This paper investigates the powerplay in one-day cricket. The rules concerning the powerplay have been tinkered with over the years, and therefore the primary motivation of the paper is the assessment of the impact of the powerplay with respect to scoring. The form of the analysis takes a “what if” approach where powerplay outcomes are substituted with what might have happened had there been no...

In security games, the solution concept commonly used is that of a Stackelberg equilibrium where the defender gets to commit to a mixed strategy. The motivation for this is that the attacker can repeatedly observe the defender’s actions and learn her distribution over actions, before acting himself. If the actions were not observable, Nash (or perhaps correlated) equilibrium would arguably be a...

Research on heuristic functions is all about estimating the length (or cost) of solution paths. But what if there is no such path? Many known heuristics have the ability to detect (some) unsolvable states, but that ability has always been treated as a by-product. No attempt has been made to design heuristics specifically for that purpose, where there is no need to preserve distances. As a case ...

We would like to arrive at a single coherent pair of credences in X and X. Perhaps we wish to use these to set our own credences; or perhaps we wish to publish them in a report of the WHO as the collective view of expert epidemiologists; or perhaps we wish to use them in a decision-making process to determine how medical research funding should be allocated in 2018. Given their expertise, we wo...

Models in science may be used for various purposes: organizing data, synthesizing information, and making predictions. However, the value of model predictions is undermined by their uncertainty, which arises primarily from the fact that our models of complex natural systems are always open. Models can never fully specify the systems that they describe, and therefore their predictions are always...

A variance swap is a derivative with a path-dependent payoff which allows investors to take positions on the future variability of an asset. In the idealised setting of a continuously monitored variance swap written on an asset with continuous paths it is well known that the variance swap payoff can be replicated exactly using a portfolio of puts and calls and a dynamic position in the asset. T...

Every week I hear people complain about meetings. Here’s something to consider: What would happen to your organization if it became difficult to have face-to-face meetings? Some organizations have taken steps in this direction by holding meetings in rooms without chairs, imposing short time limits, or limiting the size of the groups. But what if an organization went further and penalized people...