(CFD.net.au – Contract for Difference, Share, Forex, ETFs, Commodities Traders) – The Housing Industry Association (HIA) says the take up of the Federal Government’s First Home Saver Account has been overshadowed by the boost to the First Home Owners’ Grant and low interest rates.

The Account has been available for a year and offers tax discounts and co-payments, to encourage savings for first home purchases.

The HIA’s chief economist, Ben Phillips, says the Government should be promoting the Account, to coincide with the expiry of the boost to the First-Home Owners’ Grant at the end of the year.

“The current stock of the Home Saver Account is about $13 million across all the banks in Australia,” he said.

“So at the moment the take-up has been extremely low and that’s been influenced entirely, really, by the First Home Owners’ Grant.

“I think of new home loans around 30 per cent nearly at their peak, were devoted to first home buyers, so really the first home saver scheme was swamped very much by the First Home Owners’ Grant.”

Ben Phillips believes the savings scheme would grow in popularity if it was better advertised by the Government.

“So long as the Government advertises the program solidly over the coming… the remainder of this year and early into next year, I think you’ll see a much stronger take up,” he said.

“There certainly is quite a strong incentive to take up that scheme as opposed to put money aside into normal deposit accounts. So I think next year you’ll see a vast improvement in that scheme in terms of the numbers and the amount of money flowing into those accounts.”

However, an ABC News Online article last year revealed there are also many restrictive conditions attached to the accounts that would discourage large numbers of prospective first home buyers from taking up the tax savings.

The most restrictive of these conditions is the requirement to contribute to the account for at least four years before withdrawing the money to buy a home, or else see the account balance go into superannuation.

Source: First home saver scheme 'overshadowed'

(CFD.net.au – Contract for Difference, Share, Forex, ETFs, Commodities Traders) – The Housing Industry Association (HIA) says the take up of the Federal Government’s First Home Saver Account has been overshadowed by the boost to the First Home Owners’ Grant and low interest rates.

The Account has been available for a year and offers tax discounts and co-payments, to encourage savings for first home purchases.

The HIA’s chief economist, Ben Phillips, says the Government should be promoting the Account, to coincide with the expiry of the boost to the First-Home Owners’ Grant at the end of the year.

“The current stock of the Home Saver Account is about $13 million across all the banks in