Virtual reality enables individuals to be exposed to naturalistic environments in laboratory settings, offering new possibilities for research in human neuroscience and treatment of mental disorders. We used VR to study psychological, autonomic and postural reactions to heights in individuals with varying intensity of fear of heights. Study participants were immersed in a VR of an unprotected open-air elevator platform in an urban area, while standing on an unstable ground. Virtual elevation of the platform elicited robust and reliable psychophysiological activation (...) including increased distress, heart rate, and electrodermal activity, which was higher in individuals suffering from fear of heights. In these individuals, compared with individuals with low fear of heights, the VR height exposure resulted in higher velocity of postural movements as well as decreased low-frequency body sway oscillations. This indicates that individuals with strong fear of heights react to heights with maladaptive rigidity of posture due to increased weight of visual input for balance control, while the visual information is less reliable at heights. Our findings show that exposure to height in a naturalistic VR environment elicits a complex reaction involving correlated changes of the emotional state, autonomic activity, and postural balance, which are exaggerated in individuals with fear of heights. (shrink)

The article aims to define the management mechanism of complex, open dynamic systems with human participation. The following parts of the system life-cycle were identified and unified in the theoretical scope: general and specific compositional elements of repeating changes, marginal index boundaries, the dynamics of the compositional elements of the lifecycle, the key points of the change in the character of the index dynamics. In the practical scope, two common trends of socio-economical system life-cycle management are considered. The first trend (...) is the regulation of the comprising element ratio, which provides the increase in the duration of the maximally effective performance of a functioning system. The second trend is the regulation of the reproduction time of a new system. The systems life cycle aspects are investigated in almost all sciences and studied within many disciplines in the field of higher education. Therefore, deepening the mastery of scientific and methodological foundations of the life cycle of a complex open dynamic system is useful for any subject in everyday and practical activities. A human being – in the formation of own human capital. Families – when it is formed, the birth of children, the distribution of income and expenses. Companies – for efficient business activities. As well as local communities, local self-government bodies, public authorities and global entities within their profile activities. The results of the research provide the possibility of the development of applicable mechanisms for effectiveness and stability enhancement of managerial and entrepreneurial operation in business projects. (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo analisa parte do discurso que a Igreja Católica teceu sobre as mulheres, enfatizando o tema da maternidade durante o século XIX. O enfoque parte da Bulla Sylabus (1864), expedida no pontificado de Pio IX, e da encíclica Rerum Novarum (1891), do Papa Leão XIII. Entre a segunda metade do século XIX e a Primeira Guerra Mundial, a Igreja passou pelo processo conhecido como "romanização", caracterizado pela preocupação moral e disciplinar do clero diante de críticas do laicado, além (...) da promoção de ordens e congregações religiosas. O objetivo deste artigo é, portanto, discutir como aquela instituição definiu um papel social feminino vinculado à ideia do amor materno, divulgado como natural e incondicional. A partir da contribuição dos estudos de gênero, aborda a atribuição de características masculinas e femininas para a distinção não apenas biológica entre homens e mulheres. Concluiu-se que, na longa duração, o discurso católico passou de uma postura misógina - de recusa do sexo feminino - à incorporação das mulheres como público essencial para a sustentação do catolicismo diante das propostas de laicização da sociedade ocidental contemporânea. Palavras-chave: Mulheres; Discurso católico; Maternidade; Gênero.This paper discusses part of the discourse that the Catholic Church built in order to define woman's role in the 19th century, emphasizing representations of motherhood. The focus starts with Pius IX's Bulla Sylabus (1864) and Pope Lion XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891). Between the second half of the 19th century and World War I, the Catholic Church underwent a process known as "Romanization", characterized by the clergy's moral and disciplinary concern in face of the laity's criticism, and by the promotion of new religious orders and congregations. The paper considers, therefore, how the Catholic Church defined a social female role linked to the idea of maternal love, diffused as natural and unconditional. With basis on the contribution of cultural history and gender studies, it demonstrates how that Church attributed male and female characteristics to the distinction not merely biological between men and women, associating the latter with the idea of motherhood and natural love for their children. It concludes that, through time, the Church has changed its misogyny discourse - refusing the female sex - into one that incorporates women as essential to support Catholicism in facing the laicization of contemporary western society. Key words: Women; Catholic discourse; Motherhood; Gender. (shrink)

