Previous Actions Research Articles

Enhancing enterprise value by trading options

Investment activities are enhanced by a regular positioning in options. Results are presented for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index as the underlying asset. Two base activities, long the index and a dynamic portfolio periodically rebalanced to a 60% equity stake, are considered for enhancement. In each case periodic targets that may involve untraded strikes are formulated. Option positions are sought in traded strikes with a view toward minimizing the capital charge for the risk remaining after the hedge. The capital charge is based on the bid–ask spread of a two-price economy. Stress levels implicit in the two prices are taken to be consistent with risk-neutral valuations falling within the spread. New positions always take account of legacy holdings from previous actions, and all open positions are marked-to-market and delta- hedged. The option-enhanced businesses are valued using required returns, reflecting premiums for down- and upside risk charges as embedded in the bid and ask prices of the two-price economies. Option positioning is observed to add market value.

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF THE NORMALIZATION OF AN ECONOMIC ENTITY'S FINANCIAL STABILIT

Introduction. The formation and maintenance the optimum efficiency of business is a most important task of activity of economic entity. Each company must provide the effect of profit stabilization. In this case it will better perform its activities. This situation creates the necessary potential for the future. Exactly in this way the process of assets accumulation and distribution happens without undue cost and effort. Resources are become cheaper, the activities and the results are become more predictable, stable correspondent relations are formed, markets are expanded and prices are stabilized. The higher the level of stability the more the company easier to adapt to sudden changes in market conditions, the lower the risk of financial loss from such influences. On the other hand, a quick, painless and effective response to external pressure indicates an effective system of management, good planning, well-chosen priorities and goals. Purposes. The purpose of the article is to study the basic theoretical aspects of the formation and creation the performance criteria of the processes of financial stability of economic entities. Results. Company's financial stability is formed by the results of a clear strategy. If the enterprise has enough funds for the current activity, it indicates that the previous actions were effective. When the company has a good financial system, it can easily and continuously carry out all operations, maneuvering the resources. Each economic entity focused on success should direct some effort to achieve optimal profitability in the long term. It must seek to stabilize costs and revenue, to normalize risks. This can be achieved through effective allocation of resources. The considerable attention must pay to optimizing the financial, material and information flows. Except this, it must maintain a high level of liquidity of assets. The ability of the economic entity to function effectively under conditions of constant change and maintain the optimal level of liquidity and profitability over a long period, reaching set of tactical and strategic goals is a financial stability. Conclusions. Today there are a number of approaches to the assessment of financial stability. In our opinion, the most promising is an approach whereby the level of financial stability is assessed using systematic and integrated methods. Two additional indicators must be included here: the dynamic indicator of profit stability, indicator of expenses profitability.

An ecological description of jazz improvisation.

In this paper, I build on writings in psychology and philosophy to offer ecological description of jazz improvisation grounded in the analogy of navigation through a complex environment. I begin by contrasting this approach with the computational description of improvisation as algorithm of input, processing, and I continue with the ecological description itself. This description reframes many aspects of improvisation, including the (Pressing, 1984, 1988, 1998), the nature of improvisational skill, and the problem of temporal coordination between soloist and ensemble. Stylistically, I focus on straight-ahead, tonal jazz, the first style most students learn, which is foundational to much current jazz practice. The ecological description could be adapted to other styles. To bring the description to life, I offer evidence from exploratory study of improvisational errors.Because I offer something less than a falsifiable theory, I posit this paper's central premise instead as a description, which is primarily intended to encourage a shift in researchers' perspective. The result, I hope, is a picture of improvisational cognition that is richer, more complex, and harder to pin down-an opening, rather than a closing. Balancing this, I conclude with some predictions of the ecological description that could be tested empirically.The Computational View of ImprovisationThe computational view of improvisation stems from early theories of cognitive science that were inspired by the artificial intelligence research of the 1950s-60s. These theories take computerized information processing as a model for human cognition, so that information received from the external world is perceived, translated into a syntactic code of meaningful symbols, and processed according to a systematic set of rules, and body movements are mere outcomes of these processes (Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014, p. 1). In its strictest form, this view is now largely obsolete, as more recent research has revealed myriad links between perception and action, including in the realm of music performance (p. 2). But theories of improvisational psychology remain grounded in the computational view.Pressing (1984) was the first to develop a computational theory of jazz improvisation (p. 353; cf. Pressing, 1988, pp. 130-132, 1998). In Pressing's formulation, improvisation depends on two large-scale parameters. First, there is the referent: an underlying formal scheme or guiding image specific to a given piece (1984, p. 346; cf. 1988, p. 153; 1998, pp. 52-53). Second, there is the soloist's long-term memory, for like motives, scales, and arpeggios, and for techniques of combining and developing objects (1984, p. 355; cf. 1988, pp. 161, 166; 1998, pp. 53-54). Given a referent and a sufficient memory store, the act of improvisation proceeds as a self-sustaining cycle through three stages, input, processing, and output (1988, pp. 152-166). The soloist's previous actions, along with the referent, constitute the input. To process the next action, the soloist continues, develops, or alters one or more of the input's features (1984, pp. 350, 353; 1988, p. 157). At some point, the action determined by the soloist's processing crosses a cognitive Rubicon and becomes irrecoverable output. The soloist then acts without further sensory or central intervention, though there remains limited scope for local fine tuning until the action is complete (1984, p. 355; 1988, p. 153). This action, as output, in turn becomes the input for the next action, and the cycle resets.Johnson-Laird (2002) presents a different computational model. Whereas Pressing's improviser relies on a memory store of prelearned objects and processes, Johnson-Laird's has memorized no objects, instead relying on memorized rules of melodic construction within a chord progression (pp. 422, 430). The algorithm focuses on choosing notes appropriate for the harmonic context and placing them in effective contour and rhythm. …

