Learning Objects Repositories are becoming increasingly available on the Internet. Learning Objects Pool (LOP) built around the “stock exchange” metaphor, brings a new concept of Learning Objects Repositories pushing users motivation to produce good LOs as well as increasing the cooperation between users, either by submitting suggestions and comments or rating existing LOs. To achieve such high...

Current peer-to-peer content distribution networks do not effectively encourage users to act as seeders; this results in suboptimal behavior as many users disconnect immediately upon retrieving files. Reputation systems can incentivize users to remain active and seed files. Unfortunately, existing reputation systems are unsatisfactory – they do not accurately capture a node’s net contribution i...

the study was designed to analyze credit receipt and enterprise performance by small scale agro based enterprises in the niger delta region of nigeria. a multistage sampling technique was adopted in selecting 264 agro based enterprises and 96 agro based enterprises that accessed informal and formal credit respectively. the heckman model was used to examine the factors affecting amount of inform...

We present novel empirical evidence on the use of off-balance sheet financing by publiclytraded, U.S. nonfinancial firms. We find that about 5 percent of nonfinancial firms reported using a special purpose financing vehicle (SPV) to finance receivables in 2006. At the origination of the off-balance sheet financing program, firms experienced abnormal increases in stock prices on the order of 2 p...

A spate of identity thefts, data breaches and relentless media coverage of these issues has brought security issues to the forefront of not only consumers but also policy makers. This is even more important for financial industry. Users trust their banks to protect their financial assets and information. Unfortunately, hackers also realize that financial firms are an attractive target. Phishing...

internal audit is a process affected by an entity ‘s board of directors, management and other personnel, designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of objectives relating to operations, reporting and compliance. this definition reflects certain fundamental concepts. internal control is: • geared to achievement of objectives in one or more categories operations, repor...

Rogel Patawaran is cofounder of iQSecure Solutions, Inc., a secure web mail company, which began in 2002 and is currently based in Santa Monica, California. Its unique service enables hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offi ces the opportunity to have secure web-based video and telephone conferencing by simply switching online services off ered by this innovative company. In addition, he is cofou...

The decentralized I owe you (IOU) transaction network Ripple is gaining prominence as a fast, lowcost and efficient method for performing same and crosscurrency payments. Ripple keeps track of IOU credit its users have granted to their business partners or friends, and settles transactions between two connected Ripple wallets by appropriately changing credit values on the connecting paths. Simi...

A Fair Queueing Algorithm is proposed for data services in an integrated voice/data CDMA system. We introduce short-term and long-term fairness concepts to allocate data users fairly. Using these concepts, we propose Weighted Fair Queueing with Status Control(WFQS) in the consideration of a Generalized Processor Sharing(GPS) ¤uid-¤ow model. This proposed scheme allocates resources using channel...

This Appendix contains an overview of debt collection technologies in the U.S. and its recent evolution. In the first section we summarize how debt is collected in the U.S. Section 2 focuses on collection technology and its recent evolution. The last section describes the data sources used in the analysis. 1 Overview of the Debt Collection Process in the US We briefly describe the debt collecti...