Judgments of ethically questionable financial practices: a new perspective

Purpose: Research has suggested that ethics judgments should be made from an impartial perspective. However, people are often partial about their money. This study aims to investigate the extent to which perspectives – the perspective of those who can gain from the use of a financial practice and the perspective of those who can incur losses due to it – affect lay people’s ethics and legality judgments of the practice. In addition, it asks which factors influence their investment intentions. / Design/methodology/approach: The study uses a between-participant scenario experiment, in which participants are presented with cases of predatory trading and front running. Each participant is asked to take either a gain or loss perspective through the formulation of the presented cases. Subsequently, all participants make ethics, legality and investment intention judgments. / Findings: The authors establish that perspectives significantly affect people’s ethics judgments and, to a lesser extent, their legality judgments. People’s investment intentions depend on their perspectives, too, as well as on their financial considerations, ethics judgments, legality judgments and trust. / Originality/value: Research has focused on relatively stable determinants of people’s ethics judgments of financial practices. This paper shows that the situational prospect of profit can sway lay people’s judgments. When people take the gain perspective, they judge financial practices to be more ethical than when they take the loss perspective. Furthermore, people’s perspectives can distort their legality judgments and influence their investment intentions

Predatory trading: ethics judgments, legality judgments and investment intentions

Purpose: Predatory trading is a stock market trading technique in which certain market participants exploit information about other market participants' need to trade. Predatory trading often harms others. Hence, this paper examines the determinants and effects of financial practitioners' and lay people's judgments of predatory trading. Specifically, it investigates how the public availability and reliability of the exploited information affect their ethics and legality judgments and how the latter influence their behavioral intentions and regulation support. / Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted two scenario judgment studies. In the first study, participants were financial practitioners, and in the second – lay people. / Findings: Practitioners often judge predatory trading to be ethical. Practitioners and lay people incorporate in their ethics and legality judgments the public availability of the exploited information but tend to discount the legal reliability criterion. Lay people justify their ethics judgments using harm, legal or profit maximization principles. Practitioners' intentions to engage in predatory trading and lay people's intentions to let predatory fund managers invest their money depend on their judgments, which influence their regulation support. / Originality/value: This paper is the first to explore people's judgments of predatory trading. It highlights that despite the harm that predatory trading involves, practitioners often judge it to be ethical. Although law tends to lag behind financial innovation, people base their judgments and hence also behavioral intentions on their interpretation of the regulation. Hence, it reveals a dark aspect of the relationship between ethics and legality judgments

An exactly solvable phase transition model: generalized statistics and generalized Bose-Einstein condensation

In this paper, we present an exactly solvable phase transition model in which the phase transition is purely statistically derived. The phase transition in this model is a generalized Bose-Einstein condensation. The exact expression of the thermodynamic quantity which can simultaneously describe both gas phase and condensed phase is solved with the help of the homogeneous Riemann-Hilbert problem, so one can judge whether there exists a phase transition and determine the phase transition point mathematically rigorously. A generalized statistics in which the maximum occupation numbers of different quantum states can take on different values is introduced, as a generalization of Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Teaching Software Engineering from a Collaborative Perspective: Some Latin-American Experiences

Teaching software engineering has been recognized as an important challenge for computer science undergraduate programs. Instruction in such area requires not only to deliver theoretical knowledge, but also to perform practical experiences that allow students to assimilate and apply such knowledge. This paper presents some results of two Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) experiences that involved students of software engineering courses from four Latin American Universities. The obtained results were satisfactory and indicate the reported collaborative activity could be appropriate to address teaching software engineering.Teaching software engineering has been recognized as an important challenge for computer science undergraduate programs. Instruction in such area requires not only to deliver theoretical knowledge, but also to perform practical experiences that allow students to assimilate and apply such knowledge. This paper presents some results of two Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) experiences that involved students of software engineering courses from four Latin American Universities. The obtained results were satisfactory and indicate the reported collaborative activity could be appropriate to address teaching software engineering

