This paper is about a support information management system for a wind power producer having an energy storage system and participating in a day-ahead electricity market. Energy storage can play not only a leading role in mitigation of the effect of uncertainty faced by a WP producer, but also allow for conversion of wind energy into electric energy to be stored and then released at favourable hours. This storage provides capability for arbitrage, allowing an increase on profit of a WP (...) producer, but must be supported by a convenient problem formulation. The formulation proposed for the support information management system is based on an approach of stochasticity written as a mixed integer linear programming problem. WP and market prices are considered as stochastic processes represented by a set of scenarios. The charging/discharging of the ESS are considered dependent on scenarios of market prices and on scenarios of WP. The effectiveness of the proposed formulation is tested by comparison of case studies using data from the Iberian Electricity Market. The comparison is in favour of the proposed consideration of stochasticity. (shrink)

Objective: To explore the accounts and perspectives of junior doctors who were offered an HIV test by their employing National Health Service (NHS) trust and discuss ethical issues posed by this new policy. Design: Qualitative in-depth interview study. Setting: 4 NHS hospital trusts. Participants: 24 junior doctors who had been offered an HIV test as part of their pre-employment occupational health checks. Results: The manner in which HIV tests were offered to junior doctors varied both between and within the NHS (...) trusts. Overall, the doctors were highly critical of the way the HIV test was offered. Recurrent themes surrounding a lack of discussion and information regarding the indications for the test and implications of a positive result influenced the the doctors’ perception of their experiences. As a consequence of the shortcomings of how the test was offered, most of the doctors held the misperception that HIV testing was mandatory and many felt unable to decline the test. The majority of doctors referred to patient protection as adequate justification for being offered an HIV test. Conclusions: Junior doctors offered an HIV test under new Department of Health occupational health guidance were disparaging about how the test was offered. The findings of this study affect thousands of junior doctors in the UK, and the impact of these results is extensive. Participants’ suggestions regarding how the process of offering an HIV test can be improved are discussed and ethical issues regarding the new Department of Health policy are highlighted. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Serotonin transporter promoter genotype appears to increase risk for depression in the context of stressful life events. However, the effects of this genotype on measures of stress sensitivity are poorly understood. Therefore, this study examined whether 5-HTTLPR genotype was associated with negative information processing biases in early childhood. METHOD: Thirty-nine unselected seven-year-old children completed a negative mood induction procedure and a Self-Referent Encoding Task designed to measure positive and negative schematic processing. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR gene. (...) RESULTS: Children who were homozygous for the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene showed greater negative schematic processing following a negative mood prime than those with other genotypes. 5-HTTLPR genotype was not significantly associated with positive schematic processing. LIMITATIONS: The sample size for this study was small. We did not analyze more recently reported variants of the 5-HTTLPR long alleles. CONCLUSIONS: 5-HTTLPR genotype is associated with negative information processing styles following a negative mood prime in a non-clinical sample of young children. Such cognitive styles are thought to be activated in response to stressful life events, leading to depressive symptoms; thus, cognitive styles may index the "stress-sensitivity" conferred by this genotype. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: Early-emerging, temperamental differences in fear-related traits may be a heritable vulnerability factor for anxiety disorders. Previous research indicates that the serotonin transporter promoter region polymorphism is a candidate gene for such traits. METHODS: Associations between 5-HTTLPR genotype and indices of fearful child temperament, derived from maternal report and standardized laboratory observations, were examined in a community sample of 95 preschool-aged children. RESULTS: Children with one or more long alleles of the 5-HTTLPR gene were rated as significantly more nervous during (...) standardized laboratory tasks than children who were homozygous for the short alleles. Children homozygous for the short alleles were also rated as significantly shyer, by maternal report, than those with at least one copy of the long allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene. CONCLUSIONS: This study extends the literature linking the short alleles of the serotonin transporter promoter region polymorphism to fear and anxiety-related traits in early childhood and adulthood, and is one of very few studies to examine the molecular genetics of preschoolers' temperament using multiple measures of traits in a normative sample. (shrink)

