Wind turbines have been used by many groups of humans for many centuries. Wind turbines have allowed groups of humans to perform many different tasks in the past. However, only a century and a half ago, they began to be used to convert the energy captured from wind into electric energy. Moreover, only approximately twenty-five years ago, we started to introduce on a massive scale the energy generated from wind turbines into the electric networks of most developed countries in the (...) world for regular consumption. According to 2017 statistics, approximately 12 percent of the electric energy consumed in the EU is produced by wind turbines. Despite the fact that wind turbines generally appear quite similar externally—i.e., a three-blade structure, a nacelle, a tower, etc.—if we carefully examine the electric technology used within them, we find quite a wide range of technologies for energy conversion, which is a key issue in wind turbine technology. Hence, this paper adopts a dialectic perspective towards analyzing and understanding why several electric technologies coexist in wind turbine technology. We explain the specific factors that have influenced different wind turbine manufacturers to adopt different electric technologies across the last twenty-five years. We show how their actions and the technological directions that have followed have been mutually codetermined, resulting in a technological evolution that has produced today’s wind turbine variety. (shrink)

F. Nietzsche impartió unos seminarios sobre la obra Cuestiones académicas de Cicerón en la Universidad de Basilea en los semestres de verano de 1870 e invierno de 1870/71. En principio, su carácter era filológico, pues se enmarcaban en la Konjekturalkritik, una importante subdisciplina de la filología clásica decimonónica. Sin embargo, en los apuntes que hemos recibido con el título «Ciceros Academica» se pueden encontrar anotaciones filosóficas que trascienden esa dimensión técnica. Así, el artículo ensaya una lectura filosófica del escrito, con (...) especial atención al distanciamiento del filósofo de la ortodoxia académica y a su tensa renovación metodológica de la filología clásica. (shrink)

The article provides an important warning but its general conclusions should be nuanced: (i) When there is no evidence for it, we should depart from the hypothesis that a species lacks a particular cognitive capacity, and (ii) inferences from absence of evidence can be epistemically sound and scientifically strategic in cognitive and linguistic archaeology.