Problems and choices -- Who shall live? -- The physician : the captain of the team -- The hospital : the house of hope -- Drugs : the key to modern medicine -- Paying for medical care.

El propósito de esta investigación es hacer una relectura histórico-crítica de la Ética de la Liberación como ética de la vida. Este planteamiento se hace desde la memoria política crítica que permitirá ver la influencia que ella ha tenido con otras éticas que hoy pueden agruparse en torno al concepto de convivencia: la ética intercultural, la ética ecológica, la ética de la economía solidaria, la ética de una ciencia construida socialmente y de una tecnología al servicio de las personas, la (...) ética educativa como expresión de apertura y diálogo y no como adoctrinamiento, la ética religiosa separada de todo fanatismo, la ética civil más allá de todo militarismo, la ética del género más allá de toda exclusión. Lo que implica la necesidad de consolidar una ética de la convivencia, como eje central de la cultura y de la vida de los habitantes de América Latina que no es sólo necesario estudiar sino practicar. (shrink)

Muscle synergy analysis via surface electromyography is useful to study muscle coordination in motor learning, clinical diagnosis, and neurorehabilitation. However, current methods to extract muscle synergies in the upper limb suffer from two major issues. First, the necessary normalization of EMG signals is performed via maximum voluntary contraction, which requires maximal isometric force production in each muscle. However, some individuals with motor impairments have difficulties producing maximal effort in the MVC task. In addition, the MVC is known to be highly (...) unreliable, with widely different forces produced in repeated measures. Second, synergy extraction in the upper limb is typically performed with a multidirection reaching task. However, some participants with motor impairments cannot perform this task because it requires precise motor control. In this study, we proposed a new isometric rotating task that does not require precise motor control or large forces. In this task, participants maintain a cursor controlled by the arm end-point force on a target that rotates at a constant angular velocity at a designated force level. To relax constraints on motor control precision, the target is widened and blurred. To obtain a reference EMG value for normalization without requiring maximal effort, we estimated a linear relationship between joint torques and muscle activations. We assessed the reliability of joint torque normalization and synergy extraction in the rotating task in young neurotypical individuals. Compared with normalization with MVC, joint torque normalization allowed reliable EMG normalization at low force levels. In addition, the extraction of synergies was as reliable and more stable than with the multidirection reaching task. The proposed rotating task can, therefore, be used in future motor learning, clinical diagnosis, and neurorehabilitation studies. (shrink)

El artículo enfoca los problemas de convivencia en las ciudades latinoamericanas, marcadas por procesos de urbanización sin articulación, regidos por lógicas de poder y caracterizados por la falta de equilibrio y equidad. Se exploran las posibilidades de pasar de territorios de supervivencia, con relaciones sociales de dominio y violencia, a espacios de comunicación y a lugares de sentido, a través de prácticas, políticas y estrategias de convivencia. The article focuses on the problems of living in Latin American cities, marked by (...) urbanization processes without articulation, governed by logics of power and characterized by a lack of balance and fairness. It explores the possibilities to move from territories of survival, with social relationships of domination and violence, to communicative spaces and places of meaning through practices, policies and strategies of coexistence. (shrink)

For courses in Earth Science, Physical Geology, Physical Geography, Earth System Science and Environmental Philosophy. This collection of essays by scholars in both the earth sciences and philosophy discusses the connections between the earth sciences and contemporary culture, and the changing role of the earth sciences in society.

El artículo enfoca los problemas de convivencia en las ciudades latinoamericanas, marcadas por procesos de urbanización sin articulación, regidos por lógicas de poder y caracterizados por la falta de equilibrio y equidad. Se exploran las posibilidades de pasar de territorios de supervivencia, con relaciones sociales de dominio y violencia, a espacios de comunicación y a lugares de sentido, a través de prácticas, políticas y estrategias de convivencia.The article focuses on the problems of living in Latin American cities, marked by urbanization (...) processes without articulation, governed by logics of power and characterized by a lack of balance and fairness. It explores the possibilities to move from territories of survival, with social relationships of domination and violence, to communicative spaces and places of meaning through practices, policies and strategies of coexistence. (shrink)

The fourth volume in the Criminalization series, this volume explores some of the most general principles and theories of criminalization. It includes not only philosophical work, but also historical, legal, and sociological investigations into criminalization, clarifying the state of the discipline today.

