Colombia is a country that is afflicted by violent conflict. Nowadays many Colombians suffer as a result of it, especially children who are directly affected, either physically or emotionally. Peace education is a very effective tool for change, thus enables people and communities to start building processes of change together. Children are the present and future of any country and so working with them is a constructive way to start processes of change. In order to help change the current violent situation in Colombia, an intervention for building a culture of peace with Colombian children through playful interactions has been created. Taking into account the results and successes of previous research carried out by Villar-Guhl (2007), it has been possible to continue using games and activities as vehicles to work with children for peace. By doing so, it has been possible to develop a new way of empowering children, by encouraging critical thinking about their current situation in order to help them to raise their voices and participate in building a new and positive future for themselves and their communities. This intervention is a tool that starts the work of changing the current culture of violence in Colombia, hence beginning the process of transforming it into a culture of peace.

The gap between organ donors and organ recipients is a worldwide problem that has been set in national agendas around the world. However, there has not been a clear pathway to establish a standard universal guideline to deal with organ transplantation and its related processes. This paper argues through an exhaustive literature review on ethics and bioethics that the difficulty for having such system are varying conceptualizations of world health as well as the difficulty of imposing a universal ethics code.  The paper has three core parts. Part I is a theoretical view of the Human Body Parts (HBP) transplantation procurements through the optics of ethics and religions. Part II is the empirical view of those issues through legal frameworks. While part III deals with the ethical considerations of transposing a health policy in a pluralistic society. This paper finds that: (1) Cultural and religious beliefs of the general public cannot be ignored when transposing health policy. (2) Bioethical traditional approaches to organ donation have a limited scope when dealing with existential or religious problems. (3) When comparing bioethical principles solidarity showed to deal with a wider spectrum of ethical problems as compared to autonomy. (4) Having a universal guideline to deal with organ transplantation isn’t impossible; however, differences in the founding principles of global health ethics are the biggest obstacle.

This thesis offers an account of how the Colombian Army recovered from a series of humiliating defeats inflicted upon it by illegal armed groups led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the 1990s. It explains how a combination of internally generated, bottom-up and top-down organizational innovations, U.S. security assistance, and dynamic management from President Alvaro Uribe and a civilianized Ministry of Defense was able to restore Colombian Army morale, and to restructure and reorganize the military into an offensive force able to gain battlefield dominance and restore government authority over a greater part of the national territory.

This research is focused on obtaining an important reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuels by increasing the efficiency of pre-combustion carbon capture. It examines a new, low-risk, approach that uses conventional water gas shift reactors and acid gas removal technology in a unusual arrangement, within an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle power plant (IGCC). Timmins (2010) proposed a flowsheet of this nature and it is this flowsheet that is used as the starting point for this research project. Process simulation in UniSim Design R390 is conducted  to validate the viability of such  a flowsheet and to investigate optimal plant configuration. The modelling output is compared to US DOE baseline studies for competing technologies (2010).The physical solvent, Selexol, is used for cardon dioxide (CO2) absorption as recommended by researchers as the most energy efficient amongst the range of physical and chemical solvents investigated. There are mainly two thermodynamic models required to meet all of the needs of this complex process. Most of the process is modelled with the Peng-Robinson equation of state but the Selexol absorber and desorber is modelled using the non-random-two-liquid model  (NRTL) for the liquid phase and the ideal gas law for the vapour phase. A beseline flowsheet model is successfully modelled that could be attached to an IGCC plant to enable it to continue producing electric power whilst capturing 90% of the carbon derived from the fuel. The model is used for process development, and for energy efficiency evaluation. Every major item of capital equipment has been included, modelled and sized to produce a cost analysis and additionallly, the model output was used for a preliminary life cycle analysis (LCA). From the results produced in this study, the proposed process appears to be a feasible, energy-efficient, alternative technology for incorporating carbon capture within an IGCC flowsheet.

La presente investigación es un trabajo que pretende hacer un acercamiento a la crítica política de la representación mediante un estudio de casos de sujetos pertenecientes al contexto social de Colombia. La construcción del presente escrito esta guiada por los estudios culturales enfocados en la cultura visual, por la teoría crítica y a través de una indagación de tipo narrativo. Como referente tomado desde la cultura visual se trabajó con diez obras de las cincuenta que componen la colección: ‘Violencia en Colombia’ (2004) del artista Fernando Botero. Como sujetos participantes del estudio en mención se trabajó con tres grupos familiares colombianos. Las preguntas de investigación entorno a las cuales gira esta disertación son: ¿De qué forma(s) se asume la situación social de la violencia en Colombia desde el problema de la crítica política de la representación? y además ¿Cómo se relaciona cada sujeto participante en este estudio con este aspecto desde su propia cotidianidad y en relación con las dinámicas de las relaciones sociales?

