Quantitative Methods for Finance and Investment Essay Example for Free

Quantitative Methods for Finance and Investment Essay University of Bristol School of Economics, Finance and Management QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR FINANCE AND INVESTMENT (EFIMM005) Review Questions Question 1: Concepts a. Deï ¬ ne a stochastic process. Give an example in Finance of a quantity that can be modelled as a stochastic process. b. Deï ¬ ne a stationary stochastic process. c. Consider a stochastic process {Yt , t = 1, . ., T }. Deï ¬ ne the partial autocorrelation function (pacf) associated to this process. d. Explain the diï ¬â‚¬erence between estimator and estimate. e. Let {Ut , t = 1, .., T } be a mean zero white noise process. What is the value of pacf at lag 2 for the process Yt = .5Yt−1 + Ut ? f. Explain the diï ¬â‚¬erence between the autocovariance function and the sample autocovariance function. Question 2: Application The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) can be written as E(Rjt |Rmt , Rf t ) = Rf t + ÃŽ ²j (Rmt − Rf t ), where Rjt is the net return of security j at period t, Rmt is the return on a market portfolio proxy, and Rf t is the return on a risk-free proxy. The coeï ¬Æ'cient ÃŽ ²j is the CAPM beta for security j. Suppose that you have estimated ÃŽ ²j by ordinary least squares and found that the estimated value was 1.37 with standard deviation 2.6. based on 3665 observations. a. A city analyst has told you that security j closely follows the market, in the sense that security j is equally risky, on average, to the market portfolio. Perform a 5% signiï ¬ cance level test of hypothesis to determine whether data support the analysts claim. b. Are hypotheses tested concerning the value of ÃŽ ²j or its estimated values? Question 3: Techniques Consider the moving average process: Yt = ÃŽ µt + ÃŽ ¸1 ÃŽ µt−1 + ÃŽ ¸12 ÃŽ µt−12 with {ÃŽ µt }T a mean zero white noise process with variance ÏÆ' 2 0. t=0 a. Calculate the mean of Yt . b. Calculate the variance of Yt . c. Calculate the autocovariance function of {Yt }T . t=a T =120 d. Assume that {yt }t=1 represents the monthly tons of ice cream sold in the UK between Oct. 2001 and Oct. 2012. What type of dependence can the term ÃŽ ¸12 ÃŽ µt−12 capture? 1

