Adjusted Closing Prices

Historical returns depend on historical closing prices and distributions. We describe how to compute adjusted closing prices from closing price/distribution data with an emphasis on spreadsheet implementation. Then the growth of a security from one date to another (1 + total return) is just the ratio of the corresponding adjusted closing prices

Determining the Rationality of Marketing Strategy on Farms

The focus of farm management, as a discipline, has reflected historically the assumption that farms are embedded in near-perfectly competitive market structures. The common validity of this assumption is plain. As open systems, farms have asymmetric relationships with their environment: they are significantly more influenced by it than influencing it. However, farmers seem often not to appreciate the implications of this for their management options. Nor, arguably, is the farm management discipline yet well equipped to analyse initiatives that farmers might contemplate to enhance their control over market outcomes, specifically, as a means of exerting greater control over business performance. In this paper a framework for the analysis of the prospects for product differentiation of farm output is presented in an attempt to fill this lacuna. Introduction As an academic discipline, historically farm management (FM) has been focused on management decision making (Charry and Parton 2002). The domain of physical agricultural production activities may have been taught within farm management qualifications, but the discipline has persistently involved analysis for decisions. Within it farms are characterised as purposeful, open, complex systems having to cope with substantial stochasticity (Dillon 1992). Economics has been the discipline used to most effect to analyse farm management decisions (Malcolm 2004).Farm Management,

Self-Efficacy and Expectancy of Engineering Students in Higher Education: A Case Study of the Perceptions and Beliefs of Lecturers

Online assessment is intended to enhance the learning experiences of students and improve the manner in which feedback is delivered. This paper reports on an international project, undertaken in three countries, to examine the beliefs held by engineering mathematics lecturers about the self-efficacy, and constructs of expectancy of their students. The research provides a comparison with beliefs on these topics held by students in the first year of undergraduate Bachelor of Engineering programmes. The interviews were semi-structured to stimulate conversations around a set of pre-determined themes. The thematic inputs to the lecturer interviews resulted from interpretative phenomenological analysis of the beliefs, experiences and perceptions of 127 students, gained from a series of questionnaires, and interviews. The aims of the engineering mathematics lecturer interviews were to examine current practices in terms of assessment of mathematics, and the provision of feedback, in both online and face-to-face formats. A particular focus was to determine if the self-efficacy of students is considered within the process. The research highlights differences in understanding of the assessment process held by lecturers, and students, particularly in the early stages of the first semester. There is also evidence that students’ meta-cognitive functions evolve over the first year of study, and that this may reduce the differences identified between students’ and lecturers’ perceptions. The implications of these findings are discussed

Rhetorical relationships with students: A higher education case study of perceptions of online assessment in mathematics

Some students perceive that online assessment does not provide for a true reflection of their work effort. This article reports on a collaborative international project between two higher education institutions with the aim of researching issues relating to engineering student perceptions with respect to online assessment of mathematics. It provides a comparison between students of similar educational standing in Finland and Ireland. The students undertook to complete questionnaires and a sample of students was selected to participate in several group discussion interviews. Evidence from the data suggests that many of the students demonstrate low levels of confidence, do not display knowledge of continuous assessment processes and perceive many barriers when confronted with online assessment in their first semester. Alternative perspectives were sought from lecturers by means of individual interviews. The research indicates that perceptions of effort and reward as seen by students are at variance with those held by lecturers. The study offers a brief insight into the thinking of students in the first year of their engineering mathematics course. It may be suggested that alternative approaches to curriculum and pedagogical design are necessary to alleviate student concerns

Large sample theory of intrinsic and extrinsic sample means on manifolds--II

This article develops nonparametric inference procedures for estimation and testing problems for means on manifolds. A central limit theorem for Frechet sample means is derived leading to an asymptotic distribution theory of intrinsic sample means on Riemannian manifolds. Central limit theorems are also obtained for extrinsic sample means w.r.t. an arbitrary embedding of a differentiable manifold in a Euclidean space. Bootstrap methods particularly suitable for these problems are presented. Applications are given to distributions on the sphere S^d (directional spaces), real projective space RP^{N-1} (axial spaces), complex projective space CP^{k-2} (planar shape spaces) w.r.t. Veronese-Whitney embeddings and a three-dimensional shape space \Sigma_3^4.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053605000000093 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org