Best practice in the regulation of payment services

Payment services are, at their simplest, services for moving money around the economy. These services carry risks for the provider and the customer, from credit and insolvency risk, through to fraud and ‘mere’ errors. Different societies deal with, manage and allocate these risks differently. There are a number of similarities in how these services are regulated, and the careful observer can identify patterns and themes. As the economy continues to be heavily reliant on payment services for its efficient operation, commentators and governments have taken a keen interest in these services. This paper examines the six key regulatory risks for payment services: credit risk, efficiency risk, product mis-match, product failure, transactional failure and privacy. Previous articles have considered recent industry and technological developments in the payments industry, many of which post-date the existing regulatory regime in most jurisdictions. This paper draws conclusions about how a best practice regime might address recent innovations such as mobile payments, online payment services and ‘stored value’ cards. While there is significant commonality between regulatory regimes, there is not yet a common approach to many payment services issues. The goal of this project (and this paper) is to develop a better or best practice framework for the regulation of payment services, drawing on the strengths and weaknesses of the existing regimes. A best practice regime is identified – including both the elements or building blocks, and how and when they should be applied. The elements, based on analysis of key national regimes, are fair play rules, systemic stability, an active supervisor, broad scope, licensing, disclosure, obligations of the parties, liability, dispute resolution and privacy. The paper also explains how these elements can be combined to construct a coherent overall regime. The result is a recommended best practice model involving licensing, disclosure, conduct and redress standards in a three-tiered structure (thus providing a lighter-touch regime for low value products and a more intensive regime for more substantial banking-style products)

Magnetic field stabilization for high-accuracy mass measurements on exotic nuclides

The magnetic-field stability of a mass spectrometer plays a crucial role in precision mass measurements. In the case of mass determination of short-lived nuclides with a Penning trap, major causes of instabilities are temperature fluctuations in the vicinity of the trap and pressure fluctuations in the liquid helium cryostat of the superconducting magnet. Thus systems for the temperature and pressure stabilization of the Penning trap mass spectrometer ISOLTRAP at the ISOLDE facility at CERN have been installed. A reduction of the fluctuations by at least one order of magnitude downto dT=+/-5mK and dp=+/-50mtorr has been achieved, which corresponds to a relative frequency change of 2.7x10^{-9} and 1.5x10^{-10}, respectively. With this stabilization the frequency determination with the Penning trap only shows a linear temporal drift over several hours on the 10 ppb level due to the finite resistance of the superconducting magnet coils.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure

Development of engineering design tools to help reduce apple bruising

A large percentage of apples are wasted each year due to damage such as bruising. The apple journey from orchard to supermarket is very complex and apples are subjected to a variety of static and dynamic loads that could result in this damage occurring. The main aim of this work was to carry out numerical modelling to develop a design tool that can be used to optimise the design of harvesting and sorting equipment and packaging media to reduce the likelihood of apple bruise formation resulting from impact loads. An experimental study, along with analytical calculations, varying apple drop heights and counterface material properties, were used to provide data to validate the numerical modelling. Good correlation was seen between the models and experiments and this approach combined with previous work on static modelling should provide a comprehensive design tool for reducing the likelihood of apple bruising occurring

Happiness is assortative in online social networks

Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed as the correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent results indicate that beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as "loneliness" can be assortative in a social network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networks it is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social ties are mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show that general happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record of their individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is the first result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply that online social networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real social networks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalence of online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an important instrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties. Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in "real life".Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Characterising pressure and bruising in apple fruit

A large percentage of apples are wasted each year due to damage such as bruising. The apple journey from orchard to supermarket is very complex and apples are subjected to a variety of static and dynamic loads that could result in this damage occurring. The aim of this work was to use a novel ultrasonic technique to study apple contact areas and stresses under static loading that may occur, for example, in bulk storage bins used during harvesting. These results were used to identify load thresholds above which unacceptable damage occurs. They were also used to validate output from a finite element model, which will ultimately be developed into a packaging design tool to help reduce the likelihood of apple damage occurring

Sensing Subjective Well-being from Social Media

Subjective Well-being(SWB), which refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, is of great use to public policy-makers as well as economic, sociological research, etc. Traditionally, the measurement of SWB relies on time-consuming and costly self-report questionnaires. Nowadays, people are motivated to share their experiences and feelings on social media, so we propose to sense SWB from the vast user generated data on social media. By utilizing 1785 users' social media data with SWB labels, we train machine learning models that are able to "sense" individual SWB from users' social media. Our model, which attains the state-by-art prediction accuracy, can then be used to identify SWB of large population of social media users in time with very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figures, 2 tables, 10th International Conference, AMT 2014, Warsaw, Poland, August 11-14, 2014. Proceeding