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RFE: Conference Listings
This service is joint project of RFE and EconBiz.
- Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES)
Dates: | April 12-13, 2012 |
Description: | 2012 meeting of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics |
Location: | Zurich, University of Zurich, Switzerland |
Subject: | Submissions are solicited both for the meetings thematic sessions on RATIONALITY and for the meetings general sessions (on any topic relevant to the SSES). Submissions across a wide range of topics in relevant fields such as economics, finance and econometrics are welcome. [gemäß den Informationen des Anbieters - according to site editor's information] |
JEL Code: | C |
URL: | http://www.sgvs.ch/congress12/ |


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The Definitive Compendium with More Than 225 Recipes
Book Summary
Contains information on familiar and exotic root vegetables and includes recipes featuring each vegetable, including horseradish vinaigrette, stir-fried lotus root and snow peas, and yuca chips.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Welcome to the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government
NewsScott Moore's op-ed in The New York Times, The United States of China (3/12/2014) Lawrence Summer's op-ed in the Washington Post, How to provide the best aid to Ukraine (3/9/2014) Brigitte Madrian interviewed on Bloomberg TV, Why Are Companies Scaling Back Employee Benefits? (3/7/2014) Lawrence Summers to become Board Chair of the Center for Global Development (3/4/2014) Karen Mills featured in Inc., How to jumpstart the economy now (3/3/2014) An interview with Linda Bilmes in the Washington Post, Here's how to reform civil service in America (2/22/2014) An article on John Ruggie in the Brown Political Review, Ruggie Rules: How the UN Can Foster Just Business (2/22/2014) |
EventsHedge Funds 101; Panel Discussion. March 26, 11:45-1; Bell. Can Negotiating a Uniform Carbon Price Help to Internalize the Global Warming Externality?; Martin Weitzman, Harvard. March 26, 4:10-5:30; L-382. Next Generation Compliance and Enforcement at EPA; Cynthia Giles, U.S. EPA. March 27, 11:45-1; Bell. The Social Cost of Carbon; Elizabeth Kopits, EPA. March 31, 12-1:30; Bell. Natural Gas Prices and Coal Displacement; Christopher Knittel, MIT. April 2, 4:10-5:30; L-382. Does Regulation Kill Jobs?; Joseph Aldy, HKS; Cary Coglianese, Univ. of PA; Lisa Robinson, M-RCBG. April 10, 11:45-1; Bell. Many of our past seminars are also viewable via iTunes or SoundCloud. |
ResearchClick above to watch M-RCBG Director Lawrence Summers discuss his current research priorities. CSRI report (Sept. 2013): A New Global Partnership with Business: Building a Post-2015 Development Framework to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity in Africa. New book from M-RCBG faculty affiliate Dale Jorgenson: Double Dividend Social Media@HKS_BizGov On Facebook On LinkedIn
Weil Hall | 79 JFK Street | Cambridge | Massachusetts | 02138
Copyright © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College


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Top Stories
Scott Nevins: The Bi-Coastal Curious Star of Bravo's 'The People's Couch'
Entertainer, emcee, comedian and producer Scott Nevins leads his life by words of wisdom from his 86-year-old Aunt Grace: "Why worry what other people think, do they pay your rent?"
Celebrities Features
Bridget Everett: Mother Warned You About Girls Like Her
Alt-cabaret sensation Bridget Everett has the body of a Rubens nude, the voice of an angel singing the blues and the mouth of a merchant marine.
Edie Windsor Honored at "Eight Over Eighty" Gala
On March 5, nearly 500 New Yorkers came together to honor 84-year-old LGBT trailblazer Edie Windsor, who was among those celebrated at Jewish Home Lifecare's "Eight Over Eighty" gala in New York City, held at the Mandarin Oriental New York.
Lily Tomlin Headlines at Gilda's Laughfest
Lily Tomlin will headline at Gilda's LaughFest, the nation's first-ever community-wide festival of laughter, to be held March 6-16 in Michigan.
Rok Hard :: Drew Sumrok on Sex, Porn and...Thundercats?
Between sets at San Francisco's Nob Hill Theater recently, I asked devilishly sensual porn man Drew Sumrok a few questions about what and who he wants to do in 2014.
Broadway Pianist Seth Rudetsky Takes Center Stage
Few have more connections in the Broadway ecosystem than Seth Rudetsky. He played the piano for Audra McDonald's senior recital at Juilliard. He's Patti LuPone's go-to accompanist and Tina Fey came to the opening night of his new Off-Broadway show.
To See Or Not To See: Will Bieber's Privates Go Public?
Miami-Dade County Judge William Altfield ruled to release five police videos of Justin Bieber, including two clips of his urine test, but not until authorities "shade or blacken" the singer's genitals.
Earth Hour Super Heroes Work to Protect the Planet
Jamie Foxx, who plays the villain, Electro, in the highly anticipated motion picture "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," along with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, call on a global community to take simple action online to protect the planet.
Adam Lambert and Queen to Join Forces on North American Tour
Queen and Adam Lambert will reign over a highly anticipated North American summer tour starting at the United Center in Chicago on Thursday, June 19.
'Housewives' Couple Plead Guilty to Fraud in NJ
A "Real Housewives of New Jersey" star and her husband face prison time after they pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal fraud charges for concealing income and lying during bankruptcy proceedings.
Liza Opens Up About Ellen's Oscars Joke
TMZ speaks to Liza Minnelli about how she took Ellen DeGeneres's joke during Sunday night's Academy Awards -- the crack some labeled as transphobic.


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Just in case you've been living in a cave of late, some polygamy ranch in Texas recently got raided by the cops:
A judge today ruled in the Texas polygamy case that all 416 children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch must remain in temporary state custody, even as Texas Rangers investigate a possible hoax behind phone calls made last month that prompted a police raid of the sect's compound two weeks ago. "This is the hardest, toughest decision a judge makes any day," state District Judge Barbara Walther said of her ruling to keep the children from the parents who have, in some cases, allegedly abused them.The judge also ordered the fathers and mothers to undergo DNA testing to establish parental relations. The tests will be performed Monday at a mobile testing lab outside the San Angelo Coliseum, where most of the children are being held (27 teenage boys were sent to a camp for juvenile boys and girls 400 miles away).
Separately, police have identified a Colorado woman as a "person of interest" in regard to telephone calls placed to a crisis center hotline in San Angelo.
In truth, the only reason I'm even posting anything this sick story is because I needed an excuse to display that picture (above) of one of the polygamists wives who was actually on the "Larry King". Damn, talk about somebody in serious need of a makeover--get her some tweezers quick while you're at it.


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Recipe created by Rori Trovato Servings: Makes 2 dozen cookies
To make cookies: In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream butter, brown sugar, and 1/2 cup granulated sugar until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add molasses, egg, and vanilla, and beat at medium-high until incorporated, about 30 seconds. Reduce speed to low; add flour mixture and mix until well combined. Cover and chill at least 30 minutes or up to 1 day.
Preheat oven to 350°. Place remaining 1/2 cup granulated sugar in a shallow bowl. Shape dough into 1-inch balls; roll in sugar to coat. Arrange about 2 inches apart on 2 ungreased baking sheets. Using the bottom of a glass that has been lightly greased, then dipped in sugar, flatten dough into 1/4-inch-thick disks. Bake 13 to 15 minutes, or until firm. Remove from oven and immediately transfer cookies to a cooling rack. To make filling: In a medium bowl, combine all ingredients; mix until smooth, adding more powdered sugar as needed (filling should have consistency of very thick frosting). With a small spatula, frost bottoms of half the cookies (about 1teaspoon filling each); top with remaining cookies (so bottom sides are together) to make sandwich cookies. From the February 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
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We Don't Want to Live in a City Where an Inflatable Pool Filled with Fake Flamingos Is Illegal
One resourceful Manhattan resident has bypassed state regulations and installed a pool on the second-floor terrace of his apartment.
DNAinfo reported that Justin Holt, 35, decided to upgrade the aqua amenities in his Murray Hill home during the recent heat wave.
Mr. Holt grew up in North Salem, N.Y., with Read More


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Home & Garden
8 Log Rack Cover
This Copperfield 8ft is one great example of how easy it can be to turn the problems that firewood presents into a home-friendly solution for the savvy shopper. All Copperfield products are designed to be both extremely functional and to fit right it with your home and hearth. Made to fit log rack cover. Heavy-duty weather-proof vinyl construction. Easy to access Velcro open and closure. Approximately: 42 H x 24 D x 90 L.$53.85 -
Home & Garden
Get ready for the holidays with holiday decor, or create an outdoor oasis with garden and patio furniture and fashions that are fun and functional.
