Justificant les preferències. Com argumenten les opcions lingüístiques els adolescents catalans

A Catalunya, a diferència d'altres societats plurilingües occidentals, no s'hi han desenvolupat estructures socials independents per a cadascun dels principals grups lingüístics: ben al contrari, les ideologies i pràctiques impulsades d'ençà del restabliment de la Generalitat s'han mantingut contràries a la separació, en una societat integracionista no polaritzada etnolingüísticament. Aquest article tracta d'establir sobre quines bases justifiquen les seues preferències i identificacions lingüístiques un grup d'adolescents de Mataró, i com aquestes opcions s'enquadren en el marc integracionista predominant. Els informants solen mostrar preferència per la seua llengua inicial però a partir de discursos poc polaritzats i amb argumentacions que majoritàriament remeten a l'àmbit privat —als usos interpersonals i a la «comoditat» en l'ús de la llengua. En conseqüència, destaca l'escassetat de discursos basats en l'adscripció col·lectiva o de discursos polititzats sobre les llengües.Unlike other Western multilingual societies, Catalonia has not developed independent social structures for each of its main linguistic groups: on the contrary, the ideologies and practices fostered since the recovery of the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat) have been opposed to separation, in an ethnolinguistically non-polarised integrationist society. This paper seeks to establish the bases on which a group of adolescents from the town of Mataró justify their linguistic preferences and identifications, and how these choices fit into the predominant integrationist framework. The informants usually show a preference for their L1 while doing so on the basis of little polarised discourses, with rationales relating for the most part to the private sphere and especially to interpersonal language uses and to the “convenience” of using thelanguage. Accordingly, there is a notable scarcity of discourses based on group identity and politicised discourses on languages

Accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0 supporting technologies in manufacturing engineering courses

[EN] Universities are one of the fundamental actors to guarantee the dissemination of knowledge and the development of competences related to the Industry of the Future (IoF) or Industry 4.0. Computer Aided (CAX) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technologies are key part in the IoF. With this aim, it was launch a project focused on Manufacturing and partially funded by La Fondation Dassault Systèmes. This communication presents a review on CAX-PLM training, four initiatives already in place in universities participating in the project, the project scope, the approach to integrate with the industrial context, the working method to consider different competence profiles and the development framework.The authors express their gratitude to the other project colleagues and to La Fondation Dassault Systèmes for its funding support.Ríos, J.; Mas, F.; Marcos, M.; Vila, C.; Ugarte, D.; Chevrot, T. (2017). Accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0 supporting technologies in manufacturing engineering courses. MATERIALS SCIENCE FORUM. 903:100-111. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/MSF.903.100S10011190

Few-Shot Symbol Classification via Self-Supervised Learning and Nearest Neighbor

The recognition of symbols within document images is one of the most relevant steps involved in the Document Analysis field. While current state-of-the-art methods based on Deep Learning are capable of adequately performing this task, they generally require a vast amount of data that has to be manually labeled. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning-based method that addresses this task by training a neural-based feature extractor with a set of unlabeled documents and performs the recognition task considering just a few reference samples. Experiments on different corpora comprising music, text, and symbol documents report that the proposal is capable of adequately tackling the task with high accuracy rates of up to 95% in few-shot settings. Moreover, results show that the presented strategy outperforms the base supervised learning approaches trained with the same amount of data that, in some cases, even fail to converge. This approach, hence, stands as a lightweight alternative to deal with symbol classification with few annotated data.This paper is part of the project I+D+i PID2020-118447RA-I00 (MultiScore), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The first author is supported by grant FPU19/04957 from the Spanish Ministerio de Universidades. The second and third authors are respectively supported by grants ACIF/2021/356 and APOSTD/2020/256 from “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana”

Nanoplasmonic Paper-Based Platform for General Screening of Biomacromolecules

Hygiene assessment in industrial and clinical environments is crucial in the prevention of health risks. Current technologies for routine cleanliness evaluation rely on the detection of specific biomolecules, thus requiring more than one test for broad-range screening. Herein, the modulation of the catalytic activity of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) by biomacromolecules was employed to develop a nanoplasmonic platform for general hygiene screening. AuNPs were immobilized on cellulose paper by simple adsorption. When ferricyanide was dispensed onto the paper, the AuNPs catalysed the ferricyanide's dissociation, releasing free cyanide ions that dissolved them. The AuNP dissolution produced an intense colour shift detectable with the naked eye. When biomacromolecules (e.g., proteins and polysaccharides) were present, they spontaneously attached to AuNPs, forming a biomolecular corona (biocorona), reducing their catalytic activity until complete suppression when the NPs were fully covered by molecules. The concentration-dependent decrease in the catalytic activity was here used to quantify biomacromolecules and complex samples such as milk, eggs, soy sauce and yeast extract (in 20 min), with detection limits comparable to those of standard methods, i.e., 0.25 µg mL −1 for albumin. This nano-enabled technology may be applied as a broad-range (unspecific) alert system for inexpensive cleanliness evaluation, with potential applications in sensitive sectors including productive industries and hospitals

El programa de formación de usuarios de la Biblioteca de l'Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona

