Honduras

Author(s):  
Dario A. Euraque

A fact of Honduran history after the 1840s is the structural weakness of the state as an organized political agent capable of administering a nationally defined territory, managing its constitutionally prescribed monopoly over security, and effectively addressing the most minimal aspects of the population’s economic and social welfare. Various factors explain this. A key problem has been Honduran elites’ lack of cohesion and enlightened commitment to their long-term interests among themselves and beyond their borders. Resorting to lethal violence to secure advantaged and corrupt access to state resources has been the result and norm, even to the detriment of elite unity and hegemony. This has often placed the state and country at the mercy of economic and military forces, local and international, that elites cannot control, and with which they have negotiated for short-term benefit and even personal survival, most often to the detriment of national interests, and Hondurans’ rudimentary well-being.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
S. V. Kazantsev

The state and the nation have their interests. They call them “the national interests”. Even though the study of national interests began many centuries ago, there is still no single methodology to determine national interests, let alone quantifying them. National interests largely determine the goals that society sets for itself. Thus, from the national interest “preservation and survival of society” arises the strategic goal of human society, the state, and the nation — to increase the population and ensure its security. The preservation of territorial integrity is one of the national interests, so each state has the goal to preserve its territorial integrity and maintain the territory of its habitat in a life-friendly condition. If a goal is set, there should be indicators of its achievement. For example, for the strategic goal “ensuring socio-economic well-being and growth of well-being” indicators are the volume and dynamics of income of members of the society, the unemployment rate, the coeffiients of differentiation of incomes of the population and some other indexes. The author of this paper has identifid seven strategic goals of a society that correspond to six universally recognized national interests. To quantify the measure of their achievement, the author selected 23 indicators. The author based his choice according to the state of Russian statistics. It turned out that this indicator had a downward trend in 2000–2018, and its flctuations were damped.


GeroPsych ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Röcke ◽  
Annette Brose

Whereas subjective well-being remains relatively stable across adulthood, emotional experiences show remarkable short-term variability, with younger and older adults differing in both amount and correlates. Repeatedly assessed affect data captures both the dynamics and stability as well as stabilization that may indicate emotion-regulatory processes. The article reviews (1) research approaches to intraindividual affect variability, (2) functional implications of affect variability, and (3) age differences in affect variability. Based on this review, we discuss how the broader literature on emotional aging can be better integrated with theories and concepts of intraindividual affect variability by using appropriate methodological approaches. Finally, we show how a better understanding of affect variability and its underlying processes could contribute to the long-term stabilization of well-being in old age.


Author(s):  
Michael A. Cohn ◽  
Barbara L. Fredrickson

Positive emotions include pleasant or desirable situational responses, ranging from interest and contentment to love and joy, but are distinct from pleasurable sensation and undifferentiated positive affect. These emotions are markers of people's overall well-being or happiness, but they also enhance future growth and success. This has been demonstrated in work, school, relationships, mental and physical health, and longevity. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions suggests that all positive emotions lead to broadened repertoires of thoughts and actions and that broadening helps build resources that contribute to future success. Unlike negative emotions, which are adapted to provide a rapid response to a focal threat, positive emotions occur in safe or controllable situations and lead more diffusely to seeking new resources or consolidating gains. These resources outlast the temporary emotional state and contribute to later success and survival. This chapter discusses the nature of positive emotions both as evolutionary adaptations to build resources and as appraisals of a situation as desirable or rich in resources. We discuss the methodological challenges of evoking positive emotions for study both in the lab and in the field and issues in observing both short-term (“broaden”) and long-term (“build”) effects. We then review the evidence that positive emotions broaden perception, attention, motivation, reasoning, and social cognition and ways in which these may be linked to positive emotions' effects on important life outcomes. We also discuss and contextualize evidence that positive emotions may be detrimental at very high levels or in certain situations. We close by discussing ways in which positive emotions theory can be harnessed by both basic and applied positive psychology research.


