El (in)esperado encuentro entre la izquierda y lo postmoderno: hacia una banalización de la política [Ressenya]

Reseña del libro de Richard Rorty "Forjar nuestro país. El pensamiento de izquierdas en los Estados Unidos del siglo XX" Paidós, Barcelona, 1999, 172 pp

Notas sobre dominación y temporalidad en el contexto postmoderno a propósito de la distopía

Este artículo se inscribe en el cruce de la crítica de la cultura, la filosofía política y el pensamiento utópico, y se propone tres objetivos muy concretos: 1º) Mostrar cómo el ejercicio de la dominación implica el control de la temporalidad. 2º) Dar a conocer el diagnóstico efectuado al respecto por la distopía (o utopía negativa, o utopía satírica), subgénero de la ciencia ficción especializado en esbozar representaciones de sistemas políticos explícita o implícitamente totalitarios sitos en el futuro. 3º) Valorar los aciertos y errores de dicho diagnóstico contrastándolo con las transformaciones recientes de la temporalidad ligadas a las formas postmodernas de dominación.The topic of this paper pertains to the intersection of culturecriticism, political philosophy and utopian thought, and has three main aims: 1) to show how domination involves control of temporality, 2) to introduce the dystopian – also negative utopian or satiric utopian – diagnosis of this connection, as it is found in the science fiction subgenre, where future political systems, implicitly or explicitly totalitarian, are portrayed, and 3) to evaluate the insights and shortcomings of this diagnosis by means of a comparison with recent transformations of temporality in postmodern versions of domination

“Al infierno los cuerpos”: el transhumanismo y el giro postmoderno de la utopía

Se ha convertido en habitual afirmar que en la postmodernidad la utopía deja de ser viable. No es cierto. La postmodernidad produce sus propias utopías. Al examen del transhumanismo, quizás la más representativa de ellas, se presta este artículo. Objeto rector de estudio, las vicisitudes del cuerpo en la utopía citada.It has turned into a common fact to state that utopia in postmodernity is no longer feasible. It’s no true. Postmodernity produces it’s own utopies. This article focouses in the study of transhumanism, wich is probably the most representative among them. The guiding object of research will be the vicissitudes of the body in the quoted utopia

Customer-oriented risk assessment in Network Utilities

For companies that distribute services such as telecommunications, water, energy, gas, etc., quality perceived by the customers has a strong impact on the fulfillment of financial goals, positively increasing the demand and negatively increasing the risk of customer churn (loss of customers). Failures by these companies may cause customer affection in a massive way, augmenting the intention to leave the company. Therefore, maintenance performance and specifically service reliability has a strong influence on financial goals. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the contribution of the maintenance department in economic terms, based on service unreliability by network failures. The developed methodology aims to provide an analysis of failures to facilitate decision making about maintenance (preventive/predictive and corrective) costs versus negative impacts in end-customer invoicing based on the probability of losing customers. Survival analysis of recurrent failures with the General Renewal Process distribution is used for this novel purpose with the intention to be applied as a standard procedure to calculate the expected maintenance financial impact, for a given period of time. Also, geographical areas of coverage are distinguished, enabling the comparison of different technical or management alternatives. Two case studies in a telecommunications services company are presented in order to illustrate the applicability of the methodology