The debate around the possibilities of using green consumption as a strategy to address the current environmental crisis is still open. This paper, using elements from the sociology of consumption found in the work of Zygmunt Bauman, and the aesthetics of existence from Michael Foucault, problematize the current notions about the political value of green consumption and its relation to the development of collective action. It is argued that green consumption represents a fertile ground for political participation through the care of others. The argument is developed in reference to diverse initiatives inside the Local Food Movement. This article develops the idea of a subject able to resist by opening diverse consumption spaces that challenge many aspects of the current global economy.

The growing concern of continuous increases in health care expenditure, particularly due to high-cost medicines’ reimbursement, as well as international trends, promotes the feasibility and a positive scenario to establish a means for Health Technology Assessment (HTA) in Colombia. Methodology: This policy analysis paper utilizes a literature review to support the context surrounding the Colombian Health System, focusing on HTA, and a regional perspective. Following, personal interviews were conducted to provide a description of the policy process of agenda setting and policy implementation, as well as stakeholders’ opinions about the establishment and functioning of such a HTA Agency.

Esta investigación aborda el tema de las significaciones imaginarias sociales en los espacios públicos, específicamente en el servicio de transporte colectivo de pasajeros en la ciudad de Bogotá (Colombia). Realiza articulaciones entre los procesos socio-históricos, las significaciones, las ciudadanías y las subjetividades. Se ancla teóricamente en la propuesta de campos de problemas de la subjetividad desarrollada por Ana María Fernández y equipo, al igual que su apuesta metodológica: la problematización recursiva. Sus principales hallazgos se centran en las insistencias de sentido relacionadas con estrategias de supervivencia de los grupos desigualados a través de pactos de complicidad; una desinstitucionalización, degradación y homogenización de lo público y pocas condiciones para la construcción de ciudadanías. En las prácticas se encontró una forma vincular bimodal.

Résumé: Le mal de ventre chez les enfants est un lieu de métissage et de créolisation traversé par des dimensions sociales et culturelles. Il est construit collectivement au sein des familles nucléaires avec leurs parcours migratoires et leurs souffrances. Par le biais d’entretiens menés auprès de familles haïtiennes vivant à Montréal, nous documentons les trajectoires de ces douleurs, dans lesquelles les perceptions, les explications et les moyens mis en oeuvre pour les soulager interagissent d’une manière dynamique. En général, les enfants perçoivent leurs maux de ventre comme une expérience insaisissable, diffuse et ayant un impact sur leur vie sociale, tout en étant tolérés par les enfants et par les mères.Ces familles n’ont pas reçu de diagnostic médical et elles attribuent à ces maux des explications provisoires en constante recomposition. En général, elles ont recours à différentes méthodes de prise en charge des maux de ventre. L’espace familial, les activités réalisées au sein des églises et la médecine officielle sont des espaces thérapeutiques privilégiés. Abstract: Belly-stomachaches in children are a space of hybridity and creolization, affected by social and cultural dimensions. These aches are collectively constructed within nuclear families, with their migratory histories and their sufferings. Having interviewed Haitian families living in Montreal, we documented the illness trajectories, the perceptions, explanations and means of relieving the aches, which all interact in a dynamic mode. Generally speaking, the children perceive their belly-stomachaches as an irregular experience that has an impact on their social life, although tolerated by the children and theirs mothers. Families have not received a medical diagnosis and give temporary, changing explanations to the aches, in a constant reformulation. In general, families will use different methods to deal with belly and stomach aches. The family space, church activities, and official medicine are privileged therapeutic spaces.

