Moral imagination or heuristic toolbox? Events and the risk assessment of structured financial products in the financial bubble

The paper uses the example of the failure of bankers and financial managers to understand the risks of dealing in structured financial products, prior to the financial collapse, to investigate how people respond to crises. It focuses on whether crises cause people to challenge their habitual frames by the application of moral imagination. It is proposed that the structure of financial products and their markets triggered the use of heuristics that contributed to the underestimation of risks. It is further proposed that such framing heuristics are highly specialised to specific contexts, and are part of a wider set of heuristics that people carry in their cognitive ‘adaptive tool boxes’. Consequently, it is argued, when a crisis occurs the heuristics are not challenged, but are simply put away, and other more appropriate heuristics put to use until a sense of normality returns, and the use of the old heuristics is resumed

How Do Interviewers and Children Discuss Individual Occurrences of Alleged Repeated Abuse in Forensic Interviews?

Police interviews (n = 97) with 5- to 13-year-olds alleging multiple incidents of sexual abuse were examined to determine how interviewers elicited and children recounted specific instances of abuse. Coders assessed the labels for individual occurrences that arose in interviews, recording who generated them, how they were used, and other devices to aid particularisation such as the use of episodic and generic language. Interviewers used significantly more temporal labels than did children. With age, children were more likely to generate labels themselves, but most children generated at least one label. In 66% of the cases, interviewers ignored or replaced children’s labels, and when they did so, children reported proportionately fewer episodic details. Children were highly responsive to the interviewers’ language style. Results indicate that appropriately trained interviewers can help children of all ages to provide the specific details often necessary to ensure successful prosecution

Logic of Non-Monotonic Interactive Proofs (Formal Theory of Temporary Knowledge Transfer)

We propose a monotonic logic of internalised non-monotonic or instant interactive proofs (LiiP) and reconstruct an existing monotonic logic of internalised monotonic or persistent interactive proofs (LiP) as a minimal conservative extension of LiiP. Instant interactive proofs effect a fragile epistemic impact in their intended communities of peer reviewers that consists in the impermanent induction of the knowledge of their proof goal by means of the knowledge of the proof with the interpreting reviewer: If my peer reviewer knew my proof then she would at least then (in that instant) know that its proof goal is true. Their impact is fragile and their induction of knowledge impermanent in the sense of being the case possibly only at the instant of learning the proof. This accounts for the important possibility of internalising proofs of statements whose truth value can vary, which, as opposed to invariant statements, cannot have persistent proofs. So instant interactive proofs effect a temporary transfer of certain propositional knowledge (knowable ephemeral facts) via the transmission of certain individual knowledge (knowable non-monotonic proofs) in distributed systems of multiple interacting agents.Comment: continuation of arXiv:1201.3667 ; published extended abstract: DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-36039-8_16 ; related to arXiv:1208.591

The translation of food-related culture-specific items in the COVALT corpus: A study of techniques and factors

This article aims to analyse the translation of food-related culturespecific items (CSI) in the English–Catalan subcorpus of the Valencian Corpus of Translated Literature (COVALT). This general aim can be broken down into two specific aims: to find out what techniques prevail in the translation of these cultural items, and to determine what factors influence the choice of specific techniques. Corpus analysis is carried out by means of the Corpus Query Processor. The theoretical framework deals with the definition and scope of the concept of CSI, the classifications of techniques put forward in the literature for the translation of CSI, and the position of food- and drink-related elements within the broader category of CSI. Analysis of the results yielded by the corpus shows that neutralising techniques prevail over foreignising and domesticating ones, with the latter coming last in descending order. The most prominent factors identified are nonexistence of the source text (ST) item in the target culture, different degrees of institutionalisation, the ST item having been imported into the target culture, and different degrees of granularity. Correlations between techniques and factors are never very strong, but some are strong enough to deserve further attention

A study into the feasibility of generic programming for the construction of complex software

A high degree of abstraction and capacity for reuse can be obtained in software design through the use of Generic Programming (GP) concepts. Despite widespread use of GP in computing, some areas such as the construction of generic component libraries as the skeleton for complex computing systems with extensive domains have been neglected. Here we consider the design of a library of generic components based on the GP paradigm implemented with Java. Our aim is to investigate the feasibility of using GP paradigm in the construction of complex computer systems where the management of users interacting with the system and the optimisation of the system’s resources is required.Postprint (author's final draft

Kovacs-like memory effect in athermal systems: linear response analysis

We analyse the emergence of Kovacs-like memory effects in athermal systems within the linear response regime. This is done by starting from both the master equation for the probability distribution and the equations for the physically relevant moments. The general results are applied to a general class of models with conserved momentum and non-conserved energy. Our theoretical predictions, obtained within the first Sonine approximation, show an excellent agreement with the numerical results.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; submitted to the special issue of the journal Entropy on "Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics of Small Systems