Reguetón, narcocultura y bandidaje social en el filme puertorriqueño "Talento de barrio"

Talento de barrio, el filme puertorriqueño más taquillero de la historia, tiene como protagonista a Édgar, un maleante interpretado por la superestrella del reguetón Daddy Yankee. Mediante el contraste entre Édgar y otros personajes claramente antisociales, la película parece apuntar a la posibilidad del bandido social como una figura al margen de la legalidad, pero de signo positivo. Este ensayo recurre a autores como Hobsbawm, Benjamin, Agamben y otros para explorar el resurgimiento de un cierto tipo de bandidaje social, vinculado al narcotráfico y a la violencia extrema que conlleva, en la imaginación cinematográfica latinoamericana de hoy.Talento de Barrio, the highest-grossing domestic movie in Puerto Rican history, narrates the story of Edgar, a hoodlum played by reggaeton superstar Daddy Yankee. Through the opposition between Edgar and other clearly antisocial characters, the film seems to aim at the possibility of the social bandit as a figure on the margins of legality but of positive sign. This paper draws on works by Hobsbawm, Benjamin, Agamben, and others in order to explore the reemergence of a certain notion of social banditry, connected to drug trafficking and its inherent extreme violence, in the current cinematic imagination of Latin America

Technology Integration around the Geographic Information: A State of the Art

One of the elements that have popularized and facilitated the use of geographical information on a variety of computational applications has been the use of Web maps; this has opened new research challenges on different subjects, from locating places and people, the study of social behavior or the analyzing of the hidden structures of the terms used in a natural language query used for locating a place. However, the use of geographic information under technological features is not new, instead it has been part of a development and technological integration process. This paper presents a state of the art review about the application of geographic information under different approaches: its use on location based services, the collaborative user participation on it, its contextual-awareness, its use in the Semantic Web and the challenges of its use in natural languge queries. Finally, a prototype that integrates most of these areas is presented

SCNet: Learning Semantic Correspondence

This paper addresses the problem of establishing semantic correspondences between images depicting different instances of the same object or scene category. Previous approaches focus on either combining a spatial regularizer with hand-crafted features, or learning a correspondence model for appearance only. We propose instead a convolutional neural network architecture, called SCNet, for learning a geometrically plausible model for semantic correspondence. SCNet uses region proposals as matching primitives, and explicitly incorporates geometric consistency in its loss function. It is trained on image pairs obtained from the PASCAL VOC 2007 keypoint dataset, and a comparative evaluation on several standard benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed approach substantially outperforms both recent deep learning architectures and previous methods based on hand-crafted features.Comment: ICCV 201

HUNTINGTON REVISITADO: RELEYENDO “EL DESAFÍO HISPANO” EN EL VESTÍBULO DE LA TORRE TRUMP

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Héroes y bandidos: iconos populares y figuraciones de la nación en América Latina

This dissertation explores the figure of the hero in Latin American popular culture from a postcolonial-subalternist perspective. In the West, the conventional hero functions as a role model, defends principles of justice and order, and symbolically represents the state or at least the status quo. But what happens when—and where—the state is seen as unfair instead of just, weak instead of strong, and dangerous instead of benevolent? Is the hero different in Latin America, a marginal region in the world system living a heterogeneous modernity, as compared with the hero of a central, hegemonic power?Examining a number of real-life and fictional characters—from superheroes to criminals—this dissertation aims to understand the role these icons play in the historical processes of nation building, hegemonic domination, and subaltern resistance throughout the region. The first section deals with two hugely popular Mexican superheroes: Santo el Enmascarado de Plata and Chapulín Colorado. Santo is a straightforward, law-and-order superhero, this during a time in which Mexico and other Latin American countries still believed in, and pursued, economic progress via the developmentalist model, with a strong state, a very instrumental culture industry backed by the government, and so forth. Chapulín, by contrast, is the opposite of the regular superhero: weak, cowardly, and not too bright. If he is to be read as a national allegory, it certainly shows a different face of the Mexican state, in a time in which developmentalism was undoubtedly on its way out.The second part examines the two best selling musical genres in Latin America (and in the Hispanic market in the U.S.): the Mexican-U.S. Southwestern narcocorrido and the Puerto Rican-Nuyorican reggaetón, especially with respect to their treatment of drug lords, in the first case, and gang leaders, in the second. On many occasions, and in many ways, that treatment consists in depicting these outlaws as heroes, this in a post-communist, post-revolutionary, post-developmentalist world, and crucially, in a world after the complete failure and the devastating effects of neoliberalism in Latin America

La Frontera entre México y Estados Unidos en la Gran Pantalla

El cine de frontera no es nada nuevo. Las representaciones fílmicas del espacio que conecta y separa los territorios nacionales de México y Estados Unidos son abundantes y han formado parte de la historia del séptimo arte casi desde su nacimiento. Después de todo, la frontera norte es, al menos desde la intervención estadounidense de mediados del siglo XIX, un elemento fundamental para entender México y su identidad nacional, y ha sido escenario privilegiado de numerosos episodios de la vida del país, entre ellos la Revolución Mexicana. El suroeste, por su parte, también ha desempeñado un papel sustancial, e incluso definitorio según Frederick Jackson Turner, en la consolidación del proyecto nacional norteamericano (además, en lo estrictamente relacionado con el cine, no hay que olvidar que el propio Hollywood se encuentra en el área que nos ocupa)

School Teachers Trainees and the Grammatical Competence for their Teaching Practice

This paper is focused on checking, as a main objective, if the students who get into higher education show a basic grammatical competence that qualifies them to face their initial training as future teachers ( in this case, future Primary School teachers). It has been checked that the level of this competence is awfully low and that the study variable is not meaningful, since the lack of grammatical competence remains; those assumptions are based on a grammar skill survey This study is completed with a SWOT matrix that offers areas of action to solve these problems from the comparison between the quantitative results and the ethnographic techniques used (biographical narrative and focal group

DLSITE-1: lexical analysis for solving textual entailment recognition

This paper discusses the recognition of textual entailment in a text-hypothesis pair by applying a wide variety of lexical measures. We consider that the entailment phenomenon can be tackled from three general levels: lexical, syntactic and semantic. The main goals of this research are to deal with this phenomenon from a lexical point of view, and achieve high results considering only such kind of knowledge. To accomplish this, the information provided by the lexical measures is used as a set of features for a Support Vector Machine which will decide if the entailment relation is produced. A study of the most relevant features and a comparison with the best state-of-the-art textual entailment systems is exposed throughout the paper. Finally, the system has been evaluated using the Second PASCAL Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge data and evaluation methodology, obtaining an accuracy rate of 61.88%.QALL-ME consortium, 6º Programa Marco, Unión Europea, referencia del proyecto FP6-IST-033860. Gobierno de España, proyecto CICyT número TIN2006-1526-C06-01