Placebo-controlled trials are controversial when individuals might be denied existing beneficial medical interventions. In the case of malaria, most patients die in rural villages without healthcare facilities. An artesunate suppository that can be given by minimally skilled persons might be of value when patients suddenly become too ill for oral treatment but are several hours from a facility that can give injectable treatment for severe disease. In such situations, by default, no treatment is (or can be) given until the patient (...) reaches a facility, making the placebo control design clinically relevant; alternative bioequivalence designs at the facility would misrepresent reality and risk incorrect conclusions. We describe the ethical issues underpinning a placebo-controlled trial in severe malaria. To protect patients and minimise risk, all patients were referred immediately to hospital so that each had a higher chance of prompt treatment through participation. There was no difference between artesunate and placebo in patients who reached clinic rapidly; among those who could not, a single artesunate suppository significantly reduced death or permanent disability, a finding of direct and indirect benefit to patients in participating villages and elsewhere. (shrink)

O pensamento filosófico hispânico na segunda metade do séc. XX, potenciou um processo de emancipação cultural e filosófica mais profundas, que destacaram o sentido e o alcance de uma utêntica filosofia, no continente sul-americano. Com tomada de consciência da circunstância americana o que está em causa, é a procura e busca de uma autenticidade da razão latino-americana, a qual na análise que desenvolvo, só terá sentido se integrada numa dinâmica de integração cultural. Esta deverá sempre partir das circunstâncias próprias, e (...) desenvolvida a partir do respeito por um ethos vivencial comum. O presente estudo foi inspirado na obra de Carlos Beorlegui, intitulada Historia del pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano (2004), obra esta que nos apresenta uma visão geral da Filosofia latino-americana desde as cosmovisões pré-colombianas até às correntes filosóficas mais actuais, como é o caso da FL (Filosofia da Libertação), e a da pós-Modernidade ou pós-Colonialidade, comummente conhecida como interculturalismo. (shrink)

After summarizing my own views of 'I' and the first-person perspective, I consider a well-known autistic, Temple Grandin, who claims that she thinks only in pictures, not in language. I argue, to the contrary, that Grandin's mental life as she describes it in fact requires language, which, as a writer, she undoubtedly has. Finally, I turn to the question of whether thought as Temple Grandin describes it is independent of language.

Whether any apology is possible for the form of this paper is doubtful; but perhaps a few words are allowable. The miscellaneous notes, of which it consists, are fairly well described by the title: at all events, the proposals contained in them—with, I fear, many others—have been pencilled at one time or another in one margin or another. Their age varies widely: two or three must go back to days when my only complete Euripides was Kirchhoff's editio minor and my (...) only Sophocles a copy of Tournier; the most date from middle age or ‘quidquid est illud inter iuvenem et senem medium in utriusque confinio positum’; but, whenever they were made, they were not made by a student of the Greek dramatists commanding the equipment that such a student ought to have. The equipment, in any case, was out of my reach; but, though I have read the plays often, I have read them only because the ancients have a way of enabling one to forget the moderns—as I was informed in my youth by an excellent scholar who has now forgotten both. I hope, therefore, that anyone who may happen to read the paper will overlook some errors and ignorances of the amateur; and, above all, if I may borrow a sentence from Markland's preface to his emendations on Lysias, ‘si quando dictatoria ista, Lege, vel Scribe, occurrent, scito me nihil aliud velle quam Forte legendum vel scribendum’. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: In the light of the almost brilliant equilibrium of the author, who manages to compose a resourceful explanation, switching between the notional conditionality and the expected contextual understanding, I intend to focus on the interdisciplinary potential of some suggestions that offer new perspectives on conceiving society, which are driven by a non-analytical and holistic vision.

Philosophers of experiment have acknowledged that experiments are often more than mere hypothesis-tests, once thought to be an experiment's exclusive calling. Drawing on examples from contemporary biology, I make an additional amendment to our understanding of experiment by examining the way that `wide' instrumentation can, for reasons of efficiency, lead scientists away from traditional hypothesis-directed methods of experimentation and towards exploratory methods.