Persuasive Power of Neuroimages

Persuasive Power of Neuroimages Neuroimage effect and repeated exposure:  The contextual origin of neuroimage’s persuasive power Bethany Waites Erica Chastain If you were to open up a newspaper, or visit an online news source, there is good chance that you will come across a media coverage story of a scientific research study, and that article will probably contain an image to help facilitate complicated scientific information to the reader (McCabe and Castel, 2008). Many of the popular media articles describing the latest scientific research simplify the findings for the general public, accompany these findings with neuroimages, and more often than not, these findings are oversimplified or misrepresented (Morling, 2012, p.18). In 2008, it was suggested that judgments on the credibility of scientific reasoning behind research conclusions can be positively influenced (or persuaded) by the supplementary presence of neuroimages depicting cognitive processes described in the scientific research presented by media research articles (McCabe and Castel, 2008) – a finding which many have focused on replicating and discovering the for this p ower (Schweitzer et al., 2013; Weisberg et al., 2008; Schweitzer et al., 2013). If the contextual origins of the documented significant power that neuroimages exert on the credibility judgments of the scientific reasoning (henceforth called the Neuroimage Effect or NIE) can be discovered, there would be implications not only in the fields of psychology but across the scientific field in general. The scientific community is dependent on the popular media to correctly facilitate scientific information and findings to the general public, and if there are in fact contexts out of which NIE can arise, it would be imperative for the scientific community to discover and prevent them from occurring in popular media so that scientific information has a better opportunity of being correctly conveyed to the general public. In 2008, McCabe and Castel’s groundbreaking study introduced the idea of NIE after explicitly examining the persuasive power neuroimages had on the perceived credibility of cognitive neuroscience data and argued that the tendency for images to be intuitively interpreted as scientifically credible representations of various cognitive activities may be due to the reductionist nature of humanity. In their tri-experimental study, they: (1) examined whether the presence of the neuroimages led to higher ratings of flawed scientific reasoning in cognitive neuroscience research compared not only to their absence, but also to the presence of another widely-used visual representations of data such as bar graphs and a text-only control group; (2) examined whether brain images affected credibility judgments because they were more visually complex than bar graphs and whether it was this complexity that influenced judgments, and (3) attempted to generalize the findings of the first two expe riments by using a real news article with scientifically sound reasoning to depict material encountered in the real world (McCabe and Castel, 2008). They concluded that the presence of neuroimages had a statistically significant positive influence on judgment ratings of the credibility of scientific reasoning (NIE) than with the presence of bar graphs and text-only groups, and that they may be more persuasive not because of their visual complexity but because they provide tangible physical explanations of cognitive processes appealing to the reductionist nature of humanity. Following the publication of McCabe and Castel’s study, several research studies have attempted to replicate these findings, some with over-exaggerated success (Michael et al., 2013), while others failed to do so overall (Michael et al., 2013; Schweitzer et al., 2013). While a general failure to replicate the original findings of McCabe and Castel’s original study is prominent, these failures were not complete and have produced interesting and surprising results that have prompted the exploration into finding the origin of the marginal persuasive influence of the presence of a neuro-image on the judgments of scientific reasoning (Schweitzer et al., 2013). There are a handful of speculated contextual sources of the persuasive power of neuro-images including: the methodological design of repeated measures (Schweitzer et al., 2013; Weisberg et al., 2008), the quality of the article’s scientific reasoning (Schweitzer et al., 2013; Weisberg et al., 2008), and the pres ence of criticism, which calls into question the validity of the article’s conclusions (McCabe and Castel, 2008; Michael et al., 2013). The first two speculated sources of NIE previously mentioned were examined in the fifth experiment of the Schweitzer et al. (2013) study. The repeated measures effect (RME) is the suggested underlying contextual variable which produces NIE by introducing a comparative opportunity for participants in which they base their judgments of scientific reasoning in subsequent articles on the quality of scientific logic presented in the initial article (Schweitzer et al., 2013, Weisberg et al., 2008). The second mentioned underlying source, the quality of the article’s scientific reasoning, has been argued by Weisberg et al.(2008) to play a role in the influential power of neuroscience information and that the optimal condition for NIE was the use of non-scientific language, a weak argument, and high-impact images (Schweitzer et al., 2013) Schweitzer et al. (2013) designed the fifth experiment to satisfy the optimal conditions presented by Weisberg et al. and others as well as to test RME, and argued its presence would be found in the 2nd block of the experiment, as participants would have been previously exposed to scientific reasoning of the 1st block. They concluded that the study demonstrated a significant NIE in the presence of weak scientific reasoning, but only in the 2nd block after participants were presented with a comparison on which to base their judgments of scientific reasoning credibility, indicating RME as a critical contextual origin. Because there was not a significant NIE in the first block, the authors concluded that faulty arguments were not a critical contextual source. However, it is noteworthy to again mention the fact that McCabe and Castel (2008) used faulty scientific reasoning as a control within their first two experiments which did produce a significant NIE, and coupled with the arguments of Weisberg et al. (2008), it would be unwise to not deem it a potential source of NIE. The final potential source of NIE within the scope of this study is effect that the presence of criticism has on NIE which was introduced by McCabe and Castel (2008) but was iterated upon by Michael et al. in 2013. The original study’s design allowed the researchers to control the participant’s level of reasonable doubt about the credibility of scientific reasoning behind research conclusions by the presence of obviously flawed scientific reasoning within the first 2 articles, and by the presence of criticisms in the last experiment which called into question the validity of the article’s conclusions and counteracted NIE (McCabe and Castel, 2008; Michael et al., 2013). McCabe and Castel (2008) reported that the presence of criticism did not influence the participant’s ratings on the credibility of the article’s conclusions, but upon further investigation of the original data, Michael et al. (2013) discovered that the brain images were more influenti al when critiques were present to question the validity of conclusions – a notable find which counteracted the claims made by the original investigators (Michael et al., 2013). While Michael et al. discovered the discrepancy regarding the role criticism played in NIE and conducted five experiments that included a criticism manipulation, they did not elaborate on the effects of criticisms as they performed a meta-analysis of the original 2008 data and the data from their 10 experiments, to more precisely estimate NIE (Michael et al., 2013). Because this interesting discrepancy was not explicitly investigated, it does pose an intriguing possibility that neuroimages are more influential as they provide evidence against a criticism contradicting the article’s conclusions. The present study attempts to not only examine the persuasive power that neuroimages exert on the perceived credibility of the conclusion’s scientific reasoning (or the Neuroimage Effect; NIE) but also the relationship between NIE and the three potentially critical contextual origins. It is our goal to demonstrate that neuroimages exert a statistically significant positive influence on participant’s ratings of scientific reasoning, and based on prior research, expect to find a significant NIE in each of the three contextual variables. It is also our goal to discover which of those variables produces the most significant NIE, and purpose that NIE is the most influential when participants are presented with a comparative opportunity in which they are able to base their ratings on the credibility of scientific reasoning in subsequent articles on the quality of the reasoning presented in the initial article. References McCabe, D. P., Castel, A. D. (2008). Seeing Is Believing: The Effect of Brain Images on  Judgments of Scientific Reasoning. Cognition, 107(1), 343-352. Michael, R. B., Newman, E. J., Vuorre, M., Cumming, G., Garry, M. (2013). On the  (non)persuasive power of a brain image. Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 20(4), 720-725. doi:10.3758/s13423-013-0391-6 Morling, Beth. Research methods in psychology: evaluating a world of information. New York,  NY: Norton, 2012. Print. Schweitzer, N. J., Baker, D. A., Risko, E. F. (2013). Fooled by the brain: Re-examining the  influence of neuroimages. Cognition, 129(3), 501-511. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.009 Weisberg, D., Keil, F. C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., Gray, J. R. (2008). The Seductive Allure  of Neuroscience Explanations. Journal Of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470-477.

