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This project is part of the Interstate 75 road expansion, located in Southwest Florida and consisted of an expansion from four to six lanes along a 30-mile stretch. The paper presents a design, build and finance (DBF) approach applied to a US highway. This work focuses on the financial structure of the project, which did not include a concession (operation); the bidding procedure, which took into account an interesting bid evaluation criterion and; project management matters. The information on the case study was acquired by exhaustively examining the documentation of the project and by interviewing the Project Controls M a n a g e r. T h e f i n a n c i a l s t r u c t u re used in the project showed that it is possible to extend the payment period beyond the construction deadline without resorting to a toll system. As usual, the bid evaluation criteria of this project included price, time and technical background; however, these aspects were evaluated through the use of a compensated score. Finally, some interesting management aspects of the project are addressed, in order to generate some recommendations for future DBF projects in the US and the world.Palabras clave: Diseño-Construcción-Financiamiento, construcción de infraestructura vial, gestión.

The automatic diagnosis of melanoma is usually affected by the noise that is often included in an image, during the acquisition stage or by superficial factors such as hair. Specifically, hair on the surface of a lesion can cause enough distortion, resulting in an erroneous diagnosis of the region of interest. To solve this issue, several techniques have been presented to detect hair on the surface of a dermoscopy image and substitute a surface approximation for these regions. Nonetheless, the existing methods are prone to false detections or reconstructions that are not uniform, demand high computing resources and modify the textures of important characteristics. Therefore, we proposed a method that detects the hairs by means of a convolution of the image with a kernel belonging to the first derivative of the Gaussian function and replaces the hairs using a multiscale morphological reconstruction. In addition, we integrated a refining stage that contributes to maintaining the quality of the patterns on the lesion. We used 36 dermoscopy images in the evaluation, which included a total of 586 hairs that were automatically detected with the proposed process and validated with their respective manual segmentations. Our results showed sensitivity and specificity performance measurements of 94.14% and 99.89%, respective.

Los estudios sobre la participación de la mujer en el ámbito público tienden a centrarse en la representatividad. Sin embargo, la inclusión de la mujer en la esfera pública no se reduce a un tema electoral. La administración del Estado también requiere de cargos cuyo fundamento legal no recae en el sufragio, motivo por el cual el estudio de género de la composición administrativa del Estado adquiere relevancia. Con base en la discusión anterior, el artículo presenta los avances de Colombia en términos de participación de la mujer en el sector público. El objetivo consiste en brindar una aproximación teórica a la participación de la mujer en la administración del Estado y, de igual forma, evaluar los avances del país hacia la igualdad material entre los sexos. En especial, el artículo propone una aproximación teórica a la paridad democrática en Colombia, la cual se extiende a la consolidación de la democracia por fuera de las urnas.