Ethanolomics: The Think-About's of the Mexican Ethanol Project

The Mexican Ethanol Project has the potential of power up rural economy, improve the environment quality, and substitute the non-renewable fossil energy resources. But the risk of not achieving these is latent: the market distorts that it could unleash can change the expected outcomes. Public policies, such as No Deforestation, Investments in Agricultural Productivity, and Ethanol Manufacture in situ, could help orientate the private incentives to increase social welfare. In a big proportion, PEMEX and the Mexican Federal Government would be directly, or indirectly, affected by the domestic ethanol production, opening a door for them to participate in it and avoid damage on their interests. But there's still a question to answer: how long it would take before these benefits could be felt?ethanol, rural development, Mexico, public policies, oil crisis

Do Walmartians Rule? The Political Influence of the Emerging Middle Class

The present paper tries to answer the following question: did an increase in the consumption of durable goods -such as electric appliances- help the incumbent party to retain the Mexican presidency in 2006? Stated differently, did the middle class vote to support the current economic model? Important data limitations made the use of indirect tests and correlations necessary, rather than causalities -with the associated identification problems. Nonetheless, the paper was not able to reject the hypothesis mentioned above. In a tight election, a small effect could make the difference; and this analysis suggests that this is likely what happenedvoting, welfare, durable goods, middle class

Implementación del MPT en una industria cementera

Tesis (Maestría en Ciencias de la Administración con Especialidad en Producción y Calidad) UANLUANLhttp://www.uanl.mx

Uncovering the spatial structure of mobility networks

The extraction of a clear and simple footprint of the structure of large, weighted and directed networks is a general problem that has many applications. An important example is given by origin-destination matrices which contain the complete information on commuting flows, but are difficult to analyze and compare. We propose here a versatile method which extracts a coarse-grained signature of mobility networks, under the form of a $2\times 2$ matrix that separates the flows into four categories. We apply this method to origin-destination matrices extracted from mobile phone data recorded in thirty-one Spanish cities. We show that these cities essentially differ by their proportion of two types of flows: integrated (between residential and employment hotspots) and random flows, whose importance increases with city size. Finally the method allows to determine categories of networks, and in the mobility case to classify cities according to their commuting structure.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures +Supplementary informatio

From mobile phone data to the spatial structure of cities

Pervasive infrastructures, such as cell phone networks, enable to capture large amounts of human behavioral data but also provide information about the structure of cities and their dynamical properties. In this article, we focus on these last aspects by studying phone data recorded during 55 days in 31 Spanish metropolitan areas. We first define an urban dilatation index which measures how the average distance between individuals evolves during the day, allowing us to highlight different types of city structure. We then focus on hotspots, the most crowded places in the city. We propose a parameter free method to detect them and to test the robustness of our results. The number of these hotspots scales sublinearly with the population size, a result in agreement with previous theoretical arguments and measures on employment datasets. We study the lifetime of these hotspots and show in particular that the hierarchy of permanent ones, which constitute the "heart" of the city, is very stable whatever the size of the city. The spatial structure of these hotspots is also of interest and allows us to distinguish different categories of cities, from monocentric and "segregated" where the spatial distribution is very dependent on land use, to polycentric where the spatial mixing between land uses is much more important. These results point towards the possibility of a new, quantitative classification of cities using high resolution spatio-temporal data.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figure

Competencias educativas de los docentes.Facultad de Psicología de la UANL.

En el modelo educativo de la UANL, incluido en la Visón 2020, se actualizó el modelo generado en la Visión 2012, y se mantuvo el estatus formativo asignado al alumno, como un proceso de enseñanza centrado en el aprendizaje del mismo y basado en competencias, donde el docente tiene por misión ser un promotor del aprendizaje a través de la tutoría, la guía informada y el modelamiento de los procesos educativos que ocurren en el aula. Ante esto, se requiere no solo impulsar la formación de las competencias del alumno, sino preguntarse: ¿cuáles son las competencias de los docentes con las que asume la formación del psicólogo? Para dar respuesta a esta pregunta se generó un proceso de investigación cualitativa, utilizando la técnica de los grupos focales, se seleccionó, de forma aleatoria, a 31 docentes (17%) de un total de 180 maestros; con los que se formaron 7 grupos de discusión sobre dichas competencias. Se logró identificar 66 competencias, 10 referentes a actitudes y valores; 15 cognoscitivas y 41 procedimentales. Encontramos una notable diferencia entre lo que podemos llamar un perfil ideal y un perfil real de las competencias docentes

Impacto del Incremento en los Precios de los Alimentos en la Pobreza en México

In Mexico, the recent upsurge of the global food prices have affected, more than proportionately, the most margined sectors of the population. According with the present results, it is possible to conclude that, even though poverty is highly sensitive to food prices increase, the substitution capacity of the families helps cushion the wealth lose of the poorest. Different targeting mechanisms were analyzed in their efficiency for allocating public funds. In this case, food price subsidies were not the best mechanisms studied. In contrast, the usage of the "Oportunidades" platform had a higher targeting efficiency. However, it is important to remember that a large share of the Mexican population below food poverty line does not receive any support from social programs. For the Federal Government, this represents a big challenge of extending their coverage in the short and medium term.Precios de alimentos, pobreza, crisis alimentaria, transferencias, focalización, México

Comparing and modeling land use organization in cities

The advent of geolocated ICT technologies opens the possibility of exploring how people use space in cities, bringing an important new tool for urban scientists and planners, especially for regions where data is scarce or not available. Here we apply a functional network approach to determine land use patterns from mobile phone records. The versatility of the method allows us to run a systematic comparison between Spanish cities of various sizes. The method detects four major land use types that correspond to different temporal patterns. The proportion of these types, their spatial organization and scaling show a strong similarity between all cities that breaks down at a very local scale, where land use mixing is specific to each urban area. Finally, we introduce a model inspired by Schelling's segregation, able to explain and reproduce these results with simple interaction rules between different land uses.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures + Supplementary informatio

Competencias educativas de los docentes: Facultad de Psicología de la UANL

En el modelo educativo de la UANL, incluido en la Visón 2020, se actualizó el modelo generado en la Visión 2012, y se mantuvo el estatus formativo asignado al alumno, como un proceso de enseñanza centrado en el aprendizaje del mismo y basado en competencias, donde el docente tiene por misión ser un promotor del aprendizaje a través de la tutoría, la guía informada y el modelamiento de los procesos educativos que ocurren en el aula. Ante esto, se requiere no solo impulsar la formación de las competencias del alumno, sino preguntarse: ¿cuáles son las competencias de los docentes con las que asume la formación del psicólogo? Para dar respuesta a esta pregunta se generó un proceso de investigación cualitativa, utilizando la técnica de los grupos focales, se seleccionó, de forma aleatoria, a 31 docentes (17%) de un total de 180 maestros; con los que se formaron 7 grupos de discusión sobre dichas competencias. Se logró identificar 66 competencias, 10 referentes a actitudes y valores; 15 cognoscitivas y 41 procedimentales. Encontramos una notable diferencia entre lo que podemos llamar un perfil ideal y un perfil real de las competencias docentes