Chef s Mate 5 Inch Brass
Chef s Mate mills from Pepper Mill Imports are made of the finest metals and each is hand made in Greece to exacting standards. These mills produce a generous amount of freshly ground pepper with each turn of the handle. The patented grinding mechanism assures full flavor. Add pepper with the easy open front loading chute. Hand made to exacting standards Grinding mechanism is designed to actually grind the pepper maximizing flavor and aroma Front loading for ease in refilling pepper Produces a generous amount with each turn of the handle Durable all metal body$58.05 -
Home & Garden
Get ready for the holidays with holiday decor, or create an outdoor oasis with garden and patio furniture and fashions that are fun and functional.
Maitre D - Brass 12 Inches
Pepper Mills Imports was founded in 1986 and has been offering the best and finest pepper salt and spice mills made in the world. All of the mills have been hand made and were adapted from a Greek coffee mill that was originally used by the Greek army. The grinding mechanism has been designed to actually grind rather than smash which maximizes both the flavor and the aroma of the pepper salt and spices. Whether you are in your home or at a restaurant the hand-made mills from Pepper Mills Imports are some of the finest available. Pepper Mill Imports 12" Maitre D' Pepper Mill. Material: Brass. Grinding mechanism maximizes flavor and aroma. Hand made. Clean with dry brush or cloth. Made in Greece. Dimensions: 12" H x 2.5" W x 2.5" D.$59.93 -
Chimney Natural Wrought Iron Single Panel Screen - 44 Inches x 33 Inches
Natural wrought iron single panel screen. Measures 44in W X 33in H$113.25


text: Tupelo Buffalo Park camel picks 49ers to win Super Bowl Posted on February 1, 2013 by Chris Elkins in News, Sports By Courtesy The Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo Dromedary Camel, Joe, has predicted the 49ers to win the Super Bowl. Joe is 12 years old and has been at the park for 8 years. This is his first time to predict a Super Bowl winner. Click here to leave a comment!


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- What should I do before returning an item? >
- How do I return an item? >
- How do I book a collection? >
- Can I use Collect+ for returns? >
- Can I return my item at a Post Office? >
- Where can I get a replacement returns note? >
- How long will it take for my account to be credited? >
- Why hasn't my return shown up on my statement? >
- The item I bought was part of a promotional offer, what do I need to return? >
- What is your Returns policy? >
- Exceptions to our Approval Guarantee >
- Your Statutory Right To Cancel Your Order >
- What is ByBox? >
What should I do before returning an item?
Before arranging your return, you just need to refer to the Approval Guarantee checklist:- If you receive incomplete items, or if a part arrives broken, give us a call on 0844 822 1010 or email us at email@example.com as we may be able to replace the part to save you time
- You need to get returns back to us within the 21 day approval period
- Please emake sure the product is unused, complete and safely wrapped up in its original packaging and also check that any security tags are still intact
- Stick the returns address label over the original label.
- Make sure you pop in the returns note with the product and tell us why you're sending it back. Just a note, items that are not packaged or labelled in the right way will not be accepted through any of our returns routes, so please double check!
How do I return an item?
The easiest way is to take your parcel to a Collect+ store near you. Find your nearest Collect+ store here or call us on 0845 270 9888. Please note, you can only return your parcel to a Collect+ store if it weighs less than 10kg and measures less than 90x60x60cm (so no sofas's please!).You can also use the highly reliable and convenient ByBox lockers service to return your parcels. There are over 500 lockers nationwide in places such as train stations, super markets, petrol stations, sports clubs and major shopping centers. Click here to find out more about Bybox lockers, Parcels weighing less than 15kg and maximum size 66cm x 43cm x 34cm can be returned via ByBox.
Before you return your item, please wrap and label it. The store will give you a receipt and an online tracking code. We will then collect and process your return for you.
How do I book a collection?
If you don't want to return your item through a local Collect+ store or a ByBox locker, it's not a problem. A Yodel van can come and pick it up from your house. Just click My Account and choose 'Arrange a Return' or call us on 0844 822 1010.Please make sure that you get a proof of return sticker or have your receipt stamped by the delivery person. Keep it in a safe place in case you need to ask us about it. If you can't show us a proof of return on a query, we won't be able to credit your account.
Can I use Collect+ for returns?
You can! Collect+ returns are a free, convenient and safe way for you to return your items to us. There are over 3500 local neighborhood stores and most are open late, 7 days a week. We recommend this way of returning as it's so easy and secure to use.The store will give you a receipt with a tracking code so that you can follow the progress of your return online. Your parcel should weigh less than 10kg with dimensions up to 60cm x 60cm x 90cm and be securely wrapped. Click here to find your most convenient Collect+ store.
Please remember to attach a completed returns label. If you do not have one, simply download it here.
Can I return my item at a Post Office?
We recommend that you use Collect+ or ByBox lockers as the best way to return items, but you can also return items through the Post Office. Just make sure you send them back within 28 days, unused and in their original packaging, and with any security tags intact.Make that your parcel is securely packaged and enclose your completed returns note, giving us a reason for return and making sure the returns address label is fixed securely to the outer packaging.
The Post Office will provide you with a receipt. Please retain this until the item has been credited back to your account.
You should allow up to 14 days for parcels to be returned via the Post Office. If you need any more help you can email us using the Contact Us page or call us on 08448 222 321. We'll be happy to help!
Click here to find out about Post Office branches in your area. Please note, this will redirect you to the Post Office website >
Where can I get a replacement returns note?
If you need a new returns note for returning items through Yodel or via the Post Office, you can download one by accessing My Account and clicking on the link 'Arrange a Return'. If you want to return an item with Collect+ simply click hereHow long will it take for my account to be credited?
Please allow up to 7 days from the date of collection for your account to be credited for Collect+ and Home Delivery Network collections, and 14 days for goods returned via the Post Office.REMEMBER to make your usual payment, as anything you return will not be credited to your account until your next statement. Please note returned items do not count towards your minimum payment.
Why hasn't my return shown up on my statement?
Returns can take up to 14 days to get back to us and to be credited to your account. If you sent your parcel back through a Collect+ store, click here to track it using the number on your receipt. If you sent your parcel back via the Post Office, click here.Take a look in My Account to see if your account has been credited since you received your statement. If the goods are still not showing as a credit more than 14 days after collection, please call us on 0844 822 1010. Have your parcel receipt number ready, along with the item number and order date.
The item I bought was part of a promotional offer, what do I need to return?
All promotional offers, e.g. free gifts or 3 for 2's, have to be returned in their entirety. If you don't send everything back it may result in you being charged the full price for anything you keep.What is your Returns policy?
You can shop with us in confidence because, for most products, we will replace or refund an item provided it is returned to us complete, unused and in its original packaging within the 21 day Approval Guarantee period.We will replace or refund most items provided they are returned complete, unused and in the original packaging, with any appropriate security tags intact, within 21 days of receipt.
Exceptions to our Approval Guarantee
Our Approval Guarantee does not apply to some items or may apply only if certain conditions are met. We will let you know about any of these exceptions when you place your order. These items are clearly identified on the product page and any conditions are set out there. This does not affect your statutory rights.Your Statutory Right To Cancel Your Order
For most items, you have the legal right to cancel your order within 7 working days of receipt. However this right does not apply to personalised produ cts, perishable goods and audio & video recordings and computer software which has been opened. If you wish to cancel using this right, you need to inform us in writing within 7 working days, starting the day after you received the goods. You must also take reasonable care of the goods and return them to us or make them available for collection. We will not consider that you have taken reasonable care of the goods if they have been used in a way, or to an extent, beyond what would be reasonable when examining them in a shop before purchase. You will be responsible for the cost of returning the goods to us, including the collection cost, if you cancel under Distance Selling Regulations.Sale of Goods Act 1979
If any product we supply fails prematurely due to an inherent fault (manufacturing defect), we will provide you with an appropriate remedy e.g. repair, replacement, or refund. Just call us on 08448 111 800.
Supplier Helplines
If you report a fault with an electrical or furniture product, we may give you a supplier helpline to contact. We have arrangements in place with these helpline providers for them to identify the cause of any fault (we do not have the necessary technical expertise to do this) and to offer you an appropriate remedy on our behalf. If you are dissatisfied with the service provided by a particular helpline, please contact us on 0844 822 1010 and we will take back control of the matter. Most helplines are open 9am - 5pm Monday to Friday.
Returns outside of the Approval Guarantee
If you return an item to us outside the terms of our Approval Guarantee, and your statutory rights do not apply, we may return the item to you at your expense or accept the return subject to charging you a returns processing fee, as shown below to cover our costs:
- Returned late (after 21 days) - up to £15
- Returned incomplete, used, not in original packaging, or without security tags - up to £15 or returned to you at your expense
- Returned outside of the terms of the exceptions of the Approval Guarantee (e.g. returned once assembled) - up to £15 or returned to you at your expense
What is ByBox?
