Imperfect forgiveness The pragmaticality, prudentiality and ethicality of human forgiveness

XXII Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2017)The purpose of this paper is to approach the act and process of forgiveness as an imperfect human ability for peace, exploring the pragmaticality, prudentiality and ethicality of human forgiveness before moral wrongs. To conduct my research, firstly I will assume the epistemological turn that has been developed at the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace from Universitat Jaume I. This epistemological turn means we no longer work with a negative definition of peace but a positive one, that is, we do not define peace as the absence of violence, but as the presence of social justice. Secondly, I will establish a dialogue between the Philosophy for Peace approach and Christian theology as a key element for grasping a deeper understanding of the act and process of forgiveness, since this imperfect human ability of forgiveness has been a core theme of the Christian religion during the last two thousand years. It is argued that imperfect human forgiveness is pragmatically, prudentially and ethically adequate when we need to address different moral wrongs in different contexts of violence. Therefore, fostering forgiveness in those settings may help us to build more peaceful societies, as in the same way that we have learnt to hurt each other, we can learn to forgive one anothe

(No)competition in the Spanish retailing gasoline market: a variance filter approach

Various methodologies in economic literature have been used to analyse the international hydrocarbon retail sector. Nevertheless at a Spanish level these studies are much more recent and most conclude that generally there is no effective competition present in this market, regardless of the approach used. In this paper, in order to analyse the price levels in the Spanish petrol market, our starting hypothesis is that in uncompetitive markets the prices are higher and the standard deviation is lower. We use weekly retail petrol price data from the ten biggest Spanish cities, and apply Markov chains to fill the missing values for petrol 95 and diesel, and we also employ a variance filter. We conclude that this market demonstrates reduced price dispersion, regardless of brand or city.Competition, Petrol, Variance filter analysis, Gibbs sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo.

Deep Neural Networks for the Recognition and Classification of Heart Murmurs Using Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors

Auscultation is one of the most used techniques for detecting cardiovascular diseases, which is one of the main causes of death in the world. Heart murmurs are the most common abnormal finding when a patient visits the physician for auscultation. These heart sounds can either be innocent, which are harmless, or abnormal, which may be a sign of a more serious heart condition. However, the accuracy rate of primary care physicians and expert cardiologists when auscultating is not good enough to avoid most of both type-I (healthy patients are sent for echocardiogram) and type-II (pathological patients are sent home without medication or treatment) errors made. In this paper, the authors present a novel convolutional neural network based tool for classifying between healthy people and pathological patients using a neuromorphic auditory sensor for FPGA that is able to decompose the audio into frequency bands in real time. For this purpose, different networks have been trained with the heart murmur information contained in heart sound recordings obtained from nine different heart sound databases sourced from multiple research groups. These samples are segmented and preprocessed using the neuromorphic auditory sensor to decompose their audio information into frequency bands and, after that, sonogram images with the same size are generated. These images have been used to train and test different convolutional neural network architectures. The best results have been obtained with a modified version of the AlexNet model, achieving 97% accuracy (specificity: 95.12%, sensitivity: 93.20%, PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2016 score: 0.9416). This tool could aid cardiologists and primary care physicians in the auscultation process, improving the decision making task and reducing type-I and type-II errors.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

CCharPPI web server: computational characterization of protein–protein interactions from structure

The atomic structures of protein–protein interactions are central to understanding their role in biological systems, and a wide variety of biophysical functions and potentials have been developed for their characterization and the construction of predictive models. These tools are scattered across a multitude of stand-alone programs, and are often available only as model parameters requiring reimplementation. This acts as a significant barrier to their widespread adoption. CCharPPI integrates many of these tools into a single web server. It calculates up to 108 parameters, including models of electrostatics, desolvation and hydrogen bonding, as well as interface packing and complementarity scores, empirical potentials at various resolutions, docking potentials and composite scoring functions.The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013) under REA grant agreement PIEF-GA-2012-327899 and grant BIO2013-48213-R from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

How to automate a kinematic mount using a 3D printed Arduino-based system

We demonstrate a simple, flexible and cost-effective system to automatize most of the kinematic mounts available nowadays on the market. It combines 3D printed components, an Arduino board, stepper motors, and simple electronics. The system developed can control independently and simultaneously up to ten stepper motors using commands sent through the serial port, and it is suitable for applications where optical realignment using flat mirrors is required on a periodic basis.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

NAVIS: Neuromorphic Auditory VISualizer Tool

This software presents diverse utilities to perform the first post-processing layer taking the neuromorphic auditory sensors (NAS) information. The used NAS implements in FPGA a cascade filters architecture, imitating the behavior of the basilar membrane and inner hair cells and working with the sound information decomposed into its frequency components as spike streams. The well-known neuromorphic hardware interface Address-Event-Representation (AER) is used to propagate auditory information out of the NAS, emulating the auditory vestibular nerve. Using the information packetized into aedat files, which are generated through the jAER software plus an AER to USB computer interface, NAVIS implements a set of graphs that allows to represent the auditory information as cochleograms, histograms, sonograms, etc. It can also split the auditory information into different sets depending on the activity level of the spike streams. The main contribution of this software tool is that it allows complex audio post-processing treatments and representations, which is a novelty for spike-based systems in the neuromorphic community and it will help neuromorphic engineers to build sets for training spiking neural networks (SNN).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-0

Macroeconomic and policy uncertainty and Exchange rate risk Premium

The goal of this paper is to identify the main determinants of the risk premium in some European currency markets just before the EMU. To that extent, we start from Lucas (1982) exchange rate model and derive an analytical expression for the forward premium. This expression includes money and production variables and it is quite standard, except for the inclusion of macroeconomic policy risk. Under some standard assumptions, this formula simplifies substantially and becomes amenable to regression analysis. Then, using standard measures of money and production, as well as interest rate swap spreads as indicators of macroeconomic policy risk, the theoretical expression is estimated. We provide evidence suggesting that it is policy uncertainty, much more than fundamental macroeconomic uncertainty, which determined risk premium over the convergence process to the euro. Whether these results can be extended to similar experiences for other currency unions remains open for future research.Risk premium, Peso Problem, Macroeconomic policy risk, European monetary System.

"Debating as a classroom tool for adapting learning outcomes to the European higher education area"

The creation of the European Higher Education Area has meant a number of significant changes to the educational structures of the university community. In particular, the new system of European credits has generated the need for innovation in the design of curricula and teaching methods. In this paper, we propose debating as a classroom tool that can help fulfill these objectives by promoting an active student role in learning. To demonstrate the potential of this tool, a classroom experiment was conducted in a bachelor’s degree course in Industrial Economics (Regulation and Competition), involving a case study in competition policy and incorporating the techniques of a conventional debate (presentation of standpoints, turns, right to reply and summing up). The experiment yielded gains in student attainment and positive assessments of the subject. In conclusion, the incorporation of debating activities helps students to acquire the skills, be they general or specific, required to graduate successfully in Economics.European Higher Education Area; Debating; Industrial Organization; Academic Success; European Credit Transfer System. JEL classification:A23, B4, I2.