Making the business case? Intercultural differences in framing economic rationality related to environmental issues

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to challenge the assumptions prominent in the Anglo-American context that the objective of a business is to increase its profits or/and that managers have to make 'the business case' in order to implement environmentally sounder solutions or other sustainability considerations into their business decisions. The paper argues that these assumptions are not presented as a human construction or agreement, instead they are treated as though they are a given, a prerequisite to a business system. By comparing qualitative statements in a cross-cultural study the paper highlights different ways in which economic rationality could be conceptualised

Fundamental Flaws in Feller's Classical Derivation of Benford's Law

Feller's classic text 'An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications' contains a derivation of the well known significant-digit law called Benford's law. More specifically, Feller gives a sufficient condition ("large spread") for a random variable $X$ to be approximately Benford distributed, that is, for $\log_{10}X$ to be approximately uniformly distributed modulo one. This note shows that the large-spread derivation, which continues to be widely cited and used, contains serious basic errors. Concrete examples and a new inequality clearly demonstrate that large spread (or large spread on a logarithmic scale) does not imply that a random variable is approximately Benford distributed, for any reasonable definition of "spread" or measure of dispersionComment: 7 page

Bayesian Posteriors Without Bayes' Theorem

The classical Bayesian posterior arises naturally as the unique solution of several different optimization problems, without the necessity of interpreting data as conditional probabilities and then using Bayes' Theorem. For example, the classical Bayesian posterior is the unique posterior that minimizes the loss of Shannon information in combining the prior and the likelihood distributions. These results, direct corollaries of recent results about conflations of probability distributions, reinforce the use of Bayesian posteriors, and may help partially reconcile some of the differences between classical and Bayesian statistics.Comment: 6 pages, no figure

Unauthorized Immigrants in California: Estimates for Counties

Estimates changes in unauthorized immigrant populations between 2001 and 2008 by county and zip code, including percentage of total population. Discusses the challenges of obtaining accurate counts and implications for policy