No more than Conjectures: Popper and the Ethics of Scientific Enterprise

Karl Popper dealt with both problems Yurevich (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 43(2), 2009, doi:10.1007/s12124-008-9082-7) deals: the crisis in Psychology and in the discourse about the nature of science. Although he failed to provide a complete response for both problems, his proposals can yet be fruitful to the reflection on these matters in the context of the present discussion. He offers some tentative answers to what could be considered a healthy epistemic activity, something Yurevich does not provide. More interestingly, some of the Popper proposals seem to fit, and in some extent correct, the quest for ""collaborative work"" proposed by Zittoun et al. (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 43(2), 2009, doi:10.1007/s12124-008-9082-7) as a way of transforming crisis in development.

Paternal Care Decreases Foraging Activity and Body Condition, but Does Not Impose Survival Costs to Caring Males in a Neotropical Arachnid

Exclusive paternal care is the rarest form of parental investment in nature and theory predicts that the maintenance of this behavior depends on the balance between costs and benefits to males. Our goal was to assess costs of paternal care in the harvestman Iporangaia pustulosa, for which the benefits of this behavior in terms of egg survival have already been demonstrated. We evaluated energetic costs and mortality risks associated to paternal egg-guarding in the field. We quantified foraging activity of males and estimated how their body condition is influenced by the duration of the caring period. Additionally, we conducted a one-year capture-mark-recapture study and estimated apparent survival probabilities of caring and non-caring males to assess potential survival costs of paternal care. Our results indicate that caring males forage less frequently than non-caring individuals (males and females) and that their body condition deteriorates over the course of the caring period. Thus, males willing to guard eggs may provide to females a fitness-enhancing gift of cost-free care of their offspring. Caring males, however, did not show lower survival probabilities when compared to both non-caring males and females. Reduction in mortality risks as a result of remaining stationary, combined with the benefits of improving egg survival, may have played an important and previously unsuspected role favoring the evolution of paternal care. Moreover, males exhibiting paternal care could also provide an honest signal of their quality as offspring defenders, and thus female preference for caring males could be responsible for maintaining the trait.

Dilthey: The hermeneutics of life and the universal aspirations of pedagogy

Dilthey claimed that first psychology and then hermeneutics played the foundational role for his philosophy of life, whose main practical goal is to develop a pedagogy or theory of education. Pedagogy needs help from h ethics to establish its ends, and from psychology to indicate it means. This paper intends to show the relationship between Dilthey's hermeneutics of life and his pedagogy. Dilthey's philosophy of life, in so far it adopts the hermeneutical procedure, engages in the understanding of or the search for the meaning of human socio-historical creations, by adopting a special type of relationship between parts and whole. It is exactly within this hermeneutical balance that we propose to extinguish any indication of a rupture, breach, or contradiction between the quest for universal principles of human behavior and :Dilthey's defense of the impossibility of constructing human moral tasks by means of universal principles. Dilthey began his ethics lectures at the University of Berlin in 1890. These lectures, published in 1958 by Herman Nohl in volume X of Dilthey's collected works, indicate the direction of the trajectory by which formative or social ethics are consolidated as a historical solution for reaching universal principles that can guide human purposes. This trajectory is a result of the distinctively human exercise of self-reflection, by means of which we can fulfill our destiny of manifesting and exteriorizing in time the immanent energy of the absolute spirit. We wish to show that it is possible that such a pedagogy can respect its universal task of orienting the historical development of the younger generation without directing this process by means of fixed and rigid aims.