The need of understanding the relationship between the physical habitat and ecology in the fluvial systems has become a major issue due to an increasing environmental conciousness but also because of the normativity which demand the achievement of the good status of the water bodies and its ecosystems. Exactly this requirement is prescribed by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) which have included the hydromorphology as an important aspect of evaluation due to the influence that it has on the ecology of a river system. The hydromorphology gets relevance because it study the system as a whole, involving the interactions between ecology, hydrology and fluvial geomorphology. As a response to the WFD each country of the European Union has developed a method for guaranteeing the compliance of the normativity. Elements of such methods and of international literature are collected for the development of a methodology that fulfill the gaps of the current Colombian water normativity and support the decision making in the environmental planning and impact assessment. This guide for the river morphological restoration in Colombia is a complete hydromorphological analysis of a selected river which main purpose is to make an approach to the general aspects of the river in the macro scale, followed by an assessment in the meso scale in which the river is segmented, classified and the hydromorphological conditions are scored; finally, a simulation is performed for a critical reach, called in this work the “bottle neck” reach. The simulation consists in a hydrodynamics model (or hydromorphodynamics model as optional), its results of depth, velocity and substrate in combination with the preferences of a fish indicator species, are computed in the software CASiMiR and give the habitat suitability in the study area for the simulated conditions. The application of such methodology is applied in a mountainous river reach downstream the Punt da Gall dam in Switzerland for which the hydromorphological aspects in the macro and meso scale are assessed and in the micro scale the habitat distribution of fish indicator species are calculated. The present work is an attempt to apply the habitat simulation as a tool for determining hydromorphological quality, for river restoration activities and for determining minimum habitat conditions when the discharge is regulated. Future investigations include the application in a Colombian river for which the collection of biological data still is a challenge.

Since the last two decades, touch as a sense that could be extended by means of technology has become a major topic for interaction design.The following Thesis examines how touch has been approached by Digital Media and specifically by Interaction Design the last decades. Following this exam there appears to be two main ways in which touch is offered and narrated: Either as Haptic interactions which mention touch as the possibility of simulating Closeness and Intimacy, or as Tangible interactions where touch becomes critical, subversive or monstrous as it opposes to other inmaterial digital media. By a media archeological methodology of finding Topos (cliches or recurrent narrations that spread and repeat in time and different cultures), both strangeness and intimacy as narrations of touch within interaction design were analyzed from the perspective of a ‘tactiloclasm tradition’ in western culture and the return of touch as the ‘other’. Touch as closeness and intimacy, a narration which often appears in Haptic screen-based interactions, was found connected to tactiloclasm as it presents a private and pleasurable immaterial touch that is clean and free of any co-implication: touch is black boxed. By the other hand, the narration of Touch as strangeness, which often appears in Critical Design and Digital Fabrication, was found connected to a nostalgia for a supposed primitive fetishistic touch: touch returns in digital media as strangeness, monstrousity, criticality or subversiveness. As a proposal to confront these two recurrent narrations, the second part of this Thesis presents the idea of a design inquiry and the construction process of 5 smart phone cases that materialize the fat traces left by the users on the screens of their devices. The cases intend to open the black box of hidden haptic touch and confront into what we consider monstrous in touch relations. The co-implication of humans and artifacts is embodied.

Purpose: To denaturalize the concept of corporate values as a necessary managerial practice to engineer culture in organizations and to explore how its enactment influences power - resistance interplays and the workplace construction of selves. Method: We engaged in Critical Management Studies (CMS), using an interpretative approach to our empirical material. Theoretical framework: The study is based on the concepts of organizational control, corporate values enactment, workplace resistance and construction of selves. Empirical Foundation: The empirical data was gathered based on a triangulation method by employing qualitative interviews, analysis of corporate material and fieldwork observation in Asian Monetary Fund, an Indonesian financial institution headquartered in Jakarta. Conclusion: We found that corporate values is a fragmented, fluid and fragile concept which can be used by employees to reproduce, rationalize and transform power relations in the organization and this process to resist “through” rather than “against” corporate values affects the construction of selves at work; producing individuals who simultaneously identify and dis-identify to the organization.

