Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

IntroductionRheumatologists are the primary healthcare professionals responsible for patients with rheumatic diseases and should acquire medical ethical competencies, such as the informed consent process. The objective clinical structured examination is a valuable tool for assessing clinical competencies. We report the performance of 90 rheumatologist trainees participating in a station designed to evaluate the ICP during the 2018 and 2019 national accreditations.MethodsThe station was validated and represented a medical encounter in which the rheumatologist informed a patient with systemic lupus erythematosus with (...) clinically active nephritis about renal biopsy. A trained patient–actor and an evaluator were instructed to assess ICP skills in obtaining formal informed consent, delivering bad news and overall communication with patients. The evaluator used a tailored checklist and form.ResultsCandidate performance varied with ICP content and was superior for potential benefit information but significantly reduced for potential complications and biopsy description. Only 17.8% of the candidates mentioned the legal perspective of ICP. Death was omitted by the majority of the candidates ; after the patient–actor challenged candidates, only 57.1% of them gave a clear and positive answer. Evaluators frequently rated candidate communications skills as superior, but ≥1 negative aspect was identified in 69% of the candidates.ConclusionsEthical competencies are mandatory for professional rheumatologists. It seems necessary to include an ethics competency framework in the curriculum throughout the rheumatology residency. (shrink)

Victory is the ultimate aim in high performance sports; when it comes to team sports, the goal is the key that allows players to achieve that victory. This is the case with futsal which, due to its internal structure as well as the speed in the development of its game, makes the achievement of a goal not an isolated event, but rather more than one goal must be scored to achieve victory. The aim of the present study is to analyze (...) the construction of offensive sequences that have resulted in goal-scoring in the two main European futsal leagues, the Spanish and the Italian, as well as to identify the patterns relating to offensive actions that have ended with a goal being scored. Observational methodology was used to develop the research and an ad hoc observation instrument was developed for this purpose. The data was analyzed using inferential statistics as well as sequential analysis of delays in a diachronic analysis to identify the patterns of offensive actions. The results obtained enable recognition of a league’s idiosyncrasy patterns in goal-scoring in each of the leagues studied. The results obtained will allow experts to have a better understanding of how goals are scored and how to establish more specific training tasks, in both attack and defense. (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to explain the transdisciplinary training model developed at the National University of Education in Ecuador, based on the ancestral worldviews of Buen Vivir. Good Living is a philosophical and political concept of the Kichwa indigenous peoples in the Andean Region, where human beings are interconnected with planet Earth and the whole cosmos. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its Constitution, in order to (...) face climate change and to restore the ecological footprint. This article first unifies scientific knowledge with ancestral wisdom, creating an inter-epistemological dialogue using a transdisciplinary approach. Second, the article explores the epistemological notions of transdisciplinary education: self-training, hetero-training, eco-training, and onto-training. Third, the article argues that as a result, Educational Sciences of Good Living emerged to design regenerative cultures that face socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene age. In sum, the article argues that training transdisciplinary educators implies an intercultural, decolonial, and biocentric approach that promotes their inner spiritual self-awareness, among other perceptive, affective, emotional, rhetorical, poetic, epistemic, creative, artistic, cognitive, and philosophical dimensions. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 crisis may have an impact on the mental health of professionals working on the frontline, especially healthcare workers due to the increase of occupational psychosocial risks, such as emotional exhaustion and secondary traumatic stress. This study explored job demands and resources during the COVID-19 crisis in predicting emotional exhaustion and STS among health professionals. The present study is a descriptive and correlational cross-sectional design, conducted in different hospitals and health centers in Spain. The sample consisted of 221 (...) health professionals with direct involvement in treating COVID-19. An online survey was created and distributed nationwide from March 20 to April 15 which assessed: sociodemographic and occupational data, fear of contagion, contact with death/suffering, lack of material and human protection resources, challenge, emotional exhaustion, and STS. Descriptive findings show high levels of workload, contact with death/suffering, lack of MHPR and challenge, and are moderately high for fear of contagion, emotional exhaustion, and STS. We found an indirect significant effect of lack of MHPR on predicting emotional exhaustion through the workload and on STS through fear of contagion, contact with death/suffering, and workload. To conclude, this study examines the immediate consequences of the crisis on health professionals' well-being in Spain, emphasizing the job demands related to COVID-19 that health professionals are facing, and the resources available in these health contexts. These findings may boost follow-up of this crisis among health professionals to prevent them from long-term consequences. (shrink)

