), with a special focus on the use of probabilities as a mechanism for reducing ambiguity by filtering out unwanted parses. Probabilities in PCFGs induce an ordering relation among the set of trees that yield a given input sentence. PCFG parsers return the trees bearing the maximum probability for a given sentence, discarding all other possible trees. This mechanism is naturally viewed as a way of defining a new class of (...) tree languages. We formalize the tree language thus defined, study its expressive power, and show that the latter is beyond context freeness. While the increased expressive power offered by PCFGs helps to reduce ambiguity, we show that, in general, it cannot be decided whether a PCFG removes all ambiguities. (shrink)

We examine the expressive power of probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs), with a special focus on the use of probabilities as a mechanism for reducing ambiguity by filtering out unwanted parses. Probabilities in PCFGs induce an ordering relation among the set of trees that yield a given input sentence. PCFG parsers return the trees bearing the maximum probability for a given sentence, discarding all other possible trees. This mechanism is naturally viewed as a way of defining a new class of (...) tree languages. We formalize the tree language thus defined, study its expressive power, and show that the latter is beyond context freeness. While the increased expressive power offered by PCFGs helps to reduce ambiguity, we show that, in general, it cannot be decided whether a PCFG removes all ambiguities. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss exploitative transactions in bioethics. Examples of this kind of transactions allegedly include, among others, commercial surrogacy, organ selling, and research with human subjects in developing countries. The most problematic kind of exploitation is what Allan Wertheimer calls “mutually advantageous exploitation:” the weak party’s consent for the transaction is an effective and rational consent. Moreover, W does not suffer any harm by the transaction; on the contrary, the transaction benefits W. My aim in this paper is (...) twofold. From the perspective of individual ethics, I offer a model to understand the nature of the wrongfulness of the strong party’s action. And from the perspective of legal ethics, I suggest some reasons to believe that the prohibition of beneficial exploitative contracts is problematic and can only be justified in very exceptional cases. (shrink)

Bioethics embraces a number of ethical problems connected to medicine, biomedical research, and health law. Most of these have both a universal dimension and a more particular one. Reproductive rights, exploitation, commodification, biomedical research, and the protection of the environment, among others, are issues that can be discussed from a universal perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a thesis which in some ways attemts to retrieve the value of meaning as a constituent element of theories. It will be argued that theories possess in common a more or less explicit relational structure, but, at the same time, they possess a meaningful function by means of which they are instruments of knowledge or, rather, by means of which theories have the value ofknowledge in science. In conclusion, it will be suggested (...) that this approach to theories allows those with weak relational structure (social, historical theories, etc.) to be treated with a degree of adequacy by the philosophy of science. Likewise, it will be suggested that the method of semantic analysis linked to the theory of “possible worlds” could be fruitful for this purpose. (shrink)

In this article I address Schiller’s first response in his Kallias Briefe or Concerning the Beautiful, Letters to Gottfried Körner to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful in the first part of the Critique of Judgment. My main intention in the paper is to investigate Schiller’s emphasis on the notion of resistance (Widerstand) in his reading of Kant’s concept of beauty, and to ask how does this relate to Schiller’s own approach to aesthetics as an ethico-political realm. I am particularly interested (...) in the turn, in Schiller’s case, from Kant’s critique of aesthetics to the idea of aesthetics as critique. (shrink)

In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural (...) explanation that overcomes their unattractiveness. The main idea is that discursive injustice is not the result of biased interlocutors, but of problematic discursive norms. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reflect self-critically on an ongoing research project entitled “Grammars of listening,” which started as a philosophical approach to the question of listening at the site of trauma and the challenges this kind of listening poses to our conceptions of memory and history, and has recently shifted to asking about the possible limitations to such a reflection when confronted with a decolonial perspective on temporality. I start by presenting a conceptual background for my inquiry, and asking what (...) kind of listening is required when trauma is considered as a colonizing form of violence – that is, when its effects are not only understood as an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible. Following the kind of challenges that such an understanding of trauma poses to the responsibility to listen to its testimony, the paper moves on to propose that only a decolonial approach to listening can truly do justice to the task of rendering testimonies of traumatic violence audible. By decolonizing the frameworks that organize and determine colonial and colonizing distributions of sense, I propose that grammars of lo inaudito understood as decolonial grammars contribute to resisting and disorganizing the criteria for legibility and audibility that colonizing forms of violence not only institute but constantly actualize in their attempt to perpetuate their silencing power.1. (shrink)