ByBox is a simple and convenient way to return your parcels to us free of charge. There are over 500 ByBox lockers nationwide in convenient locations like your local supermarket, shopping centre, train station, retail park and petrol station. When you have a parcel that you want to return to us, you can do so by dropping it off at one of these lockers any time, day or night.Please note, you can only return your parcel via ByBox lockers that weigh less than 15kg and maximum size 53cm x 37cm x 12cm can be returned via ByBox.
Visit the ByBox website to find your nearest locker.


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SEO software provider SEOmoz has announced its acquisition of GetListed.org, a software company offering a popular tool for small business owners looking to improve their local search engine visibility.
The purchase price is reported to be about $3 million in cash and stock. As part of the purchase, GetListed CEO David Mihm will be joining the SEOmoz staff.
GetListed launched in 2009, offering local business owners a snapshot of their local search visibility, along with resources and recommendations for improving that visibility. In its announcement today, SEOmoz says the local search tool will remain free "for at least the next 4-6 months."
GetListed has also run a local search marketing workshop called Local University; it's not included in the sale to SEOmoz and will be spun off into its own organization.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the original presenters at the Local University workshops and will be a part-owner in the new Local U organization. I'm also a friend to both parties involved in this sale and helped David Mihm at various stages during the development of the GetListed tool. I would normally have declined to write this story due to those close ties, but nearly all of our writers are en route to our SMX Social Media conference in Las Vegas.)
Related Topics: Channel: Industry | SEM Industry: Acquisitions


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2014 also looks like being Knaus' year again with lots of clever improvements to their range of motorhomes. Knaus take pride in the numerous awards they have won for the design of their vehicles and customer satisfaction.
The Sky TI now has an entirely different fresh range of layouts and therefore an altogether improved sense of space, as well as additional appealing extra features aimed to make you feel at home.
ViewIf you choose a Boxstar, you get a high standard of safety due to the stable sheet-metal body. Boxstars also have the benefits of clever ventilation because of their many windows and roof-lights, the large sliding and rear door, plus being exceptionally suited for daily use.
ViewThe entirely redesigned Van TI blends the compactness of a van with the luxury of a semi-integrated motorhome – now with completely new features.
ViewFor absolute functionality and luxury, the new integrated Knaus motorhome gives an advanced concept -adventurous, clever and exciting.
ViewThe Sun TI is a partly integrated motorhome with the finest equipment and practical details such as the multi-purpose double floor and large panoramic sunroof.
ViewA completely new, innovative interior concept providing maximum freedom of movement with four fixed seats. That's what we call freedom under the stars!
ViewSimply fill in your details and we'll send you all that's extraordinary about Lowdhams.


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Product #: SC-9780545108768PARTNER POEMS FOR BUILDING FLUENCY GRADES 4-6 |
40 Engaging Poems for Two Voices With Motivating Activities That Help Students Improve Their Fluency and Comprehension By Timothy Rasinski Beloved poet David L. Harrison has teamed up with fluency expert Timothy Rasinki and Gay Fawcett to create this fun and motivating resource for helping students develop fluency and comprehension. Forty poems written for two voices engage middle-grade students in reading and rereading with a purpose. The companion activities focus on key comprehension skills, including visualizing, summarizing, synthesizing, predicting, and inferring. Complete with lesson ideas and routines for using the poems, this collection will be a welcome addition to any teacher's bookshelf. 96 pages 8-1/2" x 11" Grades 4-6
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Messing around with Strava & R. This is a map of my speed riding around different parts of the greater portland area.
Josh's PostgreSQL Database Conventions Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious. We've chosen to use relational databases, specifically PostgreSQL, for storing some of our data. We like ACID, we like the ease of ad-hoc query-ability and we like the fact that databases add an additional layer of security and data quality control. To make the most of this we should adopt some conventions, so that when we are accessing PG from an ORM, we don't bring too many ORM-isms into our data model. This ensures that other staff, who might be using other ORMs, can still work with our data and it also prevents us from relying too much on the ORM or application layer for doing work that RDBMs can already do. These are my preferred conventions, we will evolve them over time. I'll try to provide a justification for each one, but this is a discussion. All names (table, column, sequence, index, constraint, role, etc.) should be lowercase with underscores. Postgres does support AnYSortOF casing that you'd like, but it makes manual querying painful. Table names should be a singular noun that describes one row. "account", not "accounts". Some people prefer plural, we just need a standard, my vote is for singular as it makes SQL a little more natural to read e.g., "SELECT * FROM account WHERE account.balance > 5000;". We're using a relational database. Have relations. Very few tables should be islands. Foreign keys should be named "<table>_id", e.g., if the "account" table links to the "person" table, there should be a column in "account" called "person_id". In the case where there are multiple foreign keys to the same table, prefix the ids, e.g. "from_person_id" and "to_person_id" Foreign keys must have foreign key constraints. It makes the schema more readable, both by humans and introspection tools. It also prevents mistakes at the application layer. Serial columns should have the sequence as the default value for that column. E.g., if the "account" table has a primary key of "id", it should be defined (in SQL) as "id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY", which is a shortcut for "INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT nextval('account_id_seq')". Never expose serial columns outside of the model layer. If any table is going to be exposed in any way via an API, it should have a UUID column that will be exposed instead of using the "id". Index, constraint and sequence names should take the form of table_column_[idx | uidx | seq | ck] for indexes, unique indexes, sequences and constraints. Unique indexes should encompass all the rules for uniqueness. If the "user" table can only have one copy of each user, consider a unique constraint on first_name, last_name, address and zip, also on SSN, or whatever. There is nothing wrong with having the front-end, back end and database all check this. Constraints should reflect business rules. Just because your application does sanity checking, it doesn't mean that some bozo at the terminal will do it. FYI Josh has access to most of our machines and is a bozo. Postgres has a rich selection of native types (IP Addresses, UUIDs, Time intervals, Polygons). Use them where appropriate. If your data is an IP address, stick it in an INET. If it is a UUID, there's a type for that. Postgres also supports enumerated types. If we have a relatively immutable small list of possible values for a column, use an enum. If the SQL type is not descriptive enough of the type of data that is stored in a column, use the units of measurement in the column. E.g., "height_meters" if we are storing a height, in meters. God knows why we'd do that, but you get the idea. Don't be afraid of TEXT. If you want to store free form text, VARCHAR (2048) isn't what you want. Postgres is smart enough to move large chunks of text outside of the table and into a blob, so there VARCHARs end up taking more space than TEXT. If there are strict length constraints, don't use TEXT. Don't be afraid of NUMERIC. We are dealing with money. Bigint's are fine, but we need to then rely on the application layer to do the right thing. Each application needs to know what 12345 means in dollars. When we start having interest bearing accounts, 4 decimal places may not be enough. Postgres supports arbitrary precision numbers. We should standardize on NUMERIC (18,6) for money. And please be sure that your application doesn't silently translate arbitrary precision numbers into IEEE-754 floats or similar. We all saw Superman III. Set reasonable DEFAULTs. If you have a column called "created" which records when a row was created, a reasonable default would be now(). I saw this as a default on one of our tables "not null default "::character varying" Not reasonable. If its not supposed to be null, setting the default as '' is silly. At the very least, decide whether each column should be NULL. Don't be afraid of schemas. Postgres supports multiple object namespaces within the same database . If you're unaware of schemas, you are probably creating objects in the "public" schema. If we ever get to a point where any database has dozens of tables, schemas are a good way to clarify the roles of each table. Look into it. By default, don't denormalize. At our scale, its bad form to have the same column in two tables that are joined by a 1:1 relationship. Doing this means less logic at the application layer to enforce consistency. Many to many tables should be named with the name of the two tables they join. Log modifications. If tables have mutable columns, provide a _history table that keeps track of changes. If you're so inclined, you can do this with triggers.
Principles of Big Data / Data ScienceI threw this slide up as part of my talk yesterday at the IA Ventures Big Data conference. The talk was titled "Big Data with Small Data" and was my attempt at describing how we at BankSimple apply big data techniques to relatively small data sets. It was a short talk and while this was my key slide, I didn't have as much time to discuss it as I would have liked. What do you think? Discuss.
