Graphene is a nanomaterial with many promising and innovative applications, yet early studies indicate that graphene may pose risks to humans and the environment. According to ideas of responsible research and innovation, all relevant actors should strive to reduce risks related to technological innovations. Through semi-structured interviews, we investigated the idea of graphene as a risk held by two types of key actors: graphene researchers and innovation advisors at universities, where the latter are facilitating the movement of graphene from the (...) laboratory to the marketplace. The most common idea found is that graphene is not a risk due to, e.g., low toxicity, low amounts produced/used, and its similarity to harmless materials. However, some researchers and advisors also say that graphene is a risk, e.g., under certain conditions or due to a lack of risk-related information. We explain the co-existence of these seemingly contradictory ideas through the semantic ambiguity of the word risk and a risk/no-risk rhetoric, where risks are mentioned rhetorically only to be disregarded as manageable or negligible. We suggest that some of the ideas held by the researchers and innovation advisors constitute a challenge to responsible research and innovation regarding graphene. At the same time, we acknowledge the dilemma that the discourse of responsible innovation creates for the actors: denying graphene risks makes them irresponsible due to a lack of risk awareness, while affirming graphene risks makes them irresponsible due to their everyday engagement in graphene development. We therefore recommend more research into what researchers and innovation advisors should do in practice in order to qualify as responsible. (shrink)

Orphan drug policy often gives ‘special treatment’ to rare diseases, by giving additional priority or making exceptions to specific drugs, based on the rarity of the conditions they aim to treat. This essay argues that the goal of orphan drug policy should be to make prevalence irrelevant to funding decisions. It aims to demonstrate that it is severity, not prevalence, which drives our judgments that important claims are being overlooked when treatments for severe rare diseases are not funded. It shows (...) that prioritising severity avoids problems caused by prioritising rarity, and that it is compatible with a range of normative frameworks. The implications of a severity-based view for drug development are then derived. The severity-based view also accounts for what is wrong with how the current system of drug development unfairly neglects common diseases that burden the developing world. Lastly, the implications of a severity-based view for current orphan drug policies are discussed. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Human language has the characteristic of being open and in some cases polysemic. The word “infinite” is used often in common speech and more frequently in literary language, but rarely with its precise meaning. In this way the concepts can be used in a vague way but an argument can still be structured so that the central idea is understood and is shared with to the partners. At the same time no precise definition is given to the concepts used and (...) each partner makes his own reading of the text based on previous experience and cultural background. In a language dictionary the first meaning of “infinite” agrees with the etymology: what has no end. We apply the word infinite most often and incorrectly as a synonym for “very large” or something that we do not perceive its completion. In this context, the infinite mentioned in dictionaries refers to the idea or notion of the “immeasurably large” although this is open to what the individual’s means by “immeasurably great.” Based on this linguistic imprecision, the authors present a non Cantorian theory of the potential and actual infinite. For this we have introduced a new concept: the homogon that is the whole set that does not fall within the definition of sets established by Cantor. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the opinions of journalists and citizens regarding the interdependence of public media and the official sources of political power in Spain. Little research of this kind has been done in the Spanish context. Journalists and citizens representing four Spanish regions?Catalonia, Madrid, the Basque Country, and Andalusia?were questioned about their opinions regarding this interdependency. The methodology used in this research is based on quantitative techniques (surveys) and qualitative techniques (in-depth interviews and focus groups). (...) The results prove that the opinions of journalists differ from those of citizens for the majority of questions asked. Citizens are more inclined to follow directions from official sources than are journalists. The geographical background of the respondents proved to be a significant factor in terms of variation in answers. Journalists from Catalonia and the Basque country are much more reluctant to follow government directives on issues of counter terrorism or in cases of national emergency. (shrink)

This text, commissioned by the OSUN Global Observatory of Academic Freedom, discusses how the concept of academic freedom is codified in Colombian Law and regulations of public and private higher education institutions. It also explores common conceptions of academic freedom among Colombian scholars, as well as commonly observed threats to it.

