The activity of Wnt and Notch signalling is central to many cell fate decisions during development and to the maintenance and differentiation of stem cell populations in homeostasis. While classical views refer to these pathways as independent signal transduction devices that co‐operate in different systems, recent work has revealed intricate connections between their components. These observations suggest that rather than operating as two separate pathways, elements of Wnt and Notch signalling configure an integrated molecular device whose main function is to (...) regulate transitions between cell states in development and homeostasis. Here, we propose a general framework for the structure and function of the interactions between these signalling systems that is focused on the notion of ‘transition states’, i.e. intermediates that arise during cell fate decision processes. These intermediates act as checkpoints in cell fate decision processes and are characterised by the mixed molecular identities of the states involved in these processes.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays: Notch: Implications of endogenous inhibitors for therapy Abstract. (shrink)

Automated legal reasoning and its application in smart contracts and automated decisions are increasingly attracting interest. In this context, ethical and legal concerns make it necessary for automated reasoners to justify in human-understandable terms the advice given. Logic Programming, specially Answer Set Programming, has a rich semantics and has been used to very concisely express complex knowledge. However, modelling discretionality to act and other vague concepts such as ambiguity cannot be expressed in top-down execution models based on Prolog, and in (...) bottom-up execution models based on ASP the justifications are incomplete and/or not scalable. We propose to use s(CASP), a top-down execution model for predicate ASP, to model vague concepts following a set of patterns. We have implemented a framework, called s(LAW), to model, reason, and justify the applicable legislation and validate it by translating (and benchmarking) a representative use case, the criteria for the admission of students in the “Comunidad de Madrid”. (shrink)

The increasing application of artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare raises both hope and ethical concerns. Some advanced machine learning methods provide accurate clinical predictions at the expense of a significant lack of explainability. Alex John London has defended that accuracy is a more important value than explainability in AI medicine. In this article, we locate the trade-off between accurate performance and explainable algorithms in the context of distributive justice. We acknowledge that accuracy is cardinal from outcome-oriented justice because it helps (...) to maximize patients’ benefits and optimizes limited resources. However, we claim that the opaqueness of the algorithmic black box and its absence of explainability threatens core commitments of procedural fairness such as accountability, avoidance of bias, and transparency. To illustrate this, we discuss liver transplantation as a case of critical medical resources in which the lack of explainability in AI-based allocation algorithms is procedurally unfair. Finally, we provide a number of ethical recommendations for when considering the use of unexplainable algorithms in the distribution of health-related resources. (shrink)

Background: This research explores how public awareness and attitudes toward donation and transplantation policies may contribute to Spain's success in cadaveric organ donation. Materials and Methods: A representative sample of 813 people residing in Andalusia (Southern Spain) were surveyed by telephone or via Internet between October and December 2018. Results: Most participants trust Spain's donation and transplantation system (93%) and wish to donate their organs after death (76%). Among donors, a majority have expressed their consent (59%), and few nondonors have (...) expressed their refusal (14%). Only a minority are aware of the presumed consent system in force (28%) and feel sufficiently informed regarding the requirements needed to be an organ donor (16%). Participants mainly consider that relatives should represent the deceased's preferences and be consulted when the deceased's wishes are unknown, as is the case in Spain. Conclusion: Public trust in the transplant system may contribute to Spain's high performance in organ donation. High levels of societal support toward organ donation and transplantation do not correspond with similar levels of public awareness of donation and transplantation policies in Spain. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 106-109.

Critical edition, translation and commentary of an epigram addressed by Arias Montano to Hernando Díaz, from a copy probably made by Juan Moreno Ramírez. Diaz was also gifted with knives made by Lancero in Guadalajara.