PayPal horror storiesI've spent the last 37 minutes trying to send $104 to a friend for tickets to a party. He specifically asked me to send him the money via PayPal. I have a PayPal account, so it shouldn't have been a problem. The problems began when I first attempted to send him the money. PayPal complained that they weren't able to confirm that I owned the account. I'm currently on a business trip and using the hotel's internet connection, so I figure the odd IP address is confusing PayPal. None of the suggestions provided suggested that they would fix the problem, so I decided to verify my account by linking PayPal directly to my checking account. My checking account is with USAA, and linking the two required providing PayPal not only with the username and password to my bank account, but also answers to three security questions and my card's PIN. It took me a good 10 minutes of switching back and forth between USAA and PayPal to sort that out. (It's more difficult than it should be. Why don't banks support OAuth?..) By linking the two accounts I assumed that I would have provided PayPal with enough evidence that I owned my account. This wasn't the case. I also re-verified my email and set up and verified my phone number with PayPal. It took more than 5 minutes for their verification SMS to reach my phone which currently flutters between one bar and 'Searching…' while I'm out here in the mid-west. Not PayPal's fault, but clunky. None of this helped convince PayPal that I was who I said I was. If I gave anyone else all the information I had just shared with them, they could walk away with my money. But I couldn't send $104 to pay for party tickets. Its two thousand and ten. Money is electronic. Sending money between American banks, while clunky, is cheap(*) and easy. Doing it via PayPal is hard because PayPal's supports international transfer and thus, rightfully, expends more effort fighting fraud than they do sending money. Horror stories, like mine, are common. But while PayPal could certainly improve their web interface, the majority of the experience failures are due to their interminable vigilance against fraud. (*) Cheap for the banks. While it may cost them a tiny fraction of a penny, they will readily charge customers far more.
Pythonic financial simulationAlthough I'm really a C programmer, I've been doing more work over the past three years in Python. Today, for the first time, decided to write a digital signal processing program in Python. C is usually my go to language for these types of tasks and I felt like a fish out of water. You can check out the code, if you are so inclined, to my spectrum analyzer at gist. There are few sections where the code reads more like what a C programmer would write, rather than that of a native Python programmer. I was having trouble clearly expressing the following line of code: [ord(s[2*i]) | ord(s[2*i+1])<<8 for i in range(0,len(s)/2)] Essentially, that code did exactly what I wanted, but I feel that there was probably a simpler way of expressing the same intent in Python. I asked my followers on Twitter for some help with the above segment, and got some useful answers. I then re-phrased the exact same question, exposing my intent, as: Do you know of an inbuilt way to convert a byte stream containing unsigned 16 bit integers into an array of python ints? "convert a byte stream containing unsigned 16 bit integers into an array of python ints". Seventy-two characters to type. The code I was using consumed fifty-three characters. In some way, the code was 25% more efficient at expressing the underlying intent. And that brings me to the moral of this blog post. I woke up this morning to a flurry of news stories about an SEC proposal to include Python code with asset backed securities (ABS) filings. The idea that while ABS documents are chock full of legalese, a computer program can provide a very concise way of understanding how a financial instrument is supposed to operate. I really liked the idea, but needed to know more. This recommendation comes in a 667 page pdf. I just finished scanning through it, trying to find more details about the proposed implementation. You see, I spent a good chunk of last week writing a retail banking simulator in Python, and I have some questions about how they intend to do it. Of course, completely missing the point of their very sensible recommendation, no where in the document is there any Python code. Rather than making me go through hundreds of pages of text, I would have really appreciated a link to hundreds of lines of code. Oh well. Their heart is in the right place. So, why am I writing a retail banking simulator in Python? Well, at banksimple we have an ever growing Excel spreadsheet. Given the limitations of Excel, we make lots of broad assumptions about the distributions of things like account balances and daily spending. Given the non-linearities of both our business rules and human behavior, I want to get a sense of the sensitivity of our model to various risks. And the best way I know to do that is via simulation. Rather than hiding code throughout gnarly cell references, I can clearly express business rules and customer responses in code and from there I can tweak inputs and asses the impact of distribution assumptions on our revenue model. Essentially, I build a universe with millions of bank customers and let them do the things that people do with money for a few years and see what happens. This is a very different approach to modelling in Excel. It is much better at capturing non-linearities. I wanted to know whether the SEC proposal was for including full simulations of securities that can be composed of thousands of other instruments, or whether it was more like an Excel model, just written in Python. The answer is probably somewhere in those 667 pages, but I can't find it. Sorry I haven't been blogging here recently. We are quite busy getting things ready with BankSimple. You can follow along over at our blog at http://banksimple.net/blog
not knowing is half the battle A decade ago I was pitching web analytics software to a number of retail banks back in Australia. The pitching process was intense. Not only did we have to explain what web analytics was about all to marketing executives who had just discovered the internet, but we also had to get past operations teams who were held to a five nines standard. Five nines, or 99.999% uptime means six seconds of downtime per week. This attitude pervades the development of banking products, both in ways that are beneficial to the user and in ways that make what should be simple experiences painful. Running a large teller machine network requires a serious investment in uptime. With thousands of transactions running through the American card networks each second, the fallout of losing even a fraction of a percent is too serious a risk to face light-heartedly. As a whole, the network is amazingly reliable. But point of sales machines don't adhere to the same reliability levels as the network as a whole. The machines that you read your card swipes at stores are subject to risks from power failure, phone network outage or even running out of paper before coming close to hitting a system-wide network failure. In the event of a single failure at your local bodega, affected customers have the option of walking across the street to use an ATM or make some other minor adjustment to cope with a local problem. If the network as a whole were to go down, even for a short period of time, there would be chaos. An individual POS machine meets local demand at 99.9% availability. This is how the system is meant to work. Likewise, the internet. The internet is designed to be fault tolerant, with the realization that it is cheaper (and often plain better) to tolerate failure instead of going to great length to avoid it. Your POS terminal could reach 4 nines if it were housed in a fancy co-location center, but that would be hardly be convenient. Yet when we were pitching marketing analytics to the banks we got the impression that if banking technologists had their way, all bodegas would have multi-homed candy aisles and drip coffee machines with backup generator power. While this attitude has shifted since the formation of independent internet banking groups as distinct from core banking operations, tight coupling between legacy systems results in a development process that is just completely wrong. Banking is complex. Retail operations are tightly regulated. Applying this mentality to every aspect of banking leads to unnecessary inflexibility. Yet successful online experiences are defined by development processes that rapidly iterate and evaluate. The idioms for online interactions are rapidly changing – and at this point in our short history of internet usage it is difficult to see many points of conversion. This is the zeroth hour and iteration begets discovery of new interactions and continuing evolution of a common language for working with the web. As many of you know, I'm working with a great group reinventing retail banking. A big part of what we want to get right is our user experience. In researching this project, I've signed up with a bunch of different banks across America. The typical process for doing so heavily reflects the forms that you fill and experience that you would have opening an account at a branch. While many of these form fields are required by law, the end user experience is heavily informed by legacy development processes. Branches were satellite offices, connecting to mainframes via expensive WANs. The process feels unwieldy to new customers as their applications move in lock step through a system that was designed as a series of incremental improvements over a pen and paper driven process of just two decades ago. Most banks operate their core transactional processing systems on a batch cycle. This stems from the way the Fed works with banks for overnight lending. And as the internet groups budded off from core banking operations, the process of institutional mitosis resulted in a bunch of useless DNA being carried over. One of the banks I have accounts with (a top 5 US bank) regularly closes their internet banking site on Sunday nights for scheduled maintenance. When did Facebook last shut down for maintenance, scheduled or otherwise? One thing we are working very hard towards is the distinction between parts of our banking service that must be highly reliable/available and those where we can iterate quickly. For example, take call center operations. A good phone system, simply due to variability in customer demand, will need staffing slack to reach given quality of service – in terms of expected time on hold, and time to resolution. You can spend a tonne on reaching a certain level of technological availability, but have little impact in key measures of customer satisfaction due to the different costs involved in staffing. With a five nines phone system you can still deliver a shitty service if your call center capacity is capped out by 100% staff utilization. When making decisions about technology behind a retail bank, such as the call center or web site, we choose to trade iterability for early wins in the cost of scaling. Large, complex and thus rigid systems make it difficult to evaluate competing operating procedures. Short sighted metrics for success lead to short sighted incremental improvements. Free from the constraints of public markets we are able to take a risk and try something different – even if we don't know, a priori, how different it has to be. We believe it is critical to be able to try new things quickly, learn from our customers and improve their experience based on data. I'm always scared to have our audience ask "What about feature X?" during our early technology demos. More often than not "feature X" is already in our feature tracking system, but market as "Will not fix." Even very simple features that would take only minutes of development time to implement have far reaching consequences. If we added the ability to filter transactions by date, for example, a number of quick decisions would be made about how to implement the user interface - with no possible implementation resulting in an interface less complex than simply leaving the feature out. Additional complexity, without a clear use case, is bad. The flexibility to add new features as they are justifiably demanded is good. Complex systems work best when they are adaptive. Desinging new features in bulk and dumping them on users after a 12 month development cycle is just cruel. Especially so in banking, where mistrust is rampant and fear of making a mistake is justified. Better to iterate quickly and support an adaptive complexity landscape. People often ask us what it is that makes us better than other banks. Glibly, I respond that we are just a plain old retail bank – but we don't suck. Not sucking is our killer app. I don't know what that means in terms of fine grained details for future features. Sure, we have prior beliefs as to what experiences suck more than others under the current banking model, and where we should appropriately spend our valuable time. But we are also fine with being wrong - hell, we expect it. The only thing that we believe is that by setting ourselves up to respect and learn from our customers experience, we win. Other banks just can't do that. Photo by: riv / flickr
Connecting with your money According to Mr. Meara, 90 percent of all transactions with bank tellers involve checks. If everyone had an iPhone deposit app, people wouldn't come into the branch as often. That would be fine had banks not invested so much time and energy in training branch workers to persuade checking account customers to move into more profitable products. "One the one hand, fewer deposit transactions could mean a headcount reduction," he said. "But it invites the erosion of store profitability. The banks are struggling with the enormity of what it means." Hurry up & credit my account New York Times, September 18, 2009 Brand apathy is rampant in retail financial services. The number one sales channel is the branch. That expensive, increasingly empty, retail space is how banks sell new products to customers. "Is there anything else that I can help you with today" is the alpha and omega of retail bank marketing, with a small epsilon for banners of smiling families plastered inside branches. Below is a screenshot of what I see when I log into my American Express account. A small portion of the screen is stuff I care about. A small, but significant, portion of my emotional well being rides on those numbers. The bulk of the page is dedicated to selling me stuff. How about this? Make understanding and working with my money easier - make me happier, and then I'll be far more receptive to upsells. But if you can't even get basic information and interaction right, then I'm too busy worrying about my current state of affairs to consider new fangled products and the incremental complexity they entail.
