La financiación por medio del crowdfunding del audiovisual: el caso del cortometraje "Juan y la nube"

En el artículo se analizan las posibilidades que tiene el crowfunding (CF) para financiar el audiovisual. Se explica el modelo de financiación del CF y se indican las distintas ventajas que reporta para el promotor este modelo de financiación alternativa. Además se exponen ampliamente las principales características del proceso de CF seguido para financiar el cortometraje Juan y la nube (que se alzó con el Goya al Mejor corto de animación en el año 2015). Se comentan también los principales motivos que llevan a los mecenas a financiar los proyectos

The visual representation of the “indignados”. A visual analysis about the characterization of the participants of the 15-M movement.

The aim of this work is to show the type of media coverage done by the newspapers La Razón, El País and Público about the 15-M social movement during the time that the camping at Sol took place. Specifically, in terms of how the characterization of the “indignados” (outraged) got made. Based on our previous descriptive observations, we approached a visual analysis of the photographs published on the paper editions of those mainstream media from May 15-June 12 of the 2011. we started from a total sample of 379 items, developing:1) A content analysis of La Razón, El País, and Público; the most frequents words of each media, articles classifications from the reviews found on them (expositive, positive-evaluation, negative-evaluation).2) An analysis of the 408 images obtained from the total sample, which establishes a clear evolution of the “indignados” profile and how differently each media took the movement as such. That’s, when they stop naming them “indignados”, and recognize its nature as social movement by calling it: “Movimiento 15-M"...

Reading of audiovisual productions of contemporary art in art education

This article focuses on the reading of audiovisual productions of contemporary art as a creative process, seeking to analyse which effects of meaning the articulations between the visual and sound systems produce, and the meaning that children give to then. It describes a video art, identifying the languages that compose it and the relationships that link them. Such reading exercise had as corpus of analysis the Chair video art, by Masaru Ozaki, and counted with the theoretical and methodological support of the discourse semiotics, especially with studies on assembly procedures that articulate visual and auditory languages. Also, it presents a focal study with the meanings that a group of children gave to the video art. The findings indicate the importance of including the reading of audiovisual productions of contemporary art at school through the problematization of effects of meaning produced by the interrelation between different languages. And they suggest some subsidies that allow teachers from different areas of knowledge to reflect about the visuality in their pedagogical practice; the choice of the audiovisual materials taken to the classroom and other ways of seeing these texts edited.

University students with disabilities in Universities. A study of their inclusion

Access to higher education has increased among students with disabilities, and universities are adopting different alternatives which must be assessed. The purpose of this study was to identify the situation of a sample of students with disabilities (n=91) who attend a university in Spain, through the design and validation of the “CUNIDIS-d” scale, with satisfactory psychometric properties. The results show the importance of making reasoned curriculum adaptations, adapting teacher training, improving accessibility and involving all the university community. Different proposals were provided which support the social dimension of the EHEA.

Target Detection and Tracking With Heterogeneous Sensors

We present a multimodal detection and tracking algorithm for sensors composed of a camera mounted between two microphones. Target localization is performed on color-based change detection in the video modality and on time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation between the two microphones in the audio modality. The TDOA is computed by multiband generalized cross correlation (GCC) analysis. The estimated directions of arrival are then postprocessed using a Riccati Kalman filter. The visual and audio estimates are finally integrated, at the likelihood level, into a particle filter (PF) that uses a zero-order motion model, and a weighted probabilistic data association (WPDA) scheme. We demonstrate that the Kalman filtering (KF) improves the accuracy of the audio source localization and that the WPDA helps to enhance the tracking performance of sensor fusion in reverberant scenarios. The combination of multiband GCC, KF, and WPDA within the particle filtering framework improves the performance of the algorithm in noisy scenarios. We also show how the proposed audiovisual tracker summarizes the observed scene by generating metadata that can be transmitted to other network nodes instead of transmitting the raw images and can be used for very low bit rate communication. Moreover, the generated metadata can also be used to detect and monitor events of interest.