Investing in Managerial Honesty

Corporate fraud and managerial deception have been pervasive and value-destroying in recent decades. This column analyses whether investors form views about a CEO’s honesty based on his or her previous actions, and how this affects investment decisions. A CEO who has resisted, at personal cost, engaging in earnings management is perceived as being more committed to honesty, which appeals to pro­-social investors. Pro-self investors, on the other hand, value honesty when it comes to information regarding investment returns.

Observational Learning in Large Anonymous Games

I present a model of observational learning with payoff interdependence. Agents, ordered in a sequence, receive private signals about an uncertain state of the world and sample previous actions. Unlike in standard models of observational learning, an agent's payoff depends both on the state and on the actions of others. Agents want both to learn the state and to anticipate others' play. As the sample of previous actions provides information on both dimensions, standard informational externalities are confounded with payoff externalities. I show that in spite of these confounding factors, when signals are of unbounded strength there is learning in a strong sense: agents' actions are ex-post optimal given both the state of the world and others' actions. With bounded signals, actions approach ex-post optimality as the signal structure becomes more informative.

A New Lens for Looking at MOOC Data to Predict Student Performance

We present two novel methods to predict students' grades using their action time series in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The main motivation behind this contribution comes from three main differences in the methods used in previous research. First, the methods used to analyze time series often aggregate the data, which discards the effect of the previous actions on the present actions. Second, most of the previous research has a common assumption that the actions are distributed homogeneously in time, which might or might not be true for students in MOOCs. Third, the methods used to predict students' grades are often based on linear regressions and correlations, which assume a normal distribution for the data generation processes, which might not be true in all cases. To highlight the first two differences we propose to use Generalized Auto Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models. To deal with the third difference, we propose to use the Extreme Values Theory (EVT). The results show a significant improvement over existing methods in terms of prediction abilities. The results also show that there is an improvement even if a shorter time series data was used.