Interactions as the Basis of Collaboration Dynamics in Teaching Usability

Este artículo presenta el resultado de una experiencia en la cual, mediante la aplicación de un modelo instruccional colaborativo, para la enseñanza de las técnicas más comunes de evaluación de la usabilidad de interfaces de usuario, se valida el papel que desempeñan las interacciones entre estudiantes en las actividades colaborativas. Las interacciones y la aplicación del modelo facilitaron el trabajo colaborativo, entre diversas instituciones educativas, geográficamente dispersas, como un medio para transmitir conocimiento específico a estudiantes de nivel universitario. Además del modelo instruccional colaborativo aplicado, el artículo presenta resultados obtenidos en el uso experimental del modelo propuesto.Este artículo presenta el resultado de una experiencia en la cual, mediante la aplicación de un modelo instruccional colaborativo, para la enseñanza de las técnicas más comunes de evaluación de la usabilidad de interfaces de usuario, se valida el papel que desempeñan las interacciones entre estudiantes en las actividades colaborativas. Las interacciones y la aplicación del modelo facilitaron el trabajo colaborativo, entre diversas instituciones educativas, geográficamente dispersas, como un medio para transmitir conocimiento específico a estudiantes de nivel universitario. Además del modelo instruccional colaborativo aplicado, el artículo presenta resultados obtenidos en el uso experimental del modelo propuesto

A Latin American proposal for collaboration in the teaching of software usability

Este artículo propone un modelo instruccional colaborativo, para la enseñanza de las técnicas más comunes de evaluación de la usabilidad de interfaces de usuario. El modelo facilitó el trabajo colaborativo entre diversas universidades latinoamericanas, geográficamente dispersas, como un medio para transmitir conocimiento específico a estudiantes de pregrado en Ingeniería Informática y Ciencias de la Computación. Además del modelo instruccional colaborativo propuesto, el artículo presenta resultados experimentales obtenidos de su aplicación.This paper proposes a collaborative instructional model for teaching most common approaches for evaluating the usability of user interfaces. This model have facilitated the collaborative work between several Latin American universities, geographically dispersed, as a mechanism to deliver specific knowledge to undergraduate students of Computer Science and Computer Engineering. In addition to the proposed collaborative instructional model, our paper presents results of tests were we have applied this collaborative model

Una propuesta latinoamericana de colaboración en la enseñanza de la usabilidad del software

Este artículo propone un modelo instruccional colaborativo, para la enseñanza de las técnicas más comunes de evaluación de la usabilidad de interfaces de usuario. El modelo facilitó el trabajo colaborativo entre diversas universidades latinoamericanas, geográficamente dispersas, como un medio para transmitir conocimiento específico a estudiantes de pregrado en Ingeniería Informática y Ciencias de la Computación. Además del modelo instruccional colaborativo propuesto, el artículo presenta resultados experimentales obtenidos de su aplicación

Permutable entire functions satisfying algebraic differential equations

It is shown that if two transcendental entire functions permute, and if one of them satisfies an algebraic differential equation, then so does the other one.Comment: 5 page

The NCI Imaging Data Commons as a platform for reproducible research in computational pathology

Background and Objectives: Reproducibility is a major challenge in developing machine learning (ML)-based solutions in computational pathology (CompPath). The NCI Imaging Data Commons (IDC) provides >120 cancer image collections according to the FAIR principles and is designed to be used with cloud ML services. Here, we explore its potential to facilitate reproducibility in CompPath research. Methods: Using the IDC, we implemented two experiments in which a representative ML-based method for classifying lung tumor tissue was trained and/or evaluated on different datasets. To assess reproducibility, the experiments were run multiple times with separate but identically configured instances of common ML services. Results: The AUC values of different runs of the same experiment were generally consistent. However, we observed small variations in AUC values of up to 0.045, indicating a practical limit to reproducibility. Conclusions: We conclude that the IDC facilitates approaching the reproducibility limit of CompPath research (i) by enabling researchers to reuse exactly the same datasets and (ii) by integrating with cloud ML services so that experiments can be run in identically configured computing environments.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures; improved manuscript, new experiments with P100 GP