Peer Reviewe

Decoupling music notation to improve end-to-end Optical Music Recognition

Inspired by the Text Recognition field, end-to-end schemes based on Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNN) trained with the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function are considered one of the current state-of-the-art techniques for staff-level Optical Music Recognition (OMR). Unlike text symbols, music-notation elements may be defined as a combination of (i) a shape primitive located in (ii) a certain position in a staff. However, this double nature is generally neglected in the learning process, as each combination is treated as a single token. In this work, we study whether exploiting such particularity of music notation actually benefits the recognition performance and, if so, which approach is the most appropriate. For that, we thoroughly review existing specific approaches that explore this premise and propose different combinations of them. Furthermore, considering the limitations observed in such approaches, a novel decoding strategy specifically designed for OMR is proposed. The results obtained with four different corpora of historical manuscripts show the relevance of leveraging this double nature of music notation since it outperforms the standard approaches where it is ignored. In addition, the proposed decoding leads to significant reductions in the error rates with respect to the other cases.This paper is part of the project I+D+i PID2020-118447RA-I00 (MultiScore), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The first author is supported by grant FPU19/04957 from the Spanish Ministerio de Universidades. The second author is supported by grant ACIF/2021/356 from “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana“. The third author is supported by grant APOSTD/2020/256 from “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana”

Paper-based chromatic toxicity bioassay by analysis of bacterial ferricyanide reduction

Water quality assessment requires a continuous and strict analysis of samples to guarantee compliance with established standards. Nowadays, the increasing number of pollutants and their synergistic effects lead to the development general toxicity bioassays capable to analyse water pollution as a whole. Current general toxicity methods, e.g. Microtox®, rely on long operation protocols, the use of complex and expensive instrumentation and sample pre-treatment, which should be transported to the laboratory for analysis. These requirements delay sample analysis and hence, the response to avoid an environmental catastrophe. In an attempt to solve it, a fast (15 min) and low-cost toxicity bioassay based on the chromatic changes associated to bacterial ferricyanide reduction is here presented. E. coli cells (used as model bacteria) were stably trapped on low-cost paper matrices (cellulose-based paper discs, PDs) and remained viable for long times (1 month at -20 °C). Apart from bacterial carrier, paper matrices also acted as a fluidic element, allowing fluid management without the need of external pumps. Bioassay evaluation was performed using copper as model toxic agent. Chromatic changes associated to bacterial ferricyanide reduction were determined by three different transduction methods, i.e. (i) optical reflectometry (as reference method), (ii) image analysis and (iii) visual inspection. In all cases, bioassay results (in terms of half maximal effective concentrations, EC50) were in agreement with already reported data, confirming the good performance of the bioassay. The validation of the bioassay was performed by analysis of real samples from natural sources, which were analysed and compared with a reference method (i.e. Microtox). Obtained results showed agreement for about 70% of toxic samples and 80% of non-toxic samples, which may validate the use of this simple and quick protocol in the determination of general toxicity. The minimum instrumentation requirements and the simplicity of the bioassay open the possibility of in-situ water toxicity assessment with a fast and low-cost protocolPostprint (author's final draft

Effect of sodium valproate on the conformational stability of the visual G Protein-coupled receptor rhodopsin

Rhodopsin is the G protein-coupled receptor of rod photoreceptor cells that mediates vertebrate vision at low light intensities. Mutations in rhodopsin cause inherited retinal degenerative diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa. Several therapeutic strategies have attempted to address and counteract the deleterious effect of rhodopsin mutations on the conformation and function of this photoreceptor protein, but none has been successful in efficiently preventing retinal degeneration in humans. These approaches include, among others, the use of small molecules, known as pharmacological chaperones, that bind to the receptor stabilizing its proper folded conformation. Valproic acid, in its sodium valproate form, has been used as an anticonvulsant in epileptic patients and in the treatment of several psychiatric disorders. More recently, this compound has been tested as a potential therapeutic agent for the treatment of retinal degeneration associated with retinitis pigmentosa caused by rhodopsin mutations. We now report on the effect of sodium valproate on the conformational stability of heterologously expressed wild-type rhodopsin and a rhodopsin mutant, I307N, which has been shown to be an appropriate model for studying retinal degeneration in mice. We found no sign of enhanced stability for the dark inactive conformation of the I307N mutant. Furthermore, the photoactivated conformation of the mutant appears to be destabilized by sodium valproate as indicated by a faster decay of its active conformation. Therefore, our results support a destabilizing effect of sodium valproate on rhodopsin I307N mutant associated with retinal degeneration. These findings, at the molecular level, agree with recent clinical studies reporting negative effects of sodium valproate on the visual function of retinitis pigmentosa patients.This research was supported by grant PID2019-104817GB-I00 from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Justificant les preferències. Com argumenten les opcions lingüístiques els adolescents catalans

A Catalunya, a diferència d'altres societats plurilingües occidentals, no s'hi han desenvolupat estructures socials independents per a cadascun dels principals grups lingüístics: ben al contrari, les ideologies i pràctiques impulsades d'ençà del restabliment de la Generalitat s'han mantingut contràries a la separació, en una societat integracionista no polaritzada etnolingüísticament. Aquest article tracta d'establir sobre quines bases justifiquen les seues preferències i identificacions lingüístiques un grup d'adolescents de Mataró, i com aquestes opcions s'enquadren en el marc integracionista predominant. Els informants solen mostrar preferència per la seua llengua inicial però a partir de discursos poc polaritzats i amb argumentacions que majoritàriament remeten a l'àmbit privat ¿als usos interpersonals i a la «comoditat» en l'ús de la llengua. En conseqüència, destaca l'escassetat de discursos basats en l'adscripció col·lectiva o de discursos polititzats sobre les llengües