Selling customer data As someone who has spent most of their working career selling data to advertisers, I'm suprised by the number of businesses that are predicated on the model of selling data to advertisers. If you have a great widget, it is easy to get it in the hands of millions of people, especially if you are giving it away for free. As programmers and scientists we deify data. What we don't do is understand advertising. Sure we understand that advertising is about selling stuff, but we don't seem to get that the advertising industry exists to sells ways of selling stuff. Whether an external agency or an internal group, advertising professionals have to convince others that they are adding value. And if your model is simply to sell data to advertisers, you have to convince them that your data is worth at least as much as what you are selling it for. Your data needs to be useful. Smart techniques are popping up for doing interesting things with large amounts of data. But interesting isn't always useful. If you think your customer data is useful, you should use your data to make your product better. Data that is valued by your users for the richer experience it provides is likely to be valued by others. If you can't improve your customers experience with their own data, your data is worth nothing.
blockquote While I'm ranting, let me ask you something, Randall. At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck Jr. - what the fuck has gone wrong with our country? Used to be, we were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it's not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they'd say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people's fucking minds? They wouldn't have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up. And not just you. Look at Big Three automakers. Same deal. Lazy, fat, slow, stupid, from the top to the bottom - everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we're putting out. Then somehow along the way the evil motherfuckers on Wall Street got involved and became everyone's enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and "unlocking value" which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering. http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-randall-stephenson-of-att.html
When lenders compete, you win.The message is pretty clear - competition, the pillar of capitalism, results in better products and services for consumers. When lenders compete, you win. While this is the slogan for one major mortgage lead generator, the methodology is common to the industry as a whole. And people believe that magic technology fosters competition, with the net benefit of better lending rates. The reality is a little different. When I oversaw the operations of a mortgage marketplace, the competition was not in terms of the products offered, but rather, the price paid for getting a person's attention. Lenders would bid for leads and the lenders who paid the highest price received the most leads. Thus the incentives were counter to people's rational goals. The lenders with the highest margins were able to spend the most on customer acquisition, while lenders with more affordable products were unable to reach the same audience. Google recently publicized their direct entry into this space. Prior to their entry they captured only a portion of the marketing dollars - with lead generators buying keyword ads on Google, funneling the traffic to their site, collecting lead information and selling to the highest paid mortgage providers. When the lead generators spend on Google was lower than their revenue from the mortgage companies, they profited. A mercenary and highly unregulated bunch, the lead generators would go to great lengths to screw the consumer. Google's product appears better in that rather than selling out the consumer for the highest price, they display a targeted list of options - clearly outlining the competing offers - letting the consumer decide which companies to contact for a quote. As is always the case, transparency leads to a better outcome for people. Despite the numerous and simultaneous failures in the mortgage marketplace that has so deeply scarred the American economy, one upside that is often forgotten is the benefit of standardization of lending products. Prior to the development of the mortgage backed security market mortgage contracts varied greatly in their structure and terms. And while they remain complex financial contracts, standardization means that a consumer is able to properly evaluate the bulk of the financial impact of their mortgage choice by simply examining a handful of parameters. I have a home equity loan. I also have credit cards, savings accounts and brokerage accounts. The simplest account that I have, and the one that sees the most action, is the humble checking account. My checking account has a 36 page introductory preamble that outlines the terms and conditions. These terms are fully documented on a corner of my bank's web site, and change on a semi-monthly basis. No one reads these terms. I spent my summer reading not only the terms of my checking account, but of all of my accounts and the accounts at other major banks in America. You'd be terrified to know what they actually contain. That is, if you could find them. The GAO found that 65% of banks do not make these documents available on the web, and 35% fail to produce them if you visit a branch. And these terms matter. Unlike most people's mental model of retail banking operations, banks do not make most of their money on the difference between the rates at which they lend versus the rate they offer for savings. American banks, quite distinctly from banks elsewhere in the world, make the bulk of their money from fees and charges. Invisible and often unavoidable consequences of little clauses in contracts that no one ever reads. This stands in stark contrast to the message that we hear in bank marketing. Retail bank marketing is dominated by APR: Best rate savings! Lowest rate on credit cards! Yet the largest financial impact to the consumer is fees and charges. Fees and charges that consumers have no hope of simply understanding. Lead generation is rife across the financial product landscape. Some companies try to offer Google-like services for better helping consumers choose financial products - but these services fall into the trap of not taking into account the obscure and non-standardized terms that most impact financial well being. And as such no one believes the offers they see in sites like Mint.com. If people honestly believed they could "Save $2,000 by switching to Bank XYZ's credit card" then the conversion rates on these offers would be vastly better than the prevailing rates. And so with all the technology that we have at our disposal, people are no better off. Banks have no incentive to increase transparency, lead generators have no incentive to provide real offers and immense brand apathy prevails resulting in short sighted decisions further driving down customer experience. The cycle continues. Until it stops.
Chase, what matters? Last week I paid my bills. As part of the regular bill-paying process, I take any funds left over that are not required as cash over the coming weeks, and pay down my home equity facility. I pay my credit cards in full. The only rate I concern myself with is 3.8% rate on my loan. There is nothing particularly unusual about this process. A few days after I paid my bills my bank, JPM Chase, emailed me to tell me that my account was overdrawn. I logged into the web site and saw that they had put a bunch of payments through twice. Most importantly, they put my loan principal payment through twice. In their wisdom, they helped me correct this by withdrawing from my credit card to pay down my loan. My credit card has a purchase rate of 12% and an cash rate of 19%. Follow me for a moment: They withdrew from an account charging 19% to pay down an loan at 3.8%. And along the way they charge an overdraft fee for the 'service.' I have three simple requests for Chase: Reverse the double payment, restoring my checking account to its intended balance. Reverse the overdraft fee. Return the interest they are earning at 19% on the credit card account. I was first routed to the online banking group as it was clear that the error originated within their domain. The timestamps on the transactions are identical, the transaction numbers are near sequential; there is a clear indication that my intent was to only pay once, but they processed the transactions twice. From there I was transferred to the credit card fiefdom who told me that they would correct the overdraft issues - but it would take four days. Four days later I called to discover that no work order was placed and there was no note of my original call. I went through the same call center waltz, but instead was routed to the home equity group. The same group that asked me to forge a signature during the application process - but that is another story for another day. During this call I was told that the home equity group would take care of everything as they were the final destination of the funds. I made sure that the work order included the three key points listed above. I also took note of the work order number and the names and times of all the people I spoke with. Meanwhile, mind you, I still have a zero checking balance and am unable to make other payments. I am loathe to draw down the debt facilities at my disposal, as it would just make it even more complex to reverse these transactions. Friends have been helpful and luckily I have enough cash on hand. Today I called the home equity group directly to check on the status of the work order. They gave me the same estimate as the last time I spoke with them four to five days. At which point the interest would have accumulated to $11. Not a great deal in the scheme of things, but it is my goddamn $11. I'd be happy if they simply paid me the $11 and moved on - they have earned a good deal of revenue from me over the years, and this is clearly their error. But of course, they can't return me the $11 as they have no mechanism for doing so. "You cannot dispute this transaction for this reason: 5102 - Bank Releated[sic] Fees / Charges - Not Eligible" As of now it appears my only option to force the return of my overdraft fee and for me to receive any accrued interest is to take action in the New York small claims court. There is no way Chase will defend this - that would cost hundreds for legal approval alone. Of course, they make an order of magnitude more than that from my family in fees, charges, interchange and net interest margin each year. As soon as I get my $11 back, they will no longer hold any of my accounts. Customer experience matters.
