Fusiones y adquisiciones, concentración y poder de mercado en el sector bancario colombiano (2000 - 2011)

En la última década se ha presentado un fenómeno de consolidación de los establecimientos bancarios en Colombia a través de procesos de fusiones y adquisiciones, lo que se refleja en un mayor índice de concentración que podría traducirse en poder de mercado que implique mayores beneficios económicos de dichas entidades producto de un mayor margen de intermediación. El público en general, considera que estos procesos han provocado una mayor rentabilidad de los establecimientos y un mayor poder frente a los consumidores en detrimento de la calidad del servicio y dificultando a su vez la movilidad entre las entidades, lo que se traduce en una percepción negativa de este sector en el país que va en contravía de las intenciones gubernamentales de incrementar el nivel de bancarización.40 p.Contenido parcial: Algunos elementos teóricos que justifican las fusiones y adquisiciones -- Establecimientos bancarios en Colombia -- Medidas de concentración y poder de mercado -- Cálculos de concentración en el sector bancario en Colombia

Tuning the Magnetic Moment of Small Late 3d-Transition-Metal Oxide Clusters by Selectively Mixing the Transition-Metal Constituents

Producción CientíficaTransition-metal oxide nanoparticles are relevant for many applications in different areas where their superparamagnetic behavior and low blocking temperature are required. However, they have low magnetic moments, which does not favor their being turned into active actuators. Here, we report a systematical study, within the framework of the density functional theory, of the possibility of promoting a high-spin state in small late-transition-metal oxide nanoparticles through alloying. We investigated all possible nanoalloys An−xBxOm (A, B = Fe, Co, Ni; n = 2, 3, 4; 0≤x≤n) with different oxidation rates, m, up to saturation. We found that the higher the concentration of Fe, the higher the absolute stability of the oxidized nanoalloy, while the higher the Ni content, the less prone to oxidation. We demonstrate that combining the stronger tendency of Co and Ni toward parallel couplings with the larger spin polarization of Fe is particularly beneficial for certain nanoalloys in order to achieve a high total magnetic moment, and its robustness against oxidation. In particular, at high oxidation rates we found that certain FeCo oxidized nanoalloys outperform both their pure counterparts, and that alloying even promotes the reentrance of magnetism in certain cases at a critical oxygen rate, close to saturation, at which the pure oxidized counterparts exhibit quenched magnetic momentsJunta de Castilla y León (Ref. project VA124G18)Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Project PGC2018-093745-B-I00) and FEDE

The casino of Mula: a modernist work of Pedro Cerdán

[SPA] A principios del siglo XX, la incipiente burguesía muleña decide remodelar el Casino de la ciudad, instalado desde sus inicios en el Pósito Municipal. El antiguo granero había sido vendido a finales de la década de los 80 del siglo XIX a un particular que lo arrendó a la Sociedad del Casino. Tras las gestiones de don Juan Antonio Perea, Gobernador Civil de varias provincias y amigo personal del arquitecto Pedro Cerdán, será éste quien realice el proyecto de remodelación y ampliación del Casino en 1908, obra que le dará un aire noble e introducirá elementos característicos de estilo modernista como los que podemos ver en la escalera, la galería, la sala de lectura o el salón de baile, que nos recuerdan a otros edificios similares en la Región de Murcia. [ENG] At the begining of the 20th century, the emerging middle-class in Mula decides to restyle the Casino of the city, set up from its origins in the municipal public granary. The old granary had been sold at the end of the de decade of the 80’s from the 19th century to an individual who rented it to the Casino Society. After the procedures by Mr. Juan Antonio Perea, Civil Governor of several provinces and close friend of architect Pedro Celdran, he will carry out the restyling and enlargement of the casino in 1908, work which will turn it into a nobility style and will introduce modernist elements as those we can see in the stairs, in the gallery, the reading lounge or the dance hall, which will remind us to other similar building in the Region of Murcia

Non-linear classifiers applied to EEG analysis for epilepsy seizure detection

This work presents a novel approach for automatic epilepsy seizure detection based on EEG analysis that exploits the underlying non-linear nature of EEG data. In this paper, two main contributions are presented and validated: the use of non-linear classifiers through the so-called kernel trick and the proposal of a Bag-of-Words model for extracting a non-linear feature representation of the input data in an unsupervised manner. The performance of the resulting system is validated with public datasets, previously processed to remove artifacts or external disturbances, but also with private datasets recorded under realistic and non-ideal operating conditions. The use of public datasets caters for comparison purposes whereas the private one shows the performance of the system under realistic circumstances of noise, artifacts, and signals of different amplitudes. Moreover, the proposed solution has been compared to state-of-the-art works not only for pre-processed and public datasets but also with the private datasets. The mean F1-measure shows a 10% improvement over the second-best ranked method including cross-dataset experiments. The obtained results prove the robustness of the proposed solution to more realistic and variable conditions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Terapia de rehidratación en lactantes con diarrea