Patient safety has only recently been subjected to wide-spread systematic study. Healthcare differs from other high risk industries in being more diverse and multi-contextual, and less certain and regulated. Also many patient safety problems are low-frequency events associated with many, varied contributing factors. The subject of this paper is the epistemology of patient safety (the science of the method of finding out about patient safety). Patient safety research is considered here on the background of a risk management framework which requires (...) researchers to: • Understand the context - as a subset of healthcare quality, services and systems research, with technical and human behavioural (cultural) components and a range of external and internal organisational influences, a wide range of research disciplines is necessary • Identify the risks - identify the things that go wrong and the frequency and nature of different types of incidents from sources such as medical record review, observational studies, audit, incident and medico-legal reports • Analyse the risks - deconstruct the things that go wrong, identifying contributing factors and trying to detect trends and patterns in contributing factors, detection, mitigation factors, ameliorating factors and actions taken to reduce risk • Evaluate the risks - decide on priorities, identifying preventive and corrective strategies and judging the risk- and cost-benefit of potential corrective strategies such as standardisation or simplification of a process or device • Manage the risk - evaluate and scope preventive and/or corrective strategies and then implement these, or place the problem on a risk register pending solution, or accept that what is needed is unaffordable • Communicate and consult - use interactive sessions, audit, on-going feedback, reminders and patient mediated prompts • Monitor and review the state of the problem - get baseline trends and patterns so that changes can be tracked and properly attributed to an intervention A hierarchy of levels of evidence has been proposed for clinical research and we argue that insufficient weighting has been given to lower ranked levels of research and to qualitative research, although critical interpretive synthesis is now gaining acceptance in mainstream thinking (e.g. by the Cochrane Collaboration). Fundamental challenges remain including how to grasp the elusive concept of patient safety, how to quantify, characterise and cost the problems, how to judge the extent to which harm can be attributed to errors, violations or system failures, how to identify contributing factors and the extent to which they can be implicated, how to judge whether incidents or their precursors are preventable, how to generate strong evidence to make healthcare safer and how to translate research into practice. Future directions include addressing the mundane as well as rare, dramatic events, and developing further research in non-hospital settings and in developing countries. In summary, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, using information from all available data sources and combining retrospective, real time and prospective study designs, is necessary to address some of the more difficult patient safety problems. (shrink)

In the course of writing this book, answers to the following questions and many others were given in both narrative and visual form. Most of them were presented rather forcefully, and not when I was expecting them. I understood that I was to share what I learned. What is in store for the geology of North America? How do we create matter every day? What is the nature of nature? How did people live more than a half million years ago? (...) What was space travel like a half million years ago? Where is God? What are our responsibilities as humans? Is Hitler in heaven? How can we go to heaven? (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of species have focused on multicellular, sexual animals and have often neglected to consider unicellular organisms like bacteria. This article begins to fill this gap by considering what species concepts, if any, apply neatly to the bacterial world. First, I argue that the biological species concept cannot be applied to bacteria because of the variable rates of genetic transfer between populations, depending in part on which gene type is prioritized. Second, I present a critique of phylogenetic bacterial species, (...) arguing that phylogenetic bacterial classification requires a questionable metaphysical commitment to the existence of essential genes. I conclude by considering how microbiologists have dealt with these biological complexities by using more pragmatic and not exclusively evolutionary accounts of species. I argue that this pragmatism is not borne of laziness but rather of the substantial conceptual problems in classifying bacteria based on any evolutionary standard. (shrink)

In a recent note Mr. T. B. Allen had corrected a reading of J. B. Cramer βρβειος ορ to προβτειος., but in a footnote he adds ‘When I made this correction I was not aware of the word πρβειος. Liddell and Scott and Sophocles share my ignorance. I found it in the Anecdota of Boissonade III 408: κ δ τν κρεν ρνιθας σθειν κα πρβεια κα περιστερς sim. 410, 412, 419. Boissonade quotes the word from a similar treatise by Hierophilus, (...) and the 1851 edition of Stephanus reproduces his note.’ This trisyllabic word πρβειος is obviously a ‘Reimbildung’ to ρνειος, μσχειος, ταρειος etc., and its occurrence clears up a papyrus reading which has long puzzled me. In P. Lond. 113, 10, 13 [VII] we read πρωβαων δερμτων, which Preisigke lists as ‘πρβαιος=προβτειος’ Until reading Allen's note I had supposed that the loss of the syllable -ατ- in προβτ-ειος, was a haplography induced by the following δερμ-τ-ων but there are now grounds for regarding the formation as genuine. Only the variation of the adjectival suffix -ειος × -αιος presents a difficulty. In clearing this up we shall be able to lay a number of ghost-words which have spooked in the second edition of Mayser's Grammatik der ptolemäischen Papyri. (shrink)