Author(s):  
Peter Warr

Prominent among frameworks of well-being is the Vitamin Model, which emphasizes nonlinear associations with environmental features. The Vitamin Model has previously been described through average patterns for people in general, but we need also to explore inter-individual variations. For presentation, those differences can either be viewed generically, based on divergence in age, personality and so on, or through short-term episodes of emotion regulation, such as through situation-specific attentional focus and reappraisal. Both long-term and short-term variations are considered here.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 640-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Barrette ◽  
Katherine Harman

Context: Pain in sport has been normalized to the point where athletes are expected to ignore pain and remain in the game despite the possible detrimental consequences associated with playing through pain. While rehabilitation specialists may not have an influence on an athlete’s competitive nature or the culture of risk they operate in, understanding the consequences of those factors on an athlete’s physical well-being is definitely in their area of responsibility. Objective: To explore the factors associated with the experiences of subelite athletes who play through pain in gymnastics, rowing, and speed skating. Design: The authors conducted semistructured interviews with subelite athletes, coaches, and rehabilitation specialists. They recruited coach participants through their provincial sport organization. Athletes of the recruited coaches who were recovering from a musculoskeletal injury and training for a major competition were then recruited. They also recruited rehabilitation specialists who were known to treat subelite athletes independently by e-mail. Setting: An observation session was conducted at the athlete’s training facility. Interviews were then conducted either in a room at the university or at a preferred sound-attenuated location suggested by the participant. Participants: The authors studied 5 coaches, 4 subelite athletes, and 3 rehabilitation specialists. Interventions: The authors photographed athletes during a practice shortly before an important competition, and we interviewed all the participants after that competition. Our photographs were used during the interview to stimulate discussion. Results: The participant interviews revealed 3 main themes related to playing through pain. They are: Listening to your body, Decision making, and Who decides. Conclusion: When subelite athletes, striving to be the best in their sport continue to train with the pain of an injury, performance is affected in the short-term and long-term consequences are also possible. Our study provides some insight into the contrasting forces that athletes balance as they decide to continue or to stop.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (06) ◽  
pp. 10352-10360
Author(s):  
Jing Bi ◽  
Vikas Dhiman ◽  
Tianyou Xiao ◽  
Chenliang Xu

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) via Behavior Cloning (BC) works well on multiple complex tasks. However, a limitation of the typical LfD approach is that it requires expert demonstrations for all scenarios, including those in which the algorithm is already well-trained. The recently proposed Learning from Interventions (LfI) overcomes this limitation by using an expert overseer. The expert overseer only intervenes when it suspects that an unsafe action is about to be taken. Although LfI significantly improves over LfD, the state-of-the-art LfI fails to account for delay caused by the expert's reaction time and only learns short-term behavior. We address these limitations by 1) interpolating the expert's interventions back in time, and 2) by splitting the policy into two hierarchical levels, one that generates sub-goals for the future and another that generates actions to reach those desired sub-goals. This sub-goal prediction forces the algorithm to learn long-term behavior while also being robust to the expert's reaction time. Our experiments show that LfI using sub-goals in a hierarchical policy framework trains faster and achieves better asymptotic performance than typical LfD.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 1473-1478 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Fukata ◽  
M.T. Abreu

The colonic epithelium is lined along its apical membrane with ∼1014 bacteria/g of tissue. Commensal bacteria outnumber mammalian cells in the gut severalfold. The reason for this degree of commensalism probably resides in the recent recognition of the microbiome as an important source of metabolic energy in the setting of poorly digestible nutrients. As in many themes in biology, the host may have sacrificed short-term benefit, i.e. nutritional advantages, for long-term consequences, such as chronic inflammation or colon cancer. In the present review, we examine the role of TLR (Toll-like receptor) signalling in the healthy host and the diseased host. We pay particular attention to the role of TLR signalling in idiopathic IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) and colitis-associated carcinogenesis. In general, TLR signalling in health contributes to homoeostatic functions. These include induction of antimicrobial peptides, proliferation and wound healing in the intestine. The pathogenesis of IBD, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease may be due to increased TLR or decreased TLR signalling respectively. Finally, we discuss the possible role of TLR signalling in colitis-associated neoplasia.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-306
Author(s):  
Ankuj Arora ◽  
Humbert Fiorino ◽  
Damien Pellier ◽  
Sylvie Pesty

