Roaring Women: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of the conceptual metaphor of women as an animal in songs

El propósito de este trabajo es ver cómo la música contribuye a difundir una ideología específica, representando a la mujer de diferentes maneras; además de ver cómo la música y la sociedad están correlacionadas y se influencian la una a la otra. Para ver esto, se analizarán dos canciones en inglés (Roar de Katy Perry y Animals de Maroon 5) que representan dos imágenes diferentes de la mujer a través del uso de la metáfora conceptual LA MUJER ES UN ANIMAL. El análisis se llevará a cabo tomando las ideas sobre el Análisis Crítico del Discurso de Fairclough y Van Dijk para la parte lingüística o las letras y las ideas sobre multimodalidad y análisis visual de Kress y Van Leeuwen para la parte visual o el videoclip ya que el significado de las canciones depende de varios modos semióticos. El análisis multimodal muestra que en Animals se representa a una mujer cosificada, lo que contribuye a la perpetuación de la ideología del patriarcado; mientras que en Roar se representa a una mujer empoderada y autosuficiente, lo que contribuye a la creación de una nueva imagen que trata de romper con la anterior ideología. A pesar de esto, el análisis también muestra que incluso en este tipo de canciones se pueden encontrar elementos de la ideología del patriarcado ya que está muy arraigada en la sociedad.This dissertation aims to determine how music can contribute to disseminate a specific ideology by portraying women in different ways, as well as to determine how music and society are correlated and influence one to the other. In order to do that, two songs in English (Roar by Katy Perry and Animals by Maroon 5) which depict two different images of women through the use of the conceptual metaphor WOMAN IS AN ANIMAL will be analyzed. The analysis will be carried out taking the ideas of Fairclough and Van Dijk on Critical Discourse Analysis for the linguistic part, i.e. the lyrics, and of Kress and Van Leeuwen on multimodality and visual analysis for the visual part, i.e. the music video, since the meaning in songs relies on various semiotic modes. This multimodal analysis shows that Animals portrays an image of an objectified woman, contributing to the perpetuation of the patriarchal ideology; while Roar portrays an empowered and self-sufficient woman, contributing to the creation of a new image that breaks with that ideology. In spite of that, the analysis also shows that even in this song, some elements of the patriarchal ideology can be found as it is deeply rooted in society.Departamento de Filología InglesaGrado en Estudios Inglese

Transition metal dichalcogenides: nanostructuring strategies and engineering for water electrolysis

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a family of ubiquitous and inexpensive inorganic layered materials, with an ever-growing set of physicochemical properties. Namely, the edge site confined hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysis found in pristine TMDs is of high interest to replace the scarce precious metals currently employed in proton exchange membrane electrolysers. The core of this thesis is devoted to the maximization of the electrocatalytic activity of TMDs, here being MoS2 and WS2, towards the HER in acidic electrolytes by use of physical and electrochemical techniques. Activation of the electrochemically inert sulfur edge sites in MoS2 was undertaken by preparation of Ni-MoS2 hybrid nanoclusters using a dual-target magnetron sputtering and gas condensation technique. The HER enhancement observed is limited by the sulfur-deficient inherent nature of the size-selected MoS2 nanoclusters, which hampers their crystallinity and electrochemical stability, amended here by a post-sulfidation treatment consisting of sulfur evaporation and annealing. Edge site exposure is alternatively explored for crystalline TMD flakes by fabrication of nanopillar/nanocone array structures, investigating their morphology-dependent mass transport properties and chalcogen-dependent HER catalysis. Insight on the pH-dependent HER activity and stability of electrodeposited amorphous molybdenum sulfide is thoroughly investigated, proposing the moieties responsible for the observed HER catalysis. Lastly, the potential of tungsten sulfide decoration to mitigate iridium corrosion under acidic oxygen evolution reaction conditions is evaluated

Gesture and Action Recognition by Evolved Dynamic Subgestures

This paper introduces a framework for gesture and action recognition based on the evolution of temporal gesture primitives, or subgestures. Our work is inspired on the principle of producing genetic variations within a population of gesture subsequences, with the goal of obtaining a set of gesture units that enhance the generalization capability of standard gesture recognition approaches. In our context, gesture primitives are evolved over time using dynamic programming and generative models in order to recognize complex actions. In few generations, the proposed subgesture-based representation of actions and gestures outperforms the state of the art results on the MSRDaily3D and MSRAction3D datasets

