Keeping them honest -2

I first wrote about an e-governance initiative by Reserve Bank of India here http://www.decisionstats.com/2008/08/keeping-them-honest/

for finance related customer complaints against banks. Another great example of this is

an American website by the American Internal Revenue Service here at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f211.pdf

This is true for even Americans having offshore accounts. You need to pay taxes. And if you notice someone who doesn’t you can complain and get a bounty.

Note you cannot just complain against your ex boss anonymously ( yet) , but you can also file a named complaint on offshore accounts. You can also

declare tax evasion if your company is doing creative accounting , not paying contractors overtime pay, health benefits etc using regulatory arbitrage especially if these relate to cross border transactions that make things which are illegal to do in US but legal to do in say  in Indian offshoring firms. And companies that get tax breaks or a business expense deduction for doing so. You not only help your country and conscience, you actually get rich for doing so in the form of a federal payout.( see below)

image

And all at the click of a mouse and stroke of a keyboard.

Process for Evaluating Whistleblower’s Claim
  • A threshold requirement for any award under 7623 is that the information must lead to judicial or administrative action – an audit or investigation resulting in the collection of proceeds.
  • An analyst in the Whistleblower Office will consider the information provided by the whistleblower. The IRS has to decide that the case is worth pursuing.
  • In the case of a large corporate taxpayer whose returns are audited each year, an administrative action can mean the creation of a new issue under the Audit Plan or a change in the way information about an issue is collected or analyzed, which would not otherwise have occurred without the information provided by the whistleblower.

But if you are scared of doing so – but still want to clear your conscience without doing a Deep Throat – here is something the Obamas have put in place

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Advanced Services from WordPress

http://en.wordpress.com/advanced-services/

 

Advanced Services

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  • Adobe Air for Art- Tweeters

    image

    A batch mate of mine working at Adobe India’s Noida development product management had tipped me to Adobe Air, but I thought it was typical Adobe hubris- but after several months Adobe Air clearly seems to be stealing a march over any other RIA ( Including Silverlight on which I have written and tagged before)

    Above- Screenshot of how a Twitter Desktop Client, TweetDeck looks like.TweetDeck helps organize twitter friends in groups thus helping make sense of the twitter screen.

    Man with Cat- Matt Cutts, who cuts spam.

    Recent Tweet by Matt-

    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/2008-founders-letter.html

    And on Cats, a repeat

    blogcat2-thumb

    Friday Poem: To be or not to bee

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/9375908/In-Case-I-Dont-See-You-Again

    If u were me And I were you

    Tell me something ‘What would you do?

    Live life fading ,Like a rose past its prime.

    And then fall withered, When its closing time

    Or would you turn, Like a marigold to the sun

    Just be beautiful ,Thus please everyone.

     

    (Photo Credit-
    http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2009/01/the_rose_it_nev.html
    Boston Rose Museum Closing down)
    Poem from my personal collection downloadable for free from Scribd
    http://www.scribd.com/doc/9375908/In-Case-I-Dont-See-You-Again

    SugarCRM : The Cloud is Open

    http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html

    image

    Pour some sugar on the cloud, and wish you could ask aloud-

    can I be small, cut my costs and still have a CRM – The Answer is Ahem-

    SUGARCRM

     

    Coming up (Technical Review)

    KXEN as in Customer Survey

    KXEN is sharing its survey results transparently unlike other survey results that hide their methodology behind language of English rather than language of Maths. Well KXEN doesn’t and they shared the raw data.

