The Right to Informed Consent from Georg Jellinek' Status Theory

Jellinek has defined “status” as the relationship between the State and the individual that qualifies to the last one. His theory distinguishes four types: passive or subiectionis, negative or libertatis, positive or civitatis and active or status of active citizenship. Besides controversies about its validity, it is aimed here to relate Jellinek’s contribution to the conception of informed consent developed by the Spanish Constitutional Court, as a duty to refrain for healthcare professionals (STC 37/2011, among others), i.e. a denial of their power in Hohfeldian words, or a defence right. This analysis focuses on negative and positive statuses, since both are suitable for the structure of informed consent. The issue is about the position of defence rights within Jellinek’s theory and whether it is possible to use it to conceptualize contemporary fundamental rights

The nation through nature: an image analysis of the peronist government

El hombre desarrolla su vida en vinculación con su hábitat. Más aun, las ideas acerca de la naturaleza desempeñaron parte principal y hasta integrante de los procesos históricos así como su interpretación. En el presente trabajo se propone un análisis de imágenes en tanto su relevancia en la construcción de la idea de la “Nueva Argentina” y como parte del discurso del gobierno peronista (1946 - 1955). Se plantea este trabajo desde perspectivas de la historia ambiental y del análisis discursivo, desde las cuales se observará y analizará la interrelación entre el ciudadano y el territorio, la cultura y el Estado que conforman la idea de Nación.Human beings develop their lives in connection with their habitat.Furthermore, ideas about nature have played an important participating role in the historical processes as well as in their interpretation. This work proposal is to analyse images according to their relevance in the construction of the idea of a "New Argentina" and as a part of the Peronist government speech (1946-1955). This work is based on environmental history and discourse analysis perspectives, from which the interrelation between citizen and territory, the culture and the State which form the idea of Nation will be observed and analysed.Fil: Carreras Doallo, Ximena Agustina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales. Centro de Estudios de la Argentina Rural; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Long-term Memories Bias Sensitivity and Target Selection in Complex Scenes

In everyday situations, we often rely on our memories to find what we are looking for in our cluttered environment. Recently, we developed a new experimental paradigm to investigate how long-term memory (LTM) can guide attention and showed how the pre-exposure to a complex scene in which a target location had been learned facilitated the detection of the transient appearance of the target at the remembered location [Summerfield, J. J., Rao, A., Garside, N., & Nobre, A. C. Biasing perception by spatial long-term memory. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 14952–14960, 2011; Summerfield, J. J., Lepsien, J., Gitelman, D. R., Mesulam, M. M., & Nobre, A. C. Orienting attention based on long-term memory experience. Neuron, 49, 905–916, 2006]. This study extends these findings by investigating whether and how LTM can enhance perceptual sensitivity to identify targets occurring within their complex scene context. Behavioral measures showed superior perceptual sensitivity (d′) for targets located in remembered spatial contexts. We used the N2pc ERP to test whether LTM modulated the process of selecting the target from its scene context. Surprisingly, in contrast to effects of visual spatial cues or implicit contextual cueing, LTM for target locations significantly attenuated the N2pc potential. We propose that the mechanism by which these explicitly available LTMs facilitate perceptual identification of targets may differ from mechanisms triggered by other types of top–down sources of information

F-MPJ: scalable Java message-passing communications on parallel systems

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal of Supercomputing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-009-0270-0[Abstract] This paper presents F-MPJ (Fast MPJ), a scalable and efficient Message-Passing in Java (MPJ) communication middleware for parallel computing. The increasing interest in Java as the programming language of the multi-core era demands scalable performance on hybrid architectures (with both shared and distributed memory spaces). However, current Java communication middleware lacks efficient communication support. F-MPJ boosts this situation by: (1) providing efficient non-blocking communication, which allows communication overlapping and thus scalable performance; (2) taking advantage of shared memory systems and high-performance networks through the use of our high-performance Java sockets implementation (named JFS, Java Fast Sockets); (3) avoiding the use of communication buffers; and (4) optimizing MPJ collective primitives. Thus, F-MPJ significantly improves the scalability of current MPJ implementations. A performance evaluation on an InfiniBand multi-core cluster has shown that F-MPJ communication primitives outperform representative MPJ libraries up to 60 times. Furthermore, the use of F-MPJ in communication-intensive MPJ codes has increased their performance up to seven times.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2004-07797-C02Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2007-67537-C03-2Xunta de Galicia; PGIDIT06PXIB105228P

Techniques for Autotuning Algorithms on Heterogenous Platforms

Proceedings of the First PhD Symposium on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS PhD 2016) Timisoara, Romania. February 8-11, 2016.Current GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) can obtain high computational performance in scientific applications. Nevertheless, programmers have to use suitable parallel algorithms for these architectures and have to consider optimization techniques in the implementation in order to achieve that performance. This thesis is focused on designing and implementing parallel prefix algorithms into GPU architectures with little effort. For that, we have developed a very optimized library called BPLG (Tuning Butterfly Processing Library for GPUs) and based on a set of building blocks that enable to easily design well-known algorithms such as FFT, tridiagonal systems solvers, scan operator, sorting or signal processing. This library is designed under a tuning methodology based on two-stages indentified as GPU resource analysis and operator string manipulation. Specifically, this strategy is focused on a set of parallel prefix algorithms that can be represented according to a set of common permutations of the digits of each of its element indices [4], denoted as Index-Digit (ID) algorithms. So far, the proposed methodology has obtained very good results with respect to state-of-art libraries, as CUFFT, CUSPARSE, CUDPP or ModernGPU.European Cooperation in Science and Technology. COS

O consentimento informado como dereito fundamental: inmunidade ou autodeterminación?