RESUMOO presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar os meandros da composição e suas intertextualidades na polêmica do samba entre Noel Rosa e Wilson Batista, observando o dialogismo na interação verbal e musical entre os autores e os diversos textos da década de 1930. Ao apurar os ouvidos sobre a "polêmica do samba" observa-se que as composições revelam tensões inexoráveis entre um mundo festivo do "malandro" e os limites da realidade da época. Desse modo, com suporte em estudos que tratam deste (...) tema, busca-se trazer à tona um insight sobre este "duelo" musical que está, certamente, muito mais disseminado na sociedade que restrito a questões puramente estéticas.ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the meanders of composition and their intertextuality in the samba controversy between Noel Rosa and Wilson Batista. We observe dialogism in the verbal and musical interaction between the samba writers and several texts of the 1930s. When ears are in tune with the "samba controversy," one observes that the compositions reveal inexorable tensions between the festive world of the "malandro" and the limits of the reality of the time. Accordingly, based on studies that address this theme, we aim to present an insight into this musical "duel," which is not restricted to purely aesthetics issues, but certainly disseminated in society. (shrink)

El sustantivo πραπίς / πραπίδες presenta diversos usos en los poemas homéricos, de acuerdo con diferentes campos semánticos que van desde lo anatómico a lo cognoscitivo. Desde la Antigüedad se intentó clarificar el sentido básico del término, equiparándolo con los distintos campos semánticos que comprende elsustantivo φρήν / φρένες. El término no aparece nunca en singular en los poemas homéricos sino siempre en plural. Este trabajo pretende clarificar, en general, la significación del término y, en particular, el sentido que adquiere (...) cuando es empleado en singular, apelando tanto al recurso de reconstrucción de una hipotética raíz indoeuropea como a conceptos de la teoría cognitiva-prototípica como los de conceptualización, metonimización, metaforización y modelización. (shrink)

Blockchain is an open digital ledger technology that has the capability of significantly altering the way that people operations operate in organizations. This research takes a first step in proposing several ways in which the blockchain technology can be used to improve current organizational practices, while also considering the ethical implications. Specifically, the paper examines the role that blockchain technology plays in three primary areas of people operations: entry to the organization, intraorganizational processes, and exit. In each section, the paper (...) reviews the ethical implications from the lenses of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and contractarianism. The paper concludes that in whole the implementation of blockchain technology in people operations processes can create a more ethical work environment. However, careful implementation is necessary and requires extensive examination of ethical implications in advance. (shrink)

Inspired by the Studies on authoritarian personality and based on contemporary research on authoritarianism in Brazil, we will analyze the construction of the idol aura surrounding former president Bolsonaro, which allowed the far right to be elected and remain in power until the last elections in 2022. We see his rise as mostly due to the digital violence that largely benefited his campaign and was directed against the block of left-wing candidates. So as to clarify this issue, we will revisit (...) the sociohistorical and psycho-political fundamentals of the antidemocratic and ethnocentric behaviors spurred by that leadership that became idolized. We will also outline an emancipatory, antiracist, culturally relevant and decolonial education, as a way to provide what Adorno regarded as being the antidote to the reemergence of a regressive barbarism. In the case of Brazil, barbarism refers to the remnants of the slave system implemented in the country for three and a half centuries, whose destructive potential was awakened under Bolsonaro’s government, given the latent antidemocratic and authoritarian tendencies in our society. (shrink)

Significant scientific and technological advances in intensive care have been made. However, patients in the intensive care unit may experience discomfort, loss of control, and surreal experiences. This has generated relevant debates about how to humanize the intensive care units and whether humanization is necessary at all. This paper aimed to explore how humanizing intensive care is described in the literature. A scoping review was performed. Studies published between 01.01.1999 and 02.03.2020 were identified in the CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus (...) databases. After removing 185 duplicates, 363 papers were screened by title and abstract. Full-text screening of 116 papers led to the inclusion of 68 papers in the review based on the inclusion criteria; these papers mentioned humanizing or dehumanizing intensive care in the title or abstract. Humanizing care was defined as holistic care, as a general attitude of professionals toward patients and relatives and an organizational ideal encompassing all subjects of the healthcare system. Technology was considered an integral component of intensive care that must be balanced with caring for the patient as a whole and autonomous person. This holistic view of patients and relatives could ameliorate the negative effects of technology. There were geographical differences and the large number of studies from Spain and Brazil reflect the growing interest in humanizing intensive care in these particular countries. In conclusion, a more holistic approach with a greater emphasis on the individual patient, relatives, and social context is the foundation for humanizing intensive care, as reflected in the attitudes of nurses and other healthcare professionals. Demands for mastering technology may dominate nurses’ attention toward patients and relatives; therefore, humanized intensive care requires a holistic attitude from health professionals and organizations toward patients and relatives. Healthcare organizations, society, and regulatory frameworks demanding humanized intensive care may enforce humanized intensive care. (shrink)

Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation (...) in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

Under the axiom of choice, every first countable space is a Fréchet-Urysohn space. Although, in its absence even ℝ may fail to be a sequential space.Our goal in this paper is to discuss under which set-theoretic conditions some topological classes, such as the first countable spaces, the metric spaces, or the subspaces of ℝ, are classes of Fréchet-Urysohn or sequential spaces.In this context, it is seen that there are metric spaces which are not sequential spaces. This fact raises the question (...) of knowing if the completion of a metric space exists and it is unique. The answer depends on the definition of completion.Among other results it is shown that: every first countable space is a sequential space if and only if the axiom of countable choice holds, the sequential closure is idempotent in ℝ if and only if the axiom of countable choice holds for families of subsets of ℝ, and every metric space has a unique equation image-completion. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative analysis of experimental fetal surgery and fetal tissue research. The author argues that fetuses are positioned differently across each set of practices, with significant implications for actors in these domains. By empirically charting the ways in which humanity is or is not attributed to fetal work objects, the author's argument challenges contemporary debates in science studies that tend to conceptualize human and nonhuman in dualistic terms. This analysis instead shows the heterogeneous attribution of these categories, (...) as well as the spaces, margins, and positions, which constitute them as distinct. (shrink)

This article brings insights from feminist science and technology studies to bear on recent public debates over the human papillomavirus vaccine, which prevents many cervical cancers, and male circumcision as potential HIV preventive. In the United States, attempts to mandate HPV vaccination have activated intense concerns about female “promiscuity,” whereas talk of promoting circumcision against HIV has triggered scant anxiety about American boys’ sexuality. The authors show how intersections among gender, sexuality, race, and age have shaped responses to these two (...) containment technologies—and how the technologies’ deployment both relies on and reproduces meanings of gender and sexuality that constitute the omnipresent “double standard.” The analysis develops an original feminist sociology of containment, explicating how social relations shape the innovation, reinvention, and use of technologies to contain particular sorts of bodies, fluids, and sexual practices—by whom, under what conditions, and for what purposes. (shrink)

To date, COVID-19 has spread across the world, changing our way of life and forcing us to wear face masks. This report demonstrates that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations. Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old. These findings are (...) of essential importance, as they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning, and young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the role of new urban agriculture models to increase local food production capacity in cities of the Global North. Urban rooftop greenhouses and hydroponics are examples of such models receiving increasing attention as a technological approach to year-round local food production in cities. Yet, little research has addressed the unintended consequences of new modes of urban farming and food distribution, such as increased competition with existing peri-urban and rural farmers. We examine how small-scale farmers perceive (...) and have responded to a recently established rooftop greenhouse and online marketplace enterprise in Montréal, Canada. Drawing on interviews with key informants and small-scale farmers, we find that peri-urban and rural producers have been affected in three key ways that represent tensions, adaptations, and synergies arising from this new urban agriculture and food distribution enterprise. First, many farmers are concerned about increased competition and value conflation with the ideals of community supported agriculture and organic farming. Second, some farmers have adapted by developing novel marketing strategies and working with local bridge organizations to collectively market their produce to urban consumers. Third, a few farmers have decided to wholesale their produce to this new enterprise, allowing them to specialize production and avoid marketing their produce directly to urban consumers. Our study suggests that the emergence of a new form of alternative food network in Montréal has created both positive and negative disruptions for existing small-scale producers. Advocates for the expansion of new urban food production and distribution models should therefore give greater consideration to the effects on other actors in the local food system. (shrink)