Se realizó un estudio descriptivo retrospectivo de 45 niños menores de un año ingresados en la sala de enfermedades diarreicas agudas del Hospital General Docente "Aleida Fernández Chardiet" durante el año 1999 que presentaron en su evolución algún grado de desequilibrio hidroelectrolítico con el objetivo de identificar la terapia de rehidratación utilizada en dichos lactantes. Del total de 388 niños ingresados el 11,6% se deshidrató, siendo más frecuente la ligera. La terapia de rehidratación intravenosa resultó ser la forma más empleada, encontrándose que solamente en 5 pacientes, de los 36 que utilizaron la vía intravenosa, tenían bien fundamentado su uso, lo cual incrementa la estadía y los costos del paciente en la unidad

Challenges For Managing The North American Coastal Zone

Canada, the United States and Mexico are adjacent coastal nations where the impact of significantly increased human activity in the coastal zone by the year 2050 will be potentially catastrophic. Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) may well have a role to play within and between all three countries to help ameliorate this situation. This paper looks at the challenges facing sub-continental ICM, from institutional foundations to large-scale environmental management practices that cross political and cultural boundaries. To assist in this discussion, we have analyzed the overlapping sets of political-administrative units within terrestrial ecosystems, especially those with complex landscape attributes, to arrive at a series of issues that help identify areas of convergence and joint action as well as barriers to action. Finally, we look at landscape attributes on a regional scale to show that joint institutional initiatives that recognize existing ecological, socio-economic, and political-administrative differences between Canada, the United States and Mexico need to be built

Antibody-Capped Mesoporous Nanoscopic Materials:Design of a Probe for the Selective Chromo-FluorogenicDetection of Finasteride

[EN] The synthesis of capped mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN) conjugated with an antibody (AB) as a gatekeeper has been carried out in order to obtain a delivery system able to release an entrapped cargo (dye) in the presence of a target molecule (antigen) to which the conjugated antibody binds selectively. In particular, MSN loaded with rhodamine B and functionalized on the external surface with a suitable derivative of N-(t-butyl)- 3-oxo-(5a,17b)-4-aza-androst-1-ene-17-carboxamide (finasteride) have been prepared (S1). The addition of polyclonal antibodies against finasteride induced capping of the pores due to the interaction with the anchored hapten-like finasteride derivative to give a MSN¿hapten¿AB nanoparticle S1-AB. It was found that the addition of capped material S1-AB to water solutions containing finasteride resulted in displacement of the antibody, pore uncapping and entrapped-dye release. The response of the gated material is highly selective, and only finasteride, among other steroids, was able to induce a significant uncapping process. Compared with finasteride, the finasteride metabolite was able to release 17% of the dye, whereas the exogen steroids testosterone, metenolone and 16-b-hydroxystanozolol only induced very little release of rhodamine B (lower than 10%) from aqueous suspensions containing sensing solid S1-AB. A detection limit as low as 20 ppb was found for the fluorimetric detection of finasteride. In order to evaluate a possible application of the material for label-free detection of finasteride, the capped material was isolated and stored to give final sensing solid S1-AB-i. It was found to display a similar behavior towards finasteride as to that shown by freshly prepared S1-AB; even after a period of two months, no significant loss of selectivity or sensitivity was noted. Moreover, to study the application for the detection of finasteride in biological samples, this ¿aged¿ material, S1-AB-i, was tested using commercially available blank urine as matrix. Samples containing 70 and 90% blank urine were spiked with a defined amount of finasteride, and the concentration was determined using capped S1-AB-i. Recovery ranges from 94% to 118% were reached.Financial support from the Spanish Government (project MAT2009-14564-C04-01) and the Generalitat Valenciana (Spain) (projects PROMETEO/2009/016 and PROMETEO/2010/008) is gratefully acknowledged. E. C. thanks the Minesterio de Ciencia e Innovacion (MICINN, Spain) for her fellowship.Climent Terol, E.; Martínez Mañez, R.; Maquieira Catala, Á.; Sancenón Galarza, F.; Marcos Martínez, MD.; Brun Sánchez, EM.; Soto Camino, J.... (2012). Antibody-Capped Mesoporous Nanoscopic Materials:Design of a Probe for the Selective Chromo-FluorogenicDetection of Finasteride. ChemistryOpen. 1:251-259. https://doi.org/10.1002/open.201100008S251259