Bayesian Methods + MCMC Last night we had our fourth NY R Statistical Programming meetup. The topic was Bayesian Methods + MCMC. We had two presenters, Jake Hofman and Suresh Velagapundi, both of whom did an admirable job of presenting a very broad topic to an audience with diverse backgrounds. I want to use this post to bridge a gap between the background material and day to day utilization. This is catered towards the audience who may have some experience with R, but aren't very familiar with the Bayesian Way. While it is a simple example, the steps involved extend on to the issues that are faced in real world applications. The source for this example can be downloaded using the internet! We are going to step through Jake's coin flip example to get a sense of what is involved in doing Bayesian inference. There are a number of packages on the CRAN Bayesian Inference view that do all of what you will see below. I decided against using them for two reasons. First off, the coin flip example is a little too trivial for using many of the techniques that rely on multivariate parameter estimation to see any utility. But more importantly, I want to use the opportunity provided by a nice simple example to step through the underlying mechanics. My hope is that after reading through this you can have a look at the available packages and be a better judge of what they are used for and where one package may stand out over another. In the course of doing this write up I went through the MCMCpack package and it is a good exercise to compare how they implement the MCbinomialbeta() against the first half of this walk through. For the curious, the MCMCmetrop1R() function is far more advanced than the simple implementation of Metropolis-Hastings shown below, and it is a good exercise to understand their tuning parameters. As a quick recap, the point of the exercise is to go from prior belief in a distribution (in this case we believe that the coin is fair) and use observed data to arrive at a posterior distribution using both the prior and the data. There are three things that we need to know to calculate the posterior distribution: The likelihood of seeing the new data given our estimate of the bias Our prior distribution The 'evidence' or the integral of the likelihood and prior for each possible estimate I won't step through the derivation of the likelihood, as this should be easy enough to derive from the binomial probability distribution function. In this case our likelihood, with N trials and h heads is: likelihood Check that the likelihood function makes sense: t Great, the maximum likelihood for 50 heads from 100 flips is a theta of 0.5. (See chart below). Jake uses the Beta distribution as his prior as it has some neat analytic properties; namely that the posterior will be of the same distribution family as the prior. We call these types of priors conjugate priors. prior If we do the integration, we can arrive at the analytic form of the evidence and thus the posterior: evidence Let's say we don't know what the analytic form for the evidence (denominator in Bayes' rule) is, and replace it by a numerical integration over all possible theta's from 0 to 1: evidenceN While things are pretty simple with this toy example, Jake made the point that real difficulty with Bayesian inference is twofold: Integrating across theta to find the evidence (denominator) Once you have the posterior, integrating it to calculate summary statistics (mean, variance, etc.) In the above example we used the integrate() function to apply adaptive quadrature to find the evidence. We could use this method for 2, but lets not. Instead, let us use MCMC - which is at its core, a way to draw samples from a distribution that is otherwise hard to sample from. Given that this example is rather trivial, with just one parameter in question (theta), I won't step through the implementations of vanilla Monte Carlo methods (uniform, importance & rejection sampling) These implementations are pretty much straight forward from Jake's presentation. I will however, implement a simple Metropolis-Hastings MCMC sampler using a simple and symmetric Gaussian proposal density (q in Jake's notes). MHstep u) { # This candidate is likely to be a better sample return (newCandidate) } # Else, stick with our previous candidate return (prevCandidate) } Let's use our numerical approximate to the actual posterior function as the PDF we want to draw samples from: posteriorPDF Time to go on a random walk down coin flip street. steps And how did we do? png ("figure3.png", width=800, height=600) par(bty='n') par(col='red') plot(cumsum(samples)/1:steps, type='l', xlab='Step', ylab='Estimated Mean', main='Drawing samples by Metropolis-Hastings') dev.off() Nice.
Engineering vs. Architecture A few months back I caught up with a fellow Aussie in New York, who I first met once ten years ago. It is amazing how social network dynamics change as an expat. He is currently teaching Architecture at Columbia while completing his doctorate in the nature of representation in architecture. It was the sort of long conversation that lingers for a few months before finding a resting place in your mind. At first glance we spent quite some time discussing the work at the Spatial Information Design Lab as this most closely bridged the gap between our worlds. The deeper conversation was that of representation. Engineers build things. They use sciences to make sure that the things they build don't fall over. Architects design things - they take ideas of the world and represent them. Their audience is both the client and the engineering and construction teams. Different representations serve different purposes. Engineering: Representation to World. Architecture: World to Representation. Finanical engineers take what they know about how companies work and built new things to serve other companies. Economists take the real world and make model representations of reality. However there is a void in economics, between the macro and the micro, in the domain of the company. Likewise, there is a void in financial engineering. Financial engineering is currently dominated by time-series analysis. I posit a weak form of the Black Swan theorem - namely that we currently don't know enough about the past to even pretend to predict the future. We have financial historians, in the form of data providers, but we don't have the architects to take this repository of past knowledge and build representations of how companies operate. Accountants across the globe set and implement the rules of this complex system, but we don't understand it's dynamics. Can financial engineers shed the instrumentation of time series analysis and take on this role? Or will it come from a new group - the type of people who build Googles? Or will their buildings leak? Image by ken mccown on Flickr.


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[JURIST] US Department of Defense documents released Friday chronicle multiple mistreatments of Iraqi prisoners by US personnel in 2003 and 2004 but stop short of labeling the instances of mistreatment illegal, describing them instead as "wrong." Over 1000 pages of US military documents handed over to the ACLU pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request [ACLU materials] include two internal military reports which had previously been known but the contents of which had been classified: that of Gen. Richard Formica on the operation of special forces in Iraq [Boston Globe editorial], submitted in November 2004 and later released to members of Congress, and a report by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby [Washington Post backgrounder] on detainees in Afghanistan, undertaken in May 2004. The released copies of the reports were heavily redacted, but show concern over practices such as stripping detainees, depriving them of sleep, assailing them with loud music, withholding food other than bread and water in some cases for up to 17 days, and altering their environmental conditions, suggesting they were kept too hot or too cold. The Formica report expressly concluded that some Iraqi detainees were not being treated in accordance "with the spirit of the principles set forth in the Geneva Conventions." No US personnel were specifically punished for misconduct in the wake of that investigation. Both reports said insufficient training and unclear policy standards made abuses possible, and recommended appropriate changes in procedures for detainee handling. A Defense Department source told AP that the Formica report recommendations had all been implemented. AP has more.
[JURIST] The UN Security Council [official website] on Friday unanimously agreed to a resolution [summary and text] authorizing the pending war crimes trial of ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] to be shifted from the facilities of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL} in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to the facilities of the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. The Council invoked Chapter VII of the Charter to allow a chamber of the SCSL to sit outside its jurisdiction. The trial will still be conducted by SCSL prosecutors and judges, and Taylor will remain under SCSL control. In March the SCSL said it wanted to move Taylor's trial to The Hague [JURIST report] for security reasons, but the Netherlands said that it would only agree to host the trial on its territory if the tribunal found a country willing to imprison Taylor if he is found guilty [JURIST report] and a country that will grant him asylum if he is acquitted. The former process proved problematic until UK Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett said Thursday that Britain would take custody of Taylor if he is convicted [JURIST report], as long as legislation authorizing the UK to recognize convictions by the SCSL is passed by Parliament. Taylor has been indicted [PDF text] for crimes against humanity and violations of international humanitarian law, including murder, rape and the recruitment and use of child soldiers during the war in Sierra Leone. The SCSL said on Friday that it welcomed the new Security Council resolution [press release, PDF], and that Taylor could be transferred to The Hague to stand trial within weeks [Reuters report]. BBC News has more.
