Text,competence and logic: An exercise

Professional medical practice, like other organizational conduct, relies upon records which document transactions between members and their clientele. Medical practitioners employ a set of conventions providing for the systematic recording and interpretation of medical record cards that forms a social organization underlying the records cards' ordinary usage. In this paper we examine these conventions and develop a computer program which captures elements of their structure and use. By doing so we illustrate one way in which sociological analysis can contribute to the design of intelligent systems. We also suggest that the emerging discipline of Artificial Intelligence might find recent developments in sociology pertinent to its concerns.     

Regulation as Country‐Specific (Dis‐)Advantage: Smoking Bans and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment in the Tobacco Industry

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between smoking bans and the propensity of tobacco firms to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI). Using international business theory based on the firm‐specific advantage/country‐specific advantage (FSA/CSA) matrix, the authors show that, contrary to what one may expect, smoking bans at home are an important institutional intervention, reducing the propensity for firms to engage in FDI, even to countries without a ban themselves.     

Assessing Risk in Graphically Presented Financial Series

It has been argued that traders use their natural sensitivity to the fractal properties of price graphs to assess risk and that they are better able to do this when given price change as well as price level information. This approach implies that risk assessments should be higher when the Hurst exponents are lower, that this relationship should be stronger in the presence of price change information and that risk assessment should depend more strongly on the Hurst exponent than on the standard deviation of the series. Participants in Experiment 1 decided which of two assets was riskier by inspecting graphs of their price series. Graphs with lower Hurst exponents were selected only by those who were less emotionally stable and hence more sensitive to risk. However, when both price series and price change series were presented, the assets with lower Hurst exponents were selected by all participants. In a second experiment, participants were given both price level and price change series for a number of assets and rated the risk of trading in each one. Ratings depended more strongly on Hurst exponents than on other measures of volatility. They also depended on indicators of potential loss. Human risk assessment deviates from the way that risk is measured in modern finance theory: it requires integration of information relevant to both uncertainty and loss aversion, thereby imposing high attentional demands on traders. These demands may impair risk assessment but they can be eased by adding displays of price change information.     

Slippery discrimination: a review of the drivers of migrant and minority housing disadvantage

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to identify housing disadvantages faced by migrants and ethnic minorities; the legal, policy and market forces that shape them; how they have developed over time; how they are manifest nationally and locally; and how they are being responded to locally by those concerned with mitigating them. The paper thereby intends to provide a foundation to inform future research and policy and to engage with local actors to develop ways of overcoming migrant housing disadvantage and challenging discrimination. The paper finds that the interplay of legal changes, which have increasingly differentiated migrants since the 1940s, and shifting housing markets, has driven exclusion of migrants and minorities such that considerable disadvantage is revealed by analysis of census data. However, attention to local specificity provides evidence of positive responses. Examples are presented in relation to access to affordable housing, enactment of homelessness duties and community actions. Methodologically, this paper highlights the importance of simultaneous consideration of migration and ethnicity as markers of difference and exclusion, and the potential of co-production approaches for socially meaningful research concerned with inequalities.