Credit Cards in Colombia

Las tarjetas de crédito en Colombia vienen desarrollándose cada vez más de acuerdo con el buen entorno económico presentado y condiciones de mercado que son favorables. Este producto se viene adecuando a las necesidades del consumidor en demanda de financiación lo que lleva a que en la actualidad sea uno de los medios de pago de mayor utilización en nuestra economía, imprimiendo dinámica al comercio nacional y generando rentabilidad para las entidades financieras y establecimientos de crédito. Este buen desempeño ha llevado a la entrada de nuevos competidores a la industria que hacen del ejercicio comercial y de administración de la categoría de Tarjeta de Crédito una actividad cada vez más competida y que requiere analizar los comportamientos e identificar las oportunidades para el sector. El análisis del presente trabajo parte de la información histórica oficial reportada a la Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia a través de la descripción exploratoria de las principales variables de reporte en Tarjetas Vigentes, Tarjetas Canceladas, Tarjetas totales en Stock y Cartera total del producto Tarjeta de Crédito. Se elabora la Matriz de Boston Consulting Group BCG con el fin de describir la posición de cada una de las entidades financieras analizadas frente a la participación relativa de cuota de mercado y el crecimiento anual presentado, así como la relación de estas variables con la cartera total en el producto para cada banco. Se extraen las principales observaciones de las variables revisadas para proponer a partir de ello las recomendaciones para cada cuadrante de la matriz BCG. Se concluye que para lograr un mayor crecimiento del producto y del mercado, las entidades financieras deben realizar labores encaminadas a mantener la colocación de nuevos plásticos, controlar el nivel de cancelación de productos, fidelizar los clientes para disminuir la perdida de los mismos e incentivar la utilización del producto en los segmentos objetivo del banco, lo cual puede generar la ampliación del ciclo de vida de la tarjeta y generaría mayores ingresos para el sector.Credit cards in Colombia have been developing every day according with the good economic environment and favorable market conditions. This product has been adapting to the needs of consumer demand on loans which makes it one of the most widely used payment methods in our actual economy, printing with it dynamic to the domestic trade and generating profitability for financial and credit institutions. This good performance has led to the entry of new competitors in the industry that make the credit card business and category management a more competed activity that requires analyzing the behavior of the product and identifying opportunities for the industry. The analysis of this paper part of the official historical information reported to the Financial Superintendence of Colombia through exploratory description of the main variables in reporting ongoing credit cards, cancelled cards, total cards stock and total assets of the credit card portfolio. A BCG-Boston Consulting Group matrix is developed in order to describe the position of each of the financial institutions analyzed in relation with the relative market share and the annual growth, as well as the relationship of these variables with the total portfolio in the product for each bank. Principal findings of the revised variables are extracted in order to propose some recommendations for each quadrant of the BCG matrix. It is concluded that to achieve a growth on the product and the market, financial institutions should make efforts aimed at maintaining the placement of new cards, controlling the cancellation level of products, with customer relationship to decrease losing them and encouraging the use of the product in the target segments of the bank, which can also generate the extension of the life cycle of the card and generating more revenues for the industry

Census of HII regions in NGC 6754 derived with MUSE: Constraints on the metal mixing scale

We present a study of the HII regions in the galaxy NGC 6754 from a two pointing mosaic comprising 197,637 individual spectra, using Integral Field Spectrocopy (IFS) recently acquired with the MUSE instrument during its Science Verification program. The data cover the entire galaxy out to ~2 effective radii (re ), sampling its morphological structures with unprecedented spatial resolution for a wide-field IFU. A complete census of the H ii regions limited by the atmospheric seeing conditions was derived, comprising 396 individual ionized sources. This is one of the largest and most complete catalogue of H ii regions with spectroscopic information in a single galaxy. We use this catalogue to derive the radial abundance gradient in this SBb galaxy, finding a negative gradient with a slope consistent with the characteristic value for disk galaxies recently reported. The large number of H ii regions allow us to estimate the typical mixing scale-length (rmix ~0.4 re ), which sets strong constraints on the proposed mechanisms for metal mixing in disk galaxies, like radial movements associated with bars and spiral arms, when comparing with simulations. We found evidence for an azimuthal variation of the oxygen abundance, that may be related with the radial migration. These results illustrate the unique capabilities of MUSE for the study of the enrichment mechanisms in Local Universe galaxies.Comment: 13 pages, 7 Figurs, accepted for publishing in A&