Qualifying instrument for evaluation of food and nutritional care in hospital

Establishing criteria for hospital nutrition care ensures that quality care is delivered to patients. The responsibility of the Hospital Food and Nutrition Service (HFNS) is not always well defined, despite efforts to establish guidelines for patient clinical nutrition practice. This study describes the elaboration of an Instrument for Evaluation of Food and Nutritional Care (IEFNC) aimed at directing the actions of the Hospital Food and Nutrition Service. This instrument was qualified by means of a comparative analysis of the categories related to hospital food and nutritional care, published in the literature. Elaboration of the IEFNC comprised the following stages: (a) a survey of databases and documents for selection of the categories to be used in nutrition care evaluation, (b) a study of the institutional procedures for nutrition practice at two Brazilian hospitals, in order to provide a description of the sequence of actions that should be taken by the HFNS as well as other services participating in nutrition care, (c) design of the IEFNC based on the categories published in the literature, adapted to the sequence of actions observed in the routines of the hospitals under study, (d) application of the questionnaire at two different hospitals that was mentioned in the item (b), in order to assess the time spent on its application, the difficulties in phrasing the questions, and the coverage of the instrument, and (e) finalization of the instrument. The IEFNC consists of 50 open and closed questions on two areas of food and nutritional care in hospital: inpatient nutritional care and food service quality. It deals with the characterization and structure of hospitals and their HFNS, the actions concerning the patients' nutritional evaluation and monitoring, the meal production system, and the hospital diets. "This questionnaire is a tool that can be seen as a portrait of the structure and characteristics of the HFNS and its performance in clinical and meal management dietitian activities." (Nutr Hosp. 2012;27:1170-1177) DOI:10.3305/nh.2012.27.4.5868

Behavior of the thermal diffusivity of native and oxidized human low-density lipoprotein solutions studied by the Z-scan technique

Modifications in low-density lipoprotein (LDL) have emerged as a major pathogenic factor of atherosclerosis, which is the main cause of morbidity and mortality in the western world. Measurements of the heat diffusivity of human LDL solutions in their native and in vitro oxidized states are presented by using the Z-Scan (ZS) technique. Other complementary techniques were used to obtain the physical parameters necessary to interpret the optical results, e. g., pycnometry, refractometry, calorimetry, and spectrophotometry, and to understand the oxidation phase of LDL particles. To determine the sample's thermal diffusivity using the thermal lens model, an iterative one-parameter fitting method is proposed which takes into account several characteristic ZS time-dependent and the position-dependent transmittance measurements. Results show that the thermal diffusivity increases as a function of the LDL oxidation degree, which can be explained by the increase of the hydroperoxides production due to the oxidation process. The oxidation products go from one LDL to another, disseminating the oxidation process and caring the heat across the sample. This phenomenon leads to a quick thermal homogenization of the sample, avoiding the formation of the thermal lens in highly oxidized LDL solutions. (C) 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.JBO.17.10.105003]

The Evolution of Diet and Microhabitat Use in Pseudoboine Snakes

Reflecting their exceptional radiation, snakes occur in different habitats and microhabitats and are able to eat numerous types of prey. The availability of good and comprehensive phylogenies for different snake’s lineages together with natural history data provides an opportunity to explore how ecological traits diversified during their radiation. In the present study, we describe the diet and microhabitat variation (arboreal or non-arboreal) in the tribe Pseudoboini and explore how these traits evolved during the tribe’s diversification. We analyzed specimens deposited in scientific collections and gathered information on diet and microhabitat use available in the literature and provided by other researchers. We also mapped diet and microhabitat data onto a phylogeny of the tribe using the principle of parsimony. Pseudoboine snakes feed mainly on lizards and small mammals, and of the 22 species for which a minimum number of prey records was obtained, nine are diet generalists, six are lizard specialists, three are small mammal specialists, two are snake specialists, one is a lizard egg specialist, and one is a bird egg specialist. The highly diverse feeding habits of pseudoboines seem to have evolved mainly in the terminal taxa. Among those species that had enough microhabitat data (17 species), Drepanoides anomalus, Siphlophis cervinus, S. compressus, and S. pulcher frequently use the vegetation. Our results indicate that an increase in arboreality evolved several times during the diversification of the tribe, and that the Siphlophis clade seems to have maintained the high degree of arboreality from its ancestor. Species that frequently use vegetation are either lizard or lizard egg specialists, indicating that these habits might be associated in the evolution of pseudoboines.