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Daily Archives: February 26, 2013

FTC Releases Top 10 Complaint Categories for 2012

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Identity Theft Tops List for 13th Consecutive Year in Report of National Consumer Complaints

  • “Identity theft is once more the top complaint received by the Federal Trade Commission, which has released its 2012 annual report of complaints. 2012 marks the first year in which the FTC received more than 2 million complaints overall, and 369,132, or 18 percent, were related to identity theft. Of those, more than 43 percent related to tax- or wage-related fraud. The report gives national data, as well as a state-by-state accounting of top complaint categories and a listing of the metropolitan areas that generated the most complaints. This includes the top 50 metropolitan areas for both fraud complaints and identity theft complaints.”

    • ACLU – New Document Sheds Light on Government’s Ability to Search iPhones

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    “Cell phone searches are a common law enforcement tool, but up until now, the public has largely been in the dark regarding how much sensitive information the government can get with this invasive surveillance technique. A document submitted to court in connection with a drug investigation, which we recently discovered, provides a rare inventory of… Continue Reading

    Census Report Shows 30 Percent of Adults Receiving Government Assistance Have a Disability

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    News release: “Among the 46.0 million adults who received income-based government assistance in 2011, 30.4 percent of them had a disability, according to a report released today from the U.S. Census Bureau. The report, Disability Characteristics of Income-Based Government Assistance Recipients in the United States: 2011, offers information about the occurrence of disabilities among people… Continue Reading

    Speech – Simplicity, risk sensitivity and comparability: the regulatory balancing act

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    Simplicity, risk sensitivity and comparability: the regulatory balancing act (speech by Wayne Byres Secretary General Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) BCBS-EMEAP-FSI High-Level Meeting 25–26 February 2013, Seoul, Korea: “But as anyone knows who has built, supervised or just tried to understand internal risk models within a bank, they are not simple. They are, of course,… Continue Reading

    New GAO Reports – Border Patrol, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Southwest Border Security, GAO and Sequestration

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    Border Patrol – Goals and Measures Not Yet in Place to Inform Border Security Status and Resource Needs, http://GAO-13-330T, Feb 26, 2013 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – Effect on Long-Term Federal Budget Outlook Largely Depends on Whether Cost Containment Sustained, GAO-13-281, Jan 31, 2013 Southwest Border Security – Data Are Limited and Concerns… Continue Reading

    An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy

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    “The potential for using fusion energy to produce commercial electric power was first explored in the 1950s. Harnessing fusion energy offers the prospect of a nearly carbon-free energy source with a virtually unlimited supply of fuel. Unlike nuclear fission plants, appropriately designed fusion power plants would not produce the large amounts of high-level nuclear waste… Continue Reading

    International debt flows before and after the financial crisis

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    International debt flows before and after the financial crisis by Evis Rucaj, 02-21-23 “New debt statistics show that the composition of long term debt inflows in 2011 follows pre-crisis patterns. Debt statistics are central to understanding the impact of the financial crisis; the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics provides a detailed picture of debt flows… Continue Reading

    The New Microfinance Handbook: A Financial Market System Perspective

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    World Bank: “The New Microfinance Handbook provides a primer on financial services for the poor. It is written for a wide audience, including practitioners, facilitators, policy makers, regulators, investors, and donors working to improve the financial system, but who are relatively new to the sector. It will also be useful for telecommunication companies and other… Continue Reading

    A look behind the scenes at the Google news retrieval algorithm

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    Frederic Filloux, guardian.co.uk: “Its official blog merely mentions “6 billion visits per month” sent to news sites and Google News claims to connect “1 billion unique users a week to news content” [see The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale]…But how exactly does Google News work? What kind of media does its algorithm favour most?… Continue Reading

    USA.gov – What is Sequestration?

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    “Sequestration, sometimes called the sequester, is a process that automatically cuts the federal budget across most departments and agencies. Congress included the threat of sequestration in the Budget Control Act of 2011 as a way to encourage compromise on deficit reduction efforts. Congress couldn’t agree on a budget by the deadline set in the Budget… Continue Reading