    Here are some of them-

    Answer Options Strongly disagree + disagree Strongly agree + agree
    KXEN Solutions are easy to install, configure and administrate. 6.12% 93.88%
    KXEN Solutions are easy to use. 0.00% 100.00%
    KXEN Graphical User Interface (GUI) is user-friendly. 10.00% 90.00%
    KXEN on-line helps & documentation are comprehensive, explicit, clear and well-illustrated. 31.91% 68.09%
    KXEN provides you with all functionalities you expected. 17.24% 82.76%
    KXEN delivers high quality results and outputs. 5.17% 94.83%
    Projects involving KXEN are fast implemented. 5.17% 94.83%
    KXEN connexions to data sources are reliable and effective. 4.00% 96.00%
    Service(s) received was(were) performed by attentive and professional KXEN people. 0.00% 100.00%
    KXEN is the main datamining solution you are using. 20.75% 79.25%
    KXEN is the main datamining solution in your company. 36.96% 63.04%
    KXEN embraces a great datamining methodology. 3.85% 96.15%
    KXEN is really helpful in your day to day operations. 6.00% 94.00%
    KXEN helped you improve your overall business. 2.04% 97.96%
    KXEN speeded up your modeling activities. 1.89% 98.11%
    KXEN helped increase the value of Predictive Analytics in your company. 4.35% 95.65%
    KXEN is strategic for your activity. 10.00% 90.00%
    KXEN is strategic for your company. 20.00% 80.00%
    You are told about KXEN updates and latest news. 13.04% 86.96%
    You would recommend KXEN to a colleague. 0.00% 100.00%
    You would recommend KXEN to a friend. 2.04% 97.96%

     

     

    and the summarization

    image

    and to conclude

    image

    Ajay- I had a look at the raw data and had discussions with Rexer analytics ( an interview coming up) on how they do their independent surveys. The above results seem specific, measurable and transparent from a customer point of view.

    Visit www.kxen.com for better understanding.

    Disclaimer- I am a consultant on social media to KXEN

     

    R or SAS —– R and SAS ?

    http://support.sas.com/rnd/app/studio/Rinterface2.html

    R Interface Coming to SAS/IML® Studio

    While readers of the New York Times may have learned about R in recent weeks, it’s not news to many at SAS.

    “R is a leading language for developing new statistical methods,” said Bob Rodriguez, Senior Director of Statistical Development at SAS. “Our new PhD developers learned R in their graduate programs and are quite versed in it.”

    R is a matrix-based programming language that allows you to program statistical methods reasonably quickly. It’s open source software, and many add-on packages for R have emerged, providing statisticians with convenient access to new research. Many new statistical methods are first programmed in R.

    While SAS is committed to providing the new statistical methodologies that the marketplace demands and will deliver new work more quickly with a recent decoupling of the analytical product releases from Base SAS, a commercial software vendor can only put out new work so fast. And never as as fast as a professor and a grad student writing an academic implementation of brand-new methodology.

    Both R and SAS are here to stay, and finding ways to make them work better with each other is in the best interests of our customers.

    “We know a lot of our users have both R and SAS in their tool kit, and we decided to make it easier for them to access R by making it available in the SAS environment,” said Rodriguez. “Our first interface to R will be in an upcoming version of SAS/IML Studio (currently known as SAS Stat Studio), scheduled for this summer.”

    The SAS/IML Studio interface allows you to integrate R functionality with IML or SAS programs. You can also exchange data between SAS and R as data sets or matrices.

    “This is just the first step,” said Radhika Kulkarni, Vice President of Advanced Analytics. “We are busy working on an R interface that can be surfaced in the SAS server or via other SAS clients. For example, users will be able to interface with R through the IML procedure, possibly as soon as the first part of 2010.“

    SAS/IML Studio is distributed with SAS/IML software. Stay tuned for details on availability.

     

    This is not to be co related by recent announcement by Mr Gentleman who invented the R language that if needed they will enforce legal action if terms of creative common licensing are not enforced.

    It is a sad day for science when Gentleman professors are issuing mild legal threats just to make sure some pseudo science people are satisfied in  their intellectual hubris even though they themselves innovated R from language S. Revolution Computing does not want to be like the commercial maker of S Plus so they are supporting this legal position. Sad day when lawyers have to enforce code share. Maybe the R Project should start updating their website which looks like wreck across the auto bahn. Maybe Jim should visit the R users conference so the R Core team can see his horns.

    Newton sued Leibnitz, and in the last days of his life, was tasked with enforcing a paper currency which he did rigorously. Good for the world’s currency, bad for science.