Non-Verbal Communication Analysis in Victim-Offender Mediations

In this paper we present a non-invasive ambient intelligence framework for the semi-automatic analysis of non-verbal communication applied to the restorative justice field. In particular, we propose the use of computer vision and social signal processing technologies in real scenarios of Victim-Offender Mediations, applying feature extraction techniques to multi-modal audio-RGB-depth data. We compute a set of behavioral indicators that define communicative cues from the fields of psychology and observational methodology. We test our methodology on data captured in real world Victim-Offender Mediation sessions in Catalonia in collaboration with the regional government. We define the ground truth based on expert opinions when annotating the observed social responses. Using different state-of-the-art binary classification approaches, our system achieves recognition accuracies of 86% when predicting satisfaction, and 79% when predicting both agreement and receptivity. Applying a regression strategy, we obtain a mean deviation for the predictions between 0.5 and 0.7 in the range [1-5] for the computed social signals.Comment: Please, find the supplementary video material at: http://sunai.uoc.edu/~vponcel/video/VOMSessionSample.mp

Improving Bag of Visual Words Representations with Genetic Programming

The bag of visual words is a well established representation in diverse computer vision problems. Taking inspiration from the fields of text mining and retrieval, this representation has proved to be very effective in a large number of domains. In most cases, a standard term-frequency weighting scheme is considered for representing images and videos in computer vision. This is somewhat surprising, as there are many alternative ways of generating bag of words representations within the text processing community. This paper explores the use of alternative weighting schemes for landmark tasks in computer vision: image categorization and gesture recognition. We study the suitability of using well-known supervised and unsupervised weighting schemes for such tasks. More importantly, we devise a genetic program that learns new ways of representing images and videos under the bag of visual words representation. The proposed method learns to combine term-weighting primitives trying to maximize the classification performance. Experimental results are reported in standard image and video data sets showing the effectiveness of the proposed evolutionary algorithm

Depth of focus increase by multiplexing programmable diffractive lenses

A combination of several diffractive lenses written onto a single programmable liquid crystal display (LCD) is proposed for increasing the Depth of Focus (DOF) of the imaging system as a whole. The lenses are spatially multiplexed in a random scheme onto the LCD. The axial irradiance distribution produced by each lens overlaps with the next one producing an extended focal depth. To compare the image quality of the multiplexed lenses, the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) is calculated. Finally we obtain the experimental Point Spread Functions (PSF) for these multiplexed lenses and experimental results in which an extended object is illuminated under spatially incoherent monochromatic light. We compare the images obtained in the focal plane and in some defocused planes with the single lens and with three multiplexed lenses. The experimental results confirm that the multiplexed lenses produce a high increase in the depth of focus.Fil: Iemmi, Claudio Cesar. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Campos, Juan. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; EspañaFil: Escalera, J. C.. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; EspañaFil: López Coronado, O. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; EspañaFil: Gimeno, R.. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; EspañaFil: Yzuel, María J.. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona; Españ

Electrochemical growth of CoNi and Pt-CoNi soft magnetic composites on an alkanethiol monolayer-modified ITO substrate

CoNi and Pt-CoNi magnetic layers on indium-tin oxide (ITO) substrates modified by an alkanethiol self-assembled monolayer (SAM) have been electrochemically obtained as an initial stage to prepare semiconducting layer-SAM-magnetic layer hybrid structures. The best conditions to obtain the maximum compactness of adsorbed layers of dodecanethiol (C12-SH) on ITO substrate have been studied using contact angle, AFM, XPS and electrochemical tests. The electrochemical characterization (electrochemical probe or voltammetric response in blank solutions) is fundamental to ensure the maximum blocking of the substrate. Although the electrodeposition process on the SAM-modified ITO substrate is very slow if the blocking of the surface is significant, non-cracked metallic layers of CoNi, with or without a previously electrodeposited seed-layer of platinum, have been obtained by optimizing the deposition potentials. Initial nucleation is expected to take place at the pinhole defects of the C12-SH SAM, followed by a mushroom-like growth regime through the SAM interface that allows the formation of a continuous metallic layer electrically connected to the ITO surface. Due to the potential of the methodology, the preparation of patterned metallic deposits on ITO substrate using SAMs with different coverage as templates is feasible

Electrochemical sulfidation of WS2 nanoarrays:strong dependence of hydrogen evolution activity on transition metal sulfide surface composition

The activity of transition metal sulfides for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) can be increased by sulfur-enrichment of active metal-sulfide sites. In this report, we investigate the electrochemical sulfidation of atmospherically aged WS2 nanoarrays with respect to enhancing HER activity. In contrast to MoS2, it is found that sulfidation diminishes HER activity. Electrochemical and XPS experiments suggest the involvement of insoluble tungsten oxides in the altered HER and electron transfer properties. This demonstrates the strong dependence of the transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) composition with the successful sulfur incorporation and subsequent HER activity