Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts

Examines bank practices that put consumers at risk, including lack of information on fees, disproportionate overdraft penalties, and mandatory arbitration or fee-sharing provisions in a legal dispute. Includes a model disclosure box and recommendations

COMMISSION STAFF WORKING PAPER IMPACT ASSESSMENT Common Agricultural Policy towards 2020 ANNEX 8 {COM(2011) 625 final} {COM(2011) 626 final} {COM(2011) 627 final} {COM(2011) 628 final} {COM(2011) 629 final} {COM(2011) 630 final} {COM(2011) 631 final} {SEC(2011) 1154 final}. SEC (2011) 1153 final, 12.10.2011

En los últimos tempos la educación infantil ha adquirido especial relevancia en el marco de las políticas educacionales de los países latinoamericanos y en especial de Chile (CONTRERAS, HERRERA; LEYTON, 2007; DIEZ, 2011; DUSSAILLANT, 2009; TOKMAN, 2010). La investigación centra su atención en la calidad educativa y, en particular, en los procesos autoevaluativos que demuestran los niños de edades tempranas. Desde una perspectiva paradigmática cuantitativa, apoyada de reportes cualitativos, el estudio presenta la capacidad explicativa de las variables metacognición, autorregulación, autoeficacia, lenguaje y autoconcepto, respecto del desarrollo de la autoevaluación y su vinculación con mejores niveles de logros en párvulos de cinco a seis años. Los hallazgos muestran que la autoevaluación es una dimensión que muestra diversos niveles de expresión en el grupo investigado, fuertemente influenciada por las profesionales del área, tal como se aprecia en los discursos infantiles. Además, las variables analizadas presentan diferentes grados de contribución a la explicación de la autoevaluación en el grupo estudiado

Checks And Balances: 2015 Update

Checking accounts are a vital financial tool, utilized by 9 in 10 American households. This report provides the third annual evaluation of disclosure, overdraft, and dispute resolution policies and practices of 45 of the nation's 50 largest retail banks, totaling 66 percent of all domestic deposit volume. Pew's Model Summary Disclosure Box for Checking Accounts served as the template for rating each bank's disclosure documents to determine best or good practices for overdraft and dispute resolution. Additionally, this report identified trends among the 32 institutions examined in all three Checks and Balances reports to date. To ensure that all checking accounts are safe and transparent, Pew has also developed a set of policy recommendations and urges the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to incorporate these policies in new rules on overdraft practices and arbitration clauses

A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool

Checks and Balances: 2014 Update

This report is the fourth in a series by The Pew Charitable Trusts examining key checking account terms and conditions. In our first report, in 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts", we studied and reported on the disclosures from the 10 largest banks in the United States by deposit volume. Our second report, in 2012, "Still Risky: An Update on the Safety and Transparency of Checking Accounts" expanded the research and examined the disclosures from the 12 largest banks as well as the 12 largest credit unions. In both reports we highlighted our policy recommendations, which urge the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to write new rules requiring financial institutions to: * Summarize key information about terms and fees in a concise, uniform format. * Provide accountholders with clear, comprehensive terms and pricing information for all available overdraft options.* Make overdraft penalty fees reasonable and proportional to the financial institution's costs in providing the overdraft loan. * Post deposits and withdrawals in a fully disclosed, objective, and neutral manner that does not maximize overdraft fees.* Prohibit pre-dispute mandatory binding arbitration clauses in checking account agreements, which prevent accountholders from accessing courts to challenge unfair and deceptive practices or other legal violations.This study and our 2013 report, "Checks and Balances: Measuring Checking Accounts' Safety and Transparency", rate the 50 largest banks based on how well their disclosure, overdraft, and dispute resolution practices meet these policy recommendations

Querying a regulatory model for compliant building design audit

The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a BIM model containing the design information, an electronic regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computerised representations. There have been numerous approaches to computer-aided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of standardisation. The current research project therefore focuses on using an open standard regulatory knowledge and BIM representations in conjunction with open standard executable compliant design workflows to automate the compliance audit process. This paper provides an overview of different approaches to access information from a regulatory model representation. The paper then describes the use of a purpose-built high-level domain specific query language to extract regulatory information as part of the effort to automate manual design procedures for compliance audit

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours