This research investigated how monolingual Spanish speaking parents perceived their involvement during their daughters’ second language acquisition process, and what they believed the school should do to help them help their daughters. The researcher contacted 25 parents who live in Bogotá- Colombia and then administrated a questionnaire via email. It was found that: (1) Parents want to raise bilingual children in order to prepare them for the future but, (2) their low proficiency level in the second language is the main barrier to be 100 percent involved during the SLA process (3) Parents believe that in order for their daughters to be successful not only in acquiring a second language, but during their school life, both school and parents need to work as a team (4) Mothers, which according to the findings have the lowest proficiency in the second language, are the ones having to help their daughters at home with homework, and therefore the SLA process, adding an extra stress to their everyday household activities (5). The parents of this study know exactly want they want the school to teach them in order to feel proficient when helping their daughters, for that reason, the school needs to take the necessary steps to motivate, support and guide parents to be involved and effective when it comes to helping their daughters learn. Excerpts in both English and Spanish, are presented throughout the research. At the end, limitations of this research and recommendations for future research are stated.

In the present day is still thought that designing for poor means delivering low quality solutions. In a similar way the lack of sensibility and understanding of the local identity in scarce contexts is delivering many alien culturally approaches with no regard for actual needs or indigenous traditions. The outside world needs the labour of architects and designers that help to do far more than just survive, that help to live, and build a deeper comprehension of architecture that deals with the thoughts of the outside world but at the same time delivers appropriate structures, and shelters for scarce contexts, understanding the poetry of the space and the art of this communities. A deep interpretation and integration of culture, local identity and community participation will lead to the development of appropriate and successful architectural solutions in scarce contexts, a deeper understanding of the design criteria in projects located in those contexts is needed; several considerations need to be taken, starting with the idea of adapting different approaches from the design and construction stage, differing to some extend with the traditional architectural practice. On the basis of this argument, this research is intended to reveal the main design strategies and criteria used in scarce and extreme contexts. Three experienced architects in the field that had participated in some successful projects around the world were interviewed, leading to the induction of the main guidelines for assessing this sort schemes. The main aim is to propose a Colombian Oriented Solution for La Mojana, where the selection of three successful international case studies were filtered into the Colombian contexts, and analysed in order to abstract the main results. The consideration of topics such as culture and identity, vernacular architecture and technology will be analysed together in each project. Social consideration, participative design, environment, building design and specific building elements are the main parameters handled to analyse each project.

The Upper Devonian Grosmont shelf complex is the world’s largest heavy oil deposit hosted in carbonates, with an estimated >50 billion cubic meters (318 to probably 406 billion bbls) of initial volume in place. At present the Grosmont is not yet under production. This study involves log interpretation, core examination; facies  description; strontium, sulphur, carbon, and oxygen isotope analysis. The Grosmont is subdivided into four shallowing-upward cycles. Most Hondo evaporites are part of the Upper Grosmont 3 and Lower Grosmont and were deposited in a series of small, shallow subaqueous brine ponds or in an extensive lagoon. In the eastern part of the area, the Hondo appears to be dissolved resulting in solution-collapse breccias. Other diagenetic processes that were important in shaping the present reservoir characteristics were pervasive dolomitization and dolomite recrystallization, fracturing, and karstification.

Microbial pollution of water is one of the principal causes of life-threatening diarrheal diseases in the developing world. Ultraviolet (UV) light is increasingly recognized as a viable alternative for the disinfection of drinking water and wastewater in developed countries, but its feasibility in low-income areas has to be assessed further. The rural community of Cerro Grande, in Bolivia, has been hit by outbreaks of gastrointestinal diseases, so two UV-based disinfection systems were implemented there. One of them was a fabricated unit, with materials available locally, whereas the other was a commercially-available unit. The fabricated unit was validated following USEPA procedures and was modeled using computational fluid dynamics. It was observed that a UV-based disinfection system can be sustainable for as few as 20 users, and even for 48 users in areas with poor feed water quality and lacking an electrical grid and distribution network, with a monthly cost of US$2.

