Uses of also in oral semi-informal German

In recent grammars and dictionaries also (`therefore, so, well¿) continues to be preferably presented as an adverb with a conclusive-consecutive connective function that essentially corresponds to its use in formal written German. Its function as a modal particle is documented, however, since the beginnings of what is known as Partikelforschung, though not all its uses have been systematically investigated contrasting oral and written German, either in mode or concept. In this article we analyse the uses of also in semi-informal oral interactions on the basis of empirical data (from a subsample of the VARCOM corpus). Specifically, we will analyse the presence and frequency of also at the beginning of a sentence or sequence, the functions it serves as a logical-semantic connector or discourse and interaction marker and the interrelations between these functions, in order to contrast these results with the description of also provided by current reference works.

Writing for the contemporany naturalistic stage: a personal process of creation

El objetivo principal de este proyecto es desarrollar más a fondo y consolidar los objetivos formativos y competencias del grado en Estudios Ingleses a través de un trabajo de escritura creativa, en concreto, la creación de una obra teatral original. Este trabajo consiste en, por un lado, una introducción al Naturalismo, como género literario en un marco cultural y metodológico, y por otro lado, la creación personal de una obra naturalista que incluye la primera parte del manuscrito. Este proyecto incluye un proceso completo de creatividad justificado gracias a las principales teorías de algunos escritores naturalistas, como: Émile Zola – como precursor del Naturalismo – y August Strindberg como uno de los mayores mentores de este género literario. Los resultados obtenidos en este trabajo son: la creación de una obra teatral original, una especialización en el movimiento Naturalista aplicado al teatro contemporáneo, y un profundo conocimiento de la lengua inglesa a través de la perspectiva de un dramaturgo.

From institutional repositories to personal collections of learning resources

Institutional digital repositories are a basic piece to provide preservation and reutilization of learning resources. However, their creation and maintenance is usually performed following a top-down approach, causing limitations in the search and reutilization of learning resources. In order to avoid this problem we propose to use web 2.0 functionalities. In this paper we present how tagging can be used to enhance the search and reusability functionalities of institutional learning repositories as well as promoting their usage. The paper also describes the evaluation process that was performed in a pilot experience involving open educational resources.

An Explanatory Approach to the Political Uses of ICT Initiatives for Participation : Institutions, Context, and Characteristics of the Actors

Political actors use ICTs in a different manner and in different degrees when it comes to achieving a closer relationship between the public and politicians. Usually, political parties develop ICT strategies only for electoral campaigning and therefore restrain ICT usages to providing information and establishing a few channels of communication. By contrast, local governments make much more use of ICT tools for participatory and deliberative purposes. These differences in usages have not been well explained in the literature because of a lack of a comprehensive explanatory model. This chapter seeks to build the basis for this model, that is, to establish which factors affect and condition different political uses of ICTs and which principles underlie that behaviour. We consider that political actors are intentional and their behaviour is mediated by the political institutions and the socioeconomic context of the country. Also, though, the actor¿s own characteristics, such as the type and size of the organization or the model of e-democracy that the actor upholds, can have an influence in launching ICT initiatives for approaching the public.

Reconsidering the analysis of the uses of ICTs by political parties : an application to the Catalan case

For years a literature on the uses that political parties make of information andcommunication technologies (ICTs) has been developed. It is a rapidly increasing, rich,and interesting field in the forefront of the investigation in political science. Generally,these works start from the expectation that the ICTs have a regenerative potential forliberal democracies and for the political parties as well. In developed societies, politicalparties have experienced some transformations that have leaded them to an increasingdivorce with the public. This divorce is shown by the decay of party adscription andmembership, and also by the decay of the conventional political participation. In thetheoretical discussion this situation has been described as ¿the crisis of the democracy¿(Norris, 1999). According to the more radically oriented scholars this crisis reflects theincapacities of liberal democracies. In this sense, ICTs suppose a great opportunity tosurpass the representative institutions and to institutionalize new forms of directdemocracy. More moderate scholars have considered that ICTs offer the opportunity for¿renaissance¿ for representative institutions, as they can reinforce the bonds between thepublic and its representatives.

Mobile ensembles: The uses of mobile phones for social protest by Spain¿s indignados

Peer-reviewed

Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot

One of the problems with books which are relatively general in nature is that many of the individual contributions tend to be so narrow and specialised that only the author has any knowledge of (or interest in) the issues under discussion. At first sight this appears to be the case with Detecting Detection. Fortunately, however, first impressions are deceiving. Although the essays in the volume deal with writers as diverse and disparate as the Catalano-Spanish writer Juan Marse, the Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva and the once-vaunted giant of English literature,Graham Greene, among numerous others, there is much to be enjoyed and learnt, even if some of the works under discussion are unfamiliar to the crime fiction reader and/or scholar to whom the book initially appears to be directed.

Open source software expectations in retail businesses of Igualada : an exploratory study

The emergence of open source software in the last years has become a common topic of study in different fields, from the most technical characteristics to the economical aspects. This paper examines the current status about the literature dealing with economics of open source and explores the uses, infrastructure and expectations of retail businesses and institutions of the town of Igualda about it. This qualitative case study finds out that the current equipment and level of uses of ICTs are low and that the current situation of the town stores is receptive to a potential introduction of open source software.

