Marcos Gonzalez

Disregard of gender and of women’s contributions in the higher education curriculum is still a widespread phenomenon. Building on feminist institutionalism, this article explores the forms and types of resistance that efforts to engender the higher education curriculum must contend with and discusses the ways in which resistance to curricular reform is entrenched in a web of both gender-specific and apparently gender-neutral academic informal rules. In doing so, the authors use empirical evidence collected by an action-research project undertaken at a faculty of political and social sciences in a Catalan public university. The Spanish case is intriguing because mainstreaming gender in higher education has been prescribed by various national and regional laws that are nonetheless poorly implemented. The article also reflects on the positive feedback loop action-research projects can facilitate within gendered institutions such as universities and pinpoints the role of feminist agency in counteracting resistance to institutional change.

In this paper we present the authors’ experience of teaching a course in Ethics for Engineers, which has been delivered four times in three different universities in Spain and Chile. We begin by presenting the material context of the course, and especially the intellectual background of the participating students, in terms of their previous understanding of philosophy in general, and of ethics in particular. Next we set out the objectives of the course and the main topics addressed, as well as the methodology and teaching resources employed to have students achieve a genuine philosophical reflection on the ethical aspects of the profession, starting from their own mindset as engineers. Finally we offer some results based on opinion surveys of the students, as well as a more personal assessment by the authors, recapitulating the most significant achievements of the course and indicating its underlying Socratic structure

Is ethics a computable function? Can machines learn ethics like humans do? If teaching consists in no more than programming, training, indoctrinating… and if ethics is merely following a code of conduct, then yes, we can teach ethics to algorithmic machines. But if ethics is not merely about following a code of conduct or about imitating the behavior of others, then an approach based on computing outcomes, and on the reduction of ethics to the compilation and application of a set of rules, either a priori or learned, misses the point. Our intention is not to solve the technical problem of machine ethics, but to learn something about human ethics, and its rationality, by reflecting on the ethics that can and should be implemented in machines. Any machine ethics implementation will have to face a number of fundamental or conceptual problems, which in the end refer to philosophical questions, such as: what is a human being (or more generally, what is a worthy being); what is human intentional acting; and how are intentional actions and their consequences morally evaluated. We are convinced that a proper understanding of ethical issues in AI can teach us something valuable about ourselves, and what it means to lead a free and responsible ethical life, that is, being good people beyond merely “following a moral code”. In the end we believe that rationality must be seen to involve more than just computing, and that value rationality is beyond numbers. Such an understanding is a required step to recovering a renewed rationality of ethics, one that is urgently needed in our highly technified society.

An engineer who becomes an educator in a school of software engineering has the mission to teach how to design and construct software systems, therein applying his or her knowledge and expertise. However, due to their engineering background, engineers may forget that educating a person is not the same as designing a machine, since a machine has a well-defined goal, whilst a person is capable to self-propose his or her own objectives. The ethical implications are clear: educating a free person must leave space for creativity and self-determination in his or her own discovery of the way towards personal and professional fulfillment, which cannot consist only in achieving goals selected by others. We present here an argument that is applicable to most fields of engineering. However, the dis-analogy between educating students and programming robots may have a particular appeal to software engineers and computer scientists. We think the consideration of three different stages in the educational process may be useful to engineers when they act as educators. We claim that the three stages are essential to engineering education. In particular, education is incomplete if the third stage is not reached. Moreover, mentoring is incompatible with an educational assessment framework that considers the goals of the engineer are always given by others. In our view, then, an integral education is not only beyond programming the behavior of students, but also beyond having them reach those given goals.

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics.