Con el objetivo de evidenciar la forma en que la diversidad sociodemográfica ha resignificado el proceso de desarrollo territorial y origina líneas de fuga que trascienden la hegemonía de los poderes económicos-políticos-ambientales en los Llanos-Orientales, se realiza una metodología experimental que combina análisis situacionales, la genealogía, y la reconstrucción histórica de fenómenos sociales a través de 87 entrevistas a líderes sociales entre el 2019-2021. Los resultados muestran un territorio de activa conexión cultural que favorecen la lucha contra hegemónica dentro de (...) las metáforas de “el mito del Estado nación” y “la imposibilidad de generar alternativas”. El análisis expone la existencia de rebeliones de conducta a través de resistencias cotidianas creativas, políticas y culturales, que favorecen el poder de la confianza, la solidaridad, la cooperación, el afecto, así como los liderazgos colectivos. Se concluye que el poder central no tiene la capacidad de capturar estas resistencias ya que no tiene la potencia analítica para percibir la reconfiguración del espíritu humano ni las variaciones del tejido social. (shrink)

El presente trabajo intenta dilucidar los caracteres centrales de la incorporación del legado de Marx en la obra de León Rozitchner. La hipótesis que articula el escrito define al marxismo como una matriz de inteligibilidad que permite una continuidad y una persistencia en los tópicos centrales de la filosofía del autor argentino. En particular, me centraré en los períodos de juventud y madurez de León Rozitchner, para verificar la forma en que las múltiples transformaciones de su filosofía con el paso (...) del tiempo, mantienen una cohesión posibilitada por su marxismo, entendido como un marco teórico jamás abandonado. Se pondrá de relieve la manera en que algunas apropiaciones juveniles del legado marxista (como, por ejemplo, la noción de “ser social”) son resignificadas a partir de las transformaciones y las distancias que adquiere Rozitchner en su propia lectura de Marx, para finalizar en la elaboración novedosa de un “materialismo ensoñado”. (shrink)

Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both (...) samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se pretende poner en relación la noción de kénosis, sobre la que se configura esencialmente la concepción hermenéutica de la religión en Gianni Vattimo, con la pretensión emancipatoria que surge del nihilismo hermenéutico. Para ello rastrearemos esa concepción hermenéutica de la verdad que ya no nos violenta, a partir de la cual se estructura la religión del pensamiento débil. Además, constataremos cómo la concepción hermenéutica de la metafísica, aparte de presentarse como clave de la secularización, permitirá (...) identificar la salvación con la interpretación. Sobre estos presupuestos generales de su filosofía Vattimo anuncia la venida de Jesús como fenómeno hermenéutico. Tendremos que preguntarnos finalmente si las posibilidades de este planteamiento trágico de la kénosis se llevan hasta sus últimas consecuencias con el anuncio sociopolítico de una emancipación de corte hermenéutico. (shrink)

In ‘Currying omnipotence: A reply to Beall and Cotnoir’, Andrew Tedder and Guillermo Badia argue that Jc Beall and A. J. Cotnoir’s gappy solution to the traditional paradox of unrestricted omnipotence does not extend to a Curry-like version of the paradox. In this paper, we show that it does extend to it.

In the wake of corporate ethical scandals that have harmed millions of employees and investors, there has been an increase in the number of works written in the last decade, which aim to answer one apparently simple question: what causes unethical behavior, and what can we do, if anything, to prevent similar transgressions in the future? The extensive research around this question is the best proof of its real complexity as the challenge of disentangling the background of ethical behavior has (...) obvious academic and practical interest. This study aims to take a further step toward that goal. Much research has noted the impact of multiple aspects of organizational contexts on individuals’ ethical behavior. However, studies that analyze the impact of organizational learning capability (OLC) on employees’ ethical behavior are few and far between. This was the first aim of this study. The second centered on gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between OLC and ethical behavior by analyzing the mediating role of employability and organizational commitment. We tested our hypotheses through a structural equation methodology applied to a sample of 641 workers from 166 Spanish consultancy firms and found a positive, direct relationship between OLC and employability, OLC and organizational commitment, employability and organizational commitment, and organizational commitment and ethical behavior. (shrink)

