My journey through finance and stochastics

This year, Finance and Stochastics celebrates its 25th anniversary. The journal provides a platform for the community of researchers on which they can publish their ideas and results.Publication is an outcome of research which may be conducted for a number of years before it reaches the required maturity. I find this research process to be very important. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to decode it from reading the research publications. This special issue of Finance and Stochastics gives me an opportunity to focus on it. I am grateful I can present my personal memory of this process. Understanding why questions are asked and how the answers are found is critical.

The Mute Zone of Social Representations and the Effects of (Un)Masking: Review and Prospects

Twenty years ago, Guimelli and Deschamps (2000) hypothesised the existence of the mute zone of social representations. According to the authors, certain parts of the social representations of objects, described as sensitive, were not expressed under normal survey conditions. This fundamental question was curiously addressed very late in literature on social representations, but has been having significant success within the community of researchers working in this field since then. This seminal work, which offered a methodological perspective capable of highlighting such unspoken facts, paved the way for studies that proposed several theoretical interpretations and new techniques for exploring this mute zone. The challenge was twofold: to identify the processes involved and to invent the appropriate tools to express the counter-normative contents potentially attached to certain objects of representation. This article proposes to take stock of these 20 years of research and to anticipate new avenues oriented on the one hand on the study of the socio-cognitive processes involved in the mute zone phenomenon, and on the other hand on the proposal of new theoretical and methodological articulations with other concepts dealing with similar issues.

Problems with comparative analyses of avian brain size

There are multiple hypotheses for the evolution of cognition. The most prominent hypotheses are the Social Intelligence Hypothesis (SIH) and the Ecological Intelligence Hypothesis (EIH), which are often pitted against one another. These hypotheses tend to be tested using broad-scale comparative studies of brain size, where brain size is used as a proxy of cognitive ability, and various social and/or ecological variables are included as predictors. Here, we test how methodologically robust such analyses are. First, we investigate variation in brain and body size measurements across >1000 species of bird. We demonstrate that there is substantial variation in brain and body size estimates across datasets, indicating that conclusions drawn from comparative brain size models are likely to differ depending on the source of the data. Following this, we subset our data to the Corvides infraorder and interrogate how modelling decisions impact results. We show that model results change substantially depending on variable inclusion, source and classification. Indeed, we could have drawn multiple contradictory conclusions about the principal drivers of brain size evolution. These results reflect recent concerns that current methods in comparative brain size studies are not robust. We add our voices to a growing community of researchers suggesting that we move on from using such methods to investigate cognitive evolution. We suggest that a more fruitful way forward is to instead use direct measures of cognitive performance to interrogate why variation in cognition arises within species and between closely related taxa.

Reconciling high resolution climate datasets using KrigR

There is an increasing need for high spatial and temporal resolution climate data for the wide community of researchers interested in climate change and its consequences. Currently, there is a large mismatch between the spatial resolutions of global climate model and reanalysis datasets (at best around 0.25o and 0.1o respectively) and the resolutions needed by many end-users of these datasets, which are typically on the scale of 30 arcseconds (~900m). This need for improved spatial resolution in climate datasets has motivated several groups to statistically downscale various combinations of observational or reanalysis datasets. However, the variety of downscaling methods and inputs used makes it difficult to reconcile the resultant differences between these high-resolution datasets. Here we make use of the KrigR R-package to statistically downscale the world-leading ERA5(-Land) reanalysis data using kriging. We show that kriging can accurately recover spatial heterogeneity of climate data given strong relationships with co-variates; that by preserving the uncertainty associated with the statistical downscaling, one can investigate and account for confidence in high-resolution climate data; and that the statistical uncertainty provided by KrigR can explain much of the difference between widely used high resolution climate datasets (CHELSA, TerraClimate, and WorldClim2) depending on variable, timescale, and region. This demonstrates the advantages of using KrigR to generate customized high spatial and/or temporal resolution climate data.

Impact of COVID19 Lockdown on Anatomical Research – A Reflection

The ongoing COVID 19 pandemic has impacted every avenue of human life directly or indirectly. The world is slowly coming to terms with “New Normal” behaviors. The scientific community at large is awakening to necessity of reinventing and reorganizing itself to overcome the equivocal effects left by COVID 19 crisis. The field of anatomical research faces unprecedented shortage of cadavers and histological specimens that will affect the research outcome in the coming years. Moreover, the human resource crunch following diversion of man power to tackle COVID 19 induced health care emergency has eroded the dedicated research hours. Yet, the exponential collaboration and sharing exhibited by community of researchers globally bears the torch for our way out from the impacts of this COVID 19 darkness.