This is a broad and ambitious study of the entire history of humanity which takes as its point of departure Marx's theory of social evolution. However, Professor Diakonoff's theory of world history differs from Marx's in a number of ways. Firstly he has expanded Marx's five stages of development to eight. Secondly he denies that social evolution necessarily implies progress and shows how 'each progress is simultaneously a regress', and thirdly he demonstrates that the transition from one stage to another (...) is not necessarily marked by social conflict and that sometimes this is achieved peacefully and gracefully. As the book moves through these various stages, the reader is drawn into a remarkable and thought-provoking study of the process of the history of the human race which focuses on the wide range of factors (economic, social, military-technological, and socio-pyschological) which have influenced our development from palaeolithic times to the present day. (shrink)

The article highlights the issues of modeling processes of a socio-economic nature, considers the problems and reveals the factors influencing the construction of the model algorithm. In our opinion, studies of economic processes undoubtedly affect the social side of the development of the territory. The scientific novelty lies in the development and testing of new approaches to the construction of a model that allows us to systematically characterize the processes taking place, based on the analysis of the whole, territorial development, (...) in relation to the structure of its parts, including human capital, which will make it possible to create a mechanism that ensures maneuverability in order to effectively use the potential of the region. As a result, an assessment of the current state of affairs for a certain subject of the Russian Federation is given, but some aspects touched upon in the study require an additional information block. The considered structural factors are determined in the share influence, which allows us to conclude about the regulation of processes with external and internal influence. (shrink)

Judgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized, and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make real-world decisions.

Pretendemos neste texto analisar as interfaces entre a ontologia do cinema do filósofo Stanley Cavell e as reflexões centrais apresentadas no filme Retrato de uma Jovem em Chamas, em especial no que se refere à relação entre o estatuto da representação no cinema e uma determinada forma de se conceber a subjetividade. Com base sobretudo nas reflexões realizadas por Cavell acerca das consequências solipsistas do que seria o “ceticismo moderno” e sobre o percurso de que resultariam a fotografia e o (...) cinema como linguagens fundamentais da sociedade contemporânea, partimos de uma discussão acerca do escopo do processo antiteatral nas artes, argumentando que a natureza do cinema consolida uma forma particular de se conceber o olhar, forma essa que materializa o anseio de vermos sem sermos vistos. Dado esse entendimento, concernente ao atrelamento entre o processo antiteatral e desenvolvimento da imagem cinematográfica, procuramos mostrar como o filme de Céline Sciamma busca oferecer na tela a evidência de que a posição dessa invulnerabilidade do olhar decorre daquilo que Cavell qualifica como a evitação de amor ou a recusa de reconhecimento. Nesse sentido, faz parte da nossa investigação indicar que a forma de olhar criada em Retrato de uma Jovem em Chamas, a partir do amor que se constitui entre as suas personagens principais, é também uma maneira de sustentar a possibilidade de vermos e sermos vistas, e, portanto, um debate sobre a desteatralização da subjetividade e a ruptura com as implicações solipsistas do ceticismo filosófico. (shrink)

Various authors have recently argued that you cannot rationally stick to your belief in the face of known disagreement with an epistemic peer, that is, a person you take to have the same evidence and judgmental skills as you do. For, they claim, because there is but one rational response to any body of evidence, a disagreement with an epistemic peer indicates that at least one of you is not responding rationally to the evidence. Given that you take your peer (...) to have the same judgmental skills as you do, and thus regard her to be equally good at assessing the evidence as you are, you will have as much reason for thinking that it is you who is not responding rationally to the evidence as for thinking that it is her. You thus have reason for thinking that your belief on the disputed matter is not a rational response to the evidence. Hence, you cannot rationally stick to your belief. (shrink)