JEAN MONNET BEFORE THE FIRST EUROPEAN COMMUNITY: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND CRITIC

Abstract. Jean Monnet is known as the father of the European Union. His involvement in the early stages of the European integration process was crucial for the later development of the European Communities. His previous contributions to the international cooperation through the League of Nations, or his support to the Allied Naval Forces during WWI and the Franco-British Union during WWII, can provide a wider historical perspective to the work of Monnet pursuing a united Europe. As the European Union is an organization in a constant evolution with periods of stagnation, knowing more about the original design of the mastermind of the process could also provide hints for further steps in terms of integration. This research presents the work of Jean Monnet in terms of relevance to the EU development. Keywords: Jean Monnet, European Union, European politics, European integration, EU history 1. Introduction Jean Monnet commands a prominent position among the Fathers of Europe, his influence in the creation of the first European Communities and further development of the organization is well known and documented. Several scholars have researched his involvement in the European Communities, but there is not much literature on his previous attempts regarding European integration before the European Coal and Steel Community. Kevin Featherstone made an excellent contribution to the debate about the influence of Monnet in the democratic deficit of the current EU from the point of view of the functional capacity of the EU. Douglas Brinkley researched Monnet's influence in the first European Communities and how it has influenced the current European Union, underlying the outstanding impact of Monnet on the process of integration in Europe. Birkenmeier, Paula Phillips Carson and Kerry D. Carson published an essential research about supranationality and Monnet in 2003. Their research focused on the debate about whether the EU is an international or supranational organization based on cooperation or integration, the influence of Monnet in the internal organization of the EU and its development into the current hybrid organization. Giandomenico Majone investigated the economic importance in Monnet's actions in terms of European integration, especially regarding the political spillover effect generated by the economic integration. But his research lacks an analysis of the original economic positions of Monnet, taking into consideration the influences of several British economists, it does not regard his work in the international financial market, or his time in China either. Claudio Maria Radaelli conducted an examination on the technocratic approach of Monnet in the first European Communities and its influence in the current EU, but does not analyze deeply the previous actions of Monnet before the ECSC that provide important hints about Monnet's position regarding the independence of the supranational institutions. Also, the Memoirs of Monnet are an interesting source for this research, even though they have to be treated very cautiously as the author himself could have tried to influence the future by omitting some facts or underlining minor aspects of his real involvement in the process of integrating Europe. Several articles published in the prestigious journal of the Common Market Studies begotten by Monnet also provide useful information about his intentions and his actions, but especially about his wishes. The this research is more complicated because of the inclusion of several aspects that have not been properly addressed in the context of the European integration from a retrospective approach regarding Monnet's earlier actions involving international integration. Also it is important to understand Monnet's real economic influences and private development as an international financier because economy is a key element in his way to develop the European integration. The personal and intellectual development of Monnet from a schoolboy of 16 to the influential man mastering the first European Communities is also a research question included for analysis in this paper. …

Influence of trust in the spreading of information.

The understanding and prediction of information diffusion processes on networks is a major challenge in network theory with many implications in social sciences. Many theoretical advances occurred due to stochastic spreading models. Nevertheless, these stochastic models overlooked the influence of rational decisions on the outcome of the process. For instance, different levels of trust in acquaintances do play a role in information spreading, and actors may change their spreading decisions during the information diffusion process accordingly. Here, we study an information-spreading model in which the decision to transmit or not is based on trust. We explore the interplay between the propagation of information and the trust dynamics happening on a two-layer multiplex network. Actors' trustable or untrustable states are defined as accumulated cooperation or defection behaviors, respectively, in a Prisoner's Dilemma setup, and they are controlled by a memory span. The propagation of information is abstracted as a threshold model on the information-spreading layer, where the threshold depends on the trustability of agents. The analysis of the model is performed using a tree approximation and validated on homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. The results show that the memory of previous actions has a significant effect on the spreading of information. For example, the less memory that is considered, the higher is the diffusion. Information is highly promoted by the emergence of trustable acquaintances. These results provide insight into the effect of plausible biases on spreading dynamics in a multilevel networked system.

Expropriation Foncière Dans Les Grands Projets D’intérêt National Au Bénin: Cas Du Projet De Développement Touristique De La « Route Des Pêches »

The land availability for the achievement of the works of national interest often requires the expropriation of buildings because the State and its communities do not arrange land reserves. It is the case of the fishing road Project that joins in the strategy of the Beninese government to value the service sector and more particularly the tourism. This project encounters for several years the obstacles of the fact not only of the implemented procedure for the land expropriation but also its size and its orientation which varied in time. The adopted approach allowed to make an inventory of fixtures of the situation and to analyze the different options to be undertaken to have a land tax secured to set up for the project. This study proposes a procedure which, while correcting the previous actions, contributes to an expropriation based on the provision of the right of the urban planning and the law 2013-01 carrying Land and State Code in the Republic of Benin in order to avoid possible conflicts which would question at first the expropriations and indirectly, the achievement of the project.

Unfolding large-scale online collaborative human dynamics

Large-scale interacting human activities underlie all social and economic phenomena, but quantitative understanding of regular patterns and mechanism is very challenging and still rare. Self-organized online collaborative activities with a precise record of event timing provide unprecedented opportunity. Our empirical analysis of the history of millions of updates in Wikipedia shows a universal double-power-law distribution of time intervals between consecutive updates of an article. We then propose a generic model to unfold collaborative human activities into three modules: (i) individual behavior characterized by Poissonian initiation of an action, (ii) human interaction captured by a cascading response to previous actions with a power-law waiting time, and (iii) population growth due to the increasing number of interacting individuals. This unfolding allows us to obtain an analytical formula that is fully supported by the universal patterns in empirical data. Our modeling approaches reveal "simplicity" beyond complex interacting human activities.

