Comparisons of two combined models of urban travel choices: Chicago and Dresden

Methods for combining the steps of the four-step travel forecasting procedure have gained more and more interest in recent years. A comparison of two state-of-the-art models is presented: VISSUM/VISEVA by PTV AG and Technical University Dresden, Germany, and CMMC by University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. Each model is tested on large-scale networks used by practitioners at Chicago and Dresden.

Behavioral Finance

Behavioral finance as a subdiscipline of behavioral economics is finance incorporating findings from psychology and sociology into its theories. Behavioral finance models are usually developed to explain investor behavior or market anomalies when rational models provide no sufficient explanations. To understand the research agenda, methodology, and contributions, this survey reviews traditional finance theory first. Then, this survey shows how modifications (e.g. incorporating market frictions) can rationally explain observed individual or market behavior. In the second section, the survey will explain the behavioral finance research methodology -how biases are modeled, incorporated into traditional finance theories, and tested empirically and experimentally- using one specific subset of the behavioral finance literature, the overconfidence literature.

Information Aggregation with Costly Information and Random Ordering: Experimental Evidence

The cost of information is an often ignored factor in economic situations although the information acquisition behavior of the decision makers has a crucial influence on the outcome. In this experiment, we study an information aggregation process in which participants decide in a random sequence. Participants observe predecessors decisions and can acquire additional private information at a fixed price. We analyze participants information acquisition behavior and updating procedures. About one half of the individuals act rationally, whereas the other participants systematically overestimate the private signal value. This leads to excessive signal acquisitions and reduced conformity.

O paradoxo semiótico da improbabilidade da comunicação

The paper interprets Niklas Luhmann’s theorem of the “improbability of communication” as an argument against the ideal of a perfect congruence between communicating minds, whose more moderate precursors are: (1) Thomas Hobbes theory of deceitful communication, (2) implications of exclusion in the etymology of the word communication, (3) J. Lotman’s code theoretical objections against the idea of communication on the basis of a common code, (4) cognitive theories concerning impediments in communication based on the assumption that minds are black boxes, (5) Charles S. Peirce’s communication theory, and (6) poststructuralist and deconstructivist views concerning the impossibility of congruence in communication (Foucault, Derrida).O artigo interpreta o teorema da “improbabilidade da comunicação” de Niklas Luhmann como um argumento contra o ideal de uma congruência perfeita entre as mentes comunicantes, cujos precursores mais moderados são: (1) a teoria de Thomas Hobbes da comunicação enganosa, (2) as implicações da exclusão na etimologia da palavra comunicação, (3) as objeções da teoria do código de J. Lotman contra a ideia de comunicação com base em um código comum, (4) teorias cognitivas sobre os impedimentos à comunicação baseadas na suposição de que as mentes são caixas-pretas, (5) a teoria da comunicação de C. S. Peirce e (6) as visões pós-estruturalistas e desconstrutivistas sobre a impossibilidade de congruência na comunicação (Foucault, Derrida)

Time Evolution of a Decaying Quantum State: Evaluation and Onset of Non-Exponential Decay

The method developed by Van Dijk, Nogami and Toyama for obtaining the time-evolved wave function of a decaying quantum system is generalized to potentials and initial wave functions of non-compact support. The long time asymptotic behavior is extracted and employed to predict the timescale for the onset of non-exponential decay. The method is illustrated with a Gaussian initial wave function leaking through Eckart's potential barrier on the halfline

Combining phonological and acoustic ASR-free features for pathological speech intelligibility assessment

Intelligibility is widely used to measure the severity of articulatory problems in pathological speech. Recently, a number of automatic intelligibility assessment tools have been developed. Most of them use automatic speech recognizers (ASR) to compare the patient's utterance with the target text. These methods are bound to one language and tend to be less accurate when speakers hesitate or make reading errors. To circumvent these problems, two different ASR-free methods were developed over the last few years, only making use of the acoustic or phonological properties of the utterance. In this paper, we demonstrate that these ASR-free techniques are also able to predict intelligibility in other languages. Moreover, they show to be complementary, resulting in even better intelligibility predictions when both methods are combined

The semiotics of models

The paper sheds light on the concept of model in ordinary language and in scientific discourse from the perspective of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics. It proposes a general Peircean framework for the definition of models of all kinds, including mental models. A survey of definitions of scientific models that have been influential in the philosophy of science and of the typologies proposed in this context is given. The author criticizes the heterogeneity of the criteria applied in these typologies and the lack of a semiotic foundation in typological distinctions between formal, symbolic, theoretical, metaphorical, and iconic models, among others. The paper argues that the application of Peirce’s subdivision of signs into the trichotomies of the sign itself, its object, and its interpretant can offer a deeper understanding of the nature of models. Semiotic topics in the focus of the paper are (1) the distinction between models as signs and (mental) models as the interpretants of signs; (2) models considered as a type (or legisign) and models considered as tokens (or replicas) of a type; (3) the iconicity of models, including diagrammatic and metaphorical icons; (4) the contribution of indices and symbols to the informativity of models; and (5) the rhetorical qualities of models in scientific discourse. The paper argues in conclusion that informative models are hybrid signs in which a diagram incorporates indices and symbols in a rhetorically efficient way

Trajectory: A model of the sign and of semiosis

This paper examines how far the model of the trajectory as a path that a moving object follows from a source to a goal is an adequate model of the sign and of semiotic processes. Just like intentions, meanings, and messages, also signs have sources and goals. A study of the terms by which the Ancient Greeks referred to signs (sêma, semeîon, and tekmérion) reveals that the idea of goal-directedness is inherent in several respects in this early semiotic vocabulary. The paper studies Charles S. Peirce’s model of the sign as a trajectory by which Peirce describes the “agency of the sign”. Peirce’s semiotic trajectories are without beginnings and ends. Guided by final causality towards a semiotic goal, the sign can reach its goal only by asymptotic approximation. The final section of the paper presents brief notes on the trajectories characteristic of sign processes in semiotic models outlined by Algirdas Greimas and Juri Lotman. Greimas distinguishes a plurality of semiotic trajectories, such as the generative, the thematic, and the figurative one, but the prototype of all trajectories is the narrative one. Bifurcations resulting from conflicting tensions interrupt the unilinearity of the goal-directed trajectories. Besides disjunctions, the model foresees conjunctions in which trajectories merge. The dynamic forces that propel the agents (subjects and objects, agents and patients, senders and receivers, heroes and villains) along such trajectories are polar tensions and conflicts as well as phases of desire and fulfilment. Lotman proposes a dynamic model of human culture as a semiotic space where sign pro - cesses occur like “rushing torrents” or even take the form of “explosions”, suggesting trajectories whose characteristics are nonlinearity, bifurcation, sudden interruption, and unpredictable reorientation. Concomitant with such trajectories are the bidirectional trajectories that describe the dynamic relations between the centre and the periphery of a cultural semiosphere.    &nbsp