The Two-Tiered System of Allusions :: essays research papers

In Hollywood today, most films can be categorized according to the genre system. There are action films, horror flicks, Westerns, comedies and the likes. On a broader scope, films are often separated into two categories: Hollywood films, and independent or foreign ‘art house’ films. Yet, this outlook, albeit superficial, was how many viewed films. Celebrity-packed blockbusters filled with action and drama, with the use of seamless top-of-the-line digital editing and special effects were considered ‘Hollywood films’. Films where unconventional themes like existentialism or paranoia, often with excessive violence or sex or a combination of both, with obvious attempts to displace its audiences from the film were often attributed with the generic label of ‘foreign’ or ‘art house’ cinema. In recent times, such stereotyped categorizations of films are becoming inapplicable. ‘Blockbusters’ with celebrity-studded casts may have plots in which characters explore the depths of the human psyche, or avant-garde film techniques. Titles like ‘American Beauty’ (1999), ‘Fight Club’ (1999) and ‘Kill Bill 2’ (2004) come readily into mind. Hollywood perhaps could be gradually losing its stigma as a money-hungry machine churning out predictable, unintelligent flicks for mass consumption. While whether this image of Hollywood is justified remains open to debate, earlier films in the 60’s and 70’s like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967) and ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976) already revealed signs of depth and avant-garde film techniques. These films were successful as not only did they appeal to the mass audience, but they managed to communicate alternate messages to select groups who understood subtleties within th em. This was achieved via a two-tiered system, in which films could be viewed and interpreted on different levels. On one level, audiences could appreciate the film at face-value; the cohesive union the plot and acting of the characters to bring about a story which entertains and sometimes, carried messages or morals, such as Lumet’s ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975), which had political implications. On another level, the other group of audience – those who have knowledge of film history or are learned in film culture – were able to admire artistic craftsmanship of film techniques the director employed, or appreciate the subtleties and allusions embedded within the film. As Carroll (1981: 56) explained, most movie-goers in the late seventies often felt as if they were watching two films simultaneously – the simple genre film, and the art film, coordinated with allusions in which the film-literate could pick out. He states that this system allowed Hollyw ood to remain faithful to the mass audience, yet popular among the rising film-literate generation.

