The main challenge of this Thesis is to reliably preserve quality of service (QoS) contracts in component-based software systems under changing conditions of system execution. In response to this challenge, the presented contribution is twofold. The first is a model for component-based software applications, QoS contracts and reconfiguration rules as typed attributed graphs, and the definition of QoS-contracts semantics as state machines in which transitions are performed as software reconfigurations. Thus, we effectively use (formal) models at runtime to reliably reconfigure software applications for preserving its QoS contracts. More specifically, we show the feasibility of exploiting design patterns at runtime in reconfiguration loops to fulfill expected QoS levels associated to specific context conditions. We realize this formal model through a component-based architecture and implementation that can be used as an additional layer of SCA middleware stacks to preserve the QoS contracts of executed applications.  The second contribution is the characterization of adaptation properties to evaluate self-adaptive software systems in a standardized and comparable way. By its own nature, the adaptation mechanisms of self-adaptive software systems are essentially feedback loops as defined in control theory. Thus, it results reasonable to evaluate them using the standard properties used to evaluate feedback loops, re-interpreting these properties for the software domain. We define the relibility of our formal model realization in terms of a subset of the characterized adaptation properties, and we show that these properties are guaranteed in this realization.

Wind power is one of the key players in the European Union target of 20% share of energy from renewable sources in 2020 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on energy supply. In order to accomplish such target, some European countries are placing the wind farms further from the coast to exploit the higher wind speeds at open sea. However the traditional transmission system for offshore wind farms based on High Voltage Alternate Current (HVAC) is not appropriate for long distances. Hence, this research work was carried out to examine and determine the most suitable transmission system for offshore wind farms in terms of technical, environmental and economic costs. The methodological approach employed in the investigations was arranged in two parts. First, a quantitative and qualitative method of literature review involving critical examination of documented information and experiences of the two commercially available transmission systems: HVAC and HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current); second, a quantitative method that investigates and analyzes an adequate transmission system for a propose an offshore wind cluster in terms of economic and environmental costs. From the analysis, HVDC based on Voltage Source Converters (VSC) exhibited technical superiority over HVAC for long distance submarine transmission, control of active and reactive power, grid support and connection of asynchronous grids. Furthermore, in the proposed offshore wind farm cluster of 1 GW of installed capacity located at 150 km from the point of connection, after a distance of 90 km HVDC becomes more economic due to reduced system losses, and after a distance of 125 km HVDC presents lower environmental impacts associated with the raw materials used in the transmission system. At such point, particular to each transmission project, VSC-HVDC surpasses HVAC in technical, environmental and economic terms.

Colombia presents an elevated vulnerability to climate change with the highest recurrence of extreme weather events and increasing emergencies on the continent (Ideam et al, 2010). The Colombian government has been developing The Colombian Strategy for Low Carbon Development, seeking to mitigate climate change impacts in the country (Ideam et al, 2010); however, it is currently at designing stage and no actions have been implemented so far. The United Kingdom (UK) has been a global pioneer in low carbon development, with applied strategies at national and local scale that have involved the wider community. In addition, other non-governmental initiatives have promoted low carbon development from a community perspective, looking for a more localised and resilient community, through local projects implementation on food, energy production and Housing (Hopkins, 2008). As a result, UK case studies have provided a solid panorama since community initiatives have shown significant key learnings (Hopkins, 2011) providing an opportunity for achieving a climate-resilient growth in Colombia. Consequently, the present research aimed study to what extent, United Kingdom low carbon communities case studies, with particular reference in Transition Leicester, can be applied within the Colombian climate change scheme. The low carbon measures implemented and different stakeholders involve in UK low carbon communities were identified in order to obtain an insight scheme in Colombia, where opportunities and constrictions of its applicability were subsequently analysed, since socioeconomic conditions in Colombia vary considerably from the UK scheme, with a constant social conflict scenarios, large regional inequalities and an increasingly affected biodiversity (Côté et al, 2010; Ideam et al, 2010). Given the masters connotation of the study, further research is recommended.

