Novos desafios bioéticos em neurociência

Modern developments in the neurosciences raise a number of ethical issues, not always discussed in a dispassionate way. The most pressing interest lies in the fact that ‘neuroethics’ condenses an interdisciplinary scientific-philosophical reflection. Encouraged by neuroethics, new data on brain function promote a review of neuroethical “actus humanus”, and a new vision about anthropological dualism. One of the main implications of contemporary advances in neuroscience is the awareness that traditional philosophical questions are not able to give a good foundation for valid moral discernment. Moreover, neuroethics has a magic charm not just for ethical deliberation, but the cases that fall within its jurisdiction include some of the most controversial and strange issues, such as the question of dualism. Since Neuroethics, as a “neuroscience of ethics”, clarifies the constraints of human action, we can easily understand that the more we know about these conditioning factors the more we are able to affirm and justify the limits of ethics in neuroscientific knowledge. Faced with this dichotomy challenges, how do we justify ethics in the neurosciences? The link that we propose in the article is to make a synthesis of the “brain of the ethics” and the “ethics of the brain”.Os desenvolvimentos modernos das neurociências levantam um número de questões éticas nem sempre discutidas de um modo imparcial. O interesse mais urgente reside no fato de a ‘neuroética’ condensar uma reflexão científica e filosófica interdisciplinar. Estimulados pela neuroética, novos dados sobre a função cerebral promovem uma revisão do “actus humanus” neuroético e traz uma nova visão sobre o dualismo antropológico. Uma das implicações principais dos avanços contemporâneos da neurociência é a consciência de que as questões filosóficas tradicionais não são capazes de fornecer um bom fundamento ao discernimento moral válido. Além disso, não só a neuroética tem um encanto mágico para a deliberação ética como os casos que estão incluídos em sua jurisdição envolvem algumas questões mais controversas e estranhas, como a questão do dualismo. Como a Neuroética, na qualidade de “neurociência da ética”, esclarece as restrições da ação humana, podemos facilmente entender que quanto mais sabemos sobre esses fatores condicionantes, tanto mais capazes somos de afirmar e justificar os limites da ética no conhecimento neurocientífico. Diante do desafio dessa dicotomia, como justificamos a ética nas neurociências? A conexão que propomos no artigo é fazer uma síntese entre o “cérebro da ética” e a “ética do cérebro”.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Exhibition handlist

In preparing for Imprints and Impressions, we ran across many interesting words that have fallen out of the general lexicon. With this booklet, we have brought one back: handlist. Dean Kathleen Webb ran across it in a 1944 booklet from the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Though the word no longer appears in most new dictionaries, it’s still in the Oxford English Dictionary: A list of a particular type or category of things, presented in a readily consultable form; esp. a list of the books or manuscripts in a particular place, on a particular subject, etc.; a catalogue. It’s a good word … and that’s a terrible thing to waste.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rosebk_supplemental/1003/thumbnail.jp

A.I., Scientific Discovery, and Realism

none1Epistemologists have debated at length whether scientific discovery is a rational and logical process. If it is, according to the Artificial Intelligence hypothesis, it should be possible to write computer programs able to discover laws or theories; and if such programs were written, this would definitely prove the existence of a logic of discovery. This far, however, all attempts in this direction have been unsuccessful: the programs written by Herbert Simon’s group, indeed, infer famous laws of physics and chemistry; but having found no new law, they cannot properly be considered discovery machines. The programs written in the “Turing tradition”, instead, produced new and useful empirical generalization, but no theoretical discovery, thus failing to prove the logical character of the most significant kind of discoveries. A new cognitivist and connectionist approach by Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard, looks more promising. They picture scientific discovery as the construction of mental models of natural systems through analogical and abductive inferences, activated and constrained by an undetermined number of inputs and feedbacks from the environment. The connectionist architecture of mind accounts for the open-ended and intrinsically complex character which makes scientific discovery non programmable and unpredictable. At the same time, the assumption that by analogy and induction we can achieve faithful representations of nature explains the rationality and success of theorization. Reflection on this meta-research program, therefore, shows that a scientific-realist interpretation of scientific practice is required to account for both the rationality of discovery processes and the failure of past attempts to mechanize them. In fact, it might be argued that the Baconian and Millian belief in a logic of discovery was abandoned by logical positivists precisely because they lacked on the one hand a fully realist and cognitivist approach, and on the other hand a sufficiently wide conception of “logic”: they couldn’t foresee procedures which are rule-governed but complex and holistic because influenced but numberless factors escaping human control.anche al sito: http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0924-6495/contentsopenAlai, MarioAlai, Mari

Exhibition catalogue — Imprints and Impressions: Milestones in Human Progress

Exhibition catalogue for Imprints and Impressions: Milestones in Human Progress — Highlights from the Rose Rare Book Collection. Includes an introduction by Kathleen M. Webb, dean of University Libraries; essays about the impact of the exhibition\u27s books on modern inquiry, the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences; and photographs of the works in the exhibit.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rosebk_supplemental/1000/thumbnail.jp

Online learning of physics during a pandemic: A report from an academic experience in Italy

The arrival of the Sars-Cov II has opened a new window on teaching physics in academia. Frontal lectures have left space for online teaching, teachers have been faced with a new way of spreading knowledge, adapting contents and modalities of their courses. Students have faced up with a new way of learning physics, which relies on free access to materials and their informatics knowledge. We decided to investigate how online didactics has influenced students’ assessments, motivation, and satisfaction in learning physics during the pandemic in 2020. The research has involved bachelor (n = 53) and master (n = 27) students of the Physics Department at the University of Cagliari (N = 80, 47 male; 33 female). The MANOVA supported significant mean differences about gender and university level with higher values for girls and master students in almost all variables investigated. The path analysis showed that student-student, student-teacher interaction, and the organization of the courses significantly influenced satisfaction and motivation in learning physics. The results of this study can be used to improve the standards of teaching in physics at the University of Cagliar

Hierarchical categorisation of tags for delicious

In the scenario of social bookmarking, a user browsing the Web bookmarks web pages and assigns free-text labels (i.e., tags) to them according to their personal preferences. In this technical report, we approach one of the practical aspects when it comes to represent users' interests from their tagging activity, namely the categorization of tags into high-level categories of interest. The reason is that the representation of user profiles on the basis of the myriad of tags available on the Web is certainly unfeasible from various practical perspectives; mainly concerning the unavailability of data to reliably, accurately measure interests across such fine-grained categorisation, and, should the data be available, its overwhelming computational intractability. Motivated by this, our study presents the results of a categorization process whereby a collection of tags posted at Delicious #http://delicious.com# are classified into 200 subcategories of interest.Preprin

Hierarchical categorisation of web tags for Delicious

In the scenario of social bookmarking, a user browsing the Web bookmarks web pages and assigns free-text labels (i.e., tags) to them according to their personal preferences. The benefits of social tagging are clear – tags enhance Web content browsing and search. However, since these tags may be publicly available to any Internet user, a privacy attacker may collect this information and extract an accurate snapshot of users’ interests or user profiles, containing sensitive information, such as health-related information, political preferences, salary or religion. In order to hinder attackers in their efforts to profile users, this report focuses on the practical aspects of capturing user interests from their tagging activity. More accurately, we study how to categorise a collection of tags posted by users in one of the most popular bookmarking services, Delicious (http://delicious.com).Preprin