Novel silica membrane material for molecular sieve applications

Development of new silica membranes properties, e.g., molecular sieving properties, has been increasingly gaining importance in the last few years. A novel unsupported silica membrane, referred to as hydrophobic metal-doped silica, was developed by cobalt-doping within the organic templated silica matrix. The novel material was prepared by the acid-catalyzed hydrolysis and condensation process of tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) and methyltriethoxysilane (MTES), which is the precursor for methyl ligand covalently bounded to the silica matrix. The synthesis and surface properties of the novel unsupported silica membrane as well as the unsupported blank silica and modified silica membranes were revealed by surface and microstructural techniques, such as water contact angle measurement, FTIR, X-ray, Solid-state 29Si MAS NMR, TGA and N2 and CO2 adsorption measurements. The results showed that the thermal stability of the organic templated silica matrix was enhanced by cobalt-doping process. A hydrophobic microporous silica membrane material with high thermal stability up to ∼560 °C in oxidizing atmosphere and a narrow pore size distribution centered at 1.1 nm was obtained. Therefore, a novel precursor material for molecular sieve silica membranes applications has been achieved and developed.

Jofré (1965): un projecte operístic de Joan Valls Jordà amb música d’Amand Blanquer

La troballa del mecanoscrit del primer acte d’un projecte d’òpera de 1965, amb llibret del poeta Joan Valls Jordà (1917-1989) i al qual havia de posar música el compositor Amand Blanquer Ponsoda (1935-2005), aporta noves dades al voltant de la creació operística en valencià. Jofré, que havia de tenir tres actes (el segon dels quals dividit en dos quadres), va restar entre els papers del poeta fins a la seua mort i, posteriorment, ha estat custodiat en el fons Joan Valls de l’Arxiu Municipal d’Alcoi. Al llarg de gairebé cinquanta anys, sols hem pogut trobar una breu referencia de la seua existència, feta pel mateix Blanquer. Retrobar-la ara suposa, en primer lloc, donar a conèixer un inèdit de Valls; i, en segona instància, modificar la nostra percepció d’aquest gènere a les terres valencianes de la mà d’aquests dos alcoians imprescindibles.

El treball autònom de l’alumnat: un cas aplicable a l’assignatura 12039

A partir d’una assignatura espcífica de postgrau (12039), dissenyada per a estudiants egressats de geografia i història, un grup de professors de la facultat de filosofia i lletres (història contemporània, història de l’art, filología española, antropologia i filologia catalana), elaboren temes de treball diferents que dialoguen entre ells enriquint els objectius inicials de l’assignatura: els coneixements de la història i cultura contemporànies. Amb aquest punt de partida, la xarxa creada explora els punts següents: metodologies docents i col·laboratives per a fomentar la participació activa i el treball en equip de l’alumnat;s’hi treballa sobre alguns casos pràctics sobre els quals investiguen els diversos docents implicats: història i poètiques de la memòria: la violència política en la representació del franquisme, sobre les repercussions del franquisme en l’art i l’arquitectura, repercussions del franquisme en la història i en la novel·la, teatre, cine i documentals, i les seues connexions amb altres literatures i cultures pròximes.

Semantic change and intersubjectification: The origin of reprise evidential conditional in Old Catalan

The reprise evidential conditional (REC) is nowadays not very usual in Catalan: it is restricted to journalistic language and to some very formal genres (such as academic or legal language), it is not present in spontaneous discourse. On the one hand, it has been described among the rather new modality values of the conditional. On the other, the normative tradition tended to reject it for being a gallicism, or to describe it as an unsuitable neologism. Thanks to the extraction from text corpora, we surprisingly find this REC in Catalan from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the contemporary age, with semantic and pragmatic nuances and different evidence of grammaticalization. Due to the current interest in evidentiality, the REC has been widely studied in French, Italian and Portuguese, focusing mainly on its contemporary uses and not so intensively on the diachronic process that could explain the origin of this value. In line with this research, that we initiated studying the epistemic and evidential future in Catalan, our aim is to describe: a) the pragmatic context that could have been the initial point of the REC in the thirteenth century, before we find indisputable attestations of this use; b) the path of semantic change followed by the conditional from a ‘future in the past’ tense to the acquisition of epistemic and evidential values; and c) the role played by invited inferences, subjectification and intersubjectification in this change.