Limited foresight

This thesis is about multi-period problems in which the decision-maker or players cannot see far enough ahead to solve the problem completely. The thesis considers why it might be that players reason forwards at all, let alone reasoning forwards only finitely far. It shows, using finite automata, that there is a class of problems for which forwards reasoning is more efficient than backwards reasoning. It goes on to use these finite automata to solve for an optimal foresight length. It then discusses solution concepts, and applies its preferred solution concept to two problems - one macro problem involving a central banker, and one micro problem concerning the decision whether to smoke

‘It Brings it all Back, all those Good Times; it Makes Me Go Close to Tears’. Creating Digital Personalised Stories with People who have Dementia

The purpose of these three case studies was to analyse and theoretically explain the contribution of digital multimedia personalisation to stimulate and share long-term memories of people who live with mild to moderate dementia. We investigated how the use of a freely available iPad app can, in a supporting context, facilitate the creation of personalised multimedia stories, including the participants’ audio recordings, texts and photos of items, places or people important to them. Three people who were recruited from a club for people living with dementia created personalised multimedia stories using their own photographs and/or pictures downloaded from the internet, with written captions and audio-recorded voiceovers. Our analysis focuses on the themes and symbols across the three final stories of the participants and the process of creating stories with the Our Story iPad app. The discussion concerns the theoretical value of multimedia and the practical value of story-making apps for people with dementia. We conclude that the multimedia features available with the Our Story app offer a unique opportunity for people living with dementia to store, access and generate memories, capture them in writing and audio; and the ability to continue adding to the original stories

Ethopolitics and the financial citizen

While personal debt has been the subject of intense research activity over the past decade, in particular from think tanks and government bodies, it remains relatively undertheorized and neglected in general by the social sciences. This article offers a novel theoretical frame for the analysis of personal debt – and personal overindebtedness in particular – by highlighting the construction of deviance from financial behavioural normativities. Using Nikolas Rose's concept of ‘ethopolitics’ to describe the relocation of government from questions of rational administration to those of everyday morality and ethics, this article presents two characterizations of deviance from an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship: irresponsibility and incapability. From this framework, the article explores the nature of the state sponsored normalization of indebtedness and the stigmatization of overindebtedness as a corollary of ‘delinquent’ dispositions and dependencies. This article suggests that UK government policy concerning financial responsibility has been shaped by an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship which is based upon a skewed understanding of structure and agency which has its parallel in the attribution of unemployment to ‘worklessness’