Dwight D Eisenhower :: essays research papers fc

Dwight D. Eisenhower was born on October 14 1890 in Denison Texas. His parents were David Jacob Eisenhower and Ida Stover Eisenhower. He had two older brothers Arthur and Edgar and three youger ones Roy,Earl and Milton. Predictions made in his highschool year book saw Dwight as becoming a history professor and strangly enough his older brother Edgar becoming President of the United States. Many happenings in Dwight’s life show leadership ability. In 1941 Eisenhower was appointed by the army to plan the stradegy for the Third Army in war games in Louisianna. He brilliantly defeated the â€Å"enemy force†. This performance earned him a promotion to brigadier general in September 1941. The U.S. enterred World War 2 in December of 1941. After Japans attack on Pearl Habor General George C Marshall ,Army Chief of Staff, brought Eisenhower to Washington D.C. to serve in the Army’s war plans division. He was then named commanding general of the U.S. forces in the European Theatre of Operations. In July of 1942 Eisenhower became lieutenant general. Also named commander of allied forces to invade North Africa. The invasion resulted in the recapturing of the reigon from german and italian forces. Eisenhower became a four star general in February 1943. In all these campaigns he worked to create unnity between all the foreign commanders. Many americans viewd this to be a very difficult job. Eisenhower said â€Å" Good leadership was not a matter of issuing orders but it was a matter of enforcing obedience instead†. With Eisenhower having all the experience in leadership, many americans thought Eisenhower would make a great president. During the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower he was faced with many difficult tasks or decisions. When Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for office he had promised that he would travel personally to Korea to astablish a truce. In the middle of the year 1953 he full filled this promise. In 1954 Eisenhower sent protection to South Vietnam in 1954 in an effort to prevent its take over by Communist-run North Vietnam. He also launched a major federal public works program that established the national interstate highway system and the Saint Lawrence Sea Way. In the year 1956 he was forced to deal with his first

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No matter how many situps you do, if you have excess belly fat, you'll never see results, because the fat will be covering up your muscle definition. This doesn't mean you should eliminate situps from your workout, because as part of your core, they can promote back health, and improve your posture, athletic performance, and balance and stability. (See References 1) You should, however, incorporate fat-burning exercises into your workout to get visible results. The Spot Reduction Fallacy To lose body fat, you must burn more calories than your body uses every day. It takes a deficit of 500 calories a day to lose 1 pound of fat in a week from all over your body including your belly. Situps alone don't burn enough calories to have a big enough impact and they won't magically spot reduce fat from your belly. To make matters worse, if you only do situps, hoping to combat belly fat, you're building the muscles under the fat. As they get stronger and bigger, they can push your belly out even further. (See References 2) Doing Situps to Shape Up Situps work your rectus abdominis at the fr...

Free College Essay

I personally don’t believe that college should be free. Making it free would only serve to limit the value of the education while filling colleges with students that have no business/need there. College would become nothing more than a 4 year extension of high school if it were free. As things are now, society needs about 25% of the population to have a college degree for the jobs that require one and about 30% of the population has a degree. As a result, you hear from a lot of people that believe that they wasted time getting the degree because it’s not serving them as an employment enhancer. Further, nothing is truly free. Were college free to all students, someone would still have to pay those bills. Public education is already the single largest expense of non-federal governments and a huge part of the federal expense. Increasing the scope of free public education would also significantly increase the costs involved – those costs must be borne by someone. So, you either pay for it now as tuition or you pay for it for the rest of your life in the form of taxes but either way, you’ll pay for it. And then there’s the very valid point that all people aren’t really â€Å"above average† in intellect and therefor all people aren’t capable of attending and graduating from college. Our society would like to pretend that everyone is equal in motivation and intelligence but we know that’s not really true. Don’t we? What would be the result in terms of quality if we made college completely free to anyone? Add to that problem – costs keep some people from attending. This is only bad in-as-much as it limits those individuals personally. But it’s just that barrier that makes it possible for others to attend – college seats are not an unlimited resource of which we have plenty. There are only so many colleges with so many seats and more people would like to have those seats than can. If we removed the cost barrier then the competition for seats would be even greater and we’d still not have solved the problem of universal higher education. We’d need to have as many colleges as we have high schools to truly solve that problem. Then we’d need as many professors to teach in them in. Just a few of the arguments against your position that you might want to prepare to counter in your essay. There are many people that believe the compulsory secondary school education movement (‘create 100% HS graduates†) was a mistake too. While being well educated is very good at the individual level – society still needs people to do jobs that those who keep gaining more education simply don’t want to do.