The scope of this project is the redefinition of the algorithm of the wind-diesel hybrid system for rural electrification using ©IntiGIS, which is a methodology translated into a software developed by CIEMAT, useful for evaluating rural electrification projects that enables to compare different technologies based on the LEC, allowing to find which is the best and less costly technology. The analysis done considers the social and geographical particularities of the study area. The core of the new model is the definition of the renewable fraction for the wind-diesel hybrid system. For this, it was supposed that the renewable fraction will depend in first instance of the wind speed. Here, the objectives are: - find a relationship between the renewable fraction and the wind speed, and if there is a clear relationship, try to express it as a function, and – prove the influence of other parameters such as the fuel price and the consumption load in the renewable fraction behavior. The methodology followed to achieve the point above, was to use ©HOMER to simulate several wind-diesel hybrid systems and size the components of the system, in order to get the optimal renewable fraction in different scenarios. Other important point in the model is the wind capacity factor calculation for medium power wind turbines. As a result of the study, the model is more accurate estimating this factor, due to the fact the study was made, taking into account the power curves of some wind turbines that are in the market and are used for electrification purposes, in order to get an average behavior of the capacity factor when wind speed increases.

In this report we highlighted the significance of the taxicab industry for three main sectors of the economy and, furthermore, to what extent could some changes in labour and taxi regulations be detrimental to the perception of safety by taxicab passengers leading to a reduction in the number of journeys and an economic downturn in several industries. We considered the lack of effectiveness of current applications for giving security to the passengers when they hire a taxi in the street. Taking the taxicab regulation schemes and the issues concerning their passengers as a starting point, we set three groups of security requirements: User safety, Quality service and system’s capabilities and efficiency. The novel TAXI Authentication scheme was created as a response to the need to address those requirements. It is based on the increasingly accepted NFC technology and the tamper-resistant smart cards to construct the Front-office processes, particularly noteworthy is the TAXI Authentication protocol designed as a DDA authentication protocol for efficiency and scalability reasons and the quality service feedback that preserves the anonymity of users facilitating the quality assessment. Whereas, a robust Key Management System supports the Back-office processes grounded in certificates using ECDSA digital signatures due to its efficient performance in smart cards and short-length keys providing a high level of security. We conducted the preliminary security analyst against the proposed security requirements. After that, we applied to real world criminal use-cases concerning the taxicab passengers. The scheme shows promise of combating potential crime under whichever type of taxicab regulation scheme demonstrating great flexibility to adapt to a great number of circumstances and future attacks against the industry.

The main Topic of this dissertation is to critically analyze the obligations of States’ parties to the TRIPS Agreement in relation to the extent of protection that they are bound to confer on first and second medical use patents. In this sense, the Viagra case illustrates the tensions between the national pharmaceutical industries of the States members of the Andean Community and a leading pharmaceutical company like Pfizer. The dissertation pretends to demonstrate that the decisions taken by the authorities in the Andean Region were consistent with the international minimum standards of IPRs as embodied in the TRIPS Agreement. The Viagra case is the most important series of administrative and judicial decisions concerning first and second use patents in the Andean region. It is composed of the administrative rulings of the member States national authorities of the Andean Community, by the administrative rulings of the Andean Community Secretariat and by the judicial decisions of the Andean Tribunal of Justice. This case was elected as the topic of the dissertation because it doesn’t follow the international trend to expand the levels of patent protection, which has occurred in two ways. First, the scope of patentable subject- matter has been given an inclusive interpretation. Secondly, the restrictions on patentability have been narrowly interpreted.

The communications services market is undergoing a transition as the growing interconnection of providers is diminishing the importance of coverage as a differentiator, and shifting the focus to the value-added service portfolio and customer experience. At the same time, new options are emerging to deliver optimized technologies for the IT service management framework within the internet sphere.  Orange Business Services, communications service provider, develops and understands together with Accenture consultants, both clients needs and customer experience strategies for deploying an improved management service portal. The process to enable this competitive strategy for OBS includes the research of new tends in technology, the comprehension of customers expectations and needs, and the introduction of the evolutions that competitors are implementing within the market.

On the one hand food waste is generated in huge amounts throughout the food supply chain, which has environmental, economic and social consequences. On the other hand, consumers’ knowledge of safe food handling practices has an important role to play in preventing foodborne diseases which represent a growing public health issue all over the world. Though households are the largest contributor to these two issues, little is known about the effects that the consumers’ level of food safety knowledge can have on the production of food waste. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of consumers’ knowledge of safe food handling practices on the amount of food thrown away. A survey of 57 London consumers examined the level of food safety handling knowledge and practices as well as food waste behaviour. The results showed that respondents’ shopping behaviour tended to result in the production of food waste, yet there were some motivations that could decrease the likelihood of food being thrown out. For instance, they were aware of how much food they had at home and checked their cupboards before buying more food. Furthermore, it was found that economic status and feelings of guilt also contributed to respondents behaviour regarding food safety and waste. The findings indicated that most of the respondents (78%) always read the expiry dates but that their level of understanding of what these mean was low. Similarly, participants on the whole knew how to handle and store their leftover food correctly and knew the correct temperature at which a fridge or freezer should be set. However, their reported behaviour did not always match the knowledge that they demonstrated. Therefore, their responses suggested that some poor food handling practices due to knowledge not being implemented could lead to food going off before it could be eaten, thus increasing the amount of wasted food. This suggests that in order to improve consumers’ food safety handling practices and knowledge to reduce the amount of food waste, efforts should be made to develop food safety education strategies aimed at schools and households as well as new technologies to improve the interpretation of these practices.