Feature selection is a widely studied technique whose goal is to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by removing irrelevant features. It has multiple benefits, such as improved efficacy, efficiency and interpretability of almost any type of machine learning model. Feature selection techniques may be divided into three main categories, depending on the process used to remove the features known as Filter, Wrapper and Embedded. Embedded methods are usually the preferred feature selection method that efficiently obtains a selection of the (...) most relevant features of the model. However, not all models support an embedded feature selection that forces the use of a different method, reducing the efficiency and reliability of the selection. Neural networks are an example of a model that does not support embedded feature selection. As neural networks have shown to provide remarkable results in multiple scenarios such as classification and regression, sometimes in an ensemble with a model that includes an embedded feature selection, we attempt to embed a feature selection process with a general-purpose methodology. In this work, we propose a novel general-purpose layer for neural networks that removes the influence of irrelevant features. The Feature-Aware Drop Layer is included at the top of the neural network and trained during the backpropagation process without any additional parameters. Our methodology is tested with 17 datasets for classification and regression tasks, including data from different fields such as Health, Economic and Environment, among others. The results show remarkable improvements compared to three different feature selection approaches, with reliable, efficient and effective results. (shrink)

Our philosophical understanding of mental illness is being shaped by neuroscience. However, it has the paradoxical effect of igniting two radically opposed groups of philosophical views. On one side, skepticism and denialism assume that, lacking clear biological mechanisms and etiologies for most mental illnesses, we should infer they are constructions best explained by means of social factors. This is strongly associated with medical nihilism: it considers psychiatry more harmful than benign. On the other side of the divide, naturalism and reductionism (...) are on the look for failures in the biological functioning of the organism whenever a genuine mental illness occurs. Psychiatry as currently practiced, accordingly, exhibits the gaps of an ongoing research programme; a yet to be completed neuroscience would link mental illnesses with identifiable biological mechanisms. Both sides of this divide claim to be fostered by scientific discoveries and advances in neuroscience, when taken at face value. Against this background, we argue instead for a modest view. To that end, we draw attention to some nuances in the scientific realism debate. While contending that neuroscientific theories and models aim to provide true representations of their target systems, and can justifiably claim to have attained some, we argue that our confidence should not be placed beforehand in specific features of these scientific representations. Hence, it would be unwarranted to extract morals for psychiatry from posits (or their absence) in neuroscientific explanations of mental illnesses. To illustrate our position, we examine some recent discoveries in neuroscience concerning bipolar disorder. We conclude by linking our topic to a broader issue in the philosophy of medicine: insofar as psychiatry is a biomedical specialty, its classifications of health and disease are guided by pragmatic concerns, as well as by scientific discoveries. (shrink)

Algunos críticos de la ciencia afirman que es sólo un punto de vista entre otros, sin alguna autoridad epistémica especial. No obstante, en este artículo se defiende que la idea de que la investigación científica involucra una perspectiva o punto de vista no impone una restricción a su ideal de objetividad. Primero se presentan algunas aclaraciones sobre la noción de punto de vista, luego se atiende al concepto de objetividad científica, y por último se enfrentan algunos desafíos que se desprenden (...) de la noción de punto de vista y amenazan rasgos de la objetividad científica vinculados con su autoridad epistémica. -/- Some critics of science claim that it is only a point of view among others, lacking any special epistemic authority. However, this paper contends that conceiving scientific inquiry as something that involves a perspective or a point of view does not pose a constraint on its ideal of objectivity. We first put forward some clarifications on the notion of point of view, followed by some observations on scientific objectivity; finally, we face some of the challenges that rise from the notion of point of view and threaten features of scientific objectivity tied to its epistemic authority.]. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Resumen. En México, la mercadotecnia promocional se ha erigido como la segunda más grande inversión demercadotecnia, principalmente debido a que las compañías tienden con más frecuencia a subcontratar laresponsabilidad de los aspectos operativos de la mercadotecnia. Las empresas contratantes exigen cada vezmás la garantía de seguridad y certidumbre en la prestación de los servicios, por lo que la calidad de éste seha convertido en un factor determinante en la elección de una agencia de promociones. El presentedocumento técnico busca compartir un (...) caso de estudio relacionado a una empresa de promoción de ventasque enfrenta una alta tasa de deserción de clientes con su consecuente contracción en las ventas, pero quecontradictoriamente está inmersa en un mercado que tiene un crecimiento sostenido del 15 por ciento en losúltimos años. El problema fue abordado desde la perspectiva de la calidad en el servicio y la satisfacción delcliente a través de la aplicación de encuestas Servqual a algunos clientes de la compañía. Dichas encuestaspermitieron: identificar las dimensiones de calidad relevantes en el servicio, detectar las áreas de oportunidadentre el servicio esperado y el servicio real, y la elaboración de un plan de acción que posteriormente fuesistematizado e implementado. Los resultados muestran que la implementación del sistema de calidad redujola deserción de los clientes; además, se descubrió que las dimensiones de calidad del Servqual afectan enproporciones diferentes a la satisfacción del cliente.Palabras Claves. Calidad en el servicio, deserción de clientes, mercadotecnia promocional, promoción deventas, QFD, satisfacción del cliente, Servqual, sistema de calidad.. In Mexico, the promotional marketing has emerged as the second largest marketing investment,mainly because companies tend to outsource most often the operational aspects of marketing. Thosecompanies are increasingly demanding security and certainty in the delivery of services. As a consequence,service quality has become a determining factor in the election of a sales promotion agency. This technicalpaperwork shares a case study related to a sales promotion company facing high customer defection rate withits consequent contraction in sales, but ironically immersed in a market that has a sustained growth of 15 per cent in recent years. Approach of the problem was from quality service and customer satisfaction perspectivethrough the use of Servqual surveys applied to some customers. These surveys allowed: to identify relevantdimensions of quality service, to identify opportunities between the expected service and the actual service,and the development of an action plan which was later systematized and implemented. Results show that theimplementation of the quality system reduced customer desertion. Also, found that the quality dimensions of SERVQUAL affect customer satisfaction in different ways.Keywords. Customer defection, customer satisfaction, quality service, quality system, QFD, sales promotion,Servqual. (shrink)

