Reflexiones fenomenológicas: más allá de la tecnificación del turismo y la mercadotecnia.

The essence is nothing other than, in addition to being a phenomenological act, it is the interpretation and mental exercise. This exercise answers what makes tourism tourism? And what makes marketing be marketing? The aim is to try out the essence of tourism and marketing from phenomenological reflections. The phenomenological method is the study of intentional analysis, as an intuitive and reflective act. The essence of tourism and marketing, as well as of anything, is not limited to its mere purpose or utility, that is, it exceeds the sine que non conditions of the thing.

Dominant Management Logics of Siyasetnamas – A Moral Management Perspective

This article examines the management perspectives in Islamic political history, which can contribute to the contemporary management and organizational knowledge (MOK). It attempts to find out the taken-for-granted assumptions and arguments that shape the Muslim scholars’ management perspective in history. To this end, political treatises in Islamic history (namely, 'siyasetnamas') and their managerial arguments are scrutinized through content analysis. By determining underlying dominant logics -assumptions that most siyasetnamas refer to- this article allows us a mental exercise to step out of the Western mindset, which is thought to be the best, and the only way to understand MOK and tries to introduce a moral management perspective from the history of Islam. Our results indicate that siyasetnamas’ dominant management logics could provide valuable implications to MOK with their emphasis on (i) considering society as the real owner of entities, (ii) having additional societal responsibilities, and (iii) moral competency of organizational actors.

Autistic Savants and Mathematical sequence prediction.

In the third paper in a series of papers on autism savants, detection of giftedness and the use of mental arithmetic as an intervention in autism and a practice of metal wellness, we describe the use of python scripts towards primality detection exercises, of both small primes and arbitrary sized numbers and several other exercises including sequence prediction, inspired by branch prediction architectures. Sequence prediction as a mental exercise, is used as infotainment and as a wellness exercise, and a possible intervention in ASD. Several prediction mechanisms inspired by data and prediction algorithms are described. Keywords: ASD, Autism Savants, Education For The Gifted, primality detection, data mining, basket of associations, sequences, branch prediction, plotting graphs.

Behavioral and ERP Correlates of Long-Term Physical and Mental Training on a Demanding Switch Task

Physical and mental training are associated with positive effects on executive functions throughout the lifespan. However, evidence of the benefits of combined physical and mental regimes over a sedentary lifestyle remain sparse. The goal of this study was to investigate potential mechanisms, from a source-resolved event-related-potential perspective, that could explain how practicing long-term physical and mental exercise can benefit neural processing during the execution of an attention switching task. Fifty-three healthy community volunteers who self-reported long-term practice of Tai Chi (n = 10), meditation + exercise (n = 16), simple aerobics (n = 15), or a sedentary lifestyle (n = 12), aged 47.8 ± 14.6 (SD) were included in this analysis. All participants undertook high-density electroencephalography recording during a switch paradigm. Our results indicate that people who practice physical and mental exercise perform better in a task-switching paradigm. Our analysis revealed an additive effect of the combined practice of physical and mental exercise over physical exercise only. In addition, we confirmed the participation of frontal, parietal and cingulate areas as generators of event-related-potential components (N2-like and P3-like) commonly associated to the performance of switch tasks. Particularly, the N2-like component of the parietal and frontal domains showed significantly greater amplitudes in the exercise and mental training groups compared with aerobics and sedentary groups. Furthermore, we showed better performance associated with greater N2-like amplitudes. Our multivariate analysis revealed that activity type was the most relevant factor to explain the difference between groups, with an important influence of age, and body mass index, and with small effects of educational years, cardiovascular capacity, and sex. These results suggest that chronic combined physical and mental training may confer significant benefits to executive function in normally aging adults, probably through more efficient early attentional processing. Future experimental studies are needed to confirm our results and understand the mechanisms on parieto-frontal networks that contribute to the cognitive improvement associated with practicing combined mental and aerobic exercise, while carefully controlling confounding factors, such as age and body mass index.

Philosophy as Practice

This chapter looks at another way to understand the philosophical aspects of Buddhism. Instead of seeing philosophy as about abstract things to know, we can think of it also as a kind of mental exercise, an intellectual training regimen. Rather than something to know, it is something to work through, something to do. Much of Buddhist philosophy can be read on two levels, as a description of how things are and as instructions for how to realize it. As such, Buddhist philosophy is like an exercise an individual goes through to help them get started in the right direction; it is a process that they go through to get their mind out of its old habits. This means that, like any practice, it is not for everyone and eventually, that individual may not need it anymore.