Il sottotitolaggio per i film festival: due esperienze pratiche

This dissertation aims to examine the field of film festival subtitling by means of the analysis of two subtitling experiences. These experiences will be approached both on a methodological and on a practical level in order to analyse how subtitlers put theory into practice. This approach will also help underline the existing differences in work methodology as far as different work experiences are concerned. The subtitling experiences examined in this dissertation are part of my internships as a subtitler in two Italian film festivals, namely “Umbria Film Festival” and “900 Fest”. In this dissertation, I chose to focus on the subtitling of two of the audiovisual products I translated. These products are a German documentary titled Befreier und Befreite and a Danish fiction film titled Stille Hjerte. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 describes audiovisual translation at its most theoretical level, focusing on subtitling criteria and strategies. Chapter 2 examines the concept of film translation, focusing on the distinctive features of documentary translation as a specific genre. This chapter also presents the concept of film festival and provides information concerning the translation policies of festivals. Chapter 3 presents the festivals I worked for and details my internship experiences. Chapter 4 focuses on the German documentary and proposes a number of solutions to its main translation problems. Chapter 5 focuses on the Danish film and offers solutions to its translation problems. At the end of the dissertation, I will provide some comments on my internship experiences as well as on the practice of film festival subtitling.

Closed Time-like Curves and Inertial Frame Dragging: How to Time Travel via Spacetime Rotation

As the number of solutions to the Einstein equations with realistic matter sources that admit closed time-like curves (CTC's) has grown drastically, it has provoked some authors [10] to call for a physical interpretation of these seemingly exotic curves that could possibly allow for causality violations. A first step in drafting a physical interpretation would be to understand how CTC's are created because the recent work of [16] has suggested that, to follow a CTC, observers must counter-rotate with the rotating matter, contrary to the currently accepted explanation that it is due to inertial frame dragging that CTC's are created. The exact link between inertialframe dragging and CTC's is investigated by simulating particle geodesics and the precession of gyroscopes along CTC's and backward in time oriented circular orbits in the van Stockum metric, known to have CTC's that could be traversal, so the van Stockum cylinder could be exploited as a time machine. This study of gyroscopeprecession, in the van Stockum metric, supports the theory that CTC's are produced by inertial frame dragging due to rotating spacetime metrics.

Orbits design for Leo space based solar power satellite system

Space Based Solar Power satellites use solar arrays to generate clean, green, and renewable electricity in space and transmit it to earth via microwave, radiowave or laser beams to corresponding receivers (ground stations). These traditionally are large structures orbiting around earth at the geo-synchronous altitude. This thesis introduces a new architecture for a Space Based Solar Power satellite constellation. The proposed concept reduces the high cost involved in the construction of the space satellite and in the multiple launches to the geo-synchronous altitude. The proposed concept is a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that are smaller in size than the conventional system. For this application a Repeated Sun-Synchronous Track Circular Orbit is considered (RSSTO). In these orbits, the spacecraft re-visits the same locations on earth periodically every given desired number of days with the line of nodes of the spacecraft’s orbit fixed relative to the Sun. A wide range of solutions are studied, and, in this thesis, a two-orbit constellation design is chosen and simulated. The number of satellites is chosen based on the electric power demands in a given set of global cities. The orbits of the satellites are designed such that their ground tracks visit a maximum number of ground stations during the revisit period. In the simulation, the locations of the ground stations are chosen close to big cities, in USA and worldwide, so that the space power constellation beams down power directly to locations of high electric power demands. The j2 perturbations are included in the mathematical model used in orbit design. The Coverage time of each spacecraft over a ground site and the gap time between two consecutive spacecrafts visiting a ground site are simulated in order to evaluate the coverage continuity of the proposed solar power constellation. It has been observed from simulations that there always periods in which s spacecraft does not communicate with any ground station. For this reason, it is suggested that each satellite in the constellation be equipped with power storage components so that it can store power for later transmission. This thesis presents a method for designing the solar power constellation orbits such that the number of ground stations visited during the given revisit period is maximized. This leads to maximizing the power transmission to ground stations.