Background: COVID-19 has taken many lives worldwide and due to this, millions of persons are in grief. When the grief process lasts longer than 6 months, the person is in risk of developing Complicated Grief Disorder. The CGD is related to serious health consequences. To reduce the probability of developing CGD a preventive intervention could be applied. In developing countries like Mexico, the psychological services are scarce, self-applied interventions could provide support to solve this problem and reduce the health impact (...) even after the pandemic has already finished.Aims: To design and implement a self-applied intervention composed of 12 modules focused on the decrease of the risk of developing CGD, and increasing the life quality, and as a secondary objective to reduce the symptomatology of anxiety, depression, and increase of sleep quality. The Intervention Duelo COVID follows the principles of User Experience and is designed according to the needs and desires of a sample of the objective participants, to increase the adherence to the self-applied intervention, considered one of the main weaknesses of online interventions.Methods: A Randomized Controlled Trial will be conducted from the 22nd of December of 2020 to the first of June 2021. The participants will be assigned to an intervention with elements of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness and Positive Psychology. The control group will be a wait-list condition, that will receive the intervention 1.5–2 months after the pre-measurement were taken. The Power Size Calculation conducted through G*Power indicated the need for a total of 42 participants, which will be divided by 21 participants in each group. The platform will be delivered through responsive design assuring with this that the intervention will adapt to the screen size of cellphones, tablets, and computers.Ethics and Dissemination: The study counts with the approval of the Research Ethics Committee of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, México, and it is registered in Clinical Trials. The article is sent and registered in clinical trials before the recruitment started. The results will be reported in future conferences, scientific publications, and media. (shrink)

Objective: Illness perceptions are important predictors of emotional and behavioral responses in many diseases. The current study aims to investigate the COVID-19-related IP throughout Europe. The specific goals are to understand the temporal development, identify predictors and examine the impacts of IP on perceived stress and preventive behaviors.Methods: This was a time-series-cross-section study of 7,032 participants from 16 European countries using multilevel modeling from April to June 2020. IP were measured with the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire. Temporal patterns were observed (...) considering the date of participation and the date recoded to account the epidemiological evolution of each country. The outcomes considered were perceived stress and COVID-19 preventive behaviors.Results: There were significant trends, over time, for several IP, suggesting a small decrease in negativity in the perception of COVID-19 in the community. Age, gender, and education level related to some, but not all, IP. Considering the self-regulation model, perceptions consistently predicted general stress and were less consistently related to preventive behaviors. Country showed no effect in the predictive model, suggesting that national differences may have little relevance for IP, in this context.Conclusion: The present study provides a comprehensive picture of COVID-19 IP in Europe in an early stage of the pandemic. The results shed light on the process of IP formation with implications for health-related outcomes and their evolution. (shrink)

