This paper explores the participation of non-state providers in public service delivery in post-conflict reconstruction societies particularly for the provision of education. Using a qualitative research method the literature regarding state capacity and governance in war-to-peace transitions is assessed to identify the pros and cons of private sector intervention. As a case study the model of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education in Colombia is analysed in order to examine the extent to which engagements with non-state actors can be a complementary strategy to assist former combatants and victims during the implementation of a potential peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC. The Colombian model developed through the Familiar Compensation Fund – Cajas de Compensación Familiar – may be an alternative to offering educational programmes for children and youth ex-combatants. In the light of the plausible signing of a final peace agreement the provision of effective incentives in terms of basic public services will be a key driver for peacebuilding. The importance of education in development and processes of reintegration is well known, but the challenge is how to deliver adequate teaching services for children and young fighters in a context characterized by low state capacity and resource constraints. According to institutional frameworks, the model of PPPs in Colombia has served to deliver social programmes to poor communities, former combatants and victims of the armed conflict. Therefore, the case study is framed in four regions: Bogotá, Antioquia, Putumayo and Caquetá where the majority of the municipalities of the post-conflict will be concentrated except for Bogotá. The Familiar Compensation system, also known as Social Security Institutions, is a fundamental actor in the development of the Colombian social policy. Apart from providing social welfare services to workers and targeted communities, these institutions are key allies of the government in the implementation and execution of public programmes regarding the delivery of education, housing and health services given their experience, infrastructure, good practices and national coverage to reach the population in urban and rural regions. This innovative coordination between the public and private sector is also seen in the active role the Family Compensation Fund has in the articulation and definition of public policies at national and regional levels. Likewise, the SSIs have participated actively in the delivery of public education through different type of contracts under specific socio-economic requirements and governmental policies in order to benefit disadvantaged children and adults including demobilized and victims. The SSIs CAFAM, COMFAMILIAR PUTUMAYO, COMFACA and COMFAMA operate a variety of educational and complementary programmes according to the needs of each region. Some of them have worked together to deliver non-traditional educational services in municipalities intensely affected by the internal conflict, which are funded by both governmental and international agencies. In a post-conflict setting, the intervention of the SSIs as non-state providers would be crucial for state building as a result of the coordination mechanisms developed so far between the state and the private sector; the institutional and operational capacity of the SSIs in the provision of social services; and the accountability mechanism created to supervise and control the Family Compensation system through the Superintendence of Family Subsidy. Hence strengthening engagements with non-state actors in Colombia may contribute to restoring legitimacy and accountability in marginalized regions exercising the state an indirect role in service delivery via regulation and monitoring. Still accountability will need to be reinforced since some SSIs have been intervened due to political clientelism and local elite capture of decision-making, which have undermined their social impact in the communities where they operate. Nonetheless, the successful experiences of the Family Compensation Funds – among which are entrepreneurship, housing, microcredit, and education services – can be replicated and articulated in rural areas following the alternative model of PPPs in service delivery.

Usually, an actuary would begin by trying to study a particular consumer insurance pool. In this work, I am working on Colombia and soon, I struggled in having complete and precise information. Indeed, it is a recurrent issue for actuaries studying most emerging countries. The next step would be to estimate the risks an insurance company will have to face in order to create profitable products. I was interested in studying Climatic risks and, since Colombia's weather is interesting. I decided to study the floods in Colombia. Colombian weather is ruled by still unpredictable and random events: El Niño and La Niña that bring droughts and floods. Once again, I quite struggled in having reliable insurance information about the floods since this risk has never been surveyed separately from the overall house damages before 2010. From 2010 to 2012, because of the frequency and the importance of the floods, insurance companies have been trying to study the cost of climatic catastrophes but it was not profitable enough for them to keep on. Indeed, there are not enough people subscribing to house insurances for it to be profitable. Hence, I did not work only on 2010-2012 data because it does not allow me to stand back enough. I worked with the overall house damages data. Finally, from the two previous analysis, an actuary have to adapt his product to the consumer market.