Global Research Decentralized Autonomous Organization (GR-DAO): A DAO of Global Researchers

The latest trend in Blockchain formation is to utilize decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) in many verticals. To date, little attention has been given to address the global research domain due to the difficulty in creating a comprehensive framework that can marry the cutting edge of academic grade scientific research with a decentralized governance body of researchers. A global research decentralized autonomous organization (GR-DAO) would have a profound impact on the research community academically, commercially, and the public good. In this paper, we propose the GR-DAO as a global community of researchers committed to collectively creating knowledge and sharing it with the world. Scientific research is the means for knowledge creation and learning. The GR-DAO provides the guidance, community and technological solutions for the evolution of a global research infrastructure and environment. Through its design, the GR-DAO embraces, enhances and extends the model of research, research on decentralization and DAO as a model for decentralised and autonomous organizing. This design, in turn, improves most of the uses for and applications of research for the greater good of society. The paper examines the core motivation, purpose and design of the GR-DAO, its strategy to embrace, enhance and extend the research ecosystem, and the GR-DAO design uses across the DAO ecosystem

EXPRESS: JPPM’s Global Perspective and Impact: An Agenda for Research on Marketing and Public Policy

For several decades, the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing has stimulated and led debates with far-reaching implications for consumer well-being, global relationships and, ultimately, human survival. The challenges we face have not disappeared but intensified. Today, we must respond to climate change, manage a global pandemic, and address disparities and inequities that threaten our planet in ways we are yet to comprehend fully. However, the JPP&M community remains well-placed to inform responses to these crises. This article draws together perspectives on new and long-standing questions and challenges, as we highlight the increasing urgency of addressing inequities and embedding sustainability at the heart of policy-making. Yet, while progress addressing these complex questions often has been slow, we also identify compelling opportunities. Sound policies and good marketing and consumption practices in response to health crises, environmental degradation, injustice, automation, violence and war; the transformational benefits following Constructive Engagement offer hope that, even when faced with unprecedented challenges, human resilience and ingenuity can create meaningful responses. As we address chronic and novel problems, we are confident JPP&M’s community of researchers, policy makers, and advocates will continue to bring innovation, insight, and rigor, and play a leading role in discovering solutions, locally and globally.

Исследования Pоссии/СССР и стран Восточной Европы после холодной войны: новое лицо дисциплины

The paper deals with the new developments in the field of Russian and East European studies (REES) after the end of the Cold war, with the focus on the U.S. and Great Britain. Along with organizational and structural changes in the field special attention is devoted to new subjects and trends in the study of the region, with Belarus as a case study. Research in this field began in the 90s and has been booming since the 2000s. Researchers are primarily interested in the history of the country, political science, anthropology, and literary studies. The formation of an international community of researchers allows us to conclude that previously “Western” discipline of REES is gaining a global character.

A Case Study on Emerging Learning Pathways in SDG-Focused Engineering Studies through Applying CBL

Recently, a growing number of Higher Education institutions have started to implement challenge-based learning (CBL) in study processes. However, despite the growing Higher Education attention to challenge-based learning, research on the method, especially in Engineering education, has not been extensively conducted and made publicly available to the community of researchers and teaching practitioners. To bridge this gap, this paper provides a case analysis of implementing challenge-based learning in a Master’s degree program for engineering students, aiming to highlight the main aspects of combining challenge-based learning and Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11), namely sustainable cities and communities. The findings are consistent with previous CBL studies revealing positive benefits of implementing the method; however, the paper adds novelty by showcasing the learning pathways that emerge to learners and teachers when CBL is implemented in an SDG-11-focused course.

COVID-19 lockdown effects on gender inequality

<p>Among European countries, Italy was the first to be heavily hit by the outbreak of COVID-19 and quickly decreed on 9 March 2020 that the entire national territory be locked down to prevent its further spread, establishing an unprecedented situation for its citizens, including researchers. Italy hosts a noumerous (~2000) and lively community of researchers in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which contains the largest fraction of female researchers (~30%) among the world’s leading countries in astronomy (defined as the ones with IAU members >150). Therefore, the Italian community poses as an ideal testbed to investigate the consequences of the lockdown on research productivity, also by gender.<br />In order to do so, we used the INAF and MIUR websites to compile a complete database of the Italian researchers, considered by gender, and matched it with the first authors of preprints posted on the largest preprint archive of natural science publications, arXiv, for each year from 2017 to 2020.We find that the overall production in the first semester of 2020 (i.e. during the first lockdown) was lower than the average value estimated from the baseline above, but if we break down this difference by the assigned first-author gender, we find that the decrease only concerns the submissions by female researchers, while submissions by male researchers even increased. We argue that this difference in productivity between male and female researchers during the lockdown might be a reflection of the unbalanced distribution of the unpaid workload at home between partners.</p>