13 March 2010 View Comments

Financial Markets: Human Foibles, Fraud, Manipulation, and Regulation (Part 8)

Regulation of financial and securities markets is intended to protect investors while still enabling them to make personal investment decisions. Psychological phenomena, such as magical thinking, overconfidence, and representativeness heuristic can cause deviations from rational behavior and distort financial decision-making. However, regulation and regulatory bodies, such as the SEC, FDIC, and SIPC, most of which [...]


28 February 2010 View Comments

Linear Phase Filtering

“Linear Phase” refers to the condition where the phase response of the filter is a linear (straight-line) function of frequency (excluding phase wraps at +/- 180 degrees). This results in the delay through the filter being the same at all frequencies. Therefore, the filter does not cause “phase distortion” or “delay distortion”. The lack of [...]