Searching patterns in painting images with computer vision techniques

This paper presents a pattern recognition method focused on paintings images. The purpose is construct a system able to recognize authors or art styles based on common elements of his work (here called patterns). The method is based on comparing images that contain the same or similar patterns. It uses different computer vision techniques, like SIFT and SURF, to describe the patterns in descriptors, K-Means to classify and simplify these descriptors, and RANSAC to determine and detect good results. The method are good to find patterns of known images but not so good if they are not.

A unified treatment of optimum pilot overhead in multipath fading channels

The optimization of the pilot overhead in single-user wireless fading channels is investigated, and the dependence of this overhead on various system parameters of interest (e.g., fading rate, signal-to-noise ratio) is quantified. The achievable pilot-based spectral efficiency is expanded with respect to the fading rate about the no-fading point, which leads to an accurate order expansion for the pilot overhead. This expansion identifies that the pilot overhead, as well as the spectral efficiency penalty with respect to a reference system with genie-aided CSI (channel state information) at the receiver, depend on the square root of the normalized Doppler frequency. It is also shown that the widely-used block fading model is a special case of more accurate continuous fading models in terms of the achievable pilot-based spectral efficiency. Furthermore, it is established that the overhead optimization for multiantenna systems is effectively the same as for single-antenna systems with the normalized Doppler frequency multiplied by the number of transmit antennas.

An analysis of visual adaptation and contrast perception for tone mapping

Tone Mapping is the problem of compressing the range of a High-Dynamic Range image so that it can be displayed in a Low-Dynamic Range screen, without losing or introducing novel details: The final image should produce in the observer a sensation as close as possible to the perception produced by the real-world scene. We propose a tone mapping operator with two stages. The first stage is a global method that implements visual adaptation, based on experiments on human perception, in particular we point out the importance of cone saturation. The second stage performs local contrast enhancement, based on a variational model inspired by color vision phenomenology. We evaluate this method with a metric validated by psychophysical experiments and, in terms of this metric, our method compares very well with the state of the art.

Impact of antenna correlation on the capacity of multiantenna channels

This paper applies random matrix theory to obtain analytical characterizations of the capacity of correlated multiantenna channels. The analysis is not restricted to the popular separable correlation model, but rather it embraces a more general representation that subsumesmost of the channel models that have been treated in the literature. For arbitrary signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), the characterization is conducted in the regime of large numbers of antennas. For the low- and high-SNR regions, in turn, we uncover compact capacity expansions that are valid for arbitrary numbers of antennas and that shed insight on how antenna correlation impacts the tradeoffs between power, bandwidth and rate.

Interplay of spectral efficiency, power and doppler spectrum for reference-signal-assisted wireless communication

Expressions relating spectral efficiency, power, and Doppler spectrum, are derived for Rayleigh-faded wireless channels with Gaussian signal transmission. No side information on the state of the channel is assumed at the receiver. Rather, periodic reference signals are postulated in accordance with the functioning of most wireless systems. The analysis relies on a well-established lower bound, generally tight and asymptotically exact at low SNR. In contrast with most previous studies, which relied on block-fading channel models, a continuous-fading model is adopted. This embeds the Doppler spectrum directly in the derived expressions, imbuing them with practical significance. Closed-form relationships are obtained for the popular Clarke-Jakes spectrum and informative expansions, valid for arbitrary spectra, are found for the low- and high-power regimes. While the paper focuses on scalar channels, the extension to multiantenna settings is also discussed.

Comprehensive evaluation of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer performance with retransmissions

Supported by IEEE 802.15.4 standardization activities, embedded networks have been gaining popularity in recent years. The focus of this paper is to quantify the behavior of key networking metrics of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled nodes under typical operating conditions, with the inclusion of packet retransmissions. We corrected and extended previous analyses by scrutinizing the assumptions on which the prevalent Markovian modeling is generally based. By means of a comparative study, we singled out which of the assumptions impact each of the performance metrics (throughput, delay, power consumption, collision probability, and packet-discard probability). In particular, we showed that - unlike what is usually assumed - the probability that a node senses the channel busy is not constant for all the stages of the backoff procedure and that these differences have a noticeable impact on backoff delay, packet-discard probability, and power consumption. Similarly, we showed that - again contrary to common assumption - the probability of obtaining transmission access to the channel depends on the number of nodes that is simultaneously sensing it. We evidenced that ignoring this dependence has a significant impact on the calculated values of throughput and collision probability. Circumventing these and other assumptions, we rigorously characterize, through a semianalytical approach, the key metrics in a beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 system with retransmissions.

Predictability of music descriptor time series and its application to cover song detection

Intuitively, music has both predictable and unpredictable components. In this work we assess this qualitative statement in a quantitative way using common time series models fitted to state-of-the-art music descriptors. These descriptors cover different musical facets and are extracted from a large collection of real audio recordings comprising a variety of musical genres. Our findings show that music descriptor time series exhibit a certain predictability not only for short time intervals, but also for mid-term and relatively long intervals. This fact is observed independently of the descriptor, musical facet and time series model we consider. Moreover, we show that our findings are not only of theoretical relevance but can also have practical impact. To this end we demonstrate that music predictability at relatively long time intervals can be exploited in a real-world application, namely the automatic identification of cover songs (i.e. different renditions or versions of the same musical piece). Importantly, this prediction strategy yields a parameter-free approach for cover song identification that is substantially faster, allows for reduced computational storage and still maintains highly competitive accuracies when compared to state-of-the-art systems.