Sediment yield reduction in an agricultural watershed

With proper application of Best Management Practices (BMPs), the impact from the sediment to the water bodies could be minimized. However, finding the optimal allocation of BMP can be difficult, since there are numerous possible options. Also, economics plays an important role in BMP affordability and, therefore, the number of BMPs able to be placed in a given budget year. In this study, two methodologies are presented to determine the optimal cost-effective BMP allocation, by coupling a watershed-level model, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), with two different methods, targeting and a multi-objective genetic algorithm (Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II, NSGA-II). For demonstration, these two methodologies were applied to an agriculture-dominant watershed located in Lower Michigan to find the optimal allocation of filter strips and grassed waterways. For targeting, three different criteria were investigated for sediment yield minimization, during the process of which it was found that the grassed waterways near the watershed outlet reduced the watershed outlet sediment yield the most under this study condition, and cost minimization was also included as a second objective during the cost-effective BMP allocation selection. NSGA-II was used to find the optimal BMP allocation for both sediment yield reduction and cost minimization. By comparing the results and computational time of both methodologies, targeting was determined to be a better method for finding optimal cost-effective BMP allocation under this study condition, since it provided more than 13 times the amount of solutions with better fitness for the objective functions while using less than one eighth of the SWAT computational time than the NSGA-II with 150 generations did.

Maximum principle preserving high order schemes for convection-dominated diffusion equations

The maximum principle is an important property of solutions to PDE. Correspondingly, it's of great interest for people to design a high order numerical scheme solving PDE with this property maintained. In this thesis, our particular interest is solving convection-dominated diffusion equation. We first review a nonconventional maximum principle preserving(MPP) high order finite volume(FV) WENO scheme, and then propose a new parametrized MPP high order finite difference(FD) WENO framework, which is generalized from the one solving hyperbolic conservation laws. A formal analysis is presented to show that a third order finite difference scheme with this parametrized MPP flux limiters maintains the third order accuracy without extra CFL constraint when the low order monotone flux is chosen appropriately. Numerical tests in both one and two dimensional cases are performed on the simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in vorticity stream-function formulation and several other problems to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Approaching Migrant Youth Marginalization through the Capabilities Approach: Methodological Proposals

Adopting the capabilities approach and the terminology that has been respectively developed, we could assume that Amartya Sen’s “capabilities” consist in the actual living that people manage to achieve (“functionings”) as a result of actual free will. Sen’s freedom does not “only [depend on the] mere degree of the presence or absence of coercion or interference (from others)” (Otto and Ziegler 2006) but also on “the range of options a person has in deciding what kind of life to lead” (Dreze and Sen 1995, 10). In his book, Identity and Violence, Sen, without explicitly connecting the capabilities approach with his views on “genuine multiculturalis” (Sen 2007), in fact, introduces this extended conception of freedom in the way we examine identity matters. Since freedom becomes perceptible as the range of options a person has, concerning the kind of life he wishes to live, cultural freedom can be defined through the concept of the multiplicity of belonging. In other words, cultural freedom constitutes itself a capability, which is realized when nothing and no one, not even myself, can tie me down to a kind of cultural rigidity that tends to exclude and marginalize me. This latent connection of “capabilities” with “multiple identities” (Sen 2007) challenges us to search for the contribution Sen’s approach could have in the understanding and confrontation of issues concerning migrants, away from theoretical patterns that overemphasize the cultural otherness as an impediment to inclusion. Besides, Sen himself, without of course focusing exclusively on migrants, has already approached the matter of social exclusion with terms of his capabilities approach (Sen 2000).

Darstellung von Entscheidungskriterien zur Produktion und Distribution von Online-Vorlesungen

Das Interesse an Online-Vorlesungen, -Vorträgen oder -Präsentationen für E-Learning hat deutlich zugenommen. Hierfür gibt es eine Reihe von Gründen, die mit neuen Formen der Produktion und Distribution von Online-Vorlesungen zusammenhängen. Mit der Verfügbarkeit von Rapid-Authoring-Werkzeugen wird der Workflow für die Erstellung und den Einsatz von Online-Vorlesungen erleichtert und flexibilisiert. Hierbei ist zu beobachten, dass durch die Vielzahl der Möglichkeiten im Workflow zunehmend individuelle Rahmenbedingungen und Anforderungen berücksichtigt werden können. Der folgende Beitrag beschreibt diese Veränderungen. Er fasst die Optionen im Prozess der Produktion und Distribution von Online-Vorträgen im Internet zusammen. Ein solcher Überblick über das Themengebiet ist erforderlich für das Herausarbeiten eines individuellen Workflows. Hierzu werden Entscheidungskriterien für die Auswahl von Werkzeugen und Plattformen dargestellt und die mediendidaktischen Implikationen diskutiert.

