4353 research outputs found
Sort by
FIFA World Cup: A Case of (In)efficiency of the Betting Market
No full textUsing data from all FIFA World Cup competitions that took place between 1994 and 2014, a step logit model is estimated to forecast the likelihood of success of each team in each tournament. The model correctly identifies the winner in five out of the six tournaments, and among many variables considered, key contributors to the model’s forecasting performance are identified. Using only the information available by the date preceding each of the last two in-sample World Cups, we can perform a more ambitious test of the model’s ability to forecast the winner at future tournaments. Our results indicated that Spain would win in 2010 and Germany in 2014, as they did. Our results have strong implications about which information a sophisticated bettor should process when participating in the betting market. We show that, using bookmaker odds and model probabilities, a bettor could (consistently) make a profit. Therefore, our results hint at the possibility of deviations from efficiency in the large World Cup betting market
Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism: Evolutionary Theories in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian Cultural Contexts
No full textThis volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought. Such thought encompasses the biological theories of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Earnest Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and later “neo-Darwinians,” as well as the more sociological evolutionary theories of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Henri Bergson. The essays in this volume cover responses from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist (Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Tibetan), Confucian, Daoist, and Muslim traditions. These responses come from the decades immediately after publication of The Origin of Species up to the present, with attention being paid to earlier perspectives and teachings within a tradition that have affected responses to Darwinism and western evolutionary thought in general.
The book focuses on three critical issues: the struggle for survival and the moral implications read into it; genetic variation and its seeming randomness as related to the problems of meaning and purpose; and the nature of humankind and human exceptionalism. Each essay deals with one or more of the three issues within the context of a specific tradition.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1160/thumbnail.jp
Mismatches: Museums, Anthropology and Amazonia
Get PDFOver the past decades, museums, particularly the large Euro-American ethnographic ones, have had trouble developing adequate presentations of Amazonian cultural productions. To some extent, this failure can be seen as a side effect of a more general trend—namely, the widening rift between museums and the discipline of anthropology. However, I will argue that the mismatch between the museum context and Amazonian indigenous peoples and cultures also draws on the former’s difficulty in understanding and adhering to the idea of museums, as opposed to other Western technologies of visualization and transmission. The aim of this conference, drawing both on my experience as an Amazonianist anthropologist and on my involvement with the national French ethnographic museum, the Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) in Paris, is to illustrate these overlapping mismatches, to explore the reasons behind them, and finally to offer some thoughts on how museums could turn these misunderstandings to a productive use
Private-Equity Commercial Real Estate, Timberland, and Farmland: Market Integration and Information Transition Dynamics
No full textUsing data from the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF), we examine market integration of commercial real estate and timberland–farmland assets via the Fama–MacBeth two-step approach under the intertemporal capital asset pricing framework. In addition, we study the information transition dynamics between those markets via the vector error correction model (VECM). We find evidence of market segregation and one-way information flow from the timberland–farmland market to the commercial real estate market. We conclude that commercial real estate and timberland–farmland assets are driven by different market fundamentals and that lagged timberland–farmland returns can help predict current commercial real estate returns. The only exception is during market downturns when commercial real estate and timberland–farmland markets are somewhat integrated and driven by some factors that are not specified in this study
Deadly Gardens: The \u27Gothic Green\u27 in Goethe and Eichendorff
No full textJoseph von Eichendorff’s 1819 romantic fairy tale, The Marble Statue, with its enchanted yet threatening garden of Venus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famously enigmatic novel from 1809, Elective Affinities with its transformation of the baron’s lands into a vast English garden that results in four deaths, both portray idyllic gardens so lush and blooming as to seem almost mystical. And yet these gardens take on an ominously Gothic tone when their grounds or plant life are revealed to have startling power. If the traditional Gothic typically has gloomy castles and landscapes associated with a dark, possibly supernatural and definitely historical destiny from which we cannot escape, the ecoGothic tends in contrast to trap human beings in an uncertain status dominated by natural or ancient, physical forces. When these forces are vegetal, we can speak of the ‘Gothic green’, as we see in the narratives from Eichendorff and Goethe, who uncomfortably reintegrate the fate of human beings into natural processes and botanical energies beyond human control
Dual-Balance Electrodynamic Trap as a Microanalytical Tool for Identifying Gel Transitions and Viscous Properties of Levitated Aerosol Particles
