"Deliberation and prediction: it's complicated"

Alan Hájek launches a formidable attack on the idea that deliberation crowds out prediction – that when we are deliberating about what to do, we cannot rationally accommodate evidence about what we are likely to do. Although Hájek rightly diagnoses the problems with some of the arguments for the view, his treatment falls short in crucial ways. In particular, he fails to consider the most plausible version of the view, the best argument for it, and why anyone would ever believe it in the first place. In doing so, he misses a deep puzzle about deliberation and prediction – a puzzle which all of us, as agents, face, and which we may be able to resolve by recognizing the complicated relationship between deliberation and prediction

Relationship status? It's complicated

Copyright (2014) ARPA, University of Sydney - School of Economics. Published version of the paper reproduced here with permission from the publisher.Not since the radical reforms to divorce enacted in the heady 1970s has there been so much huffing and puffing and anxiety about the whole institution of marriage being blown down. At the centre of this anxiety is the relationship of marriage and sexuality: is marriage (always, necessarily, naturally) heterosexual? Should it be? These questions are being debated not just in Australia, but in many places around the world; including, of course, in the United States, where the Clinton administration’s Defence of Marriage Act of 1996 established similar ends to the Howard Government’s Marriage Act amendments of 2004: namely, to limit marriage to man/woman pairings (King 2007). Marriage has, for the most part, served heterosexuality (and its gendered foundations) in ways that normalise and endorse heterosexuality as ‘natural’. At times marriage has carried heavily gendered weight, and arguably still does. (Does ‘wife’ mean the same thing as ‘husband’, and are both these terms interchangeable with ‘spouse’, or do they all have different connotations?) The issue for many is whether marriage should remain exclusively heterosexual, or whether marriage can and should be expanded to include same-sex as well as different-sex relationships. As a social institution, marriage is entangled in sex, religion and politics, and as such can inspire heated controversy. The three books reviewed here address various questions about marriage, relationships and politics

It's complicated: apprentice leaders on the edge of chaos

A view from the dance floor of ALICSE participants showed that the integrated children's services remain under pressure to become multi-dimensional with the rhetorical push to a joint working becoming increasingly complex and difficult to navigate. This was the view of a 360 degree questionnaire to a number of ALICSE participants and reflections from an in-depth dialogue. The main findings suggested collective professionalism requires collaborative relationships between organisations and individuals, and this collaboration poses the most significant challenge for educational leadership and management. The participants on the dance floor often reciting phrases like: letting go of control, no hierarchy, self-organising. The main conclusion being an individual needs to be self-organised and it takes a leader to be confident to manage ambiguity and complexity. Using complex adaptive systems theory and blended leadership styles theories, we will assert that distributional leadership is required to navigate the complex environment. Futures thinking suggests that we could use complex adaptive systems theory to help build an effective communication strategy for individuals, teams and services allowing them to self-organise

Scotland - it's complicated

This presentation was made by Claire Lightowler, Director of CYCJ, at the Five Nations Youth Justice Conference 2014, which took place in Cardiff

A Simple Option Formula for General Jump-Diffusion and other Exponential Levy Processes

Option values are well-known to be the integral of a discounted transition density times a payoff function; this is just martingale pricing. It's usually done in 'S-space', where S is the terminal security price. But, for Levy processes the S-space transition densities are often very complicated, involving many special functions and infinite summations. Instead, we show that it's much easier to compute the option value as an integral in Fourier space - and interpret this as a Parseval identity. The formula is especially simple because (i) it's a single integration for any payoff and (ii) the integrand is typically a compact expressions with just elementary functions. Our approach clarifies and generalizes previous work using characteristic functions and Fourier inversions. For example, we show how the residue calculus leads to several variation formulas, such as a well-known, but less numerically efficient, 'Black-Scholes style' formula for call options. The result applies to any European-style, simple or exotic option (without path-dependence) under any Lévy process with a known characteristic functionoption pricing, jump-diffusion, Levy processes, Fourier, characteristic function, transforms, residue, call options, discontinuous, jump processes, analytic characteristic, Levy-Khintchine, infinitely divisible, independent increments

North Korea and ASEAN : friends again, but it's complicated

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Daniel Wertz, Program Manager at the National Committee on North Korea, explains that "Pyongyang has established diplomatic relations with every ASEAN country, has been a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum since 2000, and has embassies in every country in the region except [three].