The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures: Reading Littoral Space

From early colonial encounters to the ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, the performativity of contact has been a crucial element in the political significance of the beach. Conceptualising the beach as a creative trope and as a socio-cultural site, as well as an aesthetically productive topography, this collection examines its multiplicity of meanings and functions as a natural environment engendering both desire and fear in the human imagination from the Victorian period to the present. The contributors examine literature, film, and art, in addition to moments of encounter and environmental crisis, to highlight the beach as a social space inspiring particular codes of behaviour and specific discourses, as a geographical frontier between land and water, as an historical site of contact and conflict, and as a vacationscape promising regeneration and withdrawal from everyday life. The diversity of the beach is reflected in the geographical range, with essays on locales and texts from Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, South Africa, the United States, Polynesia, and New Zealand. Focusing on the changed function of the beach as a result of processes of industrialisation and the rise of a modern leisure and health culture, this interdisciplinary volume theorises the beach as a demarcater of the precarious boundary between land and the sea, as well as between nature and culture.

A Convex Solution to Disparity Estimation from Light Fields via the Primal-Dual Method

We present a novel approach to the reconstruction of depth from light field data. Our method uses dictionary representations and group sparsity constraints to derive a convex formulation. Although our solution results in an increase of the problem dimensionality, we keep numerical complexity at bay by restricting the space of solutions and by exploiting an efficient Primal-Dual formulation. Comparisons with state of the art techniques, on both synthetic and real data, show promising performances.

The Emergency Department: Rising wait times, costs, and possible remedies

Emergency Departments (EDs) and Emergency Rooms (ERs) are designed to manage trauma, respond to disasters, and serve as the initial care for those with serious illnesses. However, because of many factors, the ED has become the doorway to the hospital and a “catch-all net” for patients including those with non-urgent needs. This increase in the population in the ED has lead to an increase in wait times for patients. It has been well documented that there has been a constant and consistent rise in the number of patients that frequent the ED (National Center for Health Statistics, 2002); the wait time for patients in the ED has increased (Pitts, Niska, Xu, & Burt, 2008); and the cost of the treatment in the ER has risen (Everett Clinic, 2008). Because the ED was designed to treat patients who need quick diagnoses and may be in potential life-threatening circumstances, management of time can be the ultimate enemy. If a system was implemented to decrease wait times in the ED, decrease the use of ED resources, and decrease costs endured by patients seeking care, better outcomes for patients and patient satisfaction could be achieved. The goal of this research was to explore potential changes and/or alternatives to relieve the burden endured by the ED. In order to explore these options, data was collected by conducting one-on-one interviews with seven physicians closely tied to a Level 1 ED (Emergency Room physicians, Trauma Surgeons and Primary Care physicians). A qualitative analysis was performed on the responses of one-on-one interviews with the aforementioned physicians. The interviews were standardized, open-ended questions that probe what makes an effective ED, possible solutions to improving patient care in the ED, potential remedies for the mounting problems that plague the ED, and the feasibility of bringing Primary Care Physicians to the ED to decrease the wait times experienced by the patient. From the responses, it is clear that there needs to be more research in this area, several areas need to be addressed, and a variety of solutions could be implemented. The most viable option seems to be making the ED its own entity (similar to the clinic or hospital) that includes urgent clinics as a part of the system, in which triage and better staffing would be the most integral part of its success.^

De lectores y prácticas lectoras : la multiplicidad de pactos de lectura en los albores del tercer milenio

En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar el fenómeno de la lectura en el actual escenario sociocultural. Para poder dar cuenta de la complejidad de la problemática encarada, trabajaremos desde un enfoque que combina básicamente dos focalizaciones: la explicación sociohistórica y la reflexión conceptual sobre la temática, proveniente de distintas tareas semióticas. La lectura es la interacción de un sujeto con un texto entendido éste en un sentido que excede lo meramente gráfico-verbal-, con el objeto de interpretarlo, elaborando una representación mental de su significación. Toda lectura presupone un pacto tácito: el contrato de lectura. Este pacto es dinámico y cambiante, por ello analizaremos las modificaciones producidas en las modalidades de lectura de los textos escritos y la vinculación de éstas con los pactos de lectura generados por los textos audiovisuales y multimediales.