The development of neuropsychological assessment methods using virtual reality (VR) is a valid and promising option for the detection of cognitive impairment in the older people, focusing on activities composed of tasks of multiple demands. This study verified the association of age, schooling, and general cognitive status on the performance of neurologically healthy older adults in ECO-VR, a virtual reality task of multiple demands for neuropsychological assessment. A total of 111 older adults answered a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Mini Mental State (...) Examination, the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Adults (third edition), and the ECO-VR. Correlation analyses, multiple linear regression, and comparisons between groups (effects by age and schooling groups) were used to evaluate the results. The ECO-VR total score was significantly associated with age, years of education, MMSE, and Vocabulary subtest. The linear regression models identified that age was the main predictor for total score and rule breaking of ECO-VR. According to the univariate analysis, it was identified the main effect of age group and schooling group in the total ECO-VR score, but there was no interaction effect. The results are discussed in order to understand the role of sociodemographic characteristics in the performance of older adults in a virtual reality task of multiple demands. It was also verified the possibility use of virtual reality for neuropsychological assessment of older adults. (shrink)

The paper discusses the evolving concept of causationin epidemiology and its potential interaction with logic and scientific philosophy. Causes arecontingent but the necessity which binds them totheir effects relies on contrary-to-fact conditionals,i.e. conditional statements whose antecedent is false.Chance instead of determinism plays a growing role inscience and, although rarely acknowledged yet, inepidemiology: causes are multiple and chancy; a priorevent causes a subsequent event if the probabilitydistribution of the subsequent event changesconditionally upon the probability of the prior event.There are no known (...) sufficient causes in epidemiology.We merely observe tendencies toward sufficiency ortendencies toward necessity: cohort studies evaluatethe first tendencies, and case-control studies thelatter.In applied sciences, such as medicine andepidemiology, causes are intrinsically connected withgoals and effective strategies: they are recipewhich have a potential harmful or sucessful use; theyare contrastive since they make a differencebetween circumstances in which they are present andthose in which they are absent: causes do notexplain Event E but event E rather thaneven F. Causation is intrinsically linked with thenotion of ``what is pathological''.Any definition of causation will inevitably collapseinto the use made of epidemiologic methods. Theprogressive methodological sophistication of the lastforty years is in perfect alignment with a gradualimplicit overhaul of our concept of causation. (shrink)

In this article the results of a study of psychological readiness of pregnant women to parenthood are presented. Psychological readiness is defined as a structure consisting of three components: the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral, which is consistent with the single theory of psychological processes L. M. Vekkera. It was found that the main component that determines the high level of psychological readiness for motherhood is a cognitive component. The content of the cognitive component includes an understanding of the child as (...) a value. Some results of the research of value orientations of pregnant women in the structure of psychological readiness for parenthood. To identify the value system of pregnant women, the method of ‘Value Orientations‘ by M. Rokich was applied. The analysis of empirical data was performed using factor analysis and U criterion of Mann-Whitney. Respondents were distributed into two age groups: first group of 21-25 years, second group of 26-30 years. All women are nulliparous. The younger age group of pregnant women is characterized by values that are directed at the outside world. Emotional component dominates in the structure of psychological readiness for motherhood. Values of women in the second group are aimed at children. Cognitive and behavioral components dominate in the structure of their psychological readiness for motherhood. Knowledge of the structure of psychological readiness of women to parenthood will help to diagnose disorders of maternal behavior, to design methods of its correction and prevention. (shrink)

Anselm: I agreed that Pegasus is a flying horse according to the stories people tell, the paintings painters paint and so on . That is, Pegasus is a flying horse in the understanding of storytellers, their readers and the artists who depict Pegasus. You asked whether flying is not an unmediated causal power . Well, it could be an unmediated causal power if you or I had it, but not if a being with only mediated powers had it. And so (...) poor Pegasus, a being whose powers are only those given him by storytellers and artists, has only the mediated power of flying that they have given him. He flies in the thoughts and depictions of beings with unmediated powers. Still, Pegasus has not only the mediated power to fly but also the mediated power to entertain us, and perhaps even inspire us. Fool: But people could tell stories about you, too, about how you sprouted wings and flew onto the roof of Canterbury Cathedral. Anselm: Alas, if it were only in stories that I could do that, then flying would not be an unmediated causal power of mine. I would still have unmediated causal powers all right, and so would be greater than Pegasus. But flying is not one of my unmediated causal powers. However, something than which nothing greater can be conceived would, and does, as I have proved in my Proslogion, have unmediated causal powers – indeed, much greater unmediated causal powers than any poor mortals like you and me.1 •↵1 For …. (shrink)

This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...) even the most developed attempts to fulfill these desiderata fall short by failing to appropriately constrain explanatorily apt mechanistic models. -/- *This paper used to be called "The Emperor's New Mechanisms". (shrink)