Recurrence plots analysis of the CNY exchange markets based on phase space reconstruction

The employment of autocorrelation-based transformation to study the dynamics of the exchange rate system is meaningful because it benefits for chaotic prediction on the basis that the transformation from an exchange rate sequence to its associated autocorrelation sequence is reversible. This paper examines the influence of autocorrelation-based transformation on the systemic dynamics using exchange rates of CNY against different currencies among USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, MYR and RUB. First, we construct recurrence plots of exchange rate return sequences and autocorrelation sequences with a fixed sliding window length of 20. The recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) shows that the exchange rate return sequences exhibit lower degrees of determinism than the autocorrelation sequences. Further, by analyzing the RQA measures with bootstrap techniques and box plots, we reveal that the RQA measures of the exchange rate return systems and the autocorrelation sequence systems are mostly significant, and the vertical structures of recurrence plots of autocorrelation sequences are more sensitive to the shuffles of bootstrap techniques. Finally, we investigate the evolution of RQA measures with the changes of sliding window lengths. The analysis shows that appropriately adjusting the sliding window length can increase the systemic determinism.     

论马克思技术观的生态之维

面对当今的生态危机,一些人士指责马克思的思想是技术决定论,缺失生态学的考量,这是对马克思的曲解.马克思从技术的观念形式、实物形式和关系形式三个层面来把握技术,并把技术和生产力、社会关系、自然有机地联系起来加以研究.技术不仅能推动生产力发展,而且技术是联结人与自然的中介和桥梁,它具有生态价值,同时也会带来生态问题.要提高技术的生态效率,使技术朝着生态良好的方向发展,有赖于选择一个合理的社会制度.     

Conceptual Displacement: From the Natural to the Social

This paper distinguishes between epistemological naturalism, which it supports, and ontological naturalism, which it opposes. It sketches the emergence of anti-naturalist social theory among nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals and its refinement by twentieth-century feminists. These movements challenged ontological naturalism in the social sciences by substituting social constructionist concepts of race and gender for naturalist ones. Economics awaits a similar liberation. The paper identifies four naturalist concepts—atomism, determinism and biologically determined race and gender differences—as structuring mainstream economic theory. It concludes that ontological naturalism is inconsistent with the application of the epistemology of the natural sciences to the social sciences.     

The development of British accountancy in the nineteenth century: A technological determinist approach

This article argues that some of the most popular treatments of the development of accountancy in Britain do not accord with the historical evidence. This is true of the functionalist's altruistic view of the profession and of the predominant paradigm – the Weberian ‘professional project’. There is no evidence in the early history of British accountancy to support the concepts of, for example: monopolistic closure, credentialism, or the social construction of skill. Instead, using a model based on technological determinism, the article reasserts the importance of the industrialisation process in forming the accountancy profession, and sees the formation of the chartered societies as largely set up to brand the accountants' training and thereby preserve the value of their human capital.     

Navigating the uncharted: A crisis response mix to creeping ‘unknowns’

Creeping crises have received limited attention in crisis management. With a backdrop of COVID-19, we explore how tourism organisations can address unprecedented creeping crises. We propose and test a creeping crisis response matrix qualitatively and quantitatively by analysing 108 earnings calls from 22 hotel groups covering the first 16 months of the pandemic. Some cannot detect creeping crises during the incubation periods or the later re-emergence, whereas early exposure gives an advantage in crisis response. Contrary to conventional wisdom, organisational responses to unknown crises are not always reactive, with organisations deploying a varied mix of responses (reactive, adaptive, protective and proactive) even in the early stages of a crisis. As the framing of the crisis improves, crisis responses shift from survival to full-on experimentation, to response by design and then to response by protocol. The proposed matrix can be used as a response roadmap for navigating future, unknown, creeping crises.     

Credibility and determinism in a game of persuasion

This paper studies a game of persuasion. A speaker attempts to persuade a listener to take an action by presenting evidence. Glazer and Rubinstein (2006) showed that when the listener's decision is binary, neither randomization nor commitment have any value for the listener, and commented that the binary nature of the decision was important for the commitment result. In this paper, I show that concavity is the critical assumption for both results: no value to commitment and no value to randomization. Specifically, the key assumption is that the listener's utility function is a concave transformation of the speaker's utility function. This assumption holds vacuously in the binary model. The result that concavity implies credibility allows us to dispense with the assumption that the listener's decision is binary and significantly broadens the scope of the model.