Browsing by Subject "Stories"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
As the Fairy Tales Unfold
(2016-05-05) Geng, Yangyang
This project consists of two parts. The first part is a photo book, which includes my photographs of children and an accompanying text of individual stories of childhood, including my own. The second part is an analytical essay, which explores my process in creating and editing my photographs in the larger context of how other artists have approached the depiction of childhood. Specifically, I look at the work of photographers Wendy Ewald, Sally Mann and Olive Pierce, as each of these artists chose to depict the days of childhood by giving individual voice to the children who are most often overlooked or ignored. Over the summer of 2015, I worked with and photographed children in an orphanage school in China. I continued to make photographs of children in Durham, North Carolina and in Cuba in 2015 and 2016. As the photographs pulled me back to the past of my own childhood, I discovered that in a child’s world, ordinary things became magical vehicles and that childhood is often about the awkward process of learning to inhabit a newly bulky, changed body with aggressive needs and intensified fantasies. As a photographer, I am drawn to the beauty and pathos of the moments, when, for example, a boy, in his games, becomes a pirate, a soldier, or a sailor, or a little girl plays with a doll and imagines she is the princess. I have tried to capture and evoke the daydreams and the feelings of being lost that are specific to childhood. With my writing and in my photo book project, I have also tried to create spaces in which I allow other’s perceptions to surface with my own.
Open Access
How Evolution, Stories, and Irrationality Influence Decision Making in Financial Markets: Analyzing Whether We Can Leverage Our Innate Traits and Heuristics to Improve Outcomes
(2020-12-13) McCarthy, Joseph
One of the most commonly asked questions in investing is whether or not it is possible to achieve excess returns in the financial markets. To give a somewhat simple answer, for most investors a basic low-fee passive ("static") index fund portfolio is the best investment strategy since it outperforms nearly all advanced active indexing methodologies, such as "dynamic indexing," over the long-term due to factors such as high fees, high turnover, and poor asset selection (McCarthy and Tower, 2020b). Yet, even so, it does appear that it is possible to beat the market on a single trade through skill or luck as there are real inefficiencies and mispricings that occur among different investment vehicles at certain points in time (Lo, 2017; Malkiel, 2012; Ellis, 2017). This is especially evident in a number of endowment models, such as Yale's under David Swensen, which have successfully embraced risk through alternative investments – e.g., private equity – by focusing on longer time horizons and subsequently achieved very impressive results (Chambers, Dimson, and Kaffe, 2020; "Lessons from the endowment model," 2020). However, the fact that the financial markets are a zero-sum game with so many highly intelligent and highly informed investors constantly competing against one another makes it exceptionally difficult, and rare, to achieve excess returns over the long-term (Lo, 2017; Malkiel, 2012; Ellis, 2017). Indeed, the only way to truly beat the market on a regular basis is to constantly adapt your strategy in order to prevent your competitors from mimicking your successful techniques and thereby diluting your overall alpha (Lo, 2017; Malkiel, 2012; Ellis, 2017). Yet, even if we are able to consistently modify our approach as required, there are natural human biases relating to our evolutionary development; our collective stories; and our rationality / irrationality that can influence our decision making. In the following paper, I intend to provide an in-depth analysis of these three areas, and subsequently share a series of current best practices and frameworks from Behavioral Decision Theory (BDT) and Judgement and Decision Making (JDM) fields – e.g., "The Good Judgment Project" and "The Wisdom of Select Crowds" (Mannes, Soll, and Larrick, 2014; Mellers et al., 2014) – which if properly applied in a thoughtful and deliberate manner could offer a meaningful improvement in analysis, forecasting, decision making, and outcomes for both leaders and their organizations in the investing arena.
Open Access
The Unique Oral History of a Jewish Family After the Russian Revolution with Historical Context
(2011-05-04) Moroshek, Jacob
This project is a melding of conventional and oral history of the Jews in the Soviet Union. It shows how life changed immediately after the Revolution and the rapid social changes in the subsequent decades before the Second World War. The aforementioned, conventional [but brief] A-to-Z history is a precursor. It’s a basis of understanding for what’s at the heart of this project. That is the oral history of one Jewish family in the Soviet Union. Specific individuals with interesting life stories speak about everything ranging from: their childhood, work, grappling with their Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, loss and service during the war, and how they rebuilt their lives. What we find is that the oral histories of this family and the conventional history of Jews in Russia complement one another and explain more than just one would individually. The oral histories, however, are what make this work unlike any other traditional analysis of this period.