Desde el inicio de los _Troubles_ la situación en Irlanda del Norte estuvo marcada por la violencia del IRA y la confrontación sectaria entre las comunidades católicas y protestantes. En el inicio de la década de los años 90 se abrió un nuevo panorama de esperanza a la hora de poner fin al terrorismo, gracias a los Acuerdos del Viernes Santo (10 de abril de 1998). Este artículo analiza las claves y el contexto del filme _The Boxer_ (1997), del reconocido (...) director dublinés Jim Sheridan, desde la metodología de las relaciones de historia y cine. La película, previa a los acuerdos, establece como el cine de ficción puede ser una manera de influir (positivamente) en la sociedad, además de convertirse en un retrato real y simbólico sobre la crudeza y afección de la violencia y la sinrazón más manifiesta que tanto daño provocó en la sociedad norirlandesa. (shrink)

Regier, Kay, and Khetarpal report the results of computer simulations that cluster color stimuli on the basis of their coordinates in CIELAB space, one of two commonly used perceptual color spaces. Regier and coauthors find partitions of those stimuli that are strikingly similar to the way actual color lexicons partition color space. They do not argue for the custom-made clustering method used in their simulations, nor for the assumption of CIELAB space. The present paper aims to answer the question to (...) what extent their computational results depend on these assumptions. It does this by applying a great variety of known clustering methods to Regier et al.’s stimuli, and by assuming not only CIELAB space but also CIELUV space, the other main color space. (shrink)

Encontramos linguagens e códigos de todos os tipos e em todas as esferas na natureza. No entanto, quando chegamos no homem vemos esses códigos aplicados não como algo mecânico, como é notado na natureza, mas como articulações para o social. A partir disso, é apresentado à psicanálise, que tem como sua coluna vertebral a escuta que é voltada para a natureza discursiva do homem. Iremos explorar neste artigo qual seria a escuta servida para o discurso na clínica, pois não é (...) colocado uma regra no discurso do analisando, este é livre para dizer o que quer dizer e como ele entender, sendo que tal liberdade é evitada nas relações sociais, pois ele (o analisando) não a exerce por ter consciência das leis sociais que são, desde sua infância, aglutinadas a ele, as quais, seu cumprimento é cobrado.Para se ter esse ouvir a psicanálise trabalha para tornar os ouvidos do analista um órgão apropriadamente de escuta e compreensão, pois a fala do analista vem dessa escuta do discurso que não é seu durante aquele tempo, mas que vem a ser depois de completo para ser matéria de análise. (shrink)

Early research on the cell cycle revealed correlations between protein accumulation and cell proliferation. In this review, I describe the data showing that abnormality of cell growth and tumor development are dependent upon oncogene‐induced increases in the levels and activity of factors that determine the rate of protein synthesis. It is proposed that the establishment of a vicious circle, namely oncoproteins → increase in translation → oncoproteins, is a major biological mechanism that fuels neoplastic growth. The constitutively high rates of (...) protein synthesis and accumulation of proteins, including those necessary for DNA replication and mitosis, would drive cells to excessive proliferation. (shrink)

Neste artigo, analisamos postagens do Instagram da Bela Gil sobre alimentação saudável e comentários publicados pelos usuários. Partimos de uma observação sistemática do perfil entre janeiro de 2015 e julho de 2016 que nos permitiu identificar posições de sujeito da/à alimentação saudável presentes no processo de aconselhamento ali existente e nas formas de reconhecimento engendradas. Concluímos que as declarações produzidas por Bela Gil concebem a saúde, sobretudo, como responsabilidade individual e que sua autoridade é reconhecida mais pela identificação com sua (...) experiência e convicção pessoal do que com os conhecimentos científicos eventualmente mobilizados. (shrink)

The paper outlines a generalisation of the awareness-based epistemic semantics by Fagin and Halpern. Awareness is construed as a relation between agents and pieces of information instead of formulas. The main motive for introducing the generalisation is that it shows substructural logics to be a natural component of information-based epistemic logic: substructural logics can be seen as describing the logical behaviour of pieces of information. Substructural epistemic logics are introduced and some of their properties are discussed. In addition, extensions of (...) substructural epistemic logics invoking group-epistemic and dynamic modalities are sketched. (shrink)

In the article I consider various “Aristotelian” solutions to the problem of “material constitution.” First I provide a critical analysis of two solutions recently offered by Michael Rea and Kathrine Koslicki from a broadly Aristotelian perspective by arguing that both accounts of how a material whole could be constituted by its parts fall short from being satisfactory. Then I sketch how the problem in question could be solved in a more adequate way if based on Aristotelian metaphysics.

Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive psychology. The core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be represented as regions in similarity spaces. While it is generally acknowledged that not every region in such a space represents a natural concept, it is still an open question what distinguishes those regions that represent natural concepts from those that do not. The central claim of this paper is that natural concepts are represented by the (...) cells of an optimally designed similarity space. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with formal solutions to the lottery paradox on which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. It considers some recently proposed solutions of this type and presents an argument showing that these solutions are trivial in that they boil down to the claim that perfect probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The argument is then generalized, showing that a broad class of similar solutions faces the same problem. An argument against some formal solutions to the lottery paradox The (...) argument generalized Some variations Adding modalities Anticipated objections. (shrink)

Increasingly, the private sector is playing a greater role in supporting peace building efforts in conflict and post-conflict areas by providing critical expertise, know-how, and capital. However, reports of the corrupt practices of both governments and businesses have plagued international peace building efforts, deepening the distrust of stricken communities. Businesses are perceived as being selfish and indifferent to the impact their operations may have on the social and political development of local communities. Additionally, the corruption of local governments has been (...) cited as interfering with the creation of stability in conflict areas. Within this framework, multinational Public-Private Partnerships can exert two forms of influence: they can either exacerbate these problems, or they can become part of the solution. Without a relationship of trust among local businesses, government, and the private sector, peace building efforts will at best be mixed, and could possibly perpetuate violence in fragile states. Public and private interests are better served when Public-Private Partnerships are based upon collaboration and assist in establishing principles of good governance in conflict areas. This in turn can help build trust and regain the credibility of both sectors among local communities, which are essential in making Public— Private Partnerships more effective. (shrink)

This paper relates to a formal statement of the mechanisms that are thought minimally necessary to underpin consciousness. This is expressed in the form of axioms. We deem this to be useful if there is ever to be clarity in answering questions about whether this or the other organism is or is not conscious. As usual, axioms are ways of making formal statements of intuitive beliefs and looking, again formally, at the consequences of such beliefs. The use of this style (...) of exposition does not entail a claim to provide a mathematically rigorous formal deductive system. Conventional mathematical notation is used to achieve clarity, although this is elaborated with natural language in an attempt to reduce terseness. In our view, making the approach axiomatic is synonymous with building clear usable tests for consciousness and is therefore a central feature of the paper. The extended scope of this approach is to lay down some essential properties that should be considered when designing machines that could be said to be conscious. In the broader discussion about the nature of consciousness and its neurological mechanisms, it may seem to some that axiomatisation is premature and continues to beg many questions. However, the approach is meant to be open- ended so that others can build further axiomatic clarifications that address the very large number of questions which, in the search for a formal basis for consciousness, still remain to be answered. Of course, in discussions about consciousness many will also argue that the subject is not one that may ever be formally addressed by means of axioms. The view taken in this paper is 'let's try to do it and see how far it gets'. (shrink)

In this article we are offering a method of analysis and formalization of the Epicurean objection to the Skeptics from the Adversus mathematicos VIII, 337, 6-9. We emphasize the importance of this objection for understanding Sextus Empiricus’ response to it, continuously discussed by the historians of philosophy. The Epicureans argue that the Skeptics cannot criticize their proof, because when the Skeptics are criticizing their proof, they think something different from the original proof, so that the original proof remains untouchable by (...) any criticism. We explain in which sense the holistic assumption used by Sextus Empiricus and some philosophers before him can be used in the Epicurean objection to the Skeptics. In the final formalization we show that Epicureans’ argument can be interpreted as logically correct and deduced from sound premises. In the course of arguing for this thesis we are using the technical means of contemporary epistemic logic. (shrink)

In the paper I offer a brief overview of main problems in the contemporary metaphysics of time: debates on tensed and detensed theories of time and presentism-eternalism debate. I systematically expose the solutions from the point of view that the truth is grounded in reality and consider the main arguments for each position.