En las investigaciones sobre fisiología cardiovascular desarrolladas por William Harvey es posible distinguir entre dos teorías que responden a preguntas diferentes. La primera de ellas, que denominamos teoría del movimiento circular de la sangre, intenta dar una respuesta al problema sobre la cantidad de sangre que se mueve dentro del sistema. La segunda pretende dar cuenta de las causas de que la sangre se mueva y la denominamos teoría de las causas del movimiento de la sangre. En este trabajo, presentamos (...) una reconstrucción estructuralista de la primera de éstas, y mostramos que posee todos los componentes considerados esenciales para cualquier teoría, de acuerdo con la concepción estructuralista de la ciencia. (shrink)

El problema de la adopción (Padró, 2015), según el cual es imposible adoptar una lógica, sugiere la idea de que la práctica de inferir es conceptualmente prioritaria a la lógica entendida como teoría. Este problema representa un desafío para la concepción antiexcepcionalista de la lógica, que entiende a los principios lógicos como meras hipótesis o como creencias sujetas a revisión. Desde nuestra perspectiva, el principal problema de esta concepción ha sido dejar abierta la pregunta sobre la naturaleza de la práctica (...) de inferir. Sin embargo, nos parece completamente posible responder esta pregunta dentro del marco teórico antiexcepcionalista. En este trabajo desarrollamos una concepción naturalista de la práctica de inferir que viene a llenar el vacío dejado por el antiexcepcionalismo tradicional; y a su vez responde al desafío lanzado por el problema de la adopción. (shrink)

Heidegger reivindicó la primacía del lenguaje poético sobre el lenguaje racional de la metafísica tradicional, pero rechazó el uso de la metáfora en él. Su discípulo Grassi atribuye a la metáfora, en cambio, una fundamental importancia filosófica, no sólo por su función en el arte, la técnica y la vida humana en general, sino también porque todo cuanto se manifiesta a través de los sentidos se carga inevitablemente de significados pasionales ajenos en sí mismos a las representaciones sensoriales, de modo (...) que todo lenguaje que expresa una realidad es en su esenciametafórico.PALABRAS CLAVE: Grassi, Heidegger, metáfora, lenguaje poético. Heidegger defended the primacy of poetic language over the racional language of traditional metaphysics, though rejecting the use of metaphor in such language. His disciple Grassi, however, attaches the greatest philosophical importance to metaphor, not only for the role it plays in art, technology, and human life in general, but also because everything that becomes manifest through the senses –where knowledge begins– inevitably becomes charged with passionate meanings in themselves alien to sensory representations; thus any language that expresses a reality is in essence metaphorical.KEYWORDS: Grassi, Heidegger, metaphor, poetic language. (shrink)

Reseña del libro Cristià, M. (2021): AIDA. Una historia de solidaridad artística transnacional (1979-1985). Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi.

1. Cine y vanguardias : el cine como promesa estético-política desde Dziga Vertov y Jean Epstein -- 2. Deleuze y las potencias del cine : el acontecimiento de lo inorgánico -- 3. De la vida inorgánica a la vida histórica : recuperación del carácter narrativo del cine a partir de Jacques Ranciere.

A key issue in the business ethics field is the design of effective measures for assessing the ethical culture of organizations. The Corporate Ethical Virtues Model (CEV), developed by Kaptein in 2008, is an instrument for measuring ethical culture, and has been applied, adapted and validated in different contexts. In 2013, DeBode, Armenakis, Field and Walker developed the CEV–S, a shortened version of the original scale. Both the CEV and CEV–S assess eight dimensions based on corporate ethical virtues: clarity, congruency (...) of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability and sanctionability. The objective of this study is to present a Spanish version of the CEV–S and its validation process. The scale was applied to two samples of 114 and 193 Colombian employees from two companies operating in the services sector. The confirmatory factor analyses revealed a good fit for the eight-factor structure of the Spanish CEV–S and the statistical tests applied showed good levels of reliability and validity for this scale. The adequate psychometric properties shown by the Spanish CEV–S may support its use in future research to measure organizational ethical culture in Spanish-speaking settings. (shrink)

