Contributions in Merlin

This article examines the recent regulatory developments with regard to short selling. Short selling regulation is an important factor in firm governance because it affects the way in which firms are subject to market discipline. As the financial crisis has attracted regulators’ notice to short selling once again, it is important to understand the fundamental legal and economic arguments regarding short selling. These arguments have at their core the question of whether there exists a market failure. The available evidence on balance suggests that short selling restrictions hamper the price discovery process. Also, while regulations against market abuse are required, it is often an ineffective detour to pursue the goal of fair markets through the regulation of short selling. On the basis of these arguments, the article evaluates the approaches taken by the US and UK regulators, who play a leading part in the current movement towards more comprehensive short selling regulation. The US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) recently adopted rules do not seem to bring much added value and will presumably affect market efficiency in the negative. First principles suggest a somewhat more positive stance on the SEC's proposal for a circuit breaker rule and the UK. Financial Services Authority's proposed disclosure approach, though both are subject to caveats. We also highlight some central questions for future research.

We demonstrate that people can adopt a favorable view of ambiguous risks relative to ones with known probabilities, contrary to the usual attitude of ambiguity aversion, when doing so permits justification for unfair behavior. We use binary dictator games involving a choice between a relatively equitable allocation and an “unfair” allocation that is both less generous and makes the recipient's payment dependent on a p=0.5 lottery. Dictators choose the unfair option more frequently when the recipient's allocation depends on an ambiguous lottery than on a lottery with a known probability — even though the objective distributions of outcomes are identical under the two kinds of lotteries. Dictators' estimates of the expected value of the recipients' allocations are inflated under ambiguity, indicating that dictators form self-serving beliefs about ambiguity. Finally, increased unfair behavior under ambiguity is extinguished when dictators are constrained by their own initial unmotivated, and negative, attitudes towards ambiguity.

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Product success depends on skilled and competent product management. In essence, a product manager decides what functionality and quality a product should offer, to which customers, and when in time, while assuring a winning business case. Software product management is particularly important when the product is envisioned, developed, and deployed in a global environment. Geographical distance and cultural differences need to be addressed when collaborating along the requirements value chain, while robust and effective integration need to be achieved when composing products along the supply chain. The 4th International Workshop on Software Product Management (IWSPM 2010) was held in conjunction with the 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'10) in Sydney, Australia. The workshop included a keynote from senior product managers, paper presentations, and discussions on state of knowledge and development of software product management.

A large body of empirical evidence documents that people systematically violate the key axioms of the standard economic theories of choice over time and choice under risk. In response to the evidence, new models have been developed, incorporating hyperbolic time preferences or nonlinear probability weights. These models constitute pronounced departures from standard theory, and, as a consequence, are associated with several practical issues. They often fail at predicting more than one important empirical regularity and, hence, are not able to provide a unifying explanation for anomalous behavior in intertemporal and risky choice. Motivated by these deficiencies, this thesis shows that environmental factors, such as liquidity constraints or inherent uncertainty, can bridge the gap between standard economic theory and effectively observed behavior. Anomalously-looking behavior may not necessarily be caused by exotic preferences, but can naturally arise from decision makers' rational responses to their environments. The predictions made by this approach dovetail nicely with existing empirical findings. Experimental data further support the theory's main conjectures and illustrate that it indeed has significant explanatory power. The results presented have important implications for the design of proper policy interventions and the state of standard economic theory in general.

Intrusion detection is an important area of research. Traditionally, the approach taken to find attacks is to inspect the contents of every packet. However, packet inspection cannot easily be performed at high-speeds. Therefore, researchers and operators started investigating alternative approaches, such as flow-based intrusion detection. In that approach the flow of data through the network is analyzed, instead of the contents of each individual packet. The goal of this paper is to provide a survey of current research in the area of flow-based intrusion detection. The survey starts with a motivation why flow-based intrusion detection is needed. The concept of flows is explained, and relevant standards are identified. The paper provides a classification of attacks and defense techniques and shows how flow-based techniques can be used to detect scans, worms, Botnets and {dos} (DoS) attacks.

How is our body imprinted in our brain? This seemingly simple question is a subject of investigations of diverse disciplines, psychology, and philosophy originally complemented by neurosciences more recently. Despite substantial efforts, the mysteries of body representations are far from uncovered. The most widely used notions-body image and body schema-are still waiting to be clearly defined. The mechanisms that underlie body representations are coresponsible for the admiring capabilities that humans or many mammals can display: combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These features are also desirable in robots. This paper surveys the body representations in biology from a functional or computational perspective to set ground for a review of the concept of body schema in robotics. First, we examine application-oriented research: how a robot can improve its capabilities by being able to automatically synthesize, extend, or adapt a model of its body. Second, we summarize the research area in which robots are used as tools to verify hypotheses on the mechanisms underlying biological body representations. We identify trends in these research areas and propose future research directions.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2009, held in Marettimo Island, Italy, in June 2009. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 31 initial submissions. The papers are roughly divided into the two groups language aspects and tools and applications. Note that some papers fall actually into both groups: using a controlled natural language in an application domain often requires domain-specific language features.