Nietzsche and Self-Constitution

This paper argues for interpreting Nietzsche along the lines of a self-constitution view. According to the self-constitution view, a person is a kind of creation: we constitute our selves throughout our lives. The self-constitution view may take more than one form: on the narrative version, the self is like a story, while on the Kantian version, the self is a set of principles or commitments. Taking Marya Schechtman’s and Christine Korsgaard’s accounts as paradigmatic, I take the self-constitution view to emphasize practical considerations and the first person point of view and to conceive of the self as active in self-creation. The interpretation I offer can make sense of Nietzsche’s remarks about self-creation and of many of Nietzsche’s remarks about the self that would otherwise seem contradictory. In particular, Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical remarks about the self fit well with the self-constitution view as long as they are understood as theoretical claims that do not undermine the importance of the practical point of view

Bayesian model selection in logistic regression for the detection of adverse drug reactions

Motivation: Spontaneous adverse event reports have a high potential for detecting adverse drug reactions. However, due to their dimension, exploring such databases requires statistical methods. In this context, disproportionality measures are used. However, by projecting the data onto contingency tables, these methods become sensitive to the problem of co-prescriptions and masking effects. Recently, logistic regressions have been used with a Lasso type penalty to perform the detection of associations between drugs and adverse events. However, the choice of the penalty value is open to criticism while it strongly influences the results. Results: In this paper, we propose to use a logistic regression whose sparsity is viewed as a model selection challenge. Since the model space is huge, a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm carries out the model selection by maximizing the BIC criterion. Thus, we avoid the calibration of penalty or threshold. During our application on the French pharmacovigilance database, the proposed method is compared to well established approaches on a reference data set, and obtains better rates of positive and negative controls. However, many signals are not detected by the proposed method. So, we conclude that this method should be used in parallel to existing measures in pharmacovigilance.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Biometrical Journa

La prostitución

Diploma de postgrau "La pràctica de la diferència", dins del Màster en Estudis de la Diferència Sexual, Universitat de Barcelona. DUODA, Centre de recerca de dones, curs: 2012-2013, Tutora: Dra. María-Milagros Rivera Garreta

Los ideales culturales de la feminidad y sus efectos sobre el cuerpo de las mujeres

Puesto que no existe una feminidad esencial, la cultura construye modelos ideales articulados con las relaciones sociales de desigualdad y poder entre los sexos con los que las mujeres se identifican e incorporan a su Ideal del Yo. Estos modelos normativos suelen entrar en conflicto con los deseos, posibilidades y aspiraciones de cada sujeto, creando un malestar que, cuando no puede ser reconocido y expresado, se manifiesta de manera sintomática o mediante el pasaje al acto. Consideraré a continuación los efectos deletéreos de dos ideales culturales -ideal corporal de delgadez e ideal maternal- tanto en la auto-percepción, auto-valoración y relación de las mujeres con su cuerpo, como en la manipulación no sólo de la imagen corporal sino también del cuerpo real de las mujeres. En ambos casos se pondrán de manifiesto las desigualdades de género que persisten en estos "tiempos de igualdad."Inasmuch as there isn't any essential femininity, ideal models are constructed by the culture. These ideals, which are entangled with the codification of power and subordination social relations between both sexes, are incorporated by women into their Ego Ideal through the process of identification. These normative models are usually opposed to the desires, possibilities and expectations of each subject, generating thus conflicts and discomfort which, when not recognized and put into words, show themselves as a symptom or acting out. I shall consider the deleterious effects of two different cultural ideals -that of the slender body and that of maternity- not only in self-perception, self-esteem and the relationship of women to their own body, but also in the manipulation of the body image as well as of the real body. In both cases it is possible to realize that gender inequalities are still present in our "equality times.