A securities market operator's use of the "please explain" price query and its impact on compliance

Market operators in New Zealand and Australia, such as the New Zealand Exchange (NZX) and the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), have the regulatory power in their listing rules to issue queries to their market participants to explain unusual fluctuations in trading price and/or volume in the market. The operator will issue a price query where it believes that the market has not been fully informed as to price relevant information. Responsive regulation theory has informed much of the regulatory debate in securities laws in the region. Price queries map onto the lower level of the enforcement pyramid envisaged by responsive regulation and are one strategy that a market operator can use in communicating its compliance expectations to its stakeholders. The issue of a price query may be a precursor to more severe enforcement activities. The aim of this study is to investigate whether increased use of price queries by the securities market operator in New Zealand corresponded with an increase in disclosure frequency by all participating companies. The study finds that an increased use of price queries did correspond with an increase in disclosure frequency. A possible explanation for this finding is that price queries are an effective means of appealing to the factors that motivate corporations, and the individuals who control them, to comply with the law and regulatory requirements. This finding will have implications for both the NZX and the ASX as well as for regulators and policy makers generally.

Converse results to the Wiener attack on RSA

A well-known attack on RSA with low secret-exponent d was given by Wiener about 15 years ago. Wiener showed that using continued fractions, one can efficiently recover the secret-exponent d from the public key (N,e) as long as d < N 1/4. Interestingly, Wiener stated that his attack may sometimes also work when d is slightly larger than N 1/4. This raises the question of how much larger d can be: could the attack work with non-negligible probability for d=N 1/4 + ρ for some constant ρ > 0? We answer this question in the negative by proving a converse to Wiener’s result. Our result shows that, for any fixed ε > 0 and all sufficiently large modulus lengths, Wiener’s attack succeeds with negligible probability over a random choice of d < N δ (in an interval of size Ω(N δ )) as soon as δ > 1/4 + ε. Thus Wiener’s success bound d 1/4. The known attacks in this class (by Verheul and Van Tilborg and Dujella) run in exponential time, so it is natural to ask whether there exists an attack in this class with subexponential run-time. Our second converse result answers this question also in the negative.

The effect of autonomy transparency in human-robot interactions : a preliminary study on operator cognitive workload and situation awareness in multiple heterogeneous UAV management

The autonomous capabilities in collaborative unmanned aircraft systems are growing rapidly. Without appropriate transparency, the effectiveness of the future multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) management paradigm will be significantly limited by the human agent’s cognitive abilities; where the operator’s CognitiveWorkload (CW) and Situation Awareness (SA) will present as disproportionate. This proposes a challenge in evaluating the impact of robot autonomous capability feedback, allowing the human agent greater transparency into the robot’s autonomous status - in a supervisory role. This paper presents; the motivation, aim, related works, experiment theory, methodology, results and discussions, and the future work succeeding this preliminary study. The results in this paper illustrates that, with a greater transparency of a UAV’s autonomous capability, an overall improvement in the subjects’ cognitive abilities was evident, that is, with a confidence of 95%, the test subjects’ mean CW was demonstrated to have a statistically significant reduction, while their mean SA was demonstrated to have a significant increase.