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The aim of this paper is to compare 19th-century Latin American novels about piracy with 20th-century novels about drug trafficking in order to demonstrate that organized crime creates its own sovereignty juxtaposed with state sovereignty and that both pirates and drug traffickers are constantly renegotiating their relationship with the state. The literary corpus from the 19th century includes El filibustero (1864), by Mexican writer Eligio Ancona, and Los piratas en Cartagena (1886), by Colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper; from the 20th century, Contrabando (1991), by Mexican writer Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, and La Virgen de los Sicarios (1994), by Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo. This paper is divided into two sections; the first section deals with the relationship between pirates and drug traffickers and the State. It discusses the attitudes of the writers towards the State and the implications of the State actors in the illegal business. The second section discusses the existence of juxtaposed sovereignties represented through the creation of the social imaginary of piracy and drug trafficking. Drawing on historical and political resources on piracy and drug trafficking, this paper aims to create an interdisciplinary environment to discuss organized crime in literature and its political influence on society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pérez-López (2018) identificó tres parámetros para evaluar la calidad de una organización: eficacia, atractividad y unidad (Ariño, 2005; Ferreiro, Alcázar, 2019). La aplicación de estos parámetros se ha llevado a cabo mayoritariamente en entornos estables, puesto que eran los entornos habituales cuando Pérez-López formuló su teoría. Las últimas décadas han estado marcadas por grandes turbulencias sociales y empresariales (Millar, Groth, Mahon, 2018). Este artículo repasa las tres dimensiones de Pérez-López para diagnosticar la calidad de una organización y sugiere pautas para su aplicación en entornos turbulentos. Pérez-López (2018) identified three parameters to evaluate the quality of an organization: efficacy, attractivity and unity (Ariño, 2005; Ferreiro, Alcázar, 2019). The practical application of these parameters has taken place mostly in stable environments, since this was the state of the world when Pérez-López developed his theories. The last decades have been characterized by big social and organizational changes and high degree of uncertainty (Millar, Groth, Mahon, 2018). This article reviews the three dimensions of Pérez-López to assess que quality of an organization and suggests some guidelines for its implementation in volatile and uncertain environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguous relative clauses with two possible antecedent nouns have been widely studied in Spanish since they cast doubt on the universality of syntactic parsing principles. Current research suggests that there is an early contribution of prosodic information in the disambiguation of this kind or sentences in oral comprehension and production tasks. In this paper we present two comprehension experiments of locally ambiguous relative clauses with two possible attachment sites in Spanish, in which different prosodic parameters were manipulated to yield either congruous or incongruous pairings of prosody and syntax, with the aim of testing their influence on listeners' attachment preferences of the ambiguous clause and on their response times. Additionally, fundamental frequency (F0) and temporal (pause distribution) prosodic parameters were manipulated in different subexperiments so as to assess their separate contribution to participants' performance. Our results confirm an effective and relatively early use of prosodic information by listeners during language processing. In particular, congruous prosody with syntax generally facilitates participants' responses, though this effect was found to vary across the two attachment options. Finally, F0 and temporal prosodic features were found to make a similar contribution to participants' responses, with few occasional differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores some of the angles of the ancient and complex relationship between History and Literature, with special attention on the episode of persecution and harassment of the Chinese community in Mexico, particularly in the northern region. Some of the texts that have been concerned with telling these events are reviewed, despite the willingness to keep them hidden and silenced; this examination is intended to explain the historical substrate that beats in Inés Arredondo's short-story "The Silent Words", the subject of analysis of the article. I use the notions of metaphor and ambiguity to try to explain how literary creation proceeds with the materials provided by history and how it builds an artistic image and a sense of recreated facts, always in adjoining and dialogue with the procedures of historiographical discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Maynard Keynes's (1936) concept of "animal spirits" or "spontaneous optimism" as a major driving force in business fluctuations was motivated in part by his and his contemporaries' observations of human reactions to ambiguous situations where probabilities couldn't be quantified. We can add that in such ambiguity there is evidence that people let contagious popular narratives and the emotions they generate influence their economic decisions. These narratives are typically remote from factual bases, just contagious. Macroeconomic dynamic models must have a theory that is related to models of the transmission of disease in epidemiology. We need to take the contagion of narratives seriously in economic modeling if we are to improve our understanding of animal spirits and their impact on the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout time, the study of typographical errors has been approached from a variety of fields, such as bibliography, textual criticism, publishing, metalexicography, psycholinguistics and natural language processing (NLP). However, typographical errors are inherent in written texts, and there is no multidisciplinary and allencompassing method for their treatment. For that reason, we present a theoretical review of typographical errors and their categorisation, especially from the perspective of psycholinguistics and NLP. On the one hand, some of the most thorough studies from the XX century onwards have been conducted in those two fields. On the other hand, there are remarkable similarities, regarding both the conclusions reached (e.g. the low frequency of errors in the first letter of words) and the limitations encountered (e.g. ambiguity in error categorisation). Thus, our starting point will be the theoretical distinction between motoric or execution errors (mistypings) and orthographic or cognitive errors (misspellings). Moreover, we will analyse the commonalities between the abovementioned disciplines when it comes to identifying the wrong operations (omission, insertion, substitution, and transposition) behind those phenomena. Finally, we will confirm that sometimes execution errors and competence errors cannot be distinguished in the practice of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to present the topic: The Third Space: Displacement Properties of the Psycho-Cultural Experience, referring to the potential space in early human development, which interacts with its historic occurrence in the socio-cultural world. It arises mostly from thoughtful consideration obtained from psychoanalytic consultation with children and adults, as well as investigation of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Psychotherapy with children takes place in a play space, in a psychological workshop where the symptoms causing a disturbance are identified and the conflict is focused in an intermediate zone, thus named by D.W. Winnicott; it is not that far from the treatment of adult patients, wherein the analysis process of the subconscious takes place and creates a time and space of ambiguity and estrangement. Such processes of a clinical nature allow observing that throughout these and human cultural production there is a space which is opened until the transfer of the experience takes place, that is the: third space. Another way to observe this third space is through language; the ambiguous and uncertain component, which takes place in semantic displacement in the literary text. Therefore that temporal and spatial ambiguity, which encourages the displacement of language processes, into cultural expression and artistic productions or psychosocial phenomena, has as its foundation those intra-psychic transitional processes, noticed since early development. Taken amply, the third space is proposed as a theoretical and investigative field because it contributes to the reading and investigation of psychoanalytic texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision tree technique in the health sciences serves to understand the correlations between the descriptions of patients and to classify accurately in various categories. The aim of the study was to analyze the accuracy of the classification of excess weight of schoolchildren through the application of a fuzzy decision tree, using a database of Itaupú, Paraná (Brazil). We used the database of a sample consisting of 5962 students (3024 female and 2938 male), with an age range between 6 to 17 years of age. The variables considered were weight, height and the Body Mass Index (BMI). To classify the anthropometric data of the students, a diffuse decision tree was used. The learning results showed a correct classification in the female sex of 2688 and in the male sex of 2471 records respectively. In relation to accuracy, 84% was determined in the male sex and 89% in the female sex. The Area under the curve showed higher values in the Fuzzy method and in both sexes (0.965-0.983), while in the classical method, they were lower (0.804-0.895). According to the calculated results it is possible to apply the fuzzy decision tree for the classification of overweight students with an acceptable accuracy, and it is presented as an alternative technique that can save time when analyzing the nutritional status, however, no other statistical calculations were made that have to do with the precision and accuracy through conventional statistical methods and compare with the technique of fuzzy trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this project is to develop a program able to convert a subset of Spanish words to Natural Semantic Metalanguage vocabulary. This metalanguage is free of ambiguities, it is formed with simple concepts and has a reduced vocabulary, making it convenient for its processing by computer. To show how this information can be used and that a reduction in the complexity is advantageous, a small implementation of an expert system with the ability of learning the tic-tac-toe rules and evaluating the board to determine the game status is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity is the term that refers to grammatical structures that can be understood in various ways and admit different interpretations, giving rise to doubts, uncertainty or confusion in the understanding of a writing. There are currently techniques that reduce these problems, such is the case as those defined by the Natural Language Processing, a discipline that combines linguistics and computer science, with the purpose of modeling human language from a computational point of view. In the present work it is proposes a computer method based on these techniques, which allows to reduce the problems of syntactic ambiguity in texts. The solution is composed of heuristic and grammatical rules, designed from the study of the grammatical