Neutralidad y escuela pública: a propósito de la educación para la ciudadanía

[Resumen] El artículo 27-3 de la Constitución reconoce el derecho de los padres a elegir la formación religiosa y moral que esté de acuerdo con sus propias convicciones. La Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de Educación, introdujo en la educación primaria y secundaria una nueva asignatura obligatoria denominada “Educación para la ciudadanía”. Su objeto es la formación en los valores democráticos y en los derechos humanos. Sin embargo, los Reales Decretos de desarrollo de la Ley incluyen en los programas de esta asignatura también contenidos morales, que pueden colisionar con el derecho de los padres reconocido en el artículo 27-3.[Abstract] The Spanish Constitution guarantees the right of parents to ensure that their children receive religious and moral instruction in accordance with their own convictions. The Organic Law 2/2006, of Education, introduced a new compulsory subject in the primary and secondary levels, “Education for citizenship”. Its aim is the instruction on democratic values and human rights, but the analysis of the legal framework shows that the contents of the subject include moral contents. Therefore, it might contravene the parents´ right recognized in the article 27-3 of the Constitution

La sentencia de California soobre matrimonios del mismo sexo. ¿Hito o conveniencia?

[Resumen] La sentencia del Tribunal Supremo de California declarando inconstitucional la ley que definía el matrimonio como la unión de un hombre y una mujer se basa en razo- namientos controvertidos. El análisis de sus fundamentos jurídicos permite valorar si estamos ante una modificación de una línea jurisprudencial consolidada en los Estados Unidos o ante una extralimitación de la competencia judicial en este conflicto.[Abstract] The California Supreme Court overturned an Statute defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. This court’s decision was controversial, because of its juridical reasonings. A deeper analysis of this case will allow to decide whether this opi- nion is a kind of judicial activism, or a departure from other courts opinion

Failure time and critical behaviour of fracture precursors in heterogeneous materials

The acoustic emission of fracture precursors, and the failure time of samples of heterogeneous materials (wood, fiberglass) are studied as a function of the load features and geometry. It is shown that in these materials the failure time is predicted with a good accuracy by a model of microcrack nucleation proposed by Pomeau. We find that the time interval $$ between events (precursors) and the energy $\varepsilon$ are power law distributed and that the exponents of these power laws depend on the load history and on the material. In contrast, the cumulated acoustic energy $E$ presents a critical divergency near the breaking time $\tau$ which is % E\sim \left( \frac{\tau -t}\tau \right) ^{-\gamma }. The positive exponent $$ is independent, within error bars, on all the experimental parameters.Comment: to be published on European Physical Journa

Unjamming a granular hopper by vibration

We present an experimental study of the outflow of a hopper continuously vibrated by a piezoelectric device. Outpouring of grains can be achieved for apertures much below the usual jamming limit observed for non vibrated hoppers. Granular flow persists down to the physical limit of one grain diameter, a limit reached for a finite vibration amplitude. For the smaller orifices, we observe an intermittent regime characterized by alternated periods of flow and blockage. Vibrations do not significantly modify the flow rates both in the continuous and the intermittent regime. The analysis of the statistical features of the flowing regime shows that the flow time significantly increases with the vibration amplitude. However, at low vibration amplitude and small orifice sizes, the jamming time distribution displays an anomalous statistics