TL;DR: Barbara Smiley, a resident of California, sued Citibank, alleging that it violated California law by charging late fees to her credit card account as discussed by the authors, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.
Abstract: In 1992, Barbara Smiley, a resident of California, sued Citibank, alleging that it violated California law by charging late fees to her credit card account. During the litigation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – the primary regulator for national banks such as Citibank – issued a proposed regulation specifying that late fees were “interest”; under federal law, this meant that Citibank was bound solely by the law of the state where its credit card subsidiary was situated – South Dakota. When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, twenty-five states and several consumer organizations signed onto briefs supporting Smiley; fifteen states, the American Bankers Association, and the OCC supported Citibank. The Supreme Court ruled for Citibank, deferring to the OCC. The Court acknowledged but discarded the fact that the OCC seemed to have issued the regulation because of the ongoing litigation, endorsing the ability of a federal agency to issue regulations to sway pending litigation in favor of the companies it supervised. The OCC's intervention in Smiley v. Citibank was just one part of a sweeping campaign to lift constraints on national banks, allowing them to enter new businesses while blocking efforts by states to rein them in. The OCC, in turn, was just one of several federal agencies that spent most of the past two decades fulfilling the wishes of different segments of the financial sector. The Federal Reserve issued a series of decisions enabling banks to expand into the securities business and later declined to enforce consumer protection statutes against the nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies. All four major banking agencies (the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the Office of Thrift Supervision [OTS], and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC]) relaxed the capital requirements governing structured financial products, enabling banks to ramp up their securitization businesses without setting aside large amounts of capital.
TL;DR: In this paper, the MMR system provides mechanisms for forming a mixed media document that includes media of at least two types (e.g., printed paper as a first medium and digital content and/or web link as a second medium).
Abstract: A M ixed M edia R eality (MMR) system and associated techniques are disclosed. The MMR system provides mechanisms for forming a mixed media document that includes media of at least two types (e.g., printed paper as a first medium and digital content and/or web link as a second medium). In one particular embodiment, the MMR system includes an action processor and method, and MMR documents with an associated action. The MMR document structure is particularly advantageous because the ability to specify different actions for different MMR documents, combined with the ability to create any number of MMR documents for a particular location on any media, allows the MMR architecture to serve as a universal trigger or initiator for additional processing. In other words, addition processing or actions can be triggered or initiated based on MMR recognition. The action processor receives the output of the MMR recognition process which yields an MMR document including at least one action. The action processor executes that action which includes various commands to the MMR system or other systems coupled to the MMR system. The MMR system architecture is advantageous because an action can be executed by pointing the capture device at a block of text, and the action is performed. Example actions include retrieving the text in electronic form to the capture device, retrieving the specification for the action, inserting data to a MMR document, transferring data between documents, purchasing items, authoring actions or reviewing historical information about actions. The MMR system includes a variety of user applications (one or more actions) initiated by the MMR recognition of a text patch such as information retrieval for a travel guide book, stock listings or advertisements; information capture such as recording content from a conference, recording and storing multimedia associated with the document, capturing information for a calendar and on the fly authoring; purchasing media files for storage on any part of an MMR document.
TL;DR: A system and method for automatically changing the operation of a mobile device in response to a presence of information is described in this article, where the system determines an information capture device is proximate to text, automatically changes operation of the capture device to a certain mode, captures the text, and performs an action associated with the captured text.
Abstract: A system and method for automatically changing the operation of a mobile device in response to a presence of information is described. In some examples, the system determines an information capture device is proximate to text, automatically changes operation of the capture device to a certain mode, captures the text, and performs an action associated with the captured text.
TL;DR: The road map of a distributed modeling framework for plant-wide process monitoring is introduced, based on which the whole plant- wide process is decomposed into different blocks, and statistical data models are constructed in those blocks.
Abstract: With the growing complexity of the modern industrial process, monitoring large-scale plant-wide processes has become quite popular. Unlike traditional processes, the measured data in the plant-wide process pose great challenges to information capture, data management, and storage. More importantly, it is difficult to efficiently interpret the information hidden within those data. In this paper, the road map of a distributed modeling framework for plant-wide process monitoring is introduced. Based on this framework, the whole plant-wide process is decomposed into different blocks, and statistical data models are constructed in those blocks. For online monitoring, the results obtained from different blocks are integrated through the decision fusion algorithm. A detailed case study is carried out for performance evaluation of the plant-wide monitoring method. Research challenges and perspectives are discussed and highlighted for future work.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss how parties can capture the regulatory process using information that allows them to control or at least dominate regulatory outcomes (the information capture phenomenon), and trace the problem back to a series of failures by Congress and the courts to require some filtering of the information flowing through the system (filter failure).
Abstract: There are no provisions in administrative law for regulating the flow of information coming into or leaving the system, or for ensuring that regulatory participants can keep up with a rising tide of issues, details, and technicalities. Indeed, a number of doctrinal refinements, originally intended to ensure that executive branch decisions are made in the sunlight, inadvertently create incentives for participants to overwhelm the administrative system with complex information, causing much of the decisionmaking processes to remain, for all practical purposes, in the dark. As these agency decisions become increasingly obscure to all but the most well-informed insiders, administrative accountability is undermined as entire sectors of affected parties find they can no longer afford to participate in this expensive system. Pluralistic oversight, productive judicial review, and opportunities for intelligent agency decisionmaking are all put under significant strain in a system that refuses to manage - and indeed tends to encourage - excessive information. This Article first discusses how parties can capture the regulatory process using information that allows them to control or at least dominate regulatory outcomes (the information capture phenomenon). It then traces the problem back to a series of failures by Congress and the courts to require some filtering of the information flowing through the system (filter failure). Rather than filtering information, the incentives tilt in the opposite direction and encourage participants to err on the side of providing too much rather than too little information. Evidence is then offered to show how this uncontrolled and excessive information is taking a toll on the basic objectives of administrative governance. The Article closes with a series of unconventional but relatively straightforward reforms that offer some hope of bringing information capture under control.