This paper analyzes the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on corrections and crime in the southern region of Europe formed by Spain and Portugal. The main mechanisms of transmission of Covid-19 are the physical proximity between people and the fact of sharing eventually infected targets. In prisons and other correctional contexts people live in close proximity and share the same facilities. As a result, the correctional context has proven to be a critical "hot spot" for the transmission of the Covid-19 pandemic in inmates and correctional staff. First, the magnitude of the infection and their associated health and psychosocial problems (prison incidents, social isolation.. .) are described. Second, the main sanitary, social, and correctional measures applied to prevent contagion and their related damages are presented (lockdown, use of communication technologies with families, etc.). Third, it is analyzed whether there has been a relationship between the confinement caused by the pandemic and the crime rates observed in Spain and Portugal during this same period. Finally, from the impact in corrections of pandemic and the actions taken to fight it, several important lessons are derived for the future improvement of correctional systems.

In this paper, we compare different audio signal representations, including the raw audio waveform and a variety of time-frequency representations, for the task of audio synthesis with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We conduct the experiments on a subset of the NSynth dataset. The architecture follows the benchmark Progressive Growing Wasserstein GAN. We perform experiments both in a fully non-conditional manner as well as conditioning the network on the pitch information. We quantitatively evaluate the generated material utilizing standard metrics for assessing generative models, and compare training and sampling times. We show that complex-valued as well as the magnitude and Instantaneous Frequency of the Short-Time Fourier Transform achieve the best results, and yield fast generation and inversion times. The code for feature extraction, training and evaluating the model is available online. 1

Lossy audio codecs compress (and decompress) digital audio streams by removing information that tends to be inaudible in human perception. Under high compression rates, such codecs may introduce a variety of impairments in the audio signal. Many works have tackled the problem of audio enhancement and compression artifact removal using deep-learning techniques. However, only a few works tackle the restoration of heavily compressed audio signals in the musical domain. In such a scenario, there is no unique solution for the restoration of the original signal. Therefore, in this study, we test a stochastic generator of a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture for this task. Such a stochastic generator, conditioned on highly compressed musical audio signals, could one day generate outputs indistinguishable from high-quality releases. Therefore, the present study may yield insights into more efficient musical data storage and transmission. We train stochastic and deterministic generators on MP3-compressed audio signals with 16, 32, and 64 kbit/s. We perform an extensive evaluation of the different experiments utilizing objective metrics and listening tests. We find that the models can improve the quality of the audio signals over the MP3 versions for 16 and 32 kbit/s and that the stochastic generators are capable of generating outputs that are closer to the original signals than those of the deterministic generators.

This paper analyzes the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on corrections and crime in the southern region of Europe formed by Spain and Portugal. The main mechanisms of transmission of Covid-19 are the physical proximity between people and the fact of sharing eventually infected targets. In prisons and other correctional contexts people live in close proximity and share the same facilities. As a result, the correctional context has proven to be a critical "hot spot" for the transmission of the Covid-19 pandemic in inmates and correctional staff. First, the magnitude of the infection and their associated health and psychosocial problems (prison incidents, social isolation. . .) are described. Second, the main sanitary, social, and correctional measures applied to prevent contagion and their related damages are presented (lockdown, use of communication technologies with families, etc.). Third, it is analyzed whether there has been a relationship between the confinement caused by the pandemic and the crime rates observed in Spain and Portugal during this same period. Finally, from the impact in corrections of pandemic and the actions taken to fight it, several important lessons are derived for the future improvement of correctional systems.

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