categories that originate the syntactic ambiguity in the texts. The validity of the obtained result was verified from the development of an experimental design that showed how through the application of the proposed method the users improve in the understanding of texts with problems of syntactic ambiguity. This computer solution is a result of the research group of Legal Informatics of the Center for Electronic Government of the University of Information Sciences and at the same time represents an advance for the development of Legal Informatics in Cuba, by contributing to raise the management of knowledge in Ambiguous texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In medieval literature there is a long tradition of feminin transvestism, from hagiography to chivalric romances. In all of them, the change of identity motif lends itself to various ambiguities and paradoxes which are the main features in Le Roman de Silence not only in syntax but also in it's main themes. The other protagonist of the text, Merlin, a hybrid character himself, who recalls the trickster --a trait shared with Silence--, is a key figure acting as a catalyst for the plot. As such, his mere apparition in the romance alerts the reader to the paradoxes and the ambiguities at the core of a work whose trickster-like characteristics are examined as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization (WHO) formally seeks so ambiguous goals that make it difficult to design mechanisms to achieve them. A review of the regulations and the budget of the WHO leads to the following assumptions about the ambiguity that it faces: 1) finally, the WHO focus in pursuing more practical goals that can be addressed with the instruments it have; 2) the most practical goals are not defined by a single actor, they are the result of the interaction between the members of the Concrete Action System of the WHO, that are its bureaucratic apparatus, private companies and donor country representatives; 3) the WHO bureaucracy has a tendency to concentrate on more practical goals, such as combating communicable diseases, for which it have effective instruments; 4) for the national representatives it is preferable to concentrate on communicable diseases because they can take advantage of developments in vaccines in other countries or firms; and 5) private donor companies also prefer to concentrate efforts on communicable diseases so they can contribute giving what they already produce, such as vaccines. Deviating from ambiguous goals to concentrate on more practical issues is the result of strategic processes in which the actors face the ambiguity while pursuing their own interests, but also achieve, in part, the formal goals of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many anthropological conceptions, the definition of man appears as an amendment or specification of the animal being (for example as rational animal). Martin Heidegger is one of the few philosophers who, by contrast, does not define man as a human being but as Dasein, thus escaping an anthropomorphic conceptualization. Contrary to tradition, the animal to Heidegger is not a thing, but also not existing being. In this sense, the Heideggerian notion of Dasein allows to investigate the boundaries between animal and man not only in an innovative, but also quite productive way. For, although in Being and Time Heidegger is emphatic in arguing that only human being as Dasein has the form of being called "existence", his ambiguity surrounding the particular mode of being of the animal explains why important contemporary philosophers influencedby Heidegger - e.g. Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben - have addressed this problem. In this sense, the present contribution explores this ambiguity and aims firstto explore and to locate the question about the animal in Being and Time so that, in a second step, we can critically reflect on the consequences of that location both from a immanent point of view and alsofrom a more general perspective interested in exploring the relationship between humans and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forewarning of a persuasive attempt has been found to reduce persuasion because people tend to resist being manipulated. Likewise, messages that are high in ambiguity tend to be less persuasive than messages that are clear, among other reasons, because people prefer information that is easy to be processed. The present research postulates that these two variables (persuasive attempt forewarning and message ambiguity) can result paradoxically persuasive when combined together. Participants of the present experiment received a message composed by images that were presented in a logic (low ambiguity) or in a random order (high ambiguity). Furthermore, the message was said to be a commercial advertisement (with persuasive attempt) or a neutral narrative (without persuasive attempt). As predicted, it was found that the highly ambiguous message was more persuasive when it was presented as an advertisement (with persuasive attempt) rather than as a narrative context (without persuasive attempt). Knowing that the message constitutes a persuasive attempt (ad) could bias the generation of thoughts to interpret that informatio n in a positive manner (consonant with the direction of the arguments supposedly contained in the ad), leading to more attitude change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been traditionally sustained that predicates attributed to God and to the creatures are analogical predicates. But, what is analogy? Several philosophers have thought that analogy should be taken as a form of ambiguity. Here we argue that predicates attributed to God and to creatures are neither ambiguous nor vague. Following some suggestions given by McDaniel, we propose a view of analogy in which the semantic phenomenon is associated with the more or less natural character of the property or properties that the