[JURIST] Nepal's government and the Maoist rebels on Friday agreed to draft an interim constitution within 15 days and dissolve the parliament reinstated by the popular people's uprising [JURIST news archive] in April this year. Surprisingly, the Maoists [BBC backgrounder], who have been waging a people's war over a decade, also agreed to go for a competitive multiparty democracy and respect universal fundamental rights, including press freedom and rule of law. An eight-point agreement [text] was hammered out at the end of a day-long high-level peace summit between the seven-party alliance government and the Maoists Friday in capital Kathmandu. Earlier in the morning, the rebel leaders arrived in the capital in a helicopter for the talks. A six-member team led by former Supreme Court Justice Laxman Prasad Aryal has been formed to draft the proposed interim constitution [current text]. Analysts said the agreement has paved the way to ending the decade-old Maoist insurgency that has already claimed over 13,000 lives. The Maoists began the "war" in February 1996 to establish a communist republic in the Himalayan Kingdom. The government and the Maoists also agreed to extend the current ceasefire into a permanent peace so as to end the ongoing insurgency. In addition, the government and the rebels also agreed to invite the United Nations to monitor and manage the arms of the government army and the rebels in an effort to ensure free and fair elections of the proposed constituent assembly [JURIST report]. The elections are expected to be held before April 2007. The rebels and the seven-party alliance joined hands in November last year to fight together against King Gyanendra's direct rule. King Gyanendra [official profile; BBC profile] ruled the country directly for nearly 15 months after he seized power [JURIST report] in a bloodless coup on February 1, 2005. They jointly launched the popular April uprising, forcing the king to give up his powers and reinstate the parliament dissolved in 2002. The parliament and post-uprising government have already stripped Gyanendra of his wide-ranging political powers [JURIST report]. The 58-year old monarch now only has a ceremonial role.Kiran Chapagain is a special correspondent for JURIST writing from Nepal. He is an Assistant Senior Reporter for the Kathmandu Post.
[JURIST] Romania has concluded an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons [COE materials] located near Romanian airports in Europe's "spider's web" [COE graphic] of CIA rendition flights [JURIST news archive], finding no evidence that the country hosted secret prisons or cooperated in rendition flights. A committee of the Romanian Senate [official website] undertook the investigation in response to allegations leveled in a Council of Europe [official website] draft report [PDF text; JURIST report] released earlier this month by Swiss legislator Dick Marty accusing 14 European nations of cooperating with alleged CIA rendition flights on some level, and specifically accusing Romania and Poland of hosting secret prisons near airports for the CIA to use for detainee torture. Romanian Senator Norica Nicolai said that the committee investigated every flight through Romania's five airports between 2001 and 2006, finding no irregularities or suspicious flights.Romania and Poland have both denied the allegations [JURIST report] since they surfaced last year, and earlier this week some members of the European parliament said they will move to have specific references to the two countries hosting secret detention centers removed [Polskie Radio report] from the final COE report, saying that there is not even enough circumstantial evidence to include them. Reuters has more.
[JURIST] During a two-day European Union summit in Brussels [Financial Times report], German Chancellor Angela Merkel [official website in German; BBC profile] told reporters Friday that attempts to revive the European Constitution will be delayed until 2008 and won't occur during Germany's six-month presidency of the European Council as Germany had hoped. The proposed European Constitution [official website, text; JURIST news archive], which requires unanimity for passage, was rejected by French and Dutch referendums [JURIST reports] in 2005. Speaking Thursday after chairing the day's summit, Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel said [EITB report] there is little consensus among member nations [EITB report] on how to proceed with the treaty. European foreign ministers in May said there was little hope [JURIST report] that Germany would be able to achieve substantial progress on ratifying the document during its presidency in the first half of 2007.If enacted, the European constitution would streamline voting procedure on EU laws, provide for an official EU foreign minister, grant new substantive oversight powers to the European Parliament [official website], create a bill of fundamental rights, and transfer new police and immigration powers to the European Union [official website]. Constitution author and former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing said last month that France should vote again on ratification [JURIST report], but Dutch officials have said the constitution is "dead" as far as their voters are concerned [JURIST report]. Bloomberg has more.
[JURIST] The UK Foreign Office [official website] on Friday took control of the case of Australian David Hicks [JURIST news archive], an accused Taliban member who has been detained at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] for over four years. The UK High Court has ruled that Britain should grant citizenship [JURIST report] to Hicks because Hicks' mother is a British citizen, but this week denied an order mandating the UK Home Office [official website] to grant Hicks immediate citizenship. The same order nonetheless directed that jurisdiction over Hicks be transferred to the Foreign Office. Hicks wants to become a British citizen so that the UK Foreign Office can push the US to free him from Guantanamo Bay, as it has successfully done in the past with other British detainees. Hicks' lawyer Stephen Grosz believes that UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw will have to push for Hicks' release because Hicks is one of ten Guantanamo detainees awaiting trial by a military commission [JURIST news archive], a process which the UK government has publicly condemned.Meanwhile, an Australian opposition parliament on Friday accused the government of Australian Prime Minister John Howard [official profile] of abusing Hicks' human rights by defending the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST report] and called for the closure of Guantanamo. From Australia, the Herald Sun has more.
[JURIST] The kickback fraud case against leading class action law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman [firm website] has hit unexpected delays as five judges from the US District Court for the Central District of California [official website], which covers Los Angeles, have recused themselves from the case. The five recusals have been attributed to owning stock in a company sued by Milberg Weiss in the past, having approved attorneys fees in a suit brought by Milberg Weiss, and for having been supported by a former Milberg partner when appointed to the federal bench. Federal statute 28 USC 455 [text] requires federal judges to recuse themselves from any case where their impartiality may be reasonably questioned. The arraignments of two defendants who have agreed to plead guilty [Reuters report] have been postponed until Judge John F. Walter is ready to proceed. The firm faces a 20-count indictment [PDF text; JURIST report] on charges that the firm and name partners David J. Bershad and Steven G. Schulman [statements] paid up to $11.3 million since 1984 to individuals to serve as lead plaintiffs in class-action and shareholder derivative lawsuits. Milberg Weiss allegedly concealed the payments as cash or transferred the payments through other law firms. One lawyer pleaded guilty to funneling money [JURIST report] to a lead plaintiff last month. The Los Angeles Times has more.
[JURIST] US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) [official website] has threatened to subpoena administration documents on its warrantless domestic spying program [JURIST news archive] if US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales does not respond to Specter's requests to answer questions on domestic spying and a host of other issues, including presidential signing statements and last month's FBI raid on Rep. William Jefferson's congressional office [JURIST news archive]. Specter said Thursday that he has not received an adequate response from the Justice Department on requests for Gonzales to appear before the committee, but a DOJ spokesperson said the department is working with Specter to set a date for Gonzales to appear before the committee. AP has more.Specter also said Thursday that he wants to look into the Bush administration's use of signing statements [1993 US DOJ backgrounder] which are issued when a president signs new laws. Bush has used the signing statements to effectively declare any portion of legislation he signs invalid if it differs from his interpretation of presidential and executive powers under Article II [text] of the US constitution. Bush has attached such statements to 750 bills [Boston Globe report] since assuming office, most controversially when he reserved the right to bypass a ban on torture [JURIST report] when signing the 2006 defense spending bill. Bush has never vetoed a bill from Congress, so Congress has never had an opportunity to override an administration decision on what part of a law the administration will in fact follow. Critics of the procedure, including Specter and fellow committee member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) [official website] have said that Bush's signing statements impermissibly intrude upon Congress's power to write and enact laws under Article I [text], which says in part "[a]ll legislative powers herein granted shall be vested" to Congress. The American Bar Association earlier this month launched a bipartisan investigation into the legality of Bush's signing statements [JURIST report], which will report its findings in August. The Boston Globe has more.
[JURIST] The Colorado Court of Appeals [official website] ruled [text] Thursday that a 15-year-old girl can enter into a common-law marriage, remanding a case involving the common-law marriage between a 38-year Willis Rouse and a teenage girl for a lower court to determine the validity of their marriage. The appellate court overruled a decision by a lower court that the girl, who is now over 18-years old, was too young to marry at 15 without judicial approval. Colorado law requires a person to be 18 to marry, or 16 to marry with parental or judicial approval, but Colorado is also one of ten states that recognizes English common-law marriages. The appellate court did not set a minimum age for common-law marriage in Colorado, but noted that English common-law appears to set the minimum marriage age at 14 for males and 12 for females. The court wrote:
Here, we conclude the trial court erroneously held that persons under the age of sixteen may not enter into a valid common law marriage without judicial approval. As mentioned above, common law marriages in Colorado and other jurisdictions are governed by the common law, not statutes, unless the statutes evince an express legislative intent to abrogate or modify the common law. ... However, neither § 14-2-108, § 14-10-11 1(1)(c), nor any other provision of the UMA or UDMA makes any reference, either express or implied, to (1) common law marriages in general; (2) abrogation or modification of the common law regarding the age of consent for common law marriage; or (3) the need for any formalities, such as parental consent, to solemnize a common law marriage between an adult and a minor. Furthermore, the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (UMDA), upon which the UDMA is substantially based, does not address these issues. See generally In re Marriage of Wells, 850 P.2d 694 (Colo. 1993)(Colorado adopted UDMA in 1971, substantially based on UMDA).Thus, in the absence of a statutory provision to the contrary, it appears that Colorado has adopted the common law age of consent for marriage as fourteen for a male and twelve for a female, which existed under English common law. Nevertheless, we need only hold here that a fifteen-year-old female may enter into a valid common law marriage.