Children are having a sedentary lifestyle in front of a screen and this is generating problems in their health, their behaviour and their academic performance. The challenge that arises from this situation is How to improve the engagement of primary school children (8-12 years) with sport using their digital (ICT) skills as a tool? Nowadays children do not learn the basic motor skills properly and when they face sporty situations they cannot perform with competence and confidence. This fact makes them feel sport is not fun and as a result they avoid active activities and prefer sedentary ones. Additionally children usually need an adult –parents, teachers or coaches- to encourage them to be active, but if the adults are not skilled and well prepared to motivate them properly, the active experience is not good enough to build physical literacy on them. On the other hand, for doing activities in front of a screen -such as playing games- children explore, discover and learn alone. They spend hours doing the same activity because the fun is the main motivation for learning and mastering skills. This fact defined the concept of Dynamics: What if the motivation to practice physical activity is driven by the same exploration and discovery process the children are having with video-games? After researching what videogames are teaching to players a very important trend was found. Minecraft which is considered a videogame is actually a digital toy that offers a non-dictated play experience and helps children to have a transmedia learning through play. This means that the players have to explore, learn and master ways of playing not only using the game but other resources such as you tube tutorial videos, blogs, wikis and the Minecraft community among others. The proper use of these resources and the application and sharing of the information available makes possible to the players to play better and achieve their goals in the game while developing their digital literacy. If children are able to use different resources in different digital contexts to learn digital literacy while having fun why not include some physical resources to the game experience to make them learn physical literacy at the same time and become confident to perform any sporty activity? Under this principle Dynamics was developed. Dynamics is a game that uses Minecraft™ as a platform to encourage children to be active and develop their physical and digital literacy while exploring, building and using dynamic artefacts. To be able to play, children should collect dynamic blocks by doing physical exercises related to the basic motor skills in blocky spaces generated by them having a real space as a base. The Dynamic Blocks are available to the players according to their age, weight, height and bone-muscle-fat proportion. (This data that is stored and tracked by a multi-movement sensor) When the kid improves the fitness level and the mastery level, the advanced blocks are unlocked. In this way the game personalises the experience for each player. Using a see-through holographic headset Dynamics can be played in any indoor or outdoor place and prepares children to face sporty activities with competence and confidence while having fun being part of their Minecraft creations. Dynamics also allows parents, teachers and coaches teach motor skills to children and track their progress.

This thesis critically examines travel imagery of Niagara Falls. The intention behind this examination is to inquire about the relationships between perception and the representation of this specific site. These relationships will be introduced considering historical contexts and aesthetic aspects of early travelogues and pictorial representations, such as early paintings and stereoscopic images. Throughout the paper, these depictions will be compared with today’s depictions of Niagara Falls on social media websites that involve publishing photographs and comments that describe the visitor’s experience. By comparing distinct ways of disseminating representations of the site organized in a chronological order, this paper aims at unfolding critical questions about travel representations through time and media.

Actualmente los sistemas de control de riego SCADA son diseñados con modelos y protocolos que dependen exclusivamente de cada fabricante. Si se requiere una interoperabilidad a nivel de programación de riegos y estado real de actuadores y sensores, con algún sistema de gestión que no sea del mismo fabricante, significa una alta inversión económica y tecnológica, que en la mayoría de casos no es posible realizar. Adicionalmente los mecanismos de diagnóstico de fallos actuales, no permiten determinar los fallos que se presentan en los sensores, lo cual se vuelve crítico cuando se presenta una anomalía en el sistema y no se puede cumplir con una demanda de riego exigida. La finalidad principal de esta tesis es contribuir a la estandarización de los sistemas de control de riego y a la integración de mecanismos de diagnóstico de fallos avanzados. Para ello y partiendo de un caso de estudio de un sistema de control de riego piloto, la memoria se encuentra constituida por las siguientes tres partes: En la primera, se propone un modelo de procesos que pretende estandarizar los sistemas de control de riego y su interoperabilidad con sistemas de gestión. Todo esto bajo las normativas ISA-88 e ISA-95 y la especificación XML del ISA-88: Batch-ML. En este punto la tesis trata la descripción de los modelos físicos, de procedimientos y de procesos de sistemas de control de riego, por medio del lenguaje de marcas extensibles (XML), centrándose principalmente en la programación de órdenes de riego y en la determinación en tiempo real del estado de los dispositivos del sistema. Para validar dicha descripción, en la segunda parte se presenta la implementación de un software prototipo que supervisa y controla, por medio del protocolo industrial OPC, un sistema de control de riego piloto que actualmente pertenece al grupo de investigación CEPIMA (Centre d´Enginyeria de Processos i Medi Ambient) de la UPC, el cual colabora como socio académico del grupo de empresas públicas TRAGSA. Finalmente en la tercera parte, se realiza un estudio del diagnóstico de fallos del sistema - caso de estudio, partiendo de la problemática que este tipo de sistemas conlleva, al sólo poder determinar automáticamente los fallos que se presentan en las válvulas más no en los sensores de caudal existentes en el sistema. Por lo tanto se plantea utilizar una técnica de diagnóstico de fallos a nivel estructural, que permite detectar y aislar los fallos desde el análisis del comportamiento del mismo sistema. Todo esto desde el enfoque FDI.

