The article asserts that verses 124–130 in the second sūrah of the Qurʾān (al-Baqara/“the Cow”) alludes to the biblical precept (Genesis 17) but presents the practice as a custom that has no special virtues, and certainly not those the Jews ascribed to it. It then claims that circumcision is identified as one of Abraham’s trials, which are mentioned in the Qurʾān and thus part of early Islam, and that this idea did not arise in the Middle Ages.

It is shown that quantum mechanics is a plausible statistical description of an ontology described by classical electrodynamics. The reason that no contradiction arises with various no-go theorems regarding the compatibility of QM with a classical ontology, can be traced to the fact that classical electrodynamics of interacting particles has never been given a consistent definition. Once this is done, our conjecture follows rather naturally, including a purely classical explanation of photon related phenomena. Our analysis entirely rests on the block-universe (...) view entailed by relativity theory. (shrink)

Math anxiety results in a drop in performance on various math-related tasks, including the symbolic number ordering task in which participants decide whether a triplet of digits is presented in order (e.g. 3-5-7) or not (e.g. 3-7-5). We investigated whether the strategy repertoire and reaction times during a symbolic ordering task were affected by math anxiety. In study 1, participants performed an untimed symbolic number ordering task and indicated the strategy they used on a trial-by-trial basis. The use of the (...) memory retrieval strategy, based on the immediate recognition of the triplet, decreased with high math anxiety, but disappeared when controlling for general anxiety. In the study 2, participants completed a timed version of the number order task. High math-anxious participants used the decomposition strategy (e.g. 5 is larger than 3 and 7 is larger than 5 to decide whether 3-5-7 is in the correct order) more often, and were slower in responding when both memory- and other decomposition strategies were used. Altogether, both studies demonstrate that high-math anxious participants are not only slower to decide whether a number triplet is in the correct order, but also rely more on procedural strategies. (shrink)

La llegada del Tratado de Libre Comercio a Colombia sella la unión entre el Estado y el modelo económico neoliberal, en el que irónicamente se propone la reducción del mismo a la mínima expresión. Como consecuencia de este postulado se avecina una supresión de lo público quedando en manos de los particulares el manejo de las necesidades de los ciudadanos como meros aspectos de mercado. ¿Qué se globaliza? y ¿qué no se globaliza? Son los interrogantes que academia y sociedad (...) debemos responder antes de determinar si conviene o no a nuestros intereses, hacer parte de este modelo civilizatorio dominante. (shrink)