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There is a widely believed but entirely mythical story to the effect that the discovery of ‘the Phillips curve’ was, in the 1960s and 1970s, an inspiration of inflationist policy. One aspect of the explanation of how that myth came to be widely believed is considered in this paper. It is noted that the expression ‘Phillips curve’ was applied in a number of quite distinct and inconsistent ways, and as a result there was, by about 1980, an enormous confusion as to what that label meant. This confusion, as well as the multiplicity of possible meanings, it is suggested, provides part, although only part, of the explanation of the myth’s acceptance.

Simulations have traditionally been used as off-line tools for examining process models and experimenting with system models for which it would have been either impossible or too dangerous, expensive, or time-consuming, to perform with physical systems. We propose a novel way of regarding simulations as part of both the development and the working phases of systems. In our approach simulation is used within the processing and control loop of the system to provide sensor and state expectations. This minimizes the inverse sensory data analysis and model maintenance problems. We refer to this mode of operation as the verification mode, in contrast to the traditional discovery mode.

In order to provide simulations and planning that are intertwined with the control of a physical system, temporal issues have to be considered. By limiting the focus of the system to small portions of complex models which are temporarily relevant to the system’s operation, the system is able to maintain its models and respond faster. For this we employ the Context-based Caching (CbC) mechanism within our Mobile Platform Control and Simulation Program (MOSIM). CbC is a knowledge management technique which maintains large knowledge bases by making the necessary information available at the right time.

This article is about the international relations and partnering of Singapore biomed sector.

In this paper, we analyze the sand pile model of self-organized criticallity from a social scientific perspective. In the sand pile model, particles of sand land at random locations on a square table and self-organize into a critical state: a conical pile. Thereafter, the size of avalanches satisfies a power law. This empirical fact has led some to claim that self-organizing criticality explains power law distributions that occur in human systems. However, unlike grains of sand, people possess both preferences and the ability to act purposefully given those preferences. We find that by including purposive agents and allowing heterogeneity of purposes, the sand pile need not become critical. We also show that if we allow institutions to moderate actions that we can create any distribution of avalanches.

This paper studies the problem of accumulating heterogeneous capital goods in an economy with imperfect markets populated by boundedly rational agents. It relaxes classical assumptions about information and cognition. The agents are not capable of computing an equilibrium path to steady state. Agents discover prices by interacting with each other. The economy accumulates a near-optimal mix of capital goods. The structure of interactions between agents filters their behavior in such a way that limited rationality at the micro-level does not translate to grossly inefficient outcomes at the macro-level.

High unemployment rates in MENA appear to be structural in nature and result from the significant segmentation of the region's economies along formal-informal and public-private lines. It thus appears at first that Christopher's Pissarides' seminal contribution on the search theoretic underpinnings of unemployment are less relevant than a Harris-Todaro-type dual economy model. Nevertheless, I argue in this essay that Pissarides' search theoretic framework is becoming increasingly relevant as the role of public sectors in the labor market is gradually attenuated.

This paper seeks to identify, clarify, and perhaps rehabilitate the virtual reality metaphor as applied to the goal of understanding consciousness. Some proponents of the metaphor apply it in a way that implies a representational view of experience of a particular, extreme form that is indirect, internal and inactive (what we call "presentational virtualism"). In opposition to this is an application of the metaphor that eschews representation, instead preferring to view experience as direct, external and enactive ("enactive virtualism"). This paper seeks to examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of these virtuality-based positions in order to assist the development of a related, but independent view of experience: virtualist representationalism. Like presentational virtualism, this third view is representational, but like enactive virtualism, it places action centre stage, and does not require, in accounting for the richness of visual experience, global representational "snapshots" corresponding to the entire visual field to be tokened at any one time.

This study reveals the information content of individual investors' risk-adjusted return expectations. Although individual investors overestimate the performance of their stock purchases on an average, the cross-sectional variation in their risk-adjusted return expectations is predictive of future risk-adjusted stock performance. Stock purchases that investors expect to outperform the most do outperform the stock purchases that investors expect to outperform the least by an annualized alpha of 16%. The best performing stocks are those that investors with excellent experience expect to outperform the most while the worst performing stocks are those that investors with limited experience expect to outperform the least. The most experienced investors appear to be successfully using information gathered from personal experience with the company's products or services, contact with someone who works for or with the company on a regular basis, and proximity to the company's operations.

Due to COVID-19, the world has experienced the most severe economic recession since the Second World War. Some "unconventional" monetary policies have been enforced in order to stimulate the economy, and their effectiveness is positively regarded by the IMF. However, this paper identifies two negative effects of these measures. Firstly, they exacerbate policy instability; secondly, they will be detrimental to the fundamentals of monetary policies in the long term. In addition, the world economy is also confronted with many challenges, including global inflation expectations, the trends of dollar as a currency, restructuring of global supply chain, volatility of asset prices and commodity prices, and global and regional governance.