Resumo: Rorty tem sido por vezes caracterizado como o mais carbonário e destrutivo dos pensadores americanos. Este retrato parece ser confirmado por sua adoção de um historicismo radical que poderia ser entendido como equivalente ao abandono de toda forma de racionalismo. Nestes termos, não surpreendentemente, passa a ser um perfeito exemplar daquilo que expoentes da velha guarda epistemológica qualificam escandalizadamente como "perigos para a Civilização Ocidental".Neste contexto, a tarefa premente que se coloca é a de se aniquilar a verdadeira dimensão (...) do repto rortyano à filosofia contemporânea: seria seu ataque à ortodoxia realmente apropriado? Ou seria ele mais consistente do que se afirma com variantes racionalistas? Minha intenção é a de enfrentar estas questões e apontar o que me parece ser uma falha de Rorty na interpretação do projeto racionalista.: Rorty has been for several times characterized as the most revolutionary and destructive among the American Philosophers. This portrait seems to be confirmed by its adoption of a radical historicism which might have been understood as equivalent to the abandon of all form rationalism. In these terms, not surprisingly, it becomes a perfect example of what exponents of the old epistemological group scandallizedly qualify as "threats to the western civilization".In this context, the proposed urgent task is to evaluate the real dimension of Rotyan challenge to contemporary philosophy: would his assault on orthodoxy be really appropriate? Would it be more consistent than what is affirmed through rationalist alternatives? My intention is to face these questions and point what is for me Rorty's failure concerning the comprehension of rationalist project. (shrink)

It is well known that, in a topological space, the open sets can be characterized using ?lter convergence. In ZF , we cannot replace filters by ultrafilters. It is proven that the ultra?lter convergence determines the open sets for every topological space if and only if the Ultrafilter Theorem holds. More, we can also prove that the Ultra?lter Theorem is equivalent to the fact that uX = kX for every topological space X, where k is the usual Kuratowski closure operator (...) and u is the Ultra?lter Closure with uX := {x ∈ X: [U converges to x and A ∈ U ]}. However, it is possible to built a topological space X for which uX ≠ kX, but the open sets are characterized by the ultra?lter convergence. To do so, it is proved that if every set has a free ultra?lter, then the Axiom of Countable Choice holds for families of non-empty finite sets. It is also investigated under which set theoretic conditions the equality u = k is true in some subclasses of topological spaces, such as metric spaces, second countable T0-spaces or {ℝ}. (shrink)

Ethical leadership matters in the context of organizational change due to the need for followers to trust the integrity of their leaders. Yet, there have been no studies investigating ethical leadership and organizational change. To fill this gap, we introduce a model of the moderating role of involvement in change. Organizational change and involvement in change are proposed as context-level moderators in the relationships of ethical leadership and work-related attitudes and performance. We employ a sample of 199 supervisor–subordinate pairs from (...) a wide variety of organizations. Results support a three-way interaction (ethical leadership, organizational change, and involvement in change) for performance and OCBs. Our results have important implications for organizational change since ethical leadership appears to complement follower involvement when change is happening. (shrink)

The results in this paper are in a context of abstract elementary classes identified by Shelah and Villaveces in which the amalgamation property is not assumed. The long-term goal is to solve Shelah’s Categoricity Conjecture in this context. Here we tackle a problem of Shelah and Villaveces by proving that in their context, the uniqueness of limit models follows from categoricity under the assumption that the subclass of amalgamation bases is closed under unions of bounded, -increasing chains.

Teachers committed to seeing philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) often focus on assignments that help students develop personal practices, so they experience peace of mind, independence, and a cure from anguish. While we applaud these goals, our work highlights another important aspect of philosophy as a way of life that sometimes is overlooked. We want our students to experience a transformation toward seeing themselves as moral agents, growing in civic virtues, and developing “cosmic consciousness.” To reach this end, (...) we utilize a civic engagement (CE) project that we call the “Experiments in Ethics.” This CE project consists of a series of small, interrelated assignments or “experiments” that help students develop habits and certain civic dispositions. While students complete the experiments throughout the semester, we argue that civically engaged philosophy as a way of life extends beyond the confines of the classroom and the semester as our students cultivate the ability to see themselves as ethical agents capable of making changes in their own lives and the communities in which they live. (shrink)