Some three years after the global bust in equity markets, and despite a weak economic backdrop, housing prices have continued to rise in many countries. This remarkable buoyancy seems rather unusual by past experience and raises questions about the sustainability of current trends. Could housing prices falter any time soon? And if they do, could large declines be in store? Answers to these ques...

The existing disaster databases allow analyzing losses produced by previous events and assessing the risk to natural hazard in a similar way as the insurance industry does for vehicles, health, etc., if the conditions and trends are maintained. Among the existing disaster databases, we selected DesInventar whose vast majority of records correspond to “small” events; this selection is of special...

Nonhomogeneous Poisson processes (NHPPs) are often used to model recurrent events, and there is thus a need to check model fit for such models. We study the problem of obtaining exact goodness-of-fit tests for certain parametric NHPPs, using a method based on Monte Carlo simulation conditional on sufficient statistics. A closely related way of obtaining exact confidence intervals in parametri...

37 We discuss behavioral studies directed at understanding how probability 38 information is represented in motor and economic tasks. By formulating the behavioral 39 tasks in the language of statistical decision theory, we can compare performance in 40 equivalent tasks in different domains. Subjects in traditional economic decision-making 41 tasks often misrepresent the probability of rare eve...

Discourses on culture and development vary according to their conceptions of culture and of development and according to their standpoint. The ‘culture and development’ problematic has typically: (1) arisen from a conception of ‘culture’ as a relatively fixed, homogeneous set of mental programmes (categories, frameworks, images, values, norms) shared by members of a population; (2) contained an...

the armenian-turkish conflict except the disagreement between the two countries has also developed in the regional and international levels. it is becoming the conflict of interests and competition of superpowers in regional and international sphere, which has its great influence on the complication of the process of the conflict between the two countries. taking into consideration the disagree...