Taboo Process Research Articles

Exact solutions for the probability density of various conditioned processes with an entrance boundary

The probability density is a fundamental quantity for characterizing diffusion processes. However, it is seldom known except in a few renowned cases, including Brownian motion and the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process and their bridges, geometric Brownian motion, Brownian excursion, or Bessel processes. In this paper, we utilize Girsanov’s theorem, along with a variation of the method of images, to derive the exact expression of the probability density for diffusions that have one entrance boundary. Our analysis encompasses numerous families of conditioned diffusions, including the Taboo process and Brownian motion conditioned on its growth behavior, as well as the drifted Brownian meander and generalized Brownian excursion.

Цинизм как базовая ценность современного англоязычного комического дискурса

The work is aimed at identifying and analyzing the main humorous characteristics of the axiological concept of cynicism. The relevance of the study is predetermined by the fact that cynicism is considered to be an important value of humorous discourse. This work develops an axiological approach for studying humor which consists of defining the reaction of the audience to cynicism (humorous or non-humorous, positive or negative), distinguishing value features of the axiological concept of cynicism (based on literature on cynicism, definitions in dictionaries, and analysis of data.), analyzing the language means used to express the axiological concept of cynicism, determining the conceptual opposition of the axiological concept of cynicism in a particular context, determining the archetype of the corresponding character to assess the level of possible empathy of the audience for a humorous object. The data analyzed in this article comprise recordings and scripts of more than 70 stand-up specials which are more than 4500 minutes long and more than 500 episodes of various sitcoms which are more than 12,500 minutes long. The research showed that in many cases manifestation of cynicism was accompanied by laughter and moderate applauding while in most cases cynicism caused only laughter. Cynicism is aimed at ridiculing such anti-values as insincerity, shame, stupidity, lust. The main cognitive features of the axiological concept of cynicism within the framework of humorous discourse include honesty and rudeness. In its extreme form (dark humor), cynicism can be considered as a significant lack of humanity. The research also found that the axiological concept of cynicism within the framework of humorous discourse is actualized through insulting people, describing taboo processes and violating the norms and principles of social interaction. Insulting is carried out through a humiliating assessment of actions or states of a person, a true designation of a person and a response to socially disapproved behavior. The main taboo topics are masturbation, deurination, flatulence, death, and declaring sexual intention. The main cases of violating norms and principles of social interaction include deviation from standard patterns of behavior and ridiculing cliched statements. The axiological concept of cynicism is usually expressed through obscene words, insulting words, verbs denoting corresponding processes, new metaphors, similes, irony, etc. Moreover, in modern English sitcoms some of main characters behave cynically.

Polynomial convergence for reversible jump processes

We show how to use the polynomial integrability of hitting times and a type of local Poincaré inequality to obtain the Liggett–Stroock inequality, which is used to study the polynomial convergence rate for reversible jump process. In fact, the polynomial integrability of hitting times on a subset implies that the taboo process restricted on its complement set decays polynomially, by which we get the Liggett–Stroock inequality with absorbing (Dirichlet) boundary. Using it and local Poincaré inequality, the explicit constant in the Liggett–Stroock inequality and a quantitative estimate for polynomial convergence rate in the sense of ‖Pt−π‖∞→2 are obtained.

Fractional Laplacians in bounded domains: Killed, reflected, censored, and taboo Lévy flights.

The fractional Laplacian (-Δ)^{α/2}, α∈(0,2), has many equivalent (albeit formally different) realizations as a nonlocal generator of a family of α-stable stochastic processes in R^{n}. On the other hand, if the process is to be restricted to a bounded domain, there are many inequivalent proposals for what a boundary-data-respecting fractional Laplacian should actually be. This ambiguity not only holds true for each specific choice of the process behavior at the boundary (e.g., absorbtion, reflection, conditioning, or boundary taboos), but extends as well to its particular technical implementation (Dirichlet, Neumann, etc., problems). The inferred jump-type processes are inequivalent as well, differing in their spectral and statistical characteristics, which may strongly influence the ability of the formalism (if uncritically adopted) to provide an unambiguous description of real geometrically confined physical systems with disorder. Specifically that refers to their relaxation properties and the near-equilibrium asymptotic behavior. In the present paper we focus on Lévy flight-induced jump-type processes which are constrained to stay forever inside a finite domain. This refers to a concept of taboo processes (imported from Brownian to Lévy-stable contexts), to so-called censored processes, and to reflected Lévy flights whose status still remains to be unequivocally settled. As a by-product of our fractional spectral analysis, with reference to Neumann boundary conditions, we discuss disordered semiconducting heterojunctions as the bounded domain problem.

