The new risk management: the good, the bad, and the ugly

At one time, risk management was limited to insurance and the avoidance of lawsuits and accidents. The new risk management also includes using tools developed for pricing financial options for the management of financial risks within the firm. Trading in financial markets based on these tools can insulate companies from the risk of changes in interest rates, input prices, or currency fluctuations. In this article Philip H. Dybvig and William J. Marshall introduce the new risk management and the policy choices firms should be considering.Management ; Risk

The heyday of the working musician’s degree. An examination of the Durham music degrees, 1890-1945, with particular emphasis on the BMus, to determine their origin, demands, popularity and prestige as a means to professional advancement.

ABSTRACT Between 1891 and 1994 their phasing out in the 1990s the Durham degrees of BMus and DMus were non-residential and offered by examination with no tuition provided. In total over 876 were awarded during that period, many to musicians who later rose to fame and fortune within the musical establishment. Despite their importance these degrees have never been the subject of academic research. Both the BMus and DMus came about in answer to a growing demand amongst working musicians for an accessible music degree no longer available to them at other English universities due to a series of mid to late 19th century reforms that put degrees in music at arm’s length for most. These reforms were initiated to raise the standard of music degrees generally and redress the low esteem in which they were held by the public at large and particularly other graduates. Once established the Durham degrees enjoyed meteoric popularity and success, no fewer than 539 of the 876 degrees mentioned above being awarded before 1945. The period 1891-1945 can therefore rightly be regarded as the heyday of these degrees, hence the title of the dissertation. What now follows below is the fascinating story of how the Durham degrees came about, who took them, who set and examined them, and how useful they proved to their owners in opening doors of opportunity within their chosen field of musical speciality. The research is unique and hopefully it will begin to counter-balance the neglect referred to above

RingFinder: automated detection of galaxy-scale gravitational lenses in ground-based multi-filter imaging data

We present RingFinder, a tool for finding galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses in multiband imaging data. By construction, the method is sensitive to configurations involving a massive foreground early-type galaxy and a faint, background, blue source. RingFinder detects the presence of blue residuals embedded in an otherwise smooth red light distribution by difference imaging in two bands. The method is automated for efficient application to current and future surveys, having originally been designed for the 150-deg2 Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). We describe each of the steps of RingFinder. We then carry out extensive simulations to assess completeness and purity. For sources with magnification mu>4, RingFinder reaches 42% (resp. 25%) completeness and 29% (resp. 86%) purity before (resp. after) visual inspection. The completeness of RingFinder is substantially improved in the particular range of Einstein radii 0.8 < REin < 2. and lensed images brighter than g = 22.5, where it can be as high as 70%. RingFinder does not introduce any significant bias in the source or deflector population. We conclude by presenting the final catalog of RingFinder CFHTLS galaxy-scale strong lens candidates. Additional information obtained with Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Adaptive Optics high resolution imaging, and with Keck and Very Large Telescope spectroscopy, is used to assess the validity of our classification, and measure the redshift of the foreground and the background objects. From an initial sample of 640,000 early type galaxies, RingFinder returns 2500 candidates, which we further reduce by visual inspection to 330 candidates. We confirm 33 new gravitational lenses from the main sample of candidates, plus an additional 16 systems taken from earlier versions of RingFinder. First applications are presented in the SL2S galaxy-scale Lens Sample paper series.Comment: 32 pages (aastex 2col format), 6 figs, ApJ Accepte

Empty Boots - A Whaling Story: Alan Innes-Taylor

The following is a heretofore unpublished account of a small but significant part of the 1st Byrd Antarctic Expedition, 1928-1930. It recounts one man's first journey to Antarctica. The author is the late Alan Innes-Taylor, polar survival expert, and the manuscript was recently made available by his family. Only minor grammatical changes have been made. ... [The account describes his time aboard a whaling ship enroute to the Antarctic.