entities that satisfy the analogous predicate instantiate. A predicate "θ" is analogous if and only if the property Θ, which something instantiates, if and only if it is θ, is less natural that any property Ξ so that anything that instantiates Ξ, instantiates Θ. Furthermore, it is required that the entities of which the analogous term is predicated should be either ontologically or epistemically dependent on each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article proposes a theoretical/methodological foundation for literature based on embodiment studies, within a process of creative research. The body is presented as a question, and literature is embodied as a process of self-exploration. The problem is characterized as a disembodied conception of literary studies, and contrasted with an experience which generates other forms of conceiving research through the interaction of language and the body, where literature surpasses its determination as a scientific "object". In the same way, the text enacts a recognition of the lived body of the author, as a masculine body immerse in culture, and literature as a possibility to access this experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

María Teresa Andruetto, the Argentinean writer and winner of the 2012 Andersen award, is an acknowledged author of children's literature. Stemming from the theory of investigators Zohar Shavit, Maria Nikolajeva and Teresa Colomer, in this study I will analyse some of her texts (El país de Juan, Stefano – Juan's Country, Stefano) from the comparative point of view, establishing similarities with the Slovenian writer France Bevk, as well as the ambiguity dimension of Andruetto's texts by stressing those elements suitable for children's and also adults reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the political life of documents produced in relation to a World Bank-funded road engineering technical study in the Peruvian Andes. By contrast with Weber's emphasis on documents as instruments of rationalisation and transparency, and the more recent focus on documents as aesthetic artefacts and instances of institutional form, I attend to the ambiguous political processes enacted through document flows. I suggest that the ways in which project documents circulated, accumulating multiple connotations as they travelled, generated not clarity, but rather increasing indeterminacy, arguing that their political quality had to do precisely with their dual character, calling up at once normativity (and its promise of justice and order) and the play of unscrupulous «interests». I argue that their dual promise of clarity and ambivalence was key to the opening up of spaces of political possibility in the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we review the studies investigating the effects of anxiety on interpretive bias, i.e., the proneness to generate, prioritize or select a threatening interpretation over a neutral interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus. The article is organized in three sections: Conceptualization, Research, and Application. First, we motivate theoretically the relationship between anxiety and interpretive bias, with particular emphasis on the functional role of such a bias in the alarm mechanism of the defensive system. Second, we examine the existing experimental evidence on the issue under investigation in several specific areas. And, third, we address the possibility that the experimental findings on anxiety and interpretive bias can be applied to therapeutical treatments aimed to control and reduce vulnerability to anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two passages from Homer's Odyssey: on the one hand, verses XIV. 207-208 are analyzed grammatical and contextually; on the other and, it is pondered the ambiguity of verses XIII. 380-381, in relation with the same verses in II rhapsody, in order to demonstrate the rhetoric ability of Homer to say different things using the same words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an open-minded discussion, free of commitments to one discipline or another, I try to tackle, explore and unfold the concept of 'sense', without reducing it to mere 'linguistic enunciation' or 'semantic meaning'. I will argue that 'sense' comes into view only when posed against the background of confusion, disorientation or ambiguity. As well as describing its orienting function, its dialogic character and its relationship to "being", I will contend that 'sense' is both an act of opening, and of positioning with regard to the world and the real. If my argument is right, then 'sense' does not aim to limit an object (i.e., defining it); rather, it must try to reach beyond its horizons. 'Sense', then, reveals itself as a search for intelligibility in action--in other words, as critical thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will analyze the unusual way Jorge Volpi's El fin de la locura has to present its representative constructions. Parody and carnival elements —intertwined in a complex multiplicity of voices— make up a proposal based on a dementia principle. Each voice (that of Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and Barthes) help make up the configuration of narrative universe where incoherence, power and ambiguity prevail together with a parodic take-over of an intellectual world and that of the conditioning of contemporary thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the cultural relation that women have to the construction of masculinities. It is based on ethnographical fieldwork that examined the development and the transformation of masculine identities by both men and women in a "colonia popular" of Mexico City. The distinct conceptual and methodological approaches employed by anthropologists in studying manhood are compared. The concepts of men as engendered and engendering, as integral to understanding the ambiguities of gender differences, are discussed.