This thesis investigates the turbine performance of a particular tidal energy conversion device analysing the hydrodynamic variables based on computational fluid dynamics simulations. Renewable tidal energy technology is undergoing a rapid development due to its advantages and new and creative designs of marine current turbines which are constantly being studied and improved. As a result, incorporating diffusers to accelerate the flow is a method used to increase the efficiency of the turbines. However, this practice has to be evaluated and parameterised to ensure its viability. Therefore, an experimental test of a ducted turbine, carried out in 2010, was selected for analysis with the aim of improving diffuser efficiency without studying the diffuser design but other variables in the system. The advantage of this strategy applied to a particular case is that the knowledge achieved can be used to benefit any diffuser design on many tidal turbines. The diffuser that was used in the 2010 experiment exhibited a low increment in power extracted and the main objective of this thesis arises from the question of how it could be possible to extract much more power using such ducted turbine with the same rotor and diffuser because the interaction of device components and characteristics of water flow causes an impact on the flow field, and therefore in extraction of energy. A methodology based on two hypotheses was developed to understand the influence of diffuser over the flow. The hypotheses addressed two areas: effects produced by a strut characteristic of turbine design and influence of the free surface.

The ambient noise analysis field has several methods used to study Microzonation with the aim to mitigate the risk of damage in structures. A new method to study seismic noise was developed by Wassermann et al., 2016. The novel technique uses the existent relation between the transverse component of acceleration and the vertical component of rotation generated by Love waves to retrieve their inherent dispersive character (Kurrle et al., 2010). The advantage of this implementation is that it only needs two instruments to measure acceleration and rotation in the same location, making it easy to deploy as the H/V spectral ratio. Moreover, the information retrieved is easier to interpret than the aforementioned technique. In addition, the same aspects of the wavefield retrieved from array echniques such as F-K and SPAC could be recovered. This thesis aims to complement this method by studying Rayleigh waves and using the implicit relation between the vertical acceleration and the horizontal rotation or tilt generated by them. We use a statistical process to build dispersion curves for this kind of wave, finding its phase velocities in the medium and its arrival direction. Our findings indicated that the new implementation overestimates the phase velocities, which may be due to the fact that a weak-rotational motion sensor was not available, and the array-derived rotation method was used. Hence, this led to high uncertainties in the measure of rotation and also to lower magnitudes of its horizontal components with respect to the vertical one. The method seems reliable to find the back azimuth of noise generated by Rayleigh waves and complements well the findings of the Love-wave technique previously mentioned.

Population growth is currently one of the main challenges faced by all countries and their authorities. Problems generated by this trend include the formation of slums and their interaction with other elements of society, especially in developing countries where this phenomenon is significant. This situation is not new, even in Colombia. As a member of the United Nations Organization and as a developing country, this Latin American nation is supposed to conform to the Millennium Development Goals by 2020. With respect to the improvement of the condition of slums addressed in target 7d of goal number 7, a considerable number of measures have been adopted by authorities at different levels. Nevertheless, several cities and regional authorities have disregarded their obligation to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

IMBOLIC is a collection of poems that was written for the Poetry 2 Assignment and for the final MA Dissertation. The work is divided into two sections: the first one, POETRYTMENT is a sequence of twelve poems where collage, verse, prose, lyricism and Spanish as a mother tongue work as a complete treatment to release pain and grab hope. In most of the pieces, there is a double reading that suggests a dialogue between a patient and some healers. Among them: Carol Watts, Mercedes Sosa (singer), William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Rosemary Tonks, Robert Frost, Alfonsina Storni, Sasha Moorsom and Pablo Neruda. The second one, THE SONG OF THE WOMB written for the final Dissertation addresses to transformation. It is a song that tunes with the voice of cycles, Nancy Gaffield, Patricia Debney, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Asunción Silva and Alfonsina Storni. In both pieces, there is a poetic product originated from some of the ideas that are registered as in Spanish as in English in “Truenos bajo la piel /Thunders under the skin” (http://claudiaorduz.blogspot.co.uk) since January 2014. For instance: Julio (Hide and Seek adaptation) and Invisible Stitches.

Un análisis desde las teorías de tres elementos gerenciales (liderazgo, conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes) y cómo se encuentran presentes en una nueva compañía teatral, el Ensemble Lodi de Italia; con la presencia de un reparto de actrices aficionadas, el éxito y los retos que aparecen para formular unos requisitos básicos sobre como la gestión del espectáculo puede impulsar el crecimiento de una compañía en sus inicios según el modelo del ciclo de vida organizacional.