The problem for many troubled youths seeking help within a Christian context is that their need for meaningful connections and spiritual growth is attached to relationships with their significant others. When needs of attachment are not adequately met due to the effect of an insecure attachment working model in a relationship with God, the teen may end up leaving the faith community seeking a new caregiver or regress into spiritual struggles, depression, anxiety, self-doubt and other negative emotions. This paper responds (...) to the issues associated with youth attachment behaviour towards God using a caregiving theology that draws on the 'power of two' through incarnational creativity and pneumatological ecclesiology. This proposed theology first supplements the work of the pastoral counsellor to create a transformative container through which young people, already within a redemptive Christian community, can grow spiritually and deepen their relationship with God. Secondly, pastoral juxtaposition targeting the spiritual needs of hurting youths serves to create a magnet space within the church community that models incarnational love, pastoral care and support for young people by entering their world order to reframe their personal stories of grief, abandonment and insecurity through creative means. Finally, we theologise that pastoral juxtaposition also integrates the power of the Holy Spirit, as the ultimate caregiver in times of conflict, into each youth's unique journey of faith and healing. Implications of this pastoral theology are discussed and applied to everyday life. (shrink)

Despite a growing literature on environmental inaction, it remains poorly understood. This article examines much of this literature including environmental ethics, policy studies, disaster theory, and psychology. Among the many existing explanations, we examine shifting values, rational incentives, and psychological barriers to action. Ultimately, we show how most of these explanations rely on simplistic assumptions about subjectivity. To address this, we apply the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to show how an understanding of habit informed by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology reveals the deeper (...) conditions of both action and inaction. (shrink)

Loneliness has been reframed from a ‘social problem of old age’ into a major public health problem. This transformation has been generated by findings from observational studies of a relationship between loneliness and a range of negative health outcomes including dementia. From a public health perspective, key to evaluating the relationship between loneliness and dementia is examining how studies define and measure loneliness, the exposure variable, and dementia the outcome. If we are not consistently measuring these then building a body (...) of evidence for the negative health outcomes of loneliness is problematic. Three key criteria had to meet for studies to be included in our analysis. To test the proposition that loneliness is a cause of dementia we only included longitudinal studies. For inclusion studies had to measure loneliness at baseline, have samples free of dementia and assess dementia at follow up. We identified 11 papers published between 2000 and 2018 that meet these criteria. These studies included seven different countries and only one was specifically focused upon dementia: all other studies were cohort studies focused upon ageing and health and wellbeing. There was extensive heterogeneity in how studies measured loneliness and dementia and in the use of co-variates. Loneliness was measured by either self-rating scales or scales. Dementia was assessed by clinical tests, diagnostic/screening tools, cognitive function tests, and self-reported doctor diagnosis. Substantial variation in loneliness prevalence and dementia incidence. Six studies did not report a statistically significant relationship between loneliness and dementia. Significant excess risk of dementia among those who were lonely ranged from 15% to 64%. None of these studies are directly comparable as four different loneliness and dementia measures were used. We suggest that the evidence to support a relationship between loneliness and dementia is inconclusive largely because of methodological limitations of existing studies. If we wish to develop this evidence base, then using a consistent set of loneliness and dementia outcome measures in major longitudinal studies would be of benefit. (shrink)

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order.

Over-flexibility in the definition of Friston blankets obscures a key distinction between observational and interventional inference. The latter requires cognizers form not just a causal representation of the world but also of their own boundary and relationship with it, in order to diagnose the consequences of their actions. We suggest this locates the blanket in the eye of the beholder.

Establishing the basic knowledge, methodology, and technology for a framework for the continuous decoding of hand/arm movement intention was the aim of the ERC-funded project “Feel Your Reach”. In this work, we review the studies and methods we performed and implemented in the last 6 years, which build the basis for enabling severely paralyzed people to non-invasively control a robotic arm in real-time from electroencephalogram. In detail, we investigated goal-directed movement detection, decoding of executed and attempted movement trajectories, grasping correlates, (...) error processing, and kinesthetic feedback. Although we have tested some of our approaches already with the target populations, we still need to transfer the “Feel Your Reach” framework to people with cervical spinal cord injury and evaluate the decoders’ performance while participants attempt to perform upper-limb movements. While on the one hand, we made major progress towards this ambitious goal, we also critically discuss current limitations. (shrink)

Fall detection is a challenging task that has received the attention of the research community in the recent years. This study focuses on FD using data gathered from wearable devices with tri-axial accelerometers, developing a solution centered in elderly people living autonomously. This research includes three different ways to improve a FD method: an analysis of the event detection stage, comparing several alternatives, an evaluation of features to extract for each detected event and an appraisal of up to 6 different (...) clustering scenarios to split the samples in subsets that might enhance the classification. For each clustering scenario, a specific classification stage is defined. The experimentation includes publicly available simulated fall data sets. Results show the guidelines for defining a more robust and efficient FD method for on-wrist 3DACC wearable devices. (shrink)