Construction projects are characterized as complex and risky due to the involvement of many contracting parties and the higher costs of project development. The Construction industry is struggling with many problems and its productivity is clearly decreasing. Many efforts to tackle these problems have been made, but have seen to fall short. Recently a new approach, outside from the traditional model, seems to have the answers to those problems. Thus, this study aims to analyse said approach. This new methodology, based on the principles of the Toyota Production System develop by Ohno, is called Lean Construction. By performing a literature review, the conceptual basis of the lean principles in manufacturing will be analyzed. A review of the actual Construction Industry practices is presented, to later explain the failures of the model and the criticism of made by the scholar behind Lean Construction. With that, the conceptual bases of Lean Construction develop by Lauri Koskela are presented, which shows the applicability of manufacturing principles to construction and the new Transformation, Flow, Values views of construction. Lean Construction in detailed, as well as its application methodologies, taking a special focus on the Last Planner System, which provides a new form of planning and production control to the industry. Finally, through the study of two cases, the success of the model shown.

Gender-based violence during armed conflicts and under oppressive regimes is a reality. Although governments, NGOs, the international community and civil society have made efforts to address the impact of gender-selective practices on women their magnitude remains underestimated. When sexual violence has been systematically used as a strategy of terror and control, children born as a consequence of it emerge within the society as a generation conceived from violence. Even though these children are part of the narratives of wartime sexual violence survivors, they have neither gained a place in the agenda of human rights concerns nor in the post-violence political agenda. Indeed, in the aftermath of conflict they seem to be invisible subjects of the wounded society and therefore, their role in the process of national reconciliation is denied. Although there is a significant lack of information on these children, empirical evidence shows that their human rights are highly compromised in a number of ways and that their presence cannot be underestimated. In this dissertation I argue that the omission to include these children in the agenda towards reconciliation hinders the project of national reconstruction. By being excluded from this process, they are not just marginalised from the political process towards reconstruction of the society but also from society itself. My analysis is enriched by elements coming from sociology, psychology and international human rights law. I based my research on the review of International Human Rights Instruments; Literature on gender based violence during conflicts; war-affected children; trauma; and reconciliation. In addition, I reviewed literature on the plight of these children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Uganda.

This study aims to find out if a structured art therapy intervention can reduce PTSD symptoms in a group of displaced Colombian women, using an art-based and a quantitative methodology. Throughout eight art therapy sessions provided once a week, participants created a story narrating their displacement journey. At the end of the program, participants bound the images to create a book. Before and after the 8-week art therapy intervention, the participants were presented with the UCLA PTSD Reaction Index, administered as an interview in order to monitor the symptom reduction. Results indicate that art therapy may be a promising treatment to reduce PTSD symptoms in Colombian women displaced by the current war on drugs.

This study assessed the performances of a group of speakers of English as a second language (L2) when perceiving and producing the English vowel Schwa. In addition, it also aimed to evaluate the hypotheses proposed by the Speech Learning Model (SML), developed by Flege and colleagues (1988, 1992, 1995, 1999, and 2002) which suggest that L2 speakers are capable of creating new phonetic categories for new L2 sounds. Ten L2 speakers, who were living in England, and whose first language was Spanish (Colombian), as well as a group of five English native speakers participated as informants. As it had not been studied before, the effect of orthography was chosen as an important variable that could be affecting the L2 speakers’ perceptual and productive abilities. The study was carried out in three stages. The first stage, evaluated the initial L2 speakers’ perceptual and productive abilities. The second stage consisted of three sessions of pronunciation training. Finally, the third stage aimed to evaluate whether the learners improved in a post-training context. Perception was evaluated by having L2 informants judge several English words that included correct and incorrect pronunciations. Percentages of correct answers were contrasted to the results obtained from the native speakers. Regarding production, acoustic measurements of the quality and duration of the vowels were taken in order to be compared to the native speakers’ productions. Results suggest that most of the L2 speakers were influenced by the orthography of the words; therefore, they perceived and produced the English Schwas as instances of their native vowels. In consequence, as predicted by the SML, a blocking effect in the creation of new L2 phonetic categories took place and no improvement was seen after the training in terms of quality.

The illegal downloading of music issue has been studied during the last decade due to the negative impact that it has had into the music industry. However most of these studies have focused on analyzing the consequences of this act in legal and economic terms. This study focuses on analyzing the cultural, social, psychological and ethical factors influencing UK students´ music consumption of nowadays. Overall, the findings suggested that although technological advances have brought great benefits to both consumers and companies, it has also brought bad habits of consumption, contributing in the transformation of music from a cultural good to an object of consumption. This work analyze the current consumer behavior about music, the extent to which the internet affects individual's ethical and moral values within the consumption of music and finally the effects this issue has brought to the production of culture.

The present thesis work is motivated in the recent developments of wireless access technologies, which have given noticeable changes on both operator and end-user side. From the operator side, the wireless access networks have evolved from 1st generation technologies (1G) up to 3rd generation technologies (3G) during the last three decades. Additionally, 4th generation networks (4G) based in advanced radio technologies are already in development phases. The proliferation of wireless access networks yields opportunities to the end-user, however it can also induce a additional problematic due to the complexity of the network to be operated. Therefore, the end-user has the possibility to choose dynamically which access technology (access network) to connect to, in order to obtain the required service. From the moment the decisions from the users occur in a distributed, non-coordinated and generally opportunistic way, the access to wireless networks process dynamics are in a need to be studied. The present thesis work, analyses the competitive access problem by means of game theory. In particular, non-cooperative game models in which the users tend to maximize their individual utility from the access problem are considered. The thesis work presents the development and implementation of a software instrument capable of simulating game dynamics individualizing equilibria conditions and measuring the transition length to reach such equilibria (convergence time). The second part of the thesis work includes the analysis of different realistic wireless access networks considering different access strategies which are selected by the end-users and different utility function formulations with which the players “play” the game.