The Interaction of electromagnetic waves with dielectric bodies and metals has been extensively studied because of its importance to problems including propagation through rain or snow, scattering by and detection of air borne particles, coupling to missiles with plasma plumes or dielectric-filled apertures, performance of communication antennas in the presence of dielectric and magnetic inhomogeneities, and medical diagnostics and power absorption in biological bodies. Computational electromagnetics methods (CEM) offer and indispensable tool for calculating the electromagnetic scattering from an internal field distribution of arbitrarily shaped, inhomogeneous, dielectric bodies. The aim of this thesis is the study and simulation of a RF coils system design by developing a novel parallel fast Method of Moments (MoM) modeling approach suitable for the simulation of dielectric bodies and metals. The parallel fast MoM implementation uses volume and surface basis functions with special properties appropriate for the representation of flux current densities for perfect electric conductors (PEC) and dielectrics. The results obtained with our modeling method were confirmed by comparisons with analytical solutions and other commercial software results, yielding very good agreement. The RF coil is employed in high field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to obtain high quality brain images. Among all the clinical imaging techniques, MRI stands as a noninvasive technique that provides accurate, detailed anatomic images, which has had a major impact in the diagnosis of human diseases. MRI is a widely use soft-tissue imaging modality that has involved over the past several years into a powerful and versatile medical diagnostic tool capable of providing in-vivo diagnostic images of human anatomy. Current research areas in MRI system design are driven by the need to obtain detailed high resolution images with improved image signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a given magnetic field strength. One of the most critical factor that influences the quality and resolution of the MRI is the homogeneity of the RF field. To this end, this requirement demands the development of high performance MRI radio frequency (RF) coils and a standard procedure for enhancing the uniformity of the field directly at the modeling stage of the RF Coil.

The oil and gas industry has long recognized the inadequacy of existing theories to predict the behavior and outcome of some hydraulic fracturing treatments. Data sets compiled over the last two decades are incompatible with the conventional picture of a single planar hydraulic fracture. These data sets include field studies, laboratory studies and theoretical models. Several field and laboratory observations show very complex fracture paths, multisegmented fractures, branching, asymmetry and the presence of multiple fractures. The purpose of this study is to investigate the pressure behavior of systems containing near wellbore and far field multiple vertical fractures. This objective is achieved by using two analytical models. These newly developed models are used to explore pressure behavior and to generate type curves using the pressure derivative concept. The first new analytical model considers a composite reservoir with the inner zone containing an arbitrary number of dendritic multiple hydraulic fractures and the outer zone showing natural fractures. Transient pressure, derivative and flow regimes of the fractured system are investigated using this model. This study also uses a numerical model to calibrate and validate the analytical model. Pressure transient behavior of multiple fractures is modeled using a full field model (FFM) with a detailed Cartesian local grid refinement (LGR) around the fractures. The model was calibrated and validated using the case of two wing fractures at 180o. Simulations of the two types of multiple fractures, dendritic and parallel, validate some results of the analytical solutions. The TDS technique is also used to analyze the linear and pseudo-radial flow regimes in order to find fracture length, angle between fractures, fracture conductivity and several conventional reservoir parameters, e.g. permeability, wellbore storage and skin.  Multiple fractures create more surface area in direct communication with the wellbore. As a consequence, a greater volume of fluid can be produced from the wellbore per unit time. While fracture treatments continue to be designed using the best tools and techniques available, geometry estimates from fracture models have been difficult to verify. Pressure transient analysis is one of the fracture diagnostic techniques available to fill this knowledge gap, improving our understanding of hydraulic fracture behavior. It is an excellent calibration tool because it lets us evaluate the effective length of the fracture, and determine the appropriate length to use in history matching. Also, regardless of the application, identifying and understanding fracture complexities can lead to improved treatment designs, better completion strategies, and the potential for significant economic rewards through improved well performance and/or reduced completion cost.

DISAPPROPRIATIONS is a conceptual and practical reflection on online digital archives in particular, and on found footage filmmaking in general. It entails a series of 11 video artifacts exhibited online and “on-site” through QR-code stickers spread throughout the city of Montreal.  My main objective has been to investigate and instigate a dialectical montage as defined by Eisenstein, in the hyper-reality of the social, as defined by Jean Baudrillard. Secondly, I explore and promote a radically experimental use of editing (as digital assemblage and manipulation of moving images) with regards to digital based media. Although inscribed into the tradition of found footage film, DISAPPROPRIATIONS is a search for an archival practice that embraces cyberspace as a source of content and also as an aesthetical domain. Last but not least, this project is fundamentally the result of an intense reflection upon my past, present, and future film practice and the creative embodiment of three years’ research done within the MFA programme.