This paper develops a common agency problem using a two stages menu auction game to show how pressure groups can aid in deciding how much public good should be provided. By sorting people into different pressure groups that represent the individuals’ preferences for the public good, the interaction among the pressure groups is an important element that could improve the provision of public goods. This paper sketches a very simple mechanism to provide a general contribution to finance a public good. In this model, the presence of pressure groups improves the undersupply of public goods typical in voluntary contribution models, while avoiding the distortionary effects of non-lump-sum transfers of the involuntary contributions models.

The purpose of this essay is to explain why it is not only reasonable but also necessary for companies that aim to survive in the long term, to adapt to the shifts that have happened in the market by embedding a system thinking and becoming sustainable businesses, through the adoption of sustainable business strategies that deliver benefits for the Triple Bottom Line. This paper first describes the current situation of the Earth, it will also describe the existing criticism towards businesses and the raising expectations for business acting as a source of long-term solutions and change. Subsequently, it exposes the main reasons why it has been so difficult for businesses to see a business case for sustainability. Finally, this essay demonstrates that to survive in the long term it is of vital importance for companies to embed sustainable business strategies and sustainable business models that deliver benefits for the Triple Bottom Line.

Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) is an important pathogen of cattle that has been frequently associated with in vitro produced (IVP) embryos. The zona pellucida (ZP) of IVP embryos shows higher affinity for BVDV than the ZP of in vivo produced embryos and treatments that can eliminate BVDV from in vivo produced embryos are unsuccessful in the case of the IVP embryos. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether different culture conditions change the affinity of the ZP of day-7 IVP bovine embryos to BVDV. Morula and blastocysts were produced under four different culture systems: 1) in vitro culture in Menezo's B2 media and coculture with bovine oviductal epithelial cells (B2-BOEC culture); 2) in vitro culture in modified synthetic oviductai fluid with aminoacids (mSOFaa culture); 3) in vivo culture in ligated oviducts of synchronized sheep; and 4) in vivo produced embryos flushed from superovulated cows seven days after breeding. The embryos were exposed to BVDV for 24 hours, and washed 10 times and treated with trypsin, according to the recommendations of the international Embryo Transfer Society. After pooling the embryos in groups of five, the samples were homogenized and tested for the presence of BVDV by indirect immimoperoxidase assay (IIP) or reverse transcription-polymerase chah reaction (RT-PCR). No significant differences were found between the two detection systems but the IIP assay tended to detect a higher number of positive sarnples. According to the IIP assay, the mSOFaa group had a significantliy higher number of positive findings (78.6%) followed by the B2-BOEC group (32.1%), and the oviductal culture group (7.1%). None of the in vivo embryos tested positive for BVDV. These results show that different culture conditions in which embryos develop alter the way the ZP interacts with pathogens. The oviductal culture of in vitro produced zygotes seems to be beneficial in reducing the affinity of the ZP to BVDV and the washes and trypsin treatments applied to these embryos after culture appear to be more effective than in embryos completely produced in vitro.

Miguel Angel Rojas es uno de los artistas colombianos contemporáneos más prolíficos. Sus inicios como dibujante hiperrealista, su incursión en la pintura neoexpresionista de la siguiente década, sus obras indigenistas – interculturales de los años 90 y sus más recientes obras políticas referidas al narcotráfico son en conjunto, manifestaciones de un espíritu creativo, curioso y autoexigente. Sin embargo su obra fue poco conocida y divulgada hasta fechas recientes. Su actitud estética, profusa, ecléctica y abierta a los cambios, refleja el temperamento del mejor arte colombiano, aquel que le ha permitido entrar y salir con éxito y desprejuicidamente de las impredecibles y siempre cambiantes corrientes y contracorrientes del arte contemporáneo sin perder de vista su realidad local. Esta investigación intenta realizar por primera vez una revisión de la obra total del artista, cubriendo tres décadas de trabajo. Se da a conocer su obra y la interesante producción colombiana actual.