Contaminación por fosfatos en el oasis bajo riego del río Mendoza

El oasis bajo riego del río Mendoza, en la provincia argentina del mismo nombre -al igual que casi todas las ciudades en la actualidadpresenta problemas de avance de la urbanización sobre las tierras agrícolas, multiplicidad de usuarios y disminución de la disponibilidad del recurso hídrico, tanto en cantidad como en calidad. Si bien se destinan esfuerzos e inversiones tendientes a asegurar la disponibilidad de agua (mejora de eficiencias, ahorro de agua) no pasa lo mismo en relación con la preservación de su calidad. La agricultura mendocina resulta víctima de la contaminación producida por la urbanización y la industria a través del vuelco (puntual y/o difuso) de sus efluentes a la red de riego. Estudios realizados en el Oasis Norte de Mendoza pusieron de manifiesto la existencia de altos niveles de contaminación fosfatada en las aguas del río Mendoza. El presente trabajo tuvo como objetivo evaluar la evolución espacio-temporal y detectar las fuentes de esta contaminación. Los resultados del diagnóstico basado en una serie de muestreos realizados en 2003 - 2009 ponen de relieve la existencia de una moderada contaminación por fosfatos en las aguas del río Mendoza que riegan el Oasis Norte provincial. Asimismo, se detectaron niveles considerablemente altos de fosfatos en tres sitios específicos del oasis: 1. la superficie regadía servida por los canales Cacique Guaymallén y Jocolí -se observa un incremento de seis veces el contenido de fosfatos del agua: de 0,2 mg L-1 (R I) a 1,2 mg L-1 (C II)-; en este último sitio sólo se riega un pequeño sector que se aproxima a las 7.300 ha; 2. la superficie regada por el Colector Pescara aguas abajo del punto D VIII (1.250 ha), en la que los valores medios arrojaron un contenido diecisiete veces mayor (8,5 mg L-1 ) que los del sitio D I (0,49 mg L-1 ) que recibe desagües agrícolas y urbano pluviales; 3. la zona del Bajo río Mendoza (en esta zona se registró un aumento de dieciséis veces más fosfatos entre la parte media y la cola del sistema, con valores medios de 0,2 mg L-1 en el sitio R II y de 3,25 mg L-1 en R III).

Una experiencia desde equipo técnico : tensiones y apuesta en torno a procesos de autonomía en personas discapacitadas

Nos proponemos en este trabajo tensionar los conceptos de discapacidad, sujeto y educación desde las miradas interdisciplinarias de un equipo que trabaja en una institución de escolaridad especial. Las concepciones epistemológicas que subyacen a las prácticas en la educación especial, como en otros campos, generan acciones y efectos de viejas y nuevas teorías. Revisamos estos supuestos y la naturalización de las prácticas y de las perspectivas. Como equipo hacemos referencia a la necesidad de un proceso permanente de construcción del rol, que permita pensarnos, interactuar, interrogarnos y discutir las diferentes intervenciones institucionales y comunitarias. Así, la conformación interdisciplinaria del equipo nos permite beneficiarnos con una mirada crítica hacia la diversidad y conformar una multiplicidad de observaciones sobre el objeto, lo que implica un capital simbólico muy importante. En éste trabajo es nuestro interés reflexionar acerca de las prácticas interprofesionales en los ámbitos donde se desarrollan los procesos educativos, tendientes a generar procesos de subjetivación y de construcción de ciudadanía posibilitando instancias de autonomía en los alumnos.

El atributo divino de simplicidad en la Summa theologiae de Alberto Magno

El desarrollo albertino más acabado acerca de la simplicidad de la esencia divina pertenece a la Summa theologiae, redactada a partir de 1268. Allí también se estudian otras propiedades como la esencialidad y la inmutabilidad, pero la que aparece en perfecta correspondencia con la unidad divina es la simplicidad. Nuestro trabajo busca analizar los principales argumentos expuestos por Alberto Magno en la q. 20 del primer libro de la Summa, y detectar los núcleos especulativos que dan razón de la consistencia de la doctrina de la simplicidad divina y de su coherencia con la multiplicidad de atributos y de personas en Dios.

La pluralidad de puntos de vista sobre las trayectorias escolares de adolescentes de sectores populares : nuevos desafíos para las políticas y prácticas educativas en la escuela secundaria

El trabajo tematiza las representaciones sociales que circulan sobre las posibles trayectorias escolares de adolescentes de sectores populares y cómo las primeras influencian en ese recorrido escolar, condicionadas por la pertenencia de los alumnos a sectores populares, la localización de la escuela en circuitos educativos diferenciados y la trayectoria escolar que han tenido los padres de los adolescentes. Las expectativas cruzadas de docentes, padres y alumnos con respecto a los recorridos escolares y el lugar en el espacio social que ocupa cada agente, construyen un particular punto de vista acerca de la escuela y las trayectorias educativas.