SURVIVAL CAUSAL PATTERNS OF SOCIAL AND COMMERCIAL ENTREPRENEURIAL INITIATIVES IN SPAIN

This research aims at analysing the influence of a holistic configuration of factors related to industry and the characteristics of the entrepreneur and the business, on the survival of social and commercial entrepreneurial initiatives in both, new and consolidated companies. The sample ranges from 2,851 to 2,109 firms, according to the period considered, and has been obtained from the reports of the projects submitted to the Assistance Programme to Young Entrepreneurs, promoted by the Valencian Institute of Youth. Other sources of information have been the Institute’s own reports and the Chambers of Commerce. A configurational analysis is performed using the Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The results obtained show that there is no necessary condition by itself and that there are several sufficient solutions that explain a considerable percentage of survival cases. They also show how the solutions vary significantly and, consequently, the relevance of the different causal antecedents, when the company acquires greater maturity.

Impact of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) on mental health

Online gaming has become a concern for health professionals due to its dysfunctional effects. This study aimed to conceptualise and summarise the impact that gaming platforms like PUBG can have on an individual’s mental health. A systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA model. A total of five papers were shortlisted and reviewed for the purpose of this study. The results indicated the use of gaming platforms like PUBG by players to address and cope with anxiety and depression, and it also highly influences the presence of other concerns like ADHD and suicidality, self-harm and aggressive behaviours. While the literature points to the detrimental effects of PUBG, this study highlights the importance of undertaking more research to establish the causal patterns in PUBG use and how to address the issues posed from both psychological and legal perspectives.

Limiting the explanatory scope of extended active inference: the implications of a causal pattern analysis of selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics

Research in evolutionary biology and philosophy of biology and cognition strongly suggests that human organisms modify their environment through active processes of niche construction. Recently, proponents of the free-energy principle and variational active inference have argued that their approach can deepen our understanding of the reciprocal causal relationship between organisms and their niche on various scales. This paper examines the feasibility and scope of variational formalisations and conceptualisations of the organism-niche nexus with a particular focus on the extended active inference account. I will draw a conceptual distinction between selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics and argue that these notions capture different causal patterns, each of which with a distinct scope. Against this background, I will analyse and discuss the extended active inference account and its strategy to integrate variational active inference with work on extended cognition. The proponents of extended active inference assume that their account can provide an explanation of selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics. However, my key claim will be that this account has the potential to elucidate the workings of organism-niche coordination dynamics, but does not adequately capture the causal patterns of selective niche construction and developmental niche construction.

Isis, the Shadow of the West (Mediterranean 2017: The roots of hatred)

International terrorism is one of today’s chief threats to the socio-economic stability of Western countries. It is generally perceived as alien to the Western lifestyle and it is often explained away as the sorry outcome of psychosis or fanaticism. In what follows, I endeavour to show how, in a globalised world such as ours, there are no truly alien phenomena, and Isis itself can be better understood in light of global causal patterns. I conclude by indicating a possible constructive approach in our difficult times.

Boosting Causal Embeddings via Potential Verb-Mediated Causal Patterns

Existing approaches to causal embeddings rely heavily on hand-crafted high-precision causal patterns, leading to limited coverage. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method to boost causal embeddings by exploring potential verb-mediated causal patterns. It first constructs a seed set of causal word pairs, then uses them as supervision to characterize the causal strengths of extracted verb-mediated patterns, and finally exploits the weighted extractions by those verb-mediated patterns in the construction of boosted causal embeddings. Experimental results have shown that the boosted causal embeddings outperform several state-of-the-arts significantly on both English and Chinese. As by-products, the top-ranked patterns coincide with human intuition about causality.