In a Fiber to the Home (FTTH) system, the fiber is connected until the household users. A passive optical network (PON) is a particular type of FTTH networks that uses P2MP (point-to-multipoint fiber premises) in which part of the infrastructure is shared, to allow sending information of multiple channels through one fiber. This study presents a summary of the main concepts about access networks and PON systems and some technologies used to its development, including Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), independently or in hybrid configuration (TWDM). From here the key commercial devices for its implementation are identified and modelled, specifying its characteristic parameters to fulfill the minimum requirements of the new international standard ITU-T G.989 for FTTH networks. This project evaluates this standard, which proposes the implementation of NG-PON2 systems at 4x10Gbit/s, that will use the hybrid architecture TWDM and tunable transceivers and ensures coexistence with other legacy PON systems, allocating the downstream and upstream traffic in appropriate wavelength bands without overlapping. The work of analysis is focused in the identification of key devices, such as tunable transmitters and tunable receivers at ONU to achieve the minimum specified requirements. Besides, a first approximation to the coexistence element (CE) is made, for supporting the legacy PON systems. Once the minimum requirements are specified and the key devices identified, the network is designed and built in the commercial simulator VPIphotonicsTM, using CW lasers, external intensity modulators, wavelength multiplexers and the appropriate power splitters. In reception a direct detection scheme is implemented using PIN and APD photodiodes and tunable filters at ONU. Once the design is completed different test are run, the results are analyzed and the design is optimized, in order to dimension the network in terms of fiber reach, number of users, power budget, bandwidth capacity, etc. En un Sistema de Fibra hasta el hogar (FTTH, Fiber to the Home), la fibra es conectada hasta el hogar de los usuarios. Una red óptica pasiva (PON) es un tipo particular de red redes FTTH que utiliza instalaciones punto a multipunto (P2MP), en las cuales se comparte parte de la infraestructura permitiendo enviar información de múltiples canales a través de una sola fibra. Este trabajo presenta un compendio de los principales conceptos sobre redes de acceso y sistemas PON y algunas de las tecnologías usadas para el desarrollo de los mismos, incluyendo multiplexación por división en el tiempo (TDM, Time Division Multiplexing) y multiplexación por división de la longitud de onda (WDM, Wavelength Division Multiplexing), independientes o en configuración híbrida (TWDM). A partir de aquí se identifican y modelan los dispositivos comerciales clave para su implementación, especificando sus parámetros característicos para cumplir con los requerimientos del nuevo estándar internacional ITU-T G.989 para redes FFTH. Este proyecto evalúa dicho estándar, el cual plantea la implementación de sistemas NG-PON2 a 4x10GBit/s, los cuales usarán una arquitectura híbrida TWDM y transceptores sintonizables, además de garantizar la coexistencia con otros sistemas PON heredados, ubicando el tráfico en downstream y upstream en unas bandas de longitud de onda adecuadas sin solapamiento. El trabajo de análisis se enfoca en la identificación de los dispositivos clave, como transmisores y receptores ópticos sintonizables en la ONU para alcanzar los requerimientos mínimos especificados. Además se da una primera aproximación al diseño del elemento de coexistencia (CE, Coexistence element) para el soporte de los sistemas PON heredados. Una vez especificados los requerimientos mínimos e identificados los dispositivos clave, se diseña e implementa la red en el simulador VPIphotonicsTM usando láseres de onda continua, moduladores externos de intensidad, multiplexores de longitud de onda y divisores de potencia apropiados. En recepción se usa detección directa con fotodiodos PIN y APD y filtros ópticos sintonizables en la ONU. Una vez completado el diseño, se realizan diferentes test, se analizan los resultados y se optimiza el diseño para dimensionar la red en términos de número de usuarios, alcance, balance de potencias, capacidad de acho de banda, etc.