We summarize the contents of the Instruction Dignitas personae and briefly attempt to explain why we find ourselves before an impossible debate when we talk about human life, its conception and reception. We will also try to provide some light as we try to escape this cul de sac so characteristic in the moral discussions of our time. To do so, we seek the help of the moral philosopher, Alasdair...

The theory of social diagnosis recognizes two principles: 1) extra-medical social structures frame diagnosis; and 2) myriad social actors, in addition to clinicians, contribute to diagnostic labels and processes. The relationship between social diagnosis and (de)medicalization remains undertheorized, however, because social diagnosis does not account for how social actors can also resist the pa...

Interaction between agents representing real world actors in computational models must be informed by knowledge about interaction processes occurring amongst real world actors. We propose the use of endorsements to implement the cognitive processes underlying the decisions that lead to interactions among agents. The main advantage in applying the idea of endorsements lies in the fact that they ...

Within a virtual organization, more than one institution might be involved in the regulation of actors’ behavior. Each institution specifies a set of norms covering a specific aspect of the problem domain with a governance scope defining its remit. Together, they govern the participants and reflect the objectives of the organization. With actors’ behavior being simultaneously regulated by more ...

OBJECTIVES The dissemination of health-related news through newspapers can influence the behavior of patients and of health care providers. We conducted a study to analyze the characteristics of health-related research published by two leading Brazilian newspapers. METHOD We retrospectively evaluated health-related news published in the electronic versions of the newspapers Folha de São Paulo...

Contextualization of Geospatial Database Semantics Written by Administrator Thursday, 19 May 2011 07:40 Last Updated Friday, 04 October 2013 17:19 Human interactions with geographical information are contextualized by problem-solving activities which endow meaning to geospatial data and processing. However, existing spatial data models have not taken this aspect of semantics into account. This ...