Tissue P systems with evolutional communication rules are computational models inspired by biochemical systems consisting of multiple individuals living and cooperating in a certain environment, where objects can be modified when moving from one region to another region. In this work, cell separation, inspired from membrane fission process, is introduced in the framework of tissue P systems with evolutional communication rules. The computational complexity of this kind of P systems is investigated. It is proved that only problems in class P (...) can be efficiently solved by tissue P systems with cell separation with evolutional communication rules of length at most, for each natural number n≥1. In the case where that length is upper bounded by, a polynomial time solution to the SAT problem is provided, hence, assuming that P≠NP a new boundary between tractability and NP-hardness on the basis of the length of evolutional communication rules is provided. Finally, a new simulator for tissue P systems with evolutional communication rules is designed and is used to check the correctness of the solution to the SAT problem. (shrink)

We study the theories I∇n, L∇n and overspill principles for ∇n formulas. We show that IEn ⇒ L∇n ⇒ I∇n, but we do not know if I∇n L∇n. We introduce a new scheme, the growth scheme Crγ, and we prove that L∇n ⇒ Cr∇n⇒ I∇n. Also, we analyse the utility of bounded collection axioms for the study of the above theories.

The fault prediction and abductive fault diagnosis of three-phase induction motors are of great importance for improving their working safety, reliability, and economy; however, it is difficult to succeed in solving these issues. This paper proposes a fault analysis method of motors based on modified fuzzy reasoning spiking neural P systems with real numbers for fault prediction and abductive fault diagnosis. To achieve this goal, fault fuzzy production rules of three-phase induction motors are first proposed. Then, the rMFRSNPS is presented (...) to model the rules, which provides an intuitive way for modelling the motors. Moreover, to realize the parallel data computing and information reasoning in the fault prediction and diagnosis process, three reasoning algorithms for the rMFRSNPS are proposed: the pulse value reasoning algorithm, the forward fault prediction reasoning algorithm, and the backward abductive fault diagnosis reasoning algorithm. Finally, some case studies are given, in order to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

The article addresses how societal inequalities shape market arrangements. While business scholars developed important work about the interplay of organizations and societal economic inequalities, less has been said about the embeddedness of markets in unequal social structures. We argue that this issue may be addressed by cross-fertilizing the sociological approach of Bourdieu and the Strategic Action Fields perspective. To demonstrate our view, we assessed the extreme case of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling markets in Brazil, conducting a qualitative study based on (...) the precepts of abductive analysis and using data from different secondary sources, interviews, and participant observation. We verified the existence of correspondences between the power of strategic action fields and the positions the individuals controlling them occupy in what Bourdieu calls the social space and show how these differences enable inter field connections that tend to reproduce social hierarchies. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease pandemic fundamentally disrupted humans’ social life and behavior. Public health measures may have inadvertently impacted how people care for each other. This study investigated prosocial behavior, its association well-being, and predictors of prosocial behavior during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and sought to understand whether region-specific differences exist. Participants from eight regions clustering multiple countries around the world responded to a cross-sectional online-survey investigating the psychological consequences of the first upsurge of lockdowns in spring 2020. Prosocial behavior (...) was reported to occur frequently. Multiple regression analyses showed that prosocial behavior was associated with better well-being consistently across regions. With regard to predictors of prosocial behavior, high levels of perceived social support were most strongly associated with prosocial behavior, followed by high levels of perceived stress, positive affect and psychological flexibility. Sociodemographic and psychosocial predictors of prosocial behavior were similar across regions. (shrink)

From the most prominent thinkers in Latin American philosophy, literature, politics, and social science comes a challenge to conventional theories of globalization. The contributors to this volume imagine a discourse in which revolution requires no temporalized march of progress or takeovers of state power but instead aims at local control and the material conditions for human dignity.

Over the last few years, a new methodology to address the P versus NP problem has been developed, based on searching for borderlines between the nonefficiency of computing models and the presumed efficiency. These borderlines can be seen as frontiers of efficiency, which are crucial in this methodology. “Translating,” in some sense, an efficient solution in a presumably efficient model to an efficient solution in a nonefficient model would give an affirmative answer to problem P versus NP. In the framework (...) of Membrane Computing, the key of this approach is to detect the syntactic or semantic ingredients that are needed to pass from a nonefficient class of membrane systems to a presumably efficient one. This paper deals with tissue P systems with communication rules of type symport/antiport allowing the evolution of the objects triggering the rules. In previous works, frontiers of efficiency were found in these kinds of membrane systems both with division rules and with separation rules. However, since they were not optimal, it is interesting to refine these frontiers. In this work, optimal frontiers of the efficiency are obtained in terms of the total number of objects involved in the communication rules used for that kind of membrane systems. These optimizations could be easier to translate, if possible, to efficient solutions in a nonefficient model. (shrink)

The most popular work of Francisco Sánchez, Quo nihil scitur (1581), transmits an absolutely sceptic thought. However, other writings like Carmen de Cometa anni M.D.LXXVII (1578), offer us different ideas about how Sánchez considers possible the scientific knowledge like, for example, his idea about the casual relations between natural objects.

