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Daily Archives: April 12, 2015

Earned Income Tax Credit in the United States

“The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides substantial assistance to low-income working families with children. The credit encourages work for many, though may reduce work or wages for some. Counted in the poverty measure, the EITC would have been credited with lifting 6.5 million people out of poverty in 2012. The credit fails to provide substantial benefits to workers without children, is complicated, has a high erroneous payment rate, and creates substantial marriage penalties for some low- and moderate-income couples. Extending the credit to workers without children or replacing it with an individual worker credit could solve some or all of these criticisms.”

The international monetary and financial system: Its Achilles heel and what to do about it

Presentation by Mr Claudio Borio, Head of Monetary and Economic Department of the BIS, at the INET conference “New Economic Thinking: Liberté, Égalité, Fragilité”, Paris, 9 April 2015. “This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie… Continue Reading

DARPA Open Catalog

“Welcome to the DARPA Open Catalog, which contains a curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications. DARPA sponsors fundamental and applied research in a variety of areas that may lead to experimental results and reusable technology designed to benefit multiple government domains. The DARPA Open Catalog organizes publicly releasable material from DARPA programs. DARPA… Continue Reading

Report – Metadata collection of Americans’ international calls began in 1992

Brad Health – USAToday: “The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. For more than two decades, the Justice Department and… Continue Reading

Consensus-as-a-service: a brief report on the emergence of permissioned, distributed ledger systems

Via Great Wall of Numbers this Report by Tim Sanson, April 6, 2015 – Highlights: •”Distributed ledgers and cryptocurrency systems are fundamentally different. •The key difference involves how transactions are validated: Bitcoin uses pseudonymous and anonymous nodes to validate transactions whereas distributed ledgers require legal identities – permissioned nodes to validate transactions. •Consequently, distributed ledgers… Continue Reading

A critical analysis of Facebook’s Revised Policies and Terms

From social media service to advertising network – A critical analysis of Facebook’s Revised Policies and Terms DRAFT 31 March 2015. The authors are part of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT/Centre for Intellectual Property Rights(ICRI/CIR) of KU Leuven (www.icri.be), the department of Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication (SMIT) of the Vrije Universiteit… Continue Reading