Though counselling as a field has been in existence in Singapore for the last 30 years, many individuals (both members of the public and those of other professions) still do not have a clear idea of the roles played by counsellors. This indicates that counsellors’ professional identity is still fairly weak. The purpose of this study was to identify elements of practice which in-fluence the development of professional identity amongst counsellors working in tertiary educational institutions in Singapore. Using grounded theory as the main methodology, the findings from this study seek to extend the growing literature base (Chong & Ow, 2004; Low, 2015; Yeo & Lee, 2014) on the professional development of counsellors in Singapore as well as to potentially be used as the foundation for further research into future efforts to improve professional identities of counsellors in Singapore.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the concept and state of the art of stakeholder management. The objectives include the coverage of the key aspects of stakeholder management from the perspective of the literature, the synthesis of some problems of implementing stakeholder management in developing countries and formulation of solutions to these problems, and guidance on implementation of stakeholder management in developing countries. Twelve semi-structured virtual interviews with practitioners in some developing countries informed most of the contents of the chapter: the problems and solutions concerning stakeholder management in developing countries where the traditional type of procurement is still commonly used for project delivery. The content analysis of the interview data showed that, apart from the internal stakeholders of clients, design consultants, contractors and their teams of professionals, and other workers, another set of project stakeholders would include community organizations, trade unions, non-government organizations and sundry individuals, or groups. These many stakeholders present high chances of conflicting stakes. Power influences the prioritization of stakes in developing countries, i.e., the interests of more powerful stake-holders are accorded higher priority. Government and public establishments are often considered to be powerful; hence, there is often a general reluctance to challenge their stakes and those of the stakeholders associated with them. Moreover, some traditions and cultures are strong in communities, regions, or nations, and stakeholder engagements follow these norms. Some details of traditional protocols that are observed while negotiating conflicting stakes are often not documented, and the knowledge needed is sometimes deployed tacitly. Meanwhile, some socio-cultural protocols and government bureaucracy may slow down project procedures, but claiming for time extensions and other reliefs by project participants is virtually never done on these grounds. Another major influence in some developing countries is land ownership, which tends to be a leveraging factor on which some external stakeholders either bargain for compensation and concessions or attempt to disrupt a project. As “knowledge is power,” there is scope for increasing the awareness and thus power of especially external stakeholders in developing countries.

In this paper, we analyze the sand pile model of self organized criticality, from a social scientific perspective. In the sand pile model, particles of sand land at random locations on a square table and self organize into a critical state: a conical pile. Thereafter, the distribution of the size of avalanches has an extremely fat tail. It is closely approximated by a power law for large system, although here we find it is closer to log linear for a small system. This empirical fact has led some to claim that self organizing criticality explains events that generate power law distributions and other fat tailed distributions that occur in human systems. However, unlike grains of sand, people possess both preferences and the ability to act purposefully given those preferences. We find that by including purposive agents and allowing heterogeneity of purposes, the sand pile need not become critical. We also show that if we allow institutions to moderate actions that we can create any distribution of avalanches.

Simulations have traditionally been used as off-line tools for examining process models and experimenting with system models for which it would have been either impossible or too dangerous, expensive, or time-consuming, to perform with physical systems. We propose a novel way of regarding simulations as part of both the development and the working phases of systems. In our approach simulation is used within the processing and control loop of the system to provide sensor and state expectations. This minimizes the inverse sensory data analysis and model maintenance problems. We refer to this mode of operation as the verification mode, in contrast to the traditional discovery mode.

In order to provide simulations and planning that are intertwined with the control of a physical system, temporal issues have to be considered. By limiting the focus of the system to small portions of complex models which are temporarily relevant to the system's operation, the system is able to maintain its models and respond faster. For this we employ the Context-based Caching (CbC) mechanism within our Mobile Platform Control and Simulation Program (MOSIM). CbC is a knowledge management technique which maintains large knowledge bases by making the necessary information available at the right time.

We investigate the impact of scheduled government announcements relating to six different macroeconomic variables on the risk and return of three major U.S. financial markets. Our results suggest that these markets do not respond in any meaningful way, to the act of releasing information by the government. Rather, it is the ‘news’ content of these announcements which cause the market to react. For the three markets tested, unexpected balance of trade news was found to have the greatest impact on the mean return in the foreign exchange market. In the bond market, news related to the internal economy was found to be important. For the U.S. stock market, consumer and producer price information was found to be important. Finally, financial market volatility was found to have increased in response to some classes of announcement and fallen for others. In part, this result can be explained by differential “policy feedback” effects.

Four factors and the relationships between them dominate the complexity of research management: selecting people, setting agenda's, being relevant and guaranteeing quality. Filling in each of these factors is determined by expectations that are formed both inside and outside the direct influence of the research manager. The challenge to research management is to make sure that the confluence of these factors moves the boundaries of knowledge in a way that excites and satisfies both the inside and the outside world.