La publicació del Llibre blanc de les indústries culturals de Catalunya

urant quasi un any, un equip de reconeguts experts de diverses universitats catalanes i consultories especialitzades sota la meva direcció han estat treballant en la realització del Llibre blanc de les indústries culturals de Catalunya. Aquest encàrrec prové de la llei de creació de l'Institut Català de les Indústries Culturals, que estableix la realització d'un estudi que orienti les prioritats de la intervenció governamental en aquest camp. El treball ha consistit en un diagnòstic de la situació dels diversos sectors culturals i una lectura transversal dels principals reptes amb què s'enfronten els diferents agents..

Government intervention would be justified to prevent a potential epidemic of food disorders

Joan Costa-Font and Mireia Jofre-Bonet argue that distorted perceptions of self-image influence health-related behaviours. Through their empirical research, they find that social pressure is a determinant of eating disorders and policy should compensate against damaging peer-effects and counter the spread of this epidemi

Automatic speech recognition with deep neural networks for impaired speech

The final publication is available at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-49169-1_10Automatic Speech Recognition has reached almost human performance in some controlled scenarios. However, recognition of impaired speech is a difficult task for two main reasons: data is (i) scarce and (ii) heterogeneous. In this work we train different architectures on a database of dysarthric speech. A comparison between architectures shows that, even with a small database, hybrid DNN-HMM models outperform classical GMM-HMM according to word error rate measures. A DNN is able to improve the recognition word error rate a 13% for subjects with dysarthria with respect to the best classical architecture. This improvement is higher than the one given by other deep neural networks such as CNNs, TDNNs and LSTMs. All the experiments have been done with the Kaldi toolkit for speech recognition for which we have adapted several recipes to deal with dysarthric speech and work on the TORGO database. These recipes are publicly available.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Cosmology with running parameters

The experimental evidence that the equation of state (EOS) of the dark energy (DE) could be evolving with time/redshift (including the possibility that it might behave phantom-like near our time) suggests that there might be dynamical DE fields that could explain this behavior. We propose, instead, that a variable cosmological term (including perhaps a variable Newton's gravitational coupling too) may account in a natural way for all these features.Comment: Talk given at TAUP 2005, Zaragoza, Spain, 10-14 Sep 200

Body Image and Food Disorders: Evidence from a Sample of European Women

Excessive preoccupation for self-image has been pointed out as an essential factor explaining food disorders. This paper draws upon Akerlof and Kranton (2000) to model how ’self-image’ and others’ appearances influence health related behaviours. We estimate the influence of ’peers’ image’ on the likelihood of anorexia and self-image using data from a cross sectional European representative survey for 2004. We follow a two-step empirical strategy. First, we estimate the probability that a woman is extremely thin and, at the same time, she sees herself as too fat. Our findings reveal that peers’ average Body Mass Index decreases the likelihood of being anorexic. Second, we take apart the two processes and estimate a recursive probit model of being very thin and perceiving one self as being too fat. Although peers’ Body Mass Index decreases the likelihood of being very thin but increases that of seeing one self as too fat, the unobservables explaining both processes are significantly correlated.self-image, identity, body image, eating disorders, anorexia

The Participative Turn in Cultural Policy: Paradigms, Models, Contexts

There is a participative turn in Cultural policy. Nevertheless, far from being coherent and generalized, it has first to deal with one of the peculiarities of Cultural Policies: the coexistence of several paradigms that induce distinct versions of participations. Secondly, it faces three major changes that affect the relationship between culture and society. Technological, societal and political trends explain the growing protagonist role of participation in today's western societies, with significant consequences in the reconfiguration of cultural behaviours and cultural institutions strategies. In order to enlighten the plural dimensions of participation and its results and consequences for cultural life we propose a model showing the distinct proactive roles of current citizens. This will then allow us to critically examine the arguments and organizational implications for the achievement of political goals, as well as its relationship with stakeholder's positions and people behaviours. This discussion will be inspired by some results of a European research-action project that aims to experiment active citizen participation in the field of performing arts

Self-organizing propagation patterns from dynamic self-assembly in monolayers

Propagation of localized orientational waves, as imaged by Brewster angle microscopy, is induced by low intensity linearly polarized light inside axisymmetric smectic-C confined domains in a photosensitive molecular thin film at the air/water interface (Langmuir monolayer). Results from numerical simulations of a model that couples photoreorientational effects and long-range elastic forces are presented. Differences are stressed between our scenario and the paradigmatic wave phenomena in excitable chemical media