Das Krankenhaus als Schlüsselakteur im Gesundheitswesen muss heutzutage die Herausforderungen des Marktes und Wettbewerbes annehmen, dafür soll es eine Wettbewerbsstrategie folgen. Die zunehmenden Umweltprobleme mit der einhergehenden sozialen Ungerechtigkeit und Armut haben die Notwendigkeit erweckt, Unternehmen stärker in die Verantwortlichkeit ihres Handelns einzubinden. Krankenhäuser sind wichtiger Arbeitgeber, bedeutender Verbraucher von Ressourcen, und damit auch größere Erzeuger von Emissionen und Abfälle. Die vorliegende Arbeit soll klären, welche Wettbewerbsvorteile durch Nachhaltigkeitsmanagement in kolumbianischen Krankenhäusern aufgebaut und gehalten werden können. In der Einführung dieser Masterarbeit wird das kolumbianische Gesundheitssystem kurz vorgestellt sowie das externe Umfeld der Krankenhäuser erläutert, um eine allgemeine Strategie zu empfehlen. Im Anschluss wird der Einfluss von Nachhaltigkeitsmaßnahmen auf Wettbewerbsvorteile analysiert. Das kolumbianische System für soziale Sicherheit im Gesundheitswesen fördert die Qualität der Dienstleistung und Patientenorientierung als Grundlagen für die Wahl der Gesundheitseinrichtung bei Patienten. Neben den Ergebnissen der Analyse des Makroumfelds wird die Schlussfolgerung gezogen, dass eine Differenzierungsstrategie, die auf Qualität und Patientenorientierung basiert ist, das Konzept der Lebensqualität durch Wohlbefinden, Vitalität und Gesundheit in ihrer Struktur als Basis immer enthalten sollte. Der positive Einfluss von Nachhaltigkeitsmaßnahmen auf Wettbewerbsvorteile wird durch Ursache-Wirkungsbeziehungen dargestellt. Entlang der gesamten Wertschöpfungskette ist dann ihre Anwendung aufgezeigt. Einige der in der Masterarbeit identifizierten Maßnahmen sind: Risikoanalyse, Biosicherheit, Weiterbildung, Ethikkodex, effizientere Technologie, nachhaltige Beschaffung, Corporate Citizenship, u.a. Am Ende der Masterarbeit kommt der Autor zu dem Entschluss, sowohl Investitionen in Qualität als auch eine Rationalisierung von Kosten durch die Anwendung von Öko- und Sozioeffizienz in einer Weise durchzuführen, dass die Qualität der Dienstleistungen nicht belastet wird. Durch diesen Lösungsvorschlag kann das Krankenhaus attraktive Preise mit Krankenkasse handeln und gleichzeitig die Treue der Patienten behalten.

A Strong type is a class of a bounded equivalence relation (i.e. the quotient is a proper set) on tuples of the monster model of a complete theory T. Today, there are three different notions of strong types: a Shelah’s strong type is a class under the smallest definable equivalence relation on the monster model C with finite classes; a Kim-Pillay strong type is a class of the least bounded type-definable equivalence relation kp, in fact, this type may be characterized as the finest notion of strong type for which the corresponding quotient is a compact Hausdorff space when it is equipped with the so-called logic topology; finally, a Lascar strong type is simply a class of the smallest equivalence relation ls, which is bounded and invariant under automorphisms. For some years, it was an open problem to find an example of a theory for which the Kim-Pillay and the Lascar strong type do not coincide. After finding such example, it was suggested that Lascar strong types could be described from the point of view of Decriptive Set Theory, in particular of quotient of Polish spaces by Borel equivalence relations. Furthermore, it was conjectured that for every tuple a of the monster model, if [a]ls = [a]kp, then [a]kp restricted to [a]ls is nonsmooth, using the so-called Silver dichotomy. Despite the Stone space is not always Polish, the authors proved such conjecture distinguishing the case when the theory is countable -in which case for any countable model M of T, S(M) is Polish- and when it is not. My Master’s thesis consists in filling up all the details for both cases, specially for the case when T is countable. Given a complete first order theory T, its monster model C has none topological structure. Nevertheless, given a model M of T, the Stone space S(M) has it, this is, it is well known that it is Hausdorff, that given any formula ', the set of [ ] determines a basis of clopens, etc.