Library: Best sellers

The famous Black-Scholes model was the starting point of a new financial industry and has been a very important pillar of all options trading since. One of its core assumptions is that the volatility of the underlying asset is constant. It was realised early that one has to specify a dynamic on the volatility itself to get closer to market behaviour. There are mainly two aspects making this fact apparent. Considering historical evolution of volatility by analysing time series data one observes erratic behaviour over time. Secondly, backing out implied volatility from daily traded plai...

The problem of automatic toponym resolution, or computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to an unambiguous spatial footprint of the location referred to, such as a geographic latitude/longitude centroid is difficult to automate due to insufficient and error-prone geographic databases, and a large degree of place name ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty oth...

The topic of tourism development has been explored by a number of scholars and increasingly, over the past decade, more literature has become available on tourism development on small islands . For many of the small island territories or nations, they share a number of major issues in the area of tourism. These include vast distances from source markets, foreign investment and the resulting leakage of revenue, over-dependence on tourism (mono-structured economy), dependence on imports, and an overburdened infrastructure, just to name a few (Gössling 2003; Harrison, 2004; McElroy, 2006). Most ...

For millennia a patriarchal society has ruled to the exclusion of the feminine or the Goddess who was peacefully worshipped before being completely replaced by a warrior Father God. The Goddess and hence women have been relegated to second-class citizens. The concept of woman as defined by traditional patriarchal society has disempowered the female sex and deemed them inferior. This exclusion and denigration of the divine feminine has done serious damage to women and men both individually and collectively, not to mention the damage this masculine mindset has caused to the environment through w...

This thesis analyses the origins and the implications of the services sector's development, including a case study on Switzerland. In the first part, we study the definitions and classifications of service activities, as well as the post- and neo-industrial theses on the origins of the strong expansion of services in developed countries over the last decades. The second part analyses the implications for economic growth, employment and productivity growth of the services sector's development. Starting from a discussion of Baumol's unbalanced growth model, we discuss the variety of productivity...

The purpose of the study was to identify common themes on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) for Japanese subjects. In addition, Japanese TAT themes were compared with American TAT themes (Stein, 1981) for any significant differences. It was hypothesized that significant differences in narrative themes would exist between Japanese and American subjects. The subjects included sixty male and female college students attending courses in Tokyo, Japan. Subjects were enrolled in college courses during the administration of the test and ranged in age from 18 to 27 years of age. All the par...

Many educators and the public are interested in online distance education, in particular Internet-based schooling. The underlying assumption is that this is a new and untested fad in education. This is due in part to a lack of documentation within academia of the early development of online distance education, and, in part, to a shortage of experienced, practicing online schools. On the Internet, one may become confused by the flurry of activity and by the various claims from organizations that they are providing a revolutionary method of instruction--online teaching. Furthermore, many peo...

The purpose of this book is to examine the birth of bilateral strategic arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Johnson Administration, from 1964 to 1969. It is about the time and the place of the birth of bilateral strategic arms control as it came about in the United States through the efforts of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 1960s. This is the time of the birth of what quickly came to be known as SALT, or the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. This inquiry firstly considers whether the move towards bilateral strate...

This dissertation is an interpretive case study that examines alcohol use by a specific subculture of undergraduates, a college fraternity. Based on nearly three years of investigation using interviews, observation, and document analysis, this study takes a detailed look at the organization's indoctrination process and the ways that their practices are explained by its most astute observers, specifically high-status insiders. Various elements of the author's biography are integrated into the text and used to enhance understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. The multiple purposes of ...

On July 1st 1993, the EU implemented the Common Organization for the Market of Bananas (COMB) to replace the different national banana policies that previously existed in its member countries. As it turned out, the adopted regime became one of the most bitterly internally disputed outcomes of the completion of the EU single common market, and is an on-going source of dispute at the WTO level between the EU on the one side, and the US and Latin American countries on the other side. The most controversial aspects of the COMB relate to the management of banana trade with non-EU countries, and in ...