Taboos, morality and marketing: towards a conceptual model and illustration

PurposeDrawing on the anthropological literature, this paper aims to develop a model of taboos (morality) that applies to the marketing, consumer behaviour and consumption contexts.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is mainly conceptual but illustrates the general premises of the model with a case study of “dark” tourism and the contemporary marketing of the Auschwitz concentration camp.FindingsThe paper shows that even extreme taboos can be commodified and traded-off, and that not even the horrific deaths and large-scale suffering that occurred at Auschwitz are “sacred”. This can occur through reframing and seeing the same taboo through different national lens.Research limitations/implicationsQuestions pertaining to consumer morality are relative rather than universalistic, and even the most extreme cases of taboo can still be successfully marketed.Originality/valueThe paper is among the first to attempt to conceptually design a model and then explain the taboo process as it applies to a marketing and consumption context.

Sweetest taboo processes

Brownian dynamics play a key role in understanding the diffusive transport of micro particles in a bounded environment. In geometries containing confining walls, physical laws determine the behavior of the random trajectories at the boundaries. For impenetrable walls, imposing reflecting boundary conditions to the Brownian particles leads to dynamics described by reflecting stochastic differential equations. In practice, these stochastic differential equations as well as their refinements are quite challenging to handle, and more importantly, many physical processes are better modeled by processes conditioned to stay in a prescribed bounded region. In the mathematical literature, these processes are known as taboo processes, and despite their simplicity, at least compared to the reflecting stochastic differential equations approach, are surprisingly not much exploited in physics. This paper explores some aspect of taboo processes and other constrained processes in simple geometries: interval in one dimension, circular annulus in two dimensions, hollow sphere in three dimensions, and more. In particular, for the two-dimensional (2D) taboo process in a circular annulus, the Gaussian behavior of the stochastic angle is established.

Existential Analysis and Logo Therapy on a Good Way to Die

Dying and death is often understood as an ungraspable process, which is connected with a pain perception, fear and people do not like talking about this topic. We also face with this issue in the Czech Republic; often it is a taboo process. Logo therapy and existential analyses offers another point of view at this phenomenon, logo therapy perceives life as the only one that is meaningful, that has its clear boarders. And by allowing this existence of these limits it gives man everyday meaningful content, experience it intensively and to communicate immediately about its end, which is absolutely natural to life and inherently belongs. Only then, when we accept death as something given and unavoidable, we can help our loved ones who are in terminal phases and to allow them a peaceful leaving from their lives. Palliative medicine plays a great role in many dying men, helps men to cope with those situations which are already medical impractical.

Weak Poincaré inequalities and hitting times for jump processes

In this paper, we get a criteria of weak Poincare inequality by some integrability of hitting times for jump processes. In fact, integrability of hitting times on a subset F of state space E implies that the taboo process restricted on $E\setminus F$ is decay, from which we get a weak Poincare inequality with absorbing (Dirichlet) boundary. Using it and a local Poincare inequality, we obtain a weak Poincare inequality by the decomposition method.