Mobile devices and theri applications continue increasing at a fast rate. Android is the leading mobile operating system, with more than 1 billion active devices worldwide. In order to improve the quality of Android applications, we must explore and nd cost-e cient solutions to automate part of their testing process. GUI Ripping is a technique that allows a systematic and automated exploration of an application's Graphical User Interface (GUI). During this exploration, test cases are generated and executed. To evaluate GUI Ripping, I conducted an empirical experiment using GUI Ripper and the Monkey. The e ciency of these testing tools was evaluated, comparing the code coverage and the number of faults detected on two Android applications.The experiment results showed the better e ciency of GUI Ripping, achieving higher code coverage and fault detection rate.

This paper studies the hedging activities of 104 non-financial UK MNEs from 2005 to 2009 to examine their potential effect on the cost of equity. We use the Fama and French Three Factor Model to estimate the cost of equity and we collect detailed information on hedging and risk management activities directly from the annual reports. Although we evidence a negative relation between the cost of equity and hedging activities, we find that the cost of equity is not significantly affected by whether firms are hedgers or non-hedgers. We further use different subsamples and we are able to observe that: (i) size and leverage are important factors in the analysis of hedging and cost of equity, and (ii) the financial crisis plays an active role in the way firms understand and react towards unexpected volatility and risk. Finally we find that controlling for endogeneity of the hedging decision and for potential sample selection bias our results are more robust and are supporting evidence for the negative and significant relationship between hedging and cost of equity.

During the last decade, mining activity in Colombia is becoming a strong sector due to the political and economic incentives government gave to support foreign investment. This promotion and economic development should go hand by hand with environmental and social protection as it has an important contribution to the total GDP of the country. There are a high number of mining projects currently under development but despite the existence of laws, policies and regulations, there is a continuous environmental negative impact on the environment and several social problems are emerging. As a result of the current natural resource degradation, represented in a high rate of decline in vegetation cover, the increase of plant and animal species threatened, contamination of surface and ground water sources, poor air quality in major cities, land use conflicts and conditions of inadequate quality of life for the population, becomes urgent to develop responsible mining. With the aim of achieving this purpose, is necessary to evaluate the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, which is the main tool to evaluate and assess the impacts generated during a project, work or activity and make decisions as Decree 2820 of 2010 states on the other hand the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) approach is not ruled by any law but is the voluntary role of business towards society to respond to their needs and expectations. The purpose of the study is to determine the actual and potential role of EIA and CSR, both separately and if used together as decision-making and management tools. To attain the objectives of the research, a discourse analysis between different actors is used as a research strategy in order to find the answers to the research questions by collecting data through relevant documents and interviews with experts in mining, CSR and EIA process from Ministries, academy and mining companies. In this way, different perceptions on EIA and CSR are obtained, in order to determine how one improves the other or not to achieve environmental and social objectives. The findings reveal that, according to the perceptions of some environmental experts, the EIA process in Colombia is still a weak tool; it coincides with the study developed by the General Comptroller of the Republic in 2005-2006 which states that the whole licensing process (which includes the EIA) is inefficient in many aspects. It is not being used in the appropriate way, consequently does not meet the purpose of adequately protecting the environment; the analysis revealed that the main reasons for these problems are the lack of state-regulated methodologies and the moderate control to the process. Additionally, there is not a shared agenda between the Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Mines, which leads to take wrong decisions that are detrimental to either environmental protection or mining development. Regarding the Corporate Social Responsibility approach in Colombia, mining companies always work with their stakeholders developing different strategies; in most of the cases they use this approach to gain approval of communities and the social license to operate. Organizations use different instruments in order to respond to both employees and members of their geographical communities of influence. In most of the cases, their requirements centers on two main areas: basic education for them and their families and microbusiness initiatives. Even though there is no mining activity without impact, for sure there is responsible mining with less impact. The important issue is to make sure that the technical, social, economical and environmental aspects will be considered to develop a project. Moreover the guidelines proposed by the Ministry of Environment, the existent legal framework and the tools the country has, should be respected and used appropriately with the support of all the stakeholders involved in order to combine the so called “engine of the economy” with the protection of the environment and Colombian society.