El objetivo de este texto es investigar sobre los posibles puntos de encuentro entre la psicoterapia existencial, un paradigma psicológico arraigado en las filosofías de la existencia, y el posicionamiento del profesor Marino Pérez Álvarez, quien se define a sí mismo como conductista radical, respecto a su manera de entender la existencia humana y el modelo más adecuado de psicoterapia. Para ello se proponen seis puntos de encuentro: necesidad de una fundamentación filosófica para la psicología, crítica al cientificismo y al (...) modelo médico, interpretación de los trastornos mentales como problemas de la vida cotidiana, recuperación del paciente como protagonista de la terapia, crítica a la psicología positiva y crítica al dualismo cartesiano. (shrink)

El objetivo fundamental del presente artículo es la configuración de una constelación de ficciones delirantes en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea, a partir de la conceptualización del delirio literario y el análisis del proceso de construcción del relato delirante. Dado que, algunos narradores latinoamericanos despliegan ficciones delirantes en nuestros días, y existe un amplio número de casos, en donde el delirio se evidencia en la literatura de nuestro continente, autores como: Mario Bellatin, Roberto Bolaño, Rita Indiana Hernández, Horacio Castellanos Moya, (...) Cristina Rivera Garza, entre otros. Por consiguiente, se centrará la atención en la creación de una base crítica para la interpretación del delirio de algunos personajes de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea, como un constructo cultural que transgrede el orden social, y es asumido como resistencia y articulación de una praxis creativa. (shrink)

This paper considers Carson’s rewriting of Heracles’ tragic madness— through the art of collage, an assembling and disassambling of textual fragments, scraps of papers, drawings, chromatic smears, and sketches—as an imagistic site for theorizing the anti-normative materiality, physical and metaphysical, of par-a-noia. I make a case for a materiality of par-a-noia by proposing a comparison with Alain Badiou’s Marxist political formalism. The distinctive formal trait of H of H, verbal and pictorial juxtaposition, invites us to think of par-a-noia as an (...) aesthetico-political radicality located on the edge of a voiding of thought (noein), a radicality that, as I suggest at the end, can be aligned with modes of non-normate cognition, with neuroqueer countersociality. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 3 Seiten: 429-450.

It is part of a global trend today that new relationships are being forged between religion and society, between spirituality and materiality, giving rise to announcements that we live in a ‘postsecular’ or ‘desecularized’ world. Taking up two educational movements, the mindfulness movement in the West and the revival of Confucian education in China, this paper examines what and how postsecular orientations and sensibilities penetrate educational discourses and practices in different cultural contexts. We compare the two movements to reveal a (...) new quality of hybrid modernization in that they react, in different ways, to certain pathologies that are identified as consequences of secular modernity. Burnout syndrome, the sense of a spiritual void, but also the loss of a spiritual and cultural identity are being perceived as correlating to a one-sided push towards a modernity that emphasizes secular rationalization over mindfulness and Westernization over cultural particularity. The two case studies mark a critical insight on the present condition and limits of secularism and highlights the ongoing negotiations of values and modes of self-cultivation in schools. In an increasingly pluralistic world, the entanglement of the secular, spiritual, religious and wisdom traditions provides the opportunity to rethink education as a creative realm and an impossible possibility to re-engage the minds and lives of those in the hybrid pedagogical time. (shrink)

Multisensory stimulation has been shown to alter the sense of body-ownership. Given that perceived similarity between one’s own body and those of others is crucial for social cognition, we investigated whether multisensory stimulation can lead participants to experience ownership over a hand of different skin colour. Results from two studies using introspective, behavioural and physiological methods show that, following synchronous visuotactile stimulation, participants can experience body-ownership over hands that seem to belong to a different racial group. Interestingly, a baseline measure (...) of implicit racial bias did not predict whether participants would experience the RHI, but the overall strength of experienced body-ownership seemed to predict the participants’ post-illusion implicit racial bias with those who experienced a stronger RHI showing a lower bias. These findings suggest that multisensory experiences can override strict ingroup/outgroup distinctions based on skin colour and point to a key role for sensory processing in social cognition. (shrink)

This paper presents a restructured set of axioms for categorical logic. In virtue of it, the syllogistic with indefinite terms is deduced and proved, within the categorical logic boundaries. As a result, the number of all the conclusive syllogisms is deduced through a simple and axiomatic methodology. Moreover, the distinction between immediate and mediate inferences disappears, which reinstitutes the unity of Aristotelian logic.