This Open Access volume reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “va…[Read more]

This paper provides a background on the life and times of Graeme Clark, a founder of the area of biomedical engineering and the cochlear implant, who grew up in the small town of Camden, NSW.
The life and times of Professor Graeme Clark, the pioneer of the Cochlear Implant, are part of the Camden story. He was a local boy who made good, improved…[Read more]

We offer a hybrid (trinomial tree plus semi-analytic formulas) pricing method for FX Double Window Double Barrier option . Currently, the model uses spot implied volatility for the first time window, and forward implied volatility for the second time window. These are Black-Scholes implied volatilities from traded vanilla European options, but,…[Read more]

A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age, ed. by Elizabeth Lambourn.

The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sources, this innovative volume pushes out beyond this European heartland to explore the shape and potential of a cultural…[Read more]

A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age, ed. by Elizabeth Lambourn.

The cultural history of the sea during the Middle Ages is a young and dynamic field. Born only recently in the literary criticism of European sources, this innovative volume pushes out beyond this European heartland to explore the shape and potential of a cultural…[Read more]

An overview of the dialect of Old English used by Tolkien to represent the language of Rohan. I argue that Tolkien chose the dialect represented by the early glossaries in Old Mercian, especially the eighth-century Corpus Glossary, as representatives of the kind of Old English he thought Beowulf was originally composed in.

The purpose of the model is to calculate the credit spread sensitivity, correlation sensitivity, and default sensitivity via analytic methods for index CDO trades and bespoke CDO trades. The credit spread sensitivity is defined as the change in the MTM by perturbing the credit spread by a small amount; the default sensitivity is calculated by…[Read more]

This paper contributes to the history of small communities in Australia by examining the life and times of a local pharmacist and his wife in a small country town, the business they ran and their contribution to the local community. Colin and Dorothy Clark were local identities and made a significant contribution to the Camden community. Colin as…[Read more]

A pricing model for capped-accumulated-return-call (CARC) with volatility surface is presented. Proprietary approaches to interpreting volatility surface are employed during pricing. To accelerate the convergence when low discrepancy sequences are used in Monte Carlo simulation (Quasi-Monte Carlo simulation), the Brownian Bridge Path…[Read more]

The model serves the purpose of computing basis adjustments for credit spread curves of the constituent obligors of the indexes such that the market price of the index can be repriced exactly. These adjusted index constituent curves are then used to compute index base correlations and mapped base correlations for bespoke trades, price the standard…[Read more]

The emergence of Judaism and Samaritanism in antiquity is closely linked to the process by which the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) became defined as the Torah of Moses.

The payoff of reverse convertible product involves returns on multiple assets and is conditional on hitting of continuous barriers. The Monte Carlo methodology employed by ESP is an efficient conditioning technique.

Accounting requires the ability to forecast conduit administration fees. a simple stationary lognormal model for the fees is presented. Initially, the stationarity of the sweep fees is tested by measuring the level of mean reversion. Using a Dickey-Fuller statistical test the conduits are checked for approximate stationarity. Next, assuming the…[Read more]

The trend of Carolingian royal advice literature, Fürstenspiegel, or specula principum offers advice to kings on how to rule well and examples of ruling poorly. Interpretations of these texts have often focused on traditional ideas of the Carolingian reforms, for example the focus on classical models of rule in Sedulius Scottus’ De rectoribus ch…[Read more]

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and…[Read more]

Beyond the texts on women’s medicine associated with the name of a 12th-century female medical practitioner from Salerno named Trota (or the title, “Trotula”), the most widely circulated texts were those deriving from the ancient Greek *Gynecology* of Soranus (2nd century CE). In particular, the Latin translation/adaptation by Muscio (or Mustio),…[Read more]

The article presents a model for pricing digital-type barrier options on baskets of equity stocks. Within each payment period, there is a series of basket observation times. If at each observation time we observe that all basket constituent stocks remain between their lower and upper barriers, we receive a fixed coupon amount on the payment date…[Read more]

We present a model for pricing an exotic swap where one party receives a fixed amount and makes a series of variable payments at the end of each pre-defined calculation period. The variable payments can be modeled as Asian put option payoffs on the weighted sum of two respective commodity basket levels. Furthermore, each basket level consists of a…[Read more]

This document lays out a series of points in regard to a recently posted pre-print on the history of plague in late medieval and early modern Europe: Marcel Keller et al., “A Refined Phylochronology of the Second Plague Pandemic in Western Eurasia.” I am a historian of medicine and I am presenting these as historical questions. I have written it…[Read more]

A model is present for pricing an Equity Asian Swap. One leg of the swap pays the return from a monthly average of the S&P TSE60 index less a constant strike. The payment from the other leg is similarly defined for a stock. The payments are tied to notional amounts that are specified according to two pre-determined monthly schedules. Most of the…[Read more]