The social networking investigation of metadata of forensic artifacts of a typical WeChat session under Windows

AbstractDigital forensics‐related investigations have been a relative competitive research area by the computer specialists or law enforcement agency officers to confirm or refuse the assumptions with respect to the cybercrime scenes. WeChat is one of the most popular instant messaging application programs in contemporary age. While applying WeChat, there is precious information deposited in the computing devices that could be supportive evidences in a court of law. Hence, this research is focusing on the application of WeChat on the desktop PC under Windows 7 by means of the acquisition of volatile digital evidences in order to provide supporting information for some cybercrime cases. This paper provides generic investigation methods conducting forensic sound analysis on WeChat from the aspect of data volatility of the computing devices. By means of the proposed methodologies, the digital forensics specialists should be able to gather critical digital traces to confirm the previous actions of a WeChat user or even to reconstruct the crime scene to prove the suspect is guilty or innocent in a court of law. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Formation of Long-Term Locomotor Memories Is Associated with Functional Connectivity Changes in the Cerebellar-Thalamic-Cortical Network.

The ability to shape our motor behavior rapidly in everyday activity, such as when walking on sand, suggests the existence of long-term motor memories. It was suggested recently that this ability is achieved by the retrieval of previous motor actions and by enhanced relearning capacity. Little is known about the neural mechanisms that underlie these memory processes. We studied the modularity in long-term motor memories in the context of locomotor adaptation using resting-state fMRI. We show that retrieval and relearning effects are associated with separate locomotor control networks and that intersubject variability in learning and in the generation of motor memories could be predicted from baseline resting-state connectivity in locomotor-related networks.

Minimax after Money-Max: Why Major League Baseball Players Do Not Follow Optimal Strategies

This paper investigates if professional players follow the Minimax theorem in their strategies, using Major League Baseball playoff season data. Our empirical results show that baseball players do not optimize their strategies in the sense that their sequence of chosen strategies is predictable from their previous actions. Further analysis using individual salaries and other key contract variables indicates that more experience leads to players conducting strategies following Minimax. By contrast, a higher salary decreases a player's incentive to pursue optimal strategies and brings lower performance. We find the results to have strong implications for compensation practices in various fields.

From the High North to the Low South: bipolar Norway’s Antarctic strategy

Based on a close analysis of the Norwegian Antarctic strategy from 2015, this article seeks to introduce Norway’s main interests and political priorities concerning the Antarctic to an international audience. It should also function as an important contribution to the international relations literature on the region. This article fills out and enriches recent analyses and presentations of old and emerging positions on the Antarctic. Norway is the only truly bipolar state, the only one with territorial claims to areas in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. The first Norwegian Antarctic strategy in nearly 80 years must be read as a clear signal of intent from the Norwegian Government. It is uncommonly comprehensive and detailed, and covers most if not all of Norway’s key foreign policy interests. The similarity to the Norwegian Arctic approach is rather striking. The take-home message is really that one can get a very good idea of how Norwegian foreign policy towards the Antarctic will be like by looking at Norway’s previous policies and actions in the Arctic. There is a clear signal from the government that Norway’s Antarctic competence and experience shall create synergies in the pursuit of national interests in the Antarctic. Norway needs a stage for its foreign policy, and new territories to promote national interests and support the national economy now that the fossil-driven Norwegian fairy tale is approaching its last chapters.

An Estoppel-Based Approach to Enforcing Corporate Environmental Responsibilities

Within the regulatory space that exists at the intersection of UK company law and environmental regulation, the business community has generated its own environmental governance initiatives to address growing anxiety about companies’ externalised risk. Yet, there is currently nothing in law to prevent companies from frequently acting inconsistently with these voluntary unilateral assurances, which has led to widespread concern that environmental values are treated as merely instrumental to the dominant idea of achieving economic benefits for the company. This article examines a specific case for the legal facilitation of binding obligations owed to the environment, which require a company to make good on its previous commitments about environmental responsibility. It seeks to demonstrate that this is possible through the common law doctrine of estoppel, which can be opened up to prevent a company from acting inconsistently with its previous statements or actions about the governance of environmental risk.