It is followed by ‘La Partida’ a song written by Víctor Jara33 in 1974 for charango, ‘tiple’34, guitar, quena and percussion, included oh his album El derecho de vivir en paz (the right of living in peace). Duración: (4:30)

Colombian citizens and the government have faced a harsh and violent threat for more than 40 years. The guerrillas and specifically FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) have plunged the whole nation into violence, terror and death from generation to generation. Having the civil population under menace, the Colombian government has to act prudently but also quickly to avoid terrorism to take the control of the forces. The state has had to deal with this complex and difficult trouble by combating FARC through the counterinsurgency (COIN), which implies allocating sufficient resources to success and developing policies to assure the supremacy of the government over all groups outside the law. This study investigates the history of FARC’s insurgency in Colombia, the qualitative essence of this insurgency’s transitional phases and the Colombian government’s strategy towards opposing FARC. The foremost idea, the validity of which is being explored throughout the course of this study’s entirety, as that it is specifically by continuing to adhere to the methodological provisions of an integrative counterinsurgency campaign that the government will continue to score successes in its struggle against this notorious organization. This change towards a better integrative strategy is represented by the shift from the Pastrana government to the Uribe government.

One of the effects of the globalisation of our society is that people travel more covering longer distances, live far from their work place and consume goods from all around the world. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the transport of people and goods represents more than 25\% of the energy consumption and is one of the principal sources of pollution worldwide. Several efforts must be done to reduce the oil dependence, the energy consumption and the environmental impact of transport systems. In this perspective, the French Army (DGA) has designed and constructed the Electrical Chain Components Evaluation vehicle (ECCE). It is a mobile laboratory to evaluate under real conditions the electric components of Hybrid Electrical Vehicles (HEVs) that reduce the energy consumption and the pollution emission of conventional vehicles. ECCE permits evaluating different energy sources such as batteries, fuel cells, internal combustion engines, ultracapacitors or flywheels. The ECCE project, nowadays in a second phase\footnote{The first phase of the ECCE project is explained in Chapter 1} is developed in joint cooperation with the FEMTO-ST laboratory of the University of Franche-Comté and two industrial partners, HELION and PANHARD General Defense. It aims to study the implementation, control and energy management of different hybrid sources. As a research developed along the second phase of the ECCE project, the principal objective of this thesis is to design, to implement and to evaluate an energy management supervision system in the ECCE HEV. This thesis proposes an original energy management strategy based on expert knowledge and type-2 fuzzy logic. The design of the fuzzy logic controller is done by using knowledge engineering. This technique allows extracting knowledge from several experts using surveys. The consideration of type-2 fuzzy logic systems enables modelling the uncertainty in the answers of the experts. This thesis presents a second application of type-2 fuzzy logic: the voltage regulation of a DC/DC power converter. The principal motivation for developing this application is that it is easier to implement in laboratory at a relatively low cost and it permits a viability evaluation of type-2 fuzzy logic before an implementation in the ECCE mobile laboratory. This is useful because one of the main challenges of this thesis is to reduce the time to experimentally validate the energy management system. This is required to respect the time schedule constraints and to reduce the costs associated to gather the partners of the project at PANHARD locations in Saint-Germain Laval.

Waste management is one of the growing problems in many highly populated cities around the world, and the amount of strategies designed to solve it has changed during the last decade. It passed from land filing to incineration and mechanical biotechnology; this quick change was partially induced by the threat that garbage is for the environment, and later on by the acceleration of climate change, since the public services industry was bound to comply with the emissions reduction targets. The newest technologies are being applied in Europe and North America, giving them a new way to face their waste issues. However, the industrialized States are not the only ones with these concerns, in the developing countries, it is a matter that is becoming an structural problem, because of the population growth and the dynamics of the capitalist practice; moreover, it is difficult to solve due to low budget or lack of knowledge on the topic. In Bogotá D.C, waste management became one of the most controversial topics due to the many problems presented during the implementation of the Zero-Waste program and the past administrative issues with the Landfill Doña Juana that led to many health and land predicaments for the population. As a consequence, this dissertation seeks to create a new strategy to fix the gaps of the original policy, by designing five time-limited specific objectives, a reform to the segregation strategy and proposing the construction Anaerobic Digestion plant as the best solution for the sustainable control of bio-waste. Therefore, this work will show throughout all the chapters the background of the waste management system, the new strategies to be taken into account by the local administration, the advantages of the AD technology and the possible financing channels for the renovation of the Basuras- Cero Policy. All the information above will be use to conclude, that for the case of Bogotá D.C, the use of bio-waste as a new energy source will strengthen the recycling industry (with the establishment of a better segregation system and the construction of and AD plant) reduce the amount of waste sent to Landfill and decrease GHG emissions; and even though it is a small step, it can become the foundation for fixing some weaknesses of the economic system and some social mores.