Get PDFThe formation of gelatinous networks within an aerosol particle significantly alters the physicochemical properties of the aerosol material. Existing techniques for studying gel transitions rely on bulk rheometry, which is limited by contact with the sample, or microrheological techniques such as holographic optical tweezers, which rely on expensive equipment and high-powered lasers that can degrade light-absorbing aerosol. Here, we present a new technique to probe the microrheological characteristics of aerosol particles and explore gel formation under atmospheric conditions in a contactless environment without the need for high-power light sources. In a dual-balance quadrupole electrodynamic balance, levitated droplets of opposite polarity are trapped and equilibrated at fixed relative humidity (RH) and then subsequently merged, and the physical characteristics of the merged droplets are monitored as a function of time and RH using imaging techniques. By comparing the RH-dependent characteristics of MgSO4 (known to undergo a gel transition) to glucose and sucrose (known to remain as viscous Newtonian fluids) under fixed equilibration time scales, we demonstrate that gel phase transitions can be identified in aerosol particles, with MgSO4 abruptly transitioning to a rigid microgel at 30% RH. Further, we demonstrate this technique can be used to also measure aerosol viscosity and identify non-Newtonian fluid dynamics in model sea spray aerosol composed of NaCl, CaCl2, and sorbitol. Thus, using this experimental technique, it is possible to distinguish between aerosol compositions that form viscous Newtonian fluids and those that undergo a gel transition or form non-Newtonian fluids. This technique offers a simple and cost-effective analytical tool for probing gel transitions outside of bulk solubility limits, with relevant applications ranging from atmospheric science to microengineering of soft matter materials
Artificial Light at Night (ALAN): An Anthropogenic Challenge for Urban Lizard Behavior and Physiology
Get PDFArtificial light at night (ALAN) is a byproduct of anthropogenic illumination that disrupts the behaviors and physiologies of organisms as diverse as mammals, birds, non-avian reptiles, fishes, and insects. In a time of increasing urbanization, discovering the impacts of ALAN on urban organisms is crucial to conservation efforts. In this study, we investigated the impacts of ALAN on the behaviors and physiology of the green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis). Two groups of 24 urban wild-caught adult green anoles (12 males, 12 females per group) were exposed to two different light-dark cycles in a controlled lab setting for six weeks. One group was exposed to a light-dark cycle that simulated the natural light-dark cycle of a summer day in San Antonio, Texas, and the other group was exposed, in addition to the natural light-dark cycle, to an ALAN source that simulated the light intensity of the streetlights on an urban university campus. After an acclimation period, we conducted a series of behavioral trials. Three trials were repeated during mid-day and mid-night: open field tests, to examine exploratory behavior; foraging trials, to examine prey consumption; and conspecific trials, to examine same-sex interactions. The fourth trial examined behavioral time allocation over two 24 h periods. At the conclusion of behavioral trials, we measured each lizard’s body mass and snout-vent length (SVL) and the mass of its abdominal fat pads, liver, and reproductive tissues. Our data demonstrate that lizards exposed to ALAN were more likely to be awake at night. While they were awake, lizards exposed to ALAN used the light to explore, forage, and display to conspecifics. However, during the day, lizards exposed to ALAN were more likely to be asleep, were slower to move and forage, and females displayed less frequently than females not exposed to ALAN. Lizards exposed to ALAN had heavier fat pads and males had heavier testes, but ALAN did not impact liver mass, overall body mass, or female reproductive tissue mass. In sum, ALAN appears to cause behavioral trade-offs between diurnal and nocturnal activity and alters metabolic and reproductive processes within green anoles. These behavioral and physiological changes could cause the lizards to be exposed to novel situations and impact higher-level organization within the urban environment
\u3cem\u3eBarbary\u3c/em\u3e: Creating Theater to Give a Voice and a Name to Black Women in Shakepeare and Beyond
No full textThis play with a critical introduction focuses on filling in the gaps left by Shakespeare\u27s Othello by creating a space for black women in the play and giving meaning to the role of black women in Shakespeare’s canon more broadly. The critical introduction begins by interrogating the role of names and naming in Shakespeare\u27s plays and adaptations by looking at how the language characters use to identify each other contributes to the process of identity creation. From there, the introduction outlines the ways in which intersections of identity—racial prejudices, patriarchal structures, and social status—work together to uniquely position black women, like the play\u27s principal character Barbary, in a world that is not acknowledged in reading Othello. These ideas are relevant to today\u27s world because our society has inherited much of the race thinking of the early modern period, and the racial epistemologies of the early modern period continue to shape our present moment. By excluding black women from what our society considers important, classic Western art does an injustice to racial minorities still struggling to find spaces of representation in the theater. Barbary provides a look at Shakespeare from a new perspective, highlighting the storylines of black women and their role in Shakespeare’s plays and giving black women full visibility in a theatrical context