Abstract In order to be acceptable and able to “camouflage” into their physio-social context in the long run, robots need to be not just functional, but autonomously psycho-affective as well. This motivates a long term necessity of introducing behavioral autonomy in robots, so they can autonomously communicate with humans without the need of “wizard” intervention. This paper proposes a technique to learn robot speech models from human-robot dialog exchanges. It views the entire exchange in the Automated Planning (AP) paradigm, representing the dialog sequences (speech acts) in the form of action sequences that modify the state of the world upon execution, gradually propelling the state to a desired goal. We then exploit intra-action and inter-action dependencies, encoding them in the form of constraints. We attempt to satisfy these constraints using aweighted maximum satisfiability model known as MAX-SAT, and convert the solution into a speech model. This model could have many uses, such as planning of fresh dialogs. In this study, the learnt model is used to predict speech acts in the dialog sequences using the sequence labeling (predicting future acts based on previously seen ones) capabilities of the LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) class of recurrent neural networks. Encouraging empirical results demonstrate the utility of this learnt model and its long term potential to facilitate autonomous behavioral planning of robots, an aspect to be explored in future works.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-450
Author(s):  
Paul Arthur Berkman

Summary Science diplomacy is an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive (holistic) process, involving informed decisionmaking to balance national interests and common interests for the benefit of all on Earth across generations. Informed decisions operate across a ‘continuum of urgencies’, which extends from security to sustainability time scales for peoples, nations and our world. The COVID-19 pandemic is the ‘most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War’, as noted in March 2020 by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, when survival is once again a common interest at local-global levels. This essay introduces common-interest-building strategies with science diplomacy to operate short term to long term, before-through-after the ‘inflection point’ of our global pandemic, as the next step in the evolution of our globally interconnected civilisation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  
A M G van Tintelen ◽  
S H Bolt ◽  
D E M C Jansen

Abstract Background This study aims to address the lack of information about teenage mothers in different stages of their lives by exploring how they are doing in the long term and the social support they receive. Methods From December 2018 to February 2019 teenage mothers in the Netherlands were recruited by Fiom (an expert centre for unintended pregnancy), via social media and a website for teenage mothers (n = 248). Using an online survey, data were obtained to assess various outcomes, such as well-being, education, work, income, housing and social support. Respondents were divided into three groups: 0-3 years after teenage childbearing (short-term), 4-12 years (medium-term), >12 years (long-term). Results were analysed using univariate and bivariate descriptions in SPSS. Results Almost 80% of the respondents reported that they were doing well and were satisfied with their life. 63.3% had a job, and 17.0% was enrolled in education. Short-term mothers worked fewer hours per week compared to long-term mothers (p < 0.001). 85.1% of the respondents reported that they received benefits, short-term mothers receiving more benefits than long-term mothers (p < 0.001). The majority (78.2%) was satisfied with their living conditions; short-term mothers were less satisfied than long-term mothers (p = 0.031). 36.3% of the respondents smoked cigarettes. Most support was given by family (83.1%), mainly from female relatives. About 24% of the respondents received formal support. Conclusions This study shows that teenage mothers, on average, were doing well and were satisfied with their life, in both the short and long term. Regarding income and housing, short-term mothers were in a less favourable position. These results suggest that as the years pass, teenage mothers overcome difficulties. Since the association between well-being and social support on the long term is unknown, we advise investigating the effect of social support on the outcomes of teenage childbearing. Key messages Both in the short-term and the long-term, most teenage mothers were doing well and satisfied with life. Regarding housing and income, short-term mothers function less well compared to long-term mothers.


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