As part of the recent rethinking of green politics, the construction of a green democracy has been subjected to increasing scrutiny. There is a growing consensus around deliberative democracy as the preferred model for the realisation of the green programme. As a result several arguments emerge when deliberative principles and procedures are to be justified from a green standpoint. This paper offers a critical assessment of the green case for deliberative democracy, showing that deliberation is being asked to deliver more (...) than it is able to. However, it is suggested that the connection between sustainability, understood as a normative principle, and deliberative procedures may ultimately offer the best grounds for such a defence. (shrink)

This paper reports the policy-responses of different Philippine higher education institutions (HEIs) to the novel coronavirus, COVD-19 pandemic. It compares these responses with those made by HEIs in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Publicly available data and news reports were used to gauge the general public’s reaction to these policies and how the Philippines’ responses fare with its Southeast Asian neighbors. The paper observes that despite the innovations made by Philippine HEIs in terms of alternative learning modes and technologies for delivering (...) education, there are still gaps and challenges in their responses. It recommends that policy-responses and learning innovations should be grounded on a deeper understanding of distance education and should be sensitive to the call of the times. (shrink)

One of the most influential ideas in recent discussions in political philosophy and philosophy of values has been Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism. Given that different ways of living embody different applications of values, it is really difficult to talk about objectivity in the domain of morals. But if we reject the existence of criteria that allow us to judge among different moral proposals, we are led to recognize the prejudiced character of our convictions: their ethnocentric character. In my opinion, this (...) weakens our commitment to those convictions, to the extent that we are not obliged to follow them. At the same time, if that incommensurability is at the root of any interpretation of values, we cannot choose between different ways of understanding pluralism and we cannot evaluate the pluralistic model itself. Saying that some sort of pluralism is good for us if, for us, some sort of pluralism is good, is only proposing an empty tautology. In the end I will argue that we can accept the existence of a sort of moral equilibrium that can allow us to talk of moral progress. (shrink)

Millán-Puelles justifies classic realism on the basis of the human person's dignity, analyzing subjectivity as one of conscience and volition. The author suggests that Millán-Puelles recognize in the relational openness, equally constitutive of the person, the formal reason of the subsistence of its inmanent perfection.

Despite continuing controversies regarding the vital status of both brain-dead donors and individuals who undergo donation after circulatory death (DCD), respecting the dead donor rule (DDR) remains the standard moral framework for organ procurement. The DDR increases organ supply without jeopardizing trust in transplantation systems, reassuring society that donors will not experience harm during organ procurement. While the assumption that individuals cannot be harmed once they are dead is reasonable in the case of brain-dead protocols, we argue that the DDR (...) is not an acceptable strategy to protect donors from harm in DCD protocols. We propose a threefold alternative to justify organ procurement practices: (1) ensuring that donors are sufficiently protected from harm; (2) ensuring that they are respected through informed consent; and (3) ensuring that society is fully informed of the inherently debatable nature of any criterion to declare death. (shrink)

The knowledge extraction from data with noise or outliers is a complex problem in the data mining area. Normally, it is not easy to eliminate those problematic instances. To obtain information from this type of data, robust classifiers are the best option to use. One of them is the application of bagging scheme on weak single classifiers. The Credal C4.5 model is a new classification tree procedure based on the classical C4.5 algorithm and imprecise probabilities. It represents a type of (...) the so-calledcredal trees. It has been proven that CC4.5 is more robust to noise than C4.5 method and even than other previous credal tree models. In this paper, the performance of the CC4.5 model in bagging schemes on noisy domains is shown. An experimental study on data sets with added noise is carried out in order to compare results where bagging schemes are applied on credal trees and C4.5 procedure. As a benchmark point, the known Random Forest classification method is also used. It will be shown that the bagging ensemble using pruned credal trees outperforms the successful bagging C4.5 and RF when data sets with medium-to-high noise level are classified. (shrink)