Problematizamos o conceito de informação, sob a perspectiva da Linguística Sociocognitiva, em especial da teoria da metáfora conceptual e da teoria dos frames semânticos, a fim de verificar se a terminologia predominante da Ciência da Informação (CI) é próxima do “senso comum”, como querem alguns autores da área. De fato, pudemos descrever o esquema cognitivo em que o conceito de informação é produtivo. Identificamos um componente da metáfora do canal, a metáfora INFORMAÇÃO É CONTEÚDO, capaz de confirmar a suspeita dos epistemólogos da CI e ir além: ela revela uma maneira mecânica de “falar sobre comunicação” que é de um “senso comum” desde há muitos séculos. Qual “senso comum”? Argumentando que a metáfora INFORMAÇÃO É CONTEÚDO faz mais sentido no contexto da comunicação escrita do que na falada, sugerimos uma revisão crítica dos efeitos que o letramento em massa aos seis anos poderia estar provocando na mentalidade ocidental: ao valorizar a escrita, tecnologia fundamental para a sustentabilidade das “sociedades da informação”, estaremos negligenciando a oralidade e, em consequência, negando nossa humanidade? THE COMMONSENSE OF INFORMATION: TEMPESTIVE QUESTIONSAbstractWe problematize the concept of information, from the perspective of socio-cognitive linguistics, especially that from the conceptual metaphor and semantic frames theories, in order to check whether the prevailing terminology of the Information Science (IS) is close to the “commonsense”, as some authors whish. In fact, we describe a cognitive scheme in which the concept of information is productive. A component of the conduit metaphor, INFORMATION IS CONTENT, seems to confirm the suspicion of IS epistemologists and more: it reveals a mechanical way to “speek about communication” that is a “commonsense” for centuries. Which “commonsense”? Arguing that the metaphor INFORMATION IS CONTENT makes more sense in the context of written language than in spoken one, we suggest a critical review of the effects that mass literacy at age six could be causing in Western mind: giving prestige to the writing language, a key technology for the sustainability of “information societies”, are we neglecting orality and therefore denying our humanity?

Tanto nas leis como nas propostas educacionais ou nos discursos das organizações sociais, a relação do homem com o ambiente é tratada de maneira fragmentada – o homem está fora do meio, cabendo-lhe o papel de fiscalizador, predador ou controlador. Tal percepção revelaria hoje um “efeito colateral” que vem sendo descrito como uma “crise ambiental” ou, como queremos, uma “crise do letramento massivo”. Para atestá-lo, empreendemos uma análise exploratória fundamentada na Linguística Sociocognitiva. Argumentamos que os processos orais se organizam em torno da “pouca distância” que o “conhecedor” tem do “conhecido”, enquanto que, com a escrita, a linguagem interpõe “entre o conhecedor e o conhecido um objeto que é o texto escrito”. O fenômeno explicaria a ampla reanálise de uma cosmogonia em que o homem ocidental se via no “centro do mundo” e passou a compreender-se como um ser que distingue claramente o eu e a natureza (Descartes), um ser “fora do mundo”, que o lê como um “livro da Natureza”, como dirá Galileu. Para mudar tal percepção, como quer a educação ambiental contemporânea, será necessário “adquirir um sentimento vivo da unidade do saber humano”, o que significará transformar a educação formal.

In this paper I attempt to address an interpretive difficulty that surrounds Hegel's position in the history of jurisprudence. After a brief overview of Hegel's project, I outline the first two sections of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right in order to support my argument that Hegel advocates a natural law theory of legal validity. I then show that confusions regarding Hegel's place in the history of jurisprudence arise from his view that the ethical evaluation of laws is limited (with some exceptions) to procedural laws that govern the enactment and recognition of laws in the administration of justice. I end by providing Hegel's distinctive argument for legal publicity, which he takes to be essential for the enactment and recognition of valid law.

We report a scanning tunnelling microscopy investigation of the emission of dislocations around nanoindentations in the form of dislocation arrangements previously called hillocks , consisting of two pairs of Shockley partial dislocations, each encompassing a stacking fault. The spatial arrangement and size distribution of hillocks around the nanoindentation traces are studied. We show that standard dislocation theory for an isotropic continuum can be used to describe the stability of the hillocks, their size and spatial distribution and the broadening of the corresponding extended dislocations near the surface. A model is proposed in which hillocks originate from the split into dislocations partials of primary perfect dislocation loops punched into the crystal by the scanning tunnelling microscope tip. This model implies the operation of a novel dislocation mechanism involving long-range transport of matter across the surface