Gentamicin-loaded nanoparticles show improved antimicrobial effects towards Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection

Gentamicin is an aminoglycoside antibiotic commonly used for treating Pseudomonas infections, but its use is limited by a relatively short half-life. In this investigation, developed a controlled-release gentamicin formulation using poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) nanoparticles. We demonstrate that entrapment of the hydrophilic drug into a hydrophobic PLGA polymer can be improved by increasing the pH of the formulation, reducing the hydrophilicity of the drug and thus enhancing entrapment, achieving levels of up to 22.4 µg/mg PLGA. Under standard incubation conditions, these particles exhibited controlled release of gentamicin for up to 16 days. These particles were tested against both planktonic and biofilm cultures of P. aeruginosa PA01 in vitro, as well as in a 96-hour peritoneal murine infection model. In this model, the particles elicited significantly improved antimicrobial effects as determined by lower plasma and peritoneal lavage colony-forming units and corresponding reductions of the surrogate inflammatory indicators interleukin-6 and myeloperoxidase compared to free drug administration by 96 hours. These data highlight that the controlled release of gentamicin may be applicable for treating Pseudomonas infections.

Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition under Noisy Audio-Video Conditions

This paper presents the maximum weighted stream posterior (MWSP) model as a robust and efficient stream integration method for audio-visual speech recognition in environments, where the audio or video streams may be subjected to unknown and time-varying corruption. A significant advantage of MWSP is that it does not require any specific measurements of the signal in either stream to calculate appropriate stream weights during recognition, and as such it is modality-independent. This also means that MWSP complements and can be used alongside many of the other approaches that have been proposed in the literature for this problem. For evaluation we used the large XM2VTS database for speaker-independent audio-visual speech recognition. The extensive tests include both clean and corrupted utterances with corruption added in either/both the video and audio streams using a variety of types (e.g., MPEG-4 video compression) and levels of noise. The experiments show that this approach gives excellent performance in comparison to another well-known dynamic stream weighting approach and also compared to any fixed-weighted integration approach in both clean conditions or when noise is added to either stream. Furthermore, our experiments show that the MWSP approach dynamically selects suitable integration weights on a frame-by-frame basis according to the level of noise in the streams and also according to the naturally fluctuating relative reliability of the modalities even in clean conditions. The MWSP approach is shown to maintain robust recognition performance in all tested conditions, while requiring no prior knowledge about the type or level of noise.

Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and Yersinia pestis show increased outer membrane permeability to hydrophobic agents which correlates with lipopolysaccharide acyl-chain fluidity

The hydrophobic probe N-phenyl-1-naphthylamine accumulated less in non-pathogenic Yersinia spp. and non-pathogenic and pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica than in Yersinia pseudotuberculosis or Yersinia pestis. This was largely due to differences in the activity of efflux systems, but also to differences in outer membrane permeability because uptake of the probe in KCN/arsenate-poisoned cells was slower in the former group than in Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis. The probe accumulation rate was higher in Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis grown at 37 degrees C than at 26 degrees C and was always highest in Y. pestis. These yersiniae had LPSs with shorter polysaccharides than Y. enterocolitica, particularly when grown at 37 degrees C. Gelliquid-crystalline phase transitions (Tc 28-31 degrees C) were observed in LPS aggregates of Y. enterocolitica grown at 26 and 37 degrees C, with no differences between non-pathogenic and pathogenic strains. Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis LPSs showed no phase transitions and, although the fluidity of LPSs of Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. enterocolitica grown at 26 degrees C were close below the Tc of the latter, they were always in a more fluid state than Y. enterocolitica LPS. Comparison with previous studies of Salmonella choleraesuis subsp. choleraesuis serotype minnesota rough LPS showed that the increased fluidity and absence of transition of Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis LPSs cannot be explained by their shorter polysaccharides and suggested differences at the lipid A/core level. It is proposed that differences in LPS-LPS interactions and efflux activity explain the above observations and reflect the adaptation of Yersinia spp. to different habitats.