The Effect of the Gramm Leach Bliley Act on the Financial Services Industry

The financial services industry has fascinated me since high school when I participated in a University Program focusing on the industry. During this time I became familiar with the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) and other legislation that was reshaping the industry. In this paper I shed light on key events and acts that have transformed the financial services industry with a particular focus on the GLBA. I argue that the GLBA is not revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. Second, I argue that the consumer privacy portion of the GLBA is the most vital part because of the massive amount of personal information available in today’s market. Finally, the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act impacts me directly since I hope to become a Financial Advisor and the provisions of the Act will permit me to sell all types of financial instruments

On the contribution of exchange interactions to the Vlasov equation

Exchange effects play an important role in determining the equilibrium properties of dense matter systems, as well as for magnetic phenomena. There exists an extensive literature concerning, e.g., the effects of exchange interactions on the equation of state of dense matter. Here, a generalization of the Vlasov equation to include exchange effects is presented allowing for electromagnetic mean fields, thus incorporating some of the dynamic effects due to the exchange interactions. Treating the exchange term perturbatively, the correction to classical Langmuir waves in plasmas is found, and the results are compared with previous work. It is noted that the relative importance of exchange effects scales similarly with density and temperature as particle dispersive effects, but that the overall magnitude is sensitive to the details of the specific problem. The implications of our results are discussed.Comment: 9 page

The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale

The common wisdom is that distributed transactions do not scale. But what if distributed transactions could be made scalable using the next generation of networks and a redesign of distributed databases? There would be no need for developers anymore to worry about co-partitioning schemes to achieve decent performance. Application development would become easier as data placement would no longer determine how scalable an application is. Hardware provisioning would be simplified as the system administrator can expect a linear scale-out when adding more machines rather than some complex sub-linear function, which is highly application specific. In this paper, we present the design of our novel scalable database system NAM-DB and show that distributed transactions with the very common Snapshot Isolation guarantee can indeed scale using the next generation of RDMA-enabled network technology without any inherent bottlenecks. Our experiments with the TPC-C benchmark show that our system scales linearly to over 6.5 million new-order (14.5 million total) distributed transactions per second on 56 machines.Comment: 12 page