Influence of conventional hydrogen bonds in the intercalation of phenanthroline derivatives with DNA: the important role of the sugar and phosphate backbone

The influence of hydrogen bonds in model intercalated systems between guanine-cytosine and adenine-thymine DNA base pairs (bps) was analyzed with the popular intercalator 1, 10-phenanthroline (phen) and derivatives obtained by substitution with -OH and -NH2 groups in positions 4 and 7. Semiempirical and Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods were used both including dispersion effects: PM6-DH2, M06-2X and B3LYP-D3 along with the recently developed near linear-scaling coupled cluster method DLPNO-CCSD(T) for benchmark calculations. Our results given by QTAIM and non-covalent interaction analysis confirmed the existence of hydrogen bonds created by -OH and -NH2. The trends in the energy decomposition analysis for the interaction energy, ¿Eint, showed that the ¿Eelstat contributions are equal or even a little bit higher than the values for ¿Edisp. Such important ¿Eelstat attractive contribution comes mainly from the conventional hydrogen bonds formed by -OH and -NH2 functional groups with DNA not only with bps but specially with the sugar and phosphate backbone. This behavior is very different from that of phen and other classical intercalators that cannot form conventional hydrogen bonds, where the ¿Edisp is the most important attractive contribution to the ¿Eint. The inclusion of explicit water molecules in molecular dynamics simulations showed, as a general trend, that the hydrogen bonds with the bps disappear during the simulations but those with the sugar and phosphate backbone remain in time, which highlights the important role of the sugar and phosphate backbone in the stabilization of these systems

Evidence that the radioprotector effect of ascorbic acid depends on the radiation dose rate.

En este artículo se da a conocer que los daños ocasionados por el ácido ascórbico dependen de la dosis expuesta.Many studies have revealed that ascorbic acid (Aa) acts as a powerful inhibitor of genetic damage. The objetive of the present study was to evaluate the radioprotector effect of Aa at two diferent radiation dose rates. The somatic mutation and recombination test in Drosophilamelanogaster was used. 48 h larvae were treated for 24 h with 25, 50 and 100 mM of Aa. After pretreatment, larvae were irradiated with 20 Gy of gamma rays administered at 36 or 960 Gy/h. Toxicity, development rate and frequency of mutant spots were recorded. Results provide evidence of a radioprotective effect for all tested concentrations of Aa only when 20 Gy were delivered at 36 Gy/h and only with 25 mM using the 960 Gy/h. To consider the use of Aa as radioprotector or therapeutic agent, it is necessary to know its potential under different situations to avoid unwanted injuries.CONACy

A new functional for improving cell area distribution

In this work we present a new area functional that help us improve the cell area distribution in structured grids over plane irregular regions, which avoids very small and very large cell areas as much as possible. We present some results and an implementation of this functional in a preliminary version of the latest UNAMalla system

Docencia de arquitectura orientada a servicios

Este trabajo presenta los contenidos del curso “Web 2.0: Arquitectura Orientada a Servicios en Java” de la Escuela de Posgrado de la Universidad de Granada. El objetivo del curso es familiarizar al alumno con la programación de ServiciosWeb. Dada la gran variedad de técnicas disponibles para utilizar Arquitectura Orientada a Servicios, se presentan los siguientes temas: utilización de protocolos bien definidos para comunicación y contrato (SOAP y WSDL), creación de Web Services con JAX-WS y orquestación de ServiciosWeb con BPEL. Al final del curso, el alumno será capaz de crear, utilizar y mantener Servicios Web para el desarrollo de aplicaciones interempresariales, utilizando servicios creados o ya disponibles en la web, así como la orquestación lógica de los mismos.SUMMARY: This work presents the contents of the course “Web 2.0: Service Oriented Architecture on Java” from the Graduate School of the University of Granada. The course objective is to familarize students with Web Services programming. Due to the wide variety of available technologies, several subjects are presented: the usage of well-defined protocols to contract and communication (SOAP and WSDL), web services creation using JAX-WS, and service orchestration with BPEL. At the end of the course, students will be capable to create, use and manage Web Services for business applications, using new or available services in the web, and also their logical orchestration.Peer Reviewe

Modelling Long-Term Urban Temperatures with Less Training Data: A Comparative Study Using Neural Networks in the City of Madrid

In the last decades, urban climate researchers have highlighted the need for a reliable provision of meteorological data in the local urban context. Several efforts have been made in this direction using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), demonstrating that they are an accurate alternative to numerical approaches when modelling large time series. However, existing approaches are varied, and it is unclear how much data are needed to train them. This study explores whether the need for training data can be reduced without overly compromising model accuracy, and if model reliability can be increased by selecting the UHI intensity as the main model output instead of air temperature. These two approaches were compared using a common ANN configuration and under different data availability scenarios. Results show that reducing the training dataset from 12 to 9 or even 6 months would still produce reliable results, particularly if the UHI intensity is used. The latter proved to be more effective than the temperature approach under most training scenarios, with an average RMSE improvement of 16.4% when using only 3 months of data. These findings have important implications for urban climate research as they can potentially reduce the duration and cost of field measurement campaigns

The cosmic evolution of the spatially-resolved star formation rate and stellar mass of the CALIFA survey

We investigate the cosmic evolution of the absolute and specific star formation rate (SFR, sSFR) of galaxies as derived from a spatially-resolved study of the stellar populations in a set of 366 nearby galaxies from the CALIFA survey. The analysis combines GALEX and SDSS images with the 4000 break, H_beta, and [MgFe] indices measured from the datacubes, to constrain parametric models for the SFH, which are then used to study the cosmic evolution of the star formation rate density (SFRD), the sSFR, the main sequence of star formation (MSSF), and the stellar mass density (SMD). A delayed-tau model, provides the best results, in good agreement with those obtained from cosmological surveys. Our main results from this model are: a) The time since the onset of the star formation is larger in the inner regions than in the outer ones, while tau is similar or smaller in the inner than in the outer regions. b) The sSFR declines rapidly as the Universe evolves, and faster for early than for late type galaxies, and for the inner than for the outer regions of galaxies. c) SFRD and SMD agree well with results from cosmological surveys. At z< 0.5, most star formation takes place in the outer regions of late spiral galaxies, while at z>2 the inner regions of the progenitors of the current E and S0 are the major contributors to SFRD. d) The inner regions of galaxies are the major contributor to SMD at z> 0.5, growing their mass faster than the outer regions, with a lookback time at 50% SMD of 9 and 6 Gyr for the inner and outer regions. e) The MSSF follows a power-law at high redshift, with the slope evolving with time, but always being sub-linear. f) In agreement with galaxy surveys at different redshifts, the average SFH of CALIFA galaxies indicates that galaxies grow their mass mainly in a mode that is well represented by a delayed-tau model, with the peak at z~2 and an e-folding time of 3.9 Gyr.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. *Abridged abstract

Bismuth incorporation and the role of ordering in GaAsBi/GaAs structures

The structure and composition of single GaAsBi/GaAs epilayers grown by molecular beam epitaxy were investigated by optical and transmission electron microscopy techniques. Firstly, the GaAsBi layers exhibit two distinct regions and a varying Bi composition profile in the growth direction. In the lower (25 nm) region, the Bi content decays exponentially from an initial maximum value, while the upper region comprises an almost constant Bi content until the end of the layer. Secondly, despite the relatively low Bi content, CuPtB-type ordering was observed both in electron diffraction patterns and in fast Fourier transform reconstructions from high-resolution transmission electron microscopy images. The estimation of the long-range ordering parameter and the development of ordering maps by using geometrical phase algorithms indicate a direct connection between the solubility of Bi and the amount of ordering. The occurrence of both phase separation and atomic ordering has a significant effect on the optical properties of these layers