La Gran Colombia University

Introduction: This study highlights the importance of English as a foreign language in enriching the learning experience of engineering students. Objective: To evaluate the impact of a digital intervention on their linguistic development. Materials and methods: A pedagogical digital intervention methodology was used, designed to integrate technical content with language learning. Results: The results showed that the use of technological tools facilitated the understanding of concepts and increased students' interest in mastering a second language. Conclusions: The integration of specialized digital resources is key to enhancing the linguistic and professional development of future civil engineers.

This study explores corporeality as a resource for understanding its design possibilities within the act of inhabiting. This condition has been relegated in prevailing pedagogies of early architectural education due to the predominance of behaviorist models that limit sensory learning, abandoning the relationship between human beings and their habitable space. The objective was to propose a didactic approach focused on bodily perception in order to encourage creative and sensitive expression across different types of habitable spatialities. The practical setting took place with first-semester students in the Architecture program at Universidad La Gran Colombia, Armenia campus (Armenia, Colombia), with whom phenomenological experiences were carried out in six different habitable spatialities, positioning the body as a sensory device. From these experiences, graphic and textual narratives were developed around the experience of "being in" and "passing through" spatialities to understand their architectural potentialities and to propose new spatial configurations materialized through compositional exercises. This practice allowed for an approach to new uses and ways of configuring habitable spaces in an empirical and intuitive manner.

This study presents a data-driven assessment of welded Reduced Web Section (RWS) beam-to-column connections subjected to the AISC 341 cyclic loading protocol. An ABAQUS finite element framework, validated against five full-scale subassemblies, then supported a parametric investigation of 7,575 simulations spanning IPE 270 to IPE 600 sections, steel grades S235 to S355, and span-to-depth ratios from 6 to 14. The results show that 98.5% of specimens achieve interstorey drifts above 4% with less than 20% strength degradation, satisfying AISC requirements for special moment frames. Furthermore, appropriate adjustment of the RWS geometric parameters can promote elastic, or near elastic, behaviour at the column face while maintaining a moment capacity close to that of the corresponding solid beam. However, large web openings located very close to the column face reduce peak moment and amplify local stress demand around web openings, particularly in heavier beams. Within a geometry corridor defined by opening diameters of 30% to 40% of beam depth and locations of 80% to 100% of beam depth from the column face, specimens exhibit the largest increases in cumulative dissipated energy, up to 39%, while satisfying the 4% interstorey drift criterion. Overall, a well-proportioned RWS geometry provides a viable option for the seismic retrofit of existing welded moment connections in post-Northridge and post-Kobe practice, with minimal impact on moment strength. Selection of geometries that satisfy specific performance targets is facilitated by an accompanying interactive dashboard presented in the Supplementary Material.

Air pollution is a major environmental risk to public health, strongly associated with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. According to the World Health Organization, at least 99 _2.5 variability reflects the interaction between local emission sources and meteorological processes that regulate near-surface dispersion and accumulation, producing nonlinear temporal patterns that motivate hybrid modeling approaches. We propose an SSA-SVR-BiLSTM framework for short-term PM _2.5 forecasting that combines SSA-optimized SVR and BiLSTM models within a constrained linear ensemble with weights estimated exclusively on the validation partition using Lagrange multipliers. The model is evaluated on 10 months of high-frequency (5-min) air-quality and meteorological data collected at a traffic-influenced monitoring site in Duitama, Colombia. On the held-out test set, the hybrid achieved R^2 = 0.9585 and MAPE = 7.62% , outperforming five of six SSA-optimized baselines; the difference relative to the best individual model (SSA-SVR was statistically significant but practically negligible ( p = 0.0105 , Δ R^2 = 0.0002 ), and the value of the hybrid lies primarily in its improved consistency across low and medium concentration regimes rather than in a large global accuracy gain. Stratified evaluation across concentration regimes and normative thresholds (WHO, EPA) revealed systematic underestimation at extreme pollution episodes, a structural limitation shared by all evaluated models. A feature occlusion analysis identified PM _5 and PM _10 as the dominant exogenous predictors (53.6 and 21.7 ∼20% of the total relevance.

La administración de justicia enfrenta un desafío fundamental al resolver controversias que involucran la diversidad étnica y cultural de la Nación.Este artículo examina la aplicación del enfoque diferencial étnico en las decisiones judiciales, tomando como eje central el análisis de la sentencia del Consejo de Estado que declaró la nulidad del Decreto 1500 de 2018 sobre la delimitación de la Línea Negra en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. A partir de los mandatos constitucionales del Estado pluralista y los instrumentos inter-nacionales, el estudio explora la ética de la «otredad», el pluralismo jurídicoy el deber judicial de motivar las providencias integrando las cosmovisiones de los pueblos Arhuaco, Kogui, Wiwa y Kankuamo. La investigación exponelas tensiones latentes entre la legalidad administrativa y la protección de los espacios teológicos ancestrales, concluyendo con los retos institucionalesindispensables para garantizar una verdadera igualdad material y seguridad jurídica a los grupos étnicamente diferenciados.