Zambrano y Nietzsche, camino del lenguaje

¿El único camino para la filosofía es pensar con método, o bien el camino del pensar es el único método filosófico? ¿La filosofía debe someter el lenguaje a un método, o bien el método específico de la filosofía es seguir libre y creativamente el lenguaje? Yendo más allá del camino «de la sierpe» o «del intelecto», Zambrano y Nietzsche optan por encaminar la «ministría» del escritor y el filósofo bajo la «maestría» del lenguaje, favoreciendo que pensamiento y lenguaje se revitalicen recíprocamente

Déu, modernitat i postmodernitat

El professor Mayos analitza, lluny de tòpics, el discurs sobre Déu en alguns pensadors moderns i explora les condicions de possibilitat d'una paraula sobre Déu en la postmodernitat. Al final de l'article investiga els trets de la nova forma de religiositat que té lloc en el si del que s'ha anomenat com a postmodernitat

Zambrano y Nietzsche, camino del lenguaje

¿El único camino para la filosofía es pensar con método, o bien el camino del pensar es el único método filosófico? ¿La filosofía debe someter el lenguaje a un método, o bien el método específico de la filosofía es seguir libre y creativamente el lenguaje? Yendo más allá del camino «de la sierpe» o «del intelecto», Zambrano y Nietzsche optan por encaminar la «ministría» del escritor y el filósofo bajo la «maestría» del lenguaje, favoreciendo que pensamiento y lenguaje se revitalicen recíprocamente.Is thinking with method the only pathway for philosophy or the pathway of thinking is the only philosophical method? Must philosophy subdue the language to a method, or is the specific method of philosophy to follow the language freely and creatively? Beyond the pathway of «the serpent» or the pathway «of intellect», both Zambrano and Nietzsche choose to route the «ministery» of the writer and the philosopher under the «mastery» of language, thus promoting the reciprocal revitalization of thought and language.¿El único camino para la filosofía es pensar con método, o bien el camino del pensar es el único método filosófico? ¿La filosofía debe someter el lenguaje a un método, o bien el método específico de la filosofía es seguir libre y creativamente el lenguaje? Yendo más allá del camino «de la sierpe» o «del intelecto», Zambrano y Nietzsche optan por encaminar la «ministría» del escritor y el filósofo bajo la «maestría» del lenguaje, favoreciendo que pensamiento y lenguaje se revitalicen recíprocamente

Contribucions a l'anàlisi automàtica de grans volums de dades

Aquesta tesi és fonamentalment un estudi sobre la recerca d'automatismes en diferents algorismes aplicats a la ciència de la informació geogràfica. Els treballs que la formen tenen un important objectiu comú: aconseguir la màxima qualitat possible dels resultats obtinguts en substituir el mètode habitual (manual) en l'anàlisi de grans volums de dades pel corresponent mètode automàtic, que mostra diversos avantatges respecte el primer, i en el qual tenen un paper rellevant les metadades, és a dir, la informació sobre dades, objectes o recursos.Esta tesis es fundamentalmente un estudio sobre la búsqueda de automatismos en diferentes algoritmos aplicados a la ciencia de la información geográfica. Los trabajos que la forman tienen un importante objetivo común: conseguir la máxima calidad posible de los resultados obtenidos al sustituir el método habitual (manual) en el análisis de grandes volúmenes de datos por el correspondiente método automático, que muestra varias ventajas respecto al primero, y en el que tienen un papel relevante los metadatos, es decir, la información sobre datos, objetos o recursos.This thesis is basically a study of the search for automatisms in different algorithms applied to Geographical Information Science. The works that form the thesis have an important common goal: to obtain the highest possible quality in results when replacing the usual (manual) method in the analysis of large volumes of data for the corresponding automatic method. This method shows several advantages over the former and in which metadata, i.e., information about data objects or resources, play an important role

Voice source characterization for prosodic and spectral manipulation

The objective of this dissertation is to study and develop techniques to decompose the speech signal into its two main components: voice source and vocal tract. Our main efforts are on the glottal pulse analysis and characterization. We want to explore the utility of this model in different areas of speech processing: speech synthesis, voice conversion or emotion detection among others. Thus, we will study different techniques for prosodic and spectral manipulation. One of our requirements is that the methods should be robust enough to work with the large databases typical of speech synthesis. We use a speech production model in which the glottal flow produced by the vibrating vocal folds goes through the vocal (and nasal) tract cavities and its radiated by the lips. Removing the effect of the vocal tract from the speech signal to obtain the glottal pulse is known as inverse filtering. We use a parametric model fo the glottal pulse directly in the source-filter decomposition phase. In order to validate the accuracy of the parametrization algorithm, we designed a synthetic corpus using LF glottal parameters reported in the literature, complemented with our own results from the vowel database. The results show that our method gives satisfactory results in a wide range of glottal configurations and at different levels of SNR. Our method using the whitened residual compared favorably to this reference, achieving high quality ratings (Good-Excellent). Our full parametrized system scored lower than the other two ranking in third place, but still higher than the acceptance threshold (Fair-Good). Next we proposed two methods for prosody modification, one for each of the residual representations explained above. The first method used our full parametrization system and frame interpolation to perform the desired changes in pitch and duration. The second method used resampling on the residual waveform and a frame selection technique to generate a new sequence of frames to be synthesized. The results showed that both methods are rated similarly (Fair-Good) and that more work is needed in order to achieve quality levels similar to the reference methods. As part of this dissertation, we have studied the application of our models in three different areas: voice conversion, voice quality analysis and emotion recognition. We have included our speech production model in a reference voice conversion system, to evaluate the impact of our parametrization in this task. The results showed that the evaluators preferred our method over the original one, rating it with a higher score in the MOS scale. To study the voice quality, we recorded a small database consisting of isolated, sustained Spanish vowels in four different phonations (modal, rough, creaky and falsetto) and were later also used in our study of voice quality. Comparing the results with those reported in the literature, we found them to generally agree with previous findings. Some differences existed, but they could be attributed to the difficulties in comparing voice qualities produced by different speakers. At the same time we conducted experiments in the field of voice quality identification, with very good results. We have also evaluated the performance of an automatic emotion classifier based on GMM using glottal measures. For each emotion, we have trained an specific model using different features, comparing our parametrization to a baseline system using spectral and prosodic characteristics. The results of the test were very satisfactory, showing a relative error reduction of more than 20% with respect to the baseline system. The accuracy of the different emotions detection was also high, improving the results of previously reported works using the same database. Overall, we can conclude that the glottal source parameters extracted using our algorithm have a positive impact in the field of automatic emotion classification

Electromagnetic Nondestructive Evaluation of Surface Decarburization on Steels : Feasibility and Possible Applications

The need of a nondestructive testing of surface decarburization on steels is very high, since, at the present time, only destructive methods (such as optical micrography, hardness tests or chemical analysis) are industrially used to cope with what turns out to be a particularly important problem on grades with high security requirements, due to a resulting lower fatigue strength