It is now widely acknowledged that is indispensable to address disaster risk in order to advance development efforts. Alongside other issues such as poverty, food security and land use planning, disaster risk needs to be mainstreamed into the development agendas of urban centres worldwide. The indissoluble bond between disasters and climate change has encouraged this mainstreaming to be carried out through the coordination of efforts between Disaster Risk Reduction DRR and Climate Change Adaptation CCA. The unequal paths of evolution and institutional arrangements for DRR and CCA in Colombia have rendered obstacles for their coordination. DRM started by focusing on response and recovery while forgoing the discourse about the social construction of disasters. In regards to CCA, an initial and needless focus on mitigation rather than adaptation, delayed the development of the adaptation agenda in Colombia. However, the recent acknowledgment of concepts such as vulnerability and resilience in the equation of risk have begun to pave the way for framing disasters as an issue of development. The linkage between climate change and disasters in Colombia, although with previous experiences, became evident with the extensive damages that the country experienced during La Niña 2010-2011. This series of events prompted the most recent efforts for development policy and practice that have targeted the coordination of DRR and CCA in the country to achieve sustainable development. Efforts for DRM at the city level have emerged as examples with the potential to prepare the Colombian urban settings for the challenges and uncertainties of future climate change impacts. For this potential to be materialised it is necessary to take advantage of the existing entry points for coordination of DRR and CCA and their mainstreaming into development planning. Since the same body in Colombia, the National Planning Department, leads the development of the guidelines for the advancement of the two fields, there are parallel levels of intervention amongst them that can facilitate joint actions. Targeting the vulnerability and the resilience building of populations in urban contexts must be the main objective of such efforts to effectively deal with disaster risk in Colombia as a way to advance development. 

With the advent of ubiquitous computing, interaction design has broadened its object of inquiry into how smart computational artifacts inconspicuously act in  people’s everyday lives. Although user-centered design approaches remains useful for exploring how people cope with interactive systems, they cannot explain how this new breed of artifact participates in people’s sociality. User-centered design approach assumes that humans control interactive systems, but neglects any possibility of the agency of smart artifacts.Following Actor-network Theory, this research recognizes that artifacts and humans share the capacity of influencing society and meshing with each other, constituting hybrid social actors. From that standpoint, the research offers a triadic structure of networked social interaction as a methodological basis to investigate how smart devices perceive their social setting and adaptively mediate people’s interactions within activities. These triadic units of analysis account for the interactions within and between humannonhuman collectives in the actor-network. The within interactions are those that hold together humans and smart artifacts inside a collective and put forward the collective’s assembled meaning for other actors in the network.The between interactions are those that occur among collectives and characterize the dominant relational model of the actor-network. This triadic approach was modeled and used to analyze the interactions of participants in three empirical studies of social activities with communal goals, each mediated by a smart artifact that enacted – signified – a balanced distribution of obligations and privileges among subjects. Overall, the studies found that actor-networks exhibit a social viscosity that hinders people’s interactions. This is because when people try to collectively accomplish goals, they offer resistance to one another. The studies also show that the intervention of smart artifacts can facilitate the achievement of cooperative and collaborative interaction between actors when the artifacts enact the dominant moral principles which prompt the preservation of social balance, enhance the network’s information integrity, and are located at the focus of activity. The articulation of Actor-Network Theory principles with interaction design methods opens up the traditional user-artifact dyad towards triadic collective enactment by embracing diverse kinds of participants and practices, thus facilitating the design of enhanced sociality. The theoretical conceptual framework, methods and tools developed in this research are relevant to product and interaction designers, ubiquitous computing and Science and technology studies (STS) researchers; as well as practitioners interested in making the interaction between humans and computers smarter, more intuitive and more enjoyable. The outcome of this research is addressed to designers, engineers and urban planners who are responsible for the design of the new generation of computational artifacts that will cohabitate today’s transportation terminals and vehicles, offices, parks, streets, among other social spaces of the constructed world.

Previous studies have shown that residential water consumption in Phoenix, Arizona is significantly related to changes in climate, although that sensitivity varies substantially from one census tract to another. In this investigation, we determine the empirical relationship between water consumption and variations in temperature and precipitation. We find the sensitivity of consumption to either climate variable is positively related to the percent of land covered in mesic irrigated landscaping, mean household income, lot size, and percent of single-family residential lots containing swimming pools.  We use estimated changes in temperature and precipitation for 50 model – scenario combinations presented by the IPCC, and we determined that mean water consumption should increase by an average of over three percent by 2050, but the climate-induced change in consumption varies considerably across the census tracts.