[JURIST] An appeals court in Japan [JURIST news archive] on Friday dismissed the appeal of a lawsuit brought in 1997 by 42 Chinese plaintiffs against the Japanese government and ten Japanese corporations seeking compensation for forced labor, saying the statute of limitations has expired on claims arising out of events that happened during World War II. The Court acknowledged that the Japanese government and many corporations profited from forced labor during the war [law review note], but refused to allow the 847.5 million yen (US$7.25 million) claim to proceed. The plaintiffs said they planned to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Japan [official website, in English]. The Tokyo High Court [official website, in English] has consistently ruled against forced labor compensation claims arising from World War II events. Last July, the Court dismissed [JURIST report] a suit brought by Chinese plaintiffs for a germ attack, and last June, the Court overturned a 2001 district court ruling [JURIST report] granting compensation to a Chinese citizen brought to Japan to work in the mines, saying that the Japanese government had no duty to rescue the Chinese plaintiff from the mines. The Court has also cited as a general precedent the 1972 normalization of diplomatic relations between the countries, saying the agreement settled all claims between citizens of the two countries. In March, a district court dismissed a similar suit [JURIST report]. AP has more.
[JURIST] The Maryland American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [advocacy websites] filed a class action lawsuit [complaint, PDF] in Baltimore Circuit Court [official website] Thursday alleging that Baltimore police systematically arrest people and hold them for hours without charge [press release]. The lawsuit - which names Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley [official website], present and past police officials, state corrections officials and individual police officers as defendants - also alleges that officials at the Maryland Central Booking and Intake Center often perform strip searches and body cavity searches on people arrested for minor offenses such as loitering, impeding or obstructing pedestrian traffic and disturbing the peace, as well as detain them in dirty and overcrowded jail cells. The suit claims that policed arrested more than 76,000 people last year, and that 30 percent of those cases were dismissed after a preliminary review. The ACLU-MD believes that the Baltimore police department rewards its officers for the quantity of arrests, and tends to make unreasonable and unconstitutional arrests as a result. City Solicitor Ralph Tyler called the allegations "truly wild," adding that the plaintiffs will not be able to prove them. ACLU attorney David Rocah said that the lawsuit aims to change police policy and offers a remedy proposal [PDF text], including creating an incentive program for police officers to make arrests that are likely to be prosecuted and expunging the record of arrestees when they are not prosecuted. AP has more. The Baltimore Sun has local coverage.
[JURIST] The Australian Senate [official website] on Thursday narrowly voted down [official record] a motion to disallow a regulation approved by Australia Governor-General Michael Jeffrey [official website] allowing the federal government to effectively veto the Civil Unions Bill 2006 [text], recently passed by the legislature in the of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) [official website] federal district. The ACT bill would have placed civil unions on equal legal footing with marriage. Australian Attorney General Phillip Ruddock said [press release] Thursday that the ACT government passed the bill knowing that it would be invalidated, and that it was intended to attract media attention away from unpopular ACT budget cuts that were implemented at roughly the same time. The federal government overrode the civil union law [JURIST report] earlier this week under a provision [text] in the ACT Self-Government Act of 1988 permitting federal government vetoes of ACT bills. Thursday's Senate vote means that the bill is permanently quashed. ACT Attorney General Simon Corbell condemned the federal government's override [press release] on Tuesday, saying that the ACT has the right to enact laws governing its people, and that the burden is now on the federal government to tell ACT how the law should be rewritten so that it may be re-introduced before the ACT parliament. The Sydney Morning Herald has more.
[JURIST] Australian Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock [official profile], responding Friday to a independent review of new security laws, defended the government's power to define which groups are terrorist organizations subject to criminal penalties. The Security Legislation Review Committee [materials], a public and independent body charged with reviewing the Security Acts dealing with terrorism, released a 262-page report [PDF text] Thursday recommending that the governmental process of black-listing terrorist groups be more transparent so that the groups may respond to the charges before condemnation, and that the definitional criteria be made public. Ruddock, however, who established the committee last October as required by Section 4 of the Security Amendment Legislation (Terrorism) Act of 2002 [text], said that the government could compromise information received from other nations or the safety of intelligence agents if forced to reveal why groups have been identified as terrorist organizations. The report also criticized the new terror laws for not having sunset provisions, recommended that the current practice of imposing strict liability for several criminal actions carrying heavy penalties be eliminated, and said that the crime of "advocating the doing of a terrorist act" should be restricted in scope for clarity. AAP has more.
[JURIST] Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, Iraq's deputy justice minister, has said that Shiite militias [CFR backgrounder] control Iraq's prison system and that Iraq "cannot control the prisons." Yei said that Shiite militiamen free other militia members that have been convicted of major crimes, while executing Sunni inmates. In a letter to US Army Maj. Gen. John Gardner, commander of US-run prisons in Iraq, Yei asked US authorities not to transfer US-run prisons and detainees into the hands of Iraqi security forces, saying that the Iraqi Justice Ministry is not yet prepared to run the facilities and expressing fear that Shiite militias would take control of the transferred prisons. The US has announced plans to turn over four American-run prisons to the Iraqi government, including Abu Ghraib [JURIST news archive], but the plans have stalled [JURIST report] until Gardner can make sure that the Iraqi-controlled prisons would match the standards of US-run facilities. Gardner has said that US authorities will transfer Abu Ghraib in the next few months in a gradual handover, but not until "the Iraqi Corrections system have demonstrated the ability to maintain the required standards, especially in the areas of care and custody."Iraqi-run prisons came under scrutiny when the US Army found tortured detainees at a secret Interior Ministry facility in central Baghdad [JURIST report] last year. Yei said that Shiite militias control the prisons run by the Interior and Defense ministries, and that the militias infiltrate the Iraqi government. Shiite militias including the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army [Wikipedia backgrounders] enjoy the support of members of the Iraqi parliament because political parties back the militias. Jonathan Finer and Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post have more.
[JURIST] Defense lawyers for the US Marines accused of killing 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha [JURIST report] last November plan to scrutinize the authenticity of the videotape [AP report] described in the TIME magazine report [text] that first prompted an investigation into the deaths, should charges be filed against the Marines. Attorneys will also question the credibility of Hammurabi Human Rights, the two-person human rights group that provided the videotape to TIME. The videotape depicts the aftermath of the deaths at Haditha, where Marines originally reported that 15 civilians died from a roadside bomb. Questions remain why Hammurabi waited four months to release the videotape to the mainstream media. Defense attorneys say that the videotape offers no proof that the video was taken either in Haditha, or last November after the deaths occurred. TIME initially reported, when it broke the story in March, that a "journalism student" shot the video and handed it over to Hammurabi, a group that TIME reported to be connected to the well-known group Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website]. TIME later retracted its statements, saying that Hammurabi had no connection to HRW, and that the "journalism student" was actually Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi, the 43-year old founder of Hammurabi. Attorneys representing the Marines are also suspicious of the fact that family members of both employees of Hammurabi have relatives that are suspected insurgents serving time in local prisons. The US military and Iraqi officials [JURIST report] are conducting parallel probes into the deaths of 24 civilians last November in Haditha, where the US military initially reported that 15 civilians had been killed in an insurgent bombing. A preliminary US investigation [JURIST report] suggested the victims had been shot and had not provoked the Marines. The Washington Times has background [op-ed] on the Hammurabi video. Reuters has more.
[JURIST] The US military on Friday said that the Army's Criminal Investigation Command [official website] will conduct an investigation [CENTCOM press release] into the deaths of three detainees in US custody in the Salahaddin province of Iraq, located north of Baghdad. The investigation into deaths, which occurred on or around May 9, results from reported suspicions from soldiers.The investigation comes amid several probes into Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of US forces. A continuing investigation into the death of 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha [JURIST news archive] after a roadside bomb exploded has thus far determined that the deaths were unprovoked [JURIST report]. In a separate investigation, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman [JURIST report] are accused of murder and conspiracy in the death of an Iraqi in Hamandiya [JURIST report] in April. The Marines allegedly dragged the unarmed man out of his home, shot him, and placed a rifle and shovel near his body to make him look like an insurgent burying a bomb. In yet another investigation, US soldiers have been cleared of wrongdoing in the death of 11 civilians in Ishaqi [JURIST report]. Reuters has more.
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