Sue Rodriguez

Sue Rodriguez- Assisted Suicide By: Monique Sue Rodriguez, once a woman who was lively and healthy women much like the rest of us was given the horrible news that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in early 1991 changing her life tremendously. Little did she know her fight for equality of life would create a milestone in Canadian Law. Sue Rodriguez fought long and hard to demand the right to assisted suicide, which at the time was illegal under the Criminal Code of Canada, being a punishable act for up to a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Ms.Rodriguez argued that Section 241 (b) of the Criminal Code (which prohibits assisted suicide) violated her constitutional right to life, liberty and security of the person under S. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Unfortunately both the British Columbia Supreme Court and the British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed her application. Sue Rodriguez at her final attempt of trying to grant herself the right to assisted su icide appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, the verdict resulting in a five to four decision with the Supreme Court of Canada dismissing her appeal.In 1994, Ms. Rodriguez decided to take matters into her own hands, with the help of an anonymous physician Sue Rodriguez ended her life. Assisted Suicide is something I will never be able to give an honest opinion about, unless you personally have had a loved with a terminal illness asking for assisted suicide I don’t think anyone can voice if this practice is fair or not. Any case dealing with a terminally ill victim grasps compassion from people looking at the case, so I think no matter what most people put pity on Sue Rodriguez and jump to her side. Ms.Rodriguez under the Charter Section 7 deserves to be entitled to: ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. ’ This statement from th e Charter of Rights in this particular section is open to diverse interpretation, so in Sue’s case she views her ‘right to life’ as the right to end it in any given time if it is under her wish. I too believe that although suicide is illegal and punishable act under these circumstances (terminally ill patient) the right to choosing when to end our life should be granted. I do not believe that the correct verdict was rendered in this case. Although I can see where the Court is coming from, striking down the Criminal Code must involve something that is detrimental however when someone is undergoing tremendous amounts of pain I think that they should be given the right to Choose how they die. If an individual's quality of life is terrible, they should have the right to stop suffering. The Supreme Court may have dismissed Sue Rodrgiuez’s appeal; however the fight for euthanasia is far from over, there will be hundreds of thousands of cases similar to the Rodri guez case.In a few years the Court will see that this isn’t a matter that should be taken lightly, the laws must be changed to allow individuals the right to euthanasia /assisted suicide. Everyone and anyone should be entitled to die in dignity, although people like Ms. Rodriguez had to undergo assisted suicide behind closed doors I hope that someday people that are terminally ill will be able to walk into a clinic and choose to end their life if they feel so. I think this practice is legal in some countries in the world, but not in Canada because Canada is a country that embodies all aspects of law we are liberal, republican and conservative.The legal rights set out in the charter are there to protect you, and to ensure that justice is served in a just and fair manner, as we know Canada is a place all about making sure the law is served in a just manner so by letting people break the law stating suicide is a punishable act would go against the Criminal Code of Canada. Canada takes pride in the fact that we try to make laws as humane as possible, however there is just no way in ensuring that every citizen in Canada is pleased with all the laws.To reduce controversy amongst our country we have made assisted suicide an illegal act; however some countries have made the act legal under their borders. Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have a more liberal aspect to them, so euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal. The main risk involved in legalizing assisted suicide is the uproar that would come from the public, if we think changing a law regarding a speed on a highway is going to cause chaos think about the affect a law enabling killing terminally ill victims would create.Like I said before, Canada prides itself in the fact that are accommodating and try to fit the needs of every Canadian citizen so by allowing assisted suicide and euthanasia we would be upsetting a lot of individual’s that view this practice in a negative way. Another con that would result from legalizing assisted suicide would be that people would take advantage of the practice, people with depression and other mental illnesses may feel that they have the right to undergo this practice. This should not be allowed to be a factor in a human's choice to die seeing as they are fully.Legalizing assisted suicide would be the start of a slippery slope that would lead to anyone, whatever their condition, being helped into opting for death. There is a fine line when differentiating between euthanasia and assisted suicide; both relieve a terminally ill victim of their pain and suffering however the only difference being the way the act is performed. Euthanasia is the deliberate act undertaken by one person with the intention of ending the life of another person in order to relieve that person’s suffering.Assisted suicide on the other hand is when the victim completes the act themselves with the help of a doctor or other individual. I believe that both euthanasia and assisted suicide should be legalized in Canada. We have made so many advances in Canadian law; it is long overdue for these legal issues to be allowed. Your body is your body and I feel that you may do whatever you want with it, especially under the circumstances where a person is under a vast amount of pain. A doctor or the government shouldn’t be the judge of whether you are allowed to end your suffering or not.What Jack Kevorkian did was something that will go down in Canadian Law history, it is amazing knowing that there are still people in this world that will look past societal norms and do the noble thing. We are given the right to work, have a family and choose our religion however when it comes to something as personal as our lives we aren’t given the decision. Above we looked at legalizing these issues for an emotional sense however there are economic reasons why euthanasia and assisted suicide should be legalized.These two issues should be le galized because all of the money being spent on trying to cure the patient could be going to use for something else. All of the money that is being spent trying to find a treatment for the patient and all of the medicine and machines being used to keep them alive could be being put to use for something else. Everyone should be entitled to quality of life, and if they are not enjoying the life they are in they should make the final decision of whether to end it or not. The kind of quality of life is defined by the patient, not the doctor or government.