The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets’ behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets' behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.

The view from inside improves our understanding on market failure and regulation failure in financial market. The EMH fails to understand the causes of financial bubbles and crashes. Behavioral finance introduces insight from psychology. The heuristic and biases approach studied behavioral asymmetry in static environment that leads to market irrationality and information distortion. The fast and frugal thinking in decision-making further explore more complex situation under changing environment. They argue that soft-paternalistic regulation is needed under information overload. The most critical (...) issue is information uncertainty and complexity. Lacking information in frequency domain is the main barrier in managing business cycles. Data form inside reveals current limitations of financial data mainly in the short-term price changes. Microstructure studies show that pricing process is shaped by trading rules. Quantitative analysis reveals severe instability in high frequency trading and derivative market. Feasible regulation should aim to encourage new technology and sustainable growth, rather than protect obsolete technology and short-term speculation. The most fundamental challenge to sustainable economic order is the excessive size of the derivative markets that crowding out investment in real economy. This is a more severe issue than the climate change. (shrink)

Planar cell polarity (PCP) refers to the polarization of a field of cells within the plane of a cell sheet. This form of polarization is required for diverse cellular processes in vertebrates, including convergent extension (CE), the establishment of PCP in epithelial tissues and ciliogenesis. Perhaps the most distinct example of vertebrate PCP is the uniform orientation of stereociliary bundles at the apices of sensory hair cells in the mammalian auditory sensory organ. The establishment of PCP in the mammalian cochlea (...) occurs concurrently with CE in this ciliated epithelium, therefore linking three cellular processes regulated by the vertebrate PCP pathway in the same tissue and emerging as a model system for dissecting PCP signaling. This review summarizes the morphogenesis of this model system to assist the interpretation of the emerging data and proposes molecular mechanisms underlying PCP signaling in vertebrates. BioEssays 29: 120–132, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)