Analysis of the dynamics of social queues by quasi-birth-and-death processes (abstract only)

A wide variety of animals are known to form simple hierarchical groups called social queues, where individuals inherit resources or social status in a predictable order. Queues are often age-based, so that a new individual joins the end of the queue on reaching adulthood, and must wait for older individuals to die in order to reach the front of the queue. While waiting, an individual may work for her group, in the process often risking her own survival and hence her chance of inheritance. Eventually, she may survive to reach the head of the queue and becomes the dominant of the group. Queueing has been particularly well-studied in hover wasps (Hymenoptera: Stenogastrinae). In hover wasp social groups, only one female lays eggs, and there is a strict, age-based queue to inherit the reproductive position. While the dominant individual (queen) concentrates on breeding, subordinate helpers risk death by foraging outside the nest, but have a slim chance of eventually inheriting dominance. Some explanations for this altruistic behavior and for the stability of social queues have been proposed and analyzed [1, 2]. Since both the productivity of the nest and the chance to inherit the dominant position depend critically on group size, queueing dynamics are crucial for understanding social queues, but detailed analysis is lacking. Here, using hover wasps as an example, we demonstrate that the application of Little's formula [3] and quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) processes are useful for analyzing queueing dynamics and the population demographics of social queues. Let (L(t),M(t)) be the number of adults and brood (eggs, larvae and pupae) in a nest at time t. We model the vector (L(t),M(t)) as a QBD process starting from the state (L(0),M(0)) = (1, 0) to analyze the nest history of a social queue. The boundary state {L(t) = 0}, which corresponds to the termination of the nest, is regarded as the taboo state of this QBD process. Let Q be the transition rate matrix of the taboo process. By choosing different Q , we can set various conditions for the social queue. By using standard technique such as calculating Q ?1, we can estimate and compare the productivity of the nest in wide variety of social queues in different queueing and environmental conditions. Our work leads to better understanding of how environmental conditions and strategic decision-making by individuals interact to produce the observed group dynamics; and in turn, how group dynamics affects individual decision-making.

Perturbed and non-perturbed Brownian taboo processes

In this paper we study the Brownian taboo process, which is a version of Brownian motion conditioned to stay within a finite interval, and the α-perturbed Brownian taboo process, which is an analogous version of an α-perturbed Brownian motion.We are particularly interested in the asymptotic behaviour of the supremum of the taboo process, and our main results give integral tests for upper and lower functions of the supremum as t→∞. In the Brownian case these include extensions of recent results in Lambert [4], but are proved in a quite different way.

Completely asymmetric Lévy processes confined in a finite interval

Consider a completely asymmetric Lévy process which has absolutely continuous transition probabilities. By harmonic transform, we establish the existence of the Lévy process conditioned to stay in a finite interval, called the confined process (the confined Brownian motion is F.B. Knight's Brownian taboo process). We show that the confined process is positive-recurrent and specify some useful identities concerning its excursion measure away from a point. We investigate the rate of convergence of the supremum process to the right-end point of the interval.

Contemporary Hospice Care: the Sequestration of the Unbounded Body and ‘Dirty Dying’

This paper is based on a 10‐month participant observation study within an inpatient hospice in Southern England. I highlight the difficulties of using homogenous categories such as ‘the dying patient’ and ‘the dying process’ in exploring the marginalisation of patients within the physical space of contemporary hospices and similar institutions. In opposition to such categories, my findings indicate the importance of focusing upon the body of the patient, and the disease processes taking place within it and upon its surfaces, in understanding why some patients are now sequestered within hospices whereas others are not. I argue that a significant proportion of patients are admitted to hospices because of the way in which their disease spread and subsequent deterioration affects the boundedness of their bodies and undermines their identities as persons. I suggest that conceptualising a hospice as a ‘no place’–i.e. a space within which the taboo processes of bodily deformation and decay are sequestered – allows it to be understood as a central part of contemporary Western culture. Setting the disintegrating body apart from mainstream society, as hospices appear to do, enables certain ideas about ‘living’, personhood and the hygienic, sanitised, bounded body to be symbolically enforced and maintained.

Convergence of the normalized one-dimensional wiener sausage path measures to a mixture of brownian taboo processes

For Te[0,oo) and a Brownian motion path j3eQ: = {0eC([O,oo),IR):0(O)=O} denote by Cj(P) the length of the compact interval C7{0): = {/?(t):fe[O,r]}. Fix v 0 and define Pj(A) = (lexp(vT|Cr|))/E(exp(...

Brownian Local Times and Taboo Processes

Brownian Local Times and Taboo Processes