[RESUMO] A xurisprudencia constitucional española (STC 37/2011, de 28 de marzo, entre outras) ten establecido como fundamento do consentimento informado o dereito á integridade física e moral (art. 15 CE). O Tribunal Constitucional configura o consentimento informado como un deber de abstención do profesional sanitario, é dicir, como unha negación da competencia do profesional sanitario na terminoloxía de Hohfeld. Así pois, o consentimento informado queda conformado como un dereito negativo ou de defensa, polo que concibilo como liberdade xurídica ou facultade de autodeterminación positiva esixiría a revisión do seu fundamento constitucional. O presente artigo pretende precisamente revisar a natureza iusfundamental do consentimento informado a partir da obra de W. N. Hohfeld e Robert Alexy[ABSTRACT]The Spanish Constitutional Court (STC 37/2011, 28th March, among others) had established the right to physical and moral integrity as constitutional foundation for informed consent (article 15 CE). Informed consent had been shaped by the Spanish Constitutional Court as an inhibition duty for physicians, that is to say, the denial of physician’s competence in Hohfeld’s wording. Since informed consent is defined as a negative or defensive right, understanding it as a legal freedom or a right to self–determination would require a review of its constitutional foundations. This paper aims just to review the legal basis of informed consent by means of W. N. Hohfeld’s and Robert Alexy’s wor

XARK: an extensible framework for automatic recognition of computational kernels

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1391956.1391959[Abstract] The recognition of program constructs that are frequently used by software developers is a powerful mechanism for optimizing and parallelizing compilers to improve the performance of the object code. The development of techniques for automatic recognition of computational kernels such as inductions, reductions and array recurrences has been an intensive research area in the scope of compiler technology during the 90's. This article presents a new compiler framework that, unlike previous techniques that focus on specific and isolated kernels, recognizes a comprehensive collection of computational kernels that appear frequently in full-scale real applications. The XARK compiler operates on top of the Gated Single Assignment (GSA) form of a high-level intermediate representation (IR) of the source code. Recognition is carried out through a demand-driven analysis of this high-level IR at two different levels. First, the dependences between the statements that compose the strongly connected components (SCCs) of the data-dependence graph of the GSA form are analyzed. As a result of this intra-SCC analysis, the computational kernels corresponding to the execution of the statements of the SCCs are recognized. Second, the dependences between statements of different SCCs are examined in order to recognize more complex kernels that result from combining simpler kernels in the same code. Overall, the XARK compiler builds a hierarchical representation of the source code as kernels and dependence relationships between those kernels. This article describes in detail the collection of computational kernels recognized by the XARK compiler. Besides, the internals of the recognition algorithms are presented. The design of the algorithms enables to extend the recognition capabilities of XARK to cope with new kernels, and provides an advanced symbolic analysis framework to run other compiler techniques on demand. Finally, extensive experiments showing the effectiveness of XARK for a collection of benchmarks from different application domains are presented. In particular, the SparsKit-II library for the manipulation of sparse matrices, the Perfect benchmarks, the SPEC CPU2000 collection and the PLTMG package for solving elliptic partial differential equations are analyzed in detail.Ministeiro de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2004-07797-C02Ministeiro de Educación y Ciencia; TIN2007-67537-C03Xunta de Galicia; PGIDIT05PXIC10504PNXunta de Galicia; PGIDIT06PXIB105228P

Sparse Householder QR factorization on a mesh

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Proceedings of 4th Euromicro Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EMPDP.1996.500566.[Abstract] We analyze the parallelization of QR factorization by means of Householder transformations. This parallelization is carried out on a machine with a mesh topology (a 2-D torus to be more precise). We use a cyclic distribution of the elements of the sparse matrix M we want to decompose over the processors. Each processor represents the nonzero elements of its part of the matrix by a one-dimensional doubly linked list data structure. Then, we describe the different procedures that constitute the parallel algorithm. As an application of QR factorization, we concentrate on the least squares problem and finally we present an evaluation of the efficiency of this algorithm for a set of test matrices from the Harwell-Boeing sparse matrix collection

Innovación docente en el EEES de cara a la práctica profesional a través del aprendizaje basado en proyectos

En este artículo se describe nuestra experiencia en la docencia de Arquitectura e Ingeniería de Computadores en el Máster en Informática de la Universidade da Coruña, en la cual concurrían las circunstancias de titulación EEES de nueva implantación y un número reducido de alumnos. La orientación profesionalizante del máster nos motivó a explorar en innovación docente de cara a la práctica profesional, fundamentalmente a través de metologías de aprendizaje basado en proyectos (project-based learning) combinado con las acciones de: (1) sustitución de docencia teórica por trabajos académicamente dirigidos; (2) impartición de seminarios profesionales; (3) uso de técnicas de role playing; y (4) desarrollo de habilidades comunicativas. La valoración global es que esta metodología y sus acciones asociadas han resultado tremendamente positivas en la docencia de la materia.Peer Reviewe