Prediction of User Behavior using Web log in Web Usage Mining

usage mining is application of data mining. Web Usage Mining is the automatic discovery of user access pattern from web servers. Web usage mining is consists of preprocessing, pattern discovery, pattern analysis. Web prediction is a classification problem which attempts to predict the most likely web pages that a user may visit depending on the information of the previously visited web pages. In this paper emphasizes is given on the user Behaviour using web log file prediction using web log record, click streams record and user information. Here, two different clustering techniques, namely Fuzzy C-Means Clustering algorithms and Markov model has been investigated to predict the webpage that will be accessed in the future based on the previous action of browsers behavior. But prediction of future request of the user mainly concern with its accuracy and efficiency. The discovered patterns can be used for better web page access prediction.Prediction model are better prediction of next web page the user want to visit. Using web page access prediction, the right advertisement will be placed in the website according to the users' browsing patterns.In Web page prediction, the next action corresponds to predicting the next page to be visited. The previous actions correspond to the previous pages that have already been visited.

CORRESPONDÊNCIA ENTRE AUTO-RELATOS E DESEMPENHOS ACADÊMICOS ANTECEDENTES EM CRIANÇAS COM HISTÓRIA DE FRACASSO ESCOLAR

Este estudo investigou variáveis controladoras de auto-relatos de crianças com história de fracasso escolar sobre desempenhos acadêmicos antecedentes e condições para produzir auto-relatos precisos, correspondentes a ações antecedentes. Quatro crianças do ciclo básico escolar participaram. “Fazer” consistiu em ler em voz alta uma palavra escrita. “Dizer” consistiu em relatar se sua leitura havia sido ou não correta. Numa condição linha de base, na ausência do experimentador e sem conseqüências contingentes à correspondência, os participantes sistematicamente relataram como corretas as suas leituras incorretas. A presença do experimentador e o reforço de correspondência foram condições efetivas para aumentar o número de relatos precisos desses desempenhos. Uma história de punição de erros, provavelmente, controlou inicialmente o auto-relato impreciso das crianças. Palavras-chave: correspondência entre dizer a fazer, fracasso escolar, auto-relato, crianças

Poker-CNN: A Pattern Learning Strategy for Making Draws and Bets in Poker Games Using Convolutional Networks

Poker is a family of card games that includes many varia- tions. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representa- tion. Our poker player learns through iterative self-play, and improves its understanding of the game by training on the results of its previous actions without sophisticated domain knowledge. We evaluate our system on three poker games: single player video poker, two-player Limit Texas Hold’em, and finally two-player 2-7 triple draw poker. We show that our model can quickly learn patterns in these very different poker games while it improves from zero knowledge to a competi- tive player against human experts. The contributions of this paper include: (1) a novel represen- tation for poker games, extendable to different poker vari- ations, (2) a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based learning model that can effectively learn the patterns in three different games, and (3) a self-trained system that signif- icantly beats the heuristic-based program on which it is trained, and our system is competitive against human expert players.

Variability in Dopamine Genes Dissociates Model-Based and Model-Free Reinforcement Learning.

Decisions can stem reflexively from their previously associated outcomes or flexibly from deliberative consideration of potential choice outcomes. Research implicates a dopamine-dependent striatal learning mechanism in the former type of choice. Although recent work has indicated that dopamine is also involved in flexible, goal-directed decision-making, it remains unclear whether it also contributes via striatum or via the dopamine-dependent working memory function of prefrontal cortex. We examined genetic indices of dopamine function in these regions and their relation to the two choice strategies. We found that striatal dopamine function related most clearly to the reflexive strategy, as previously shown, and that prefrontal dopamine related most clearly to the flexible strategy. These findings suggest that dissociable brain regions support dissociable choice strategies.

Influenza Vaccination among Pregnant Women: Patient Beliefs and Medical Provider Practices.

ACOG's research department recruited four medical centers to participate in a study on the attitudes and practices of medical providers and pregnant patients regarding influenza vaccination. Medical providers and patients were given voluntary surveys and medical record data was collected over two flu seasons, from 2013 to 2015. Discrepancies between self-reports of medical providers and patients and medical records were observed. Nearly 80% of patients self-reported accepting the influenza vaccine, but medical record data only reported 36% of patients accepting the vaccine. Similarly, all medical providers reported giving recommendations for the vaccine, but only 85% of patients reported receiving a recommendation. Age, education, a medical provider's recommendation, and educational materials were found to positively influence patient beliefs about the influenza vaccine. Accepting the vaccine was influenced by a patient's previous actions, beliefs, and a medical provider's recommendation. Patients who reported previously not accepting the vaccine and had negative feelings towards the vaccine but accepted it while pregnant reported concern for the health and safety of their baby. Future research should focus on groups that may be less likely to accept the vaccine and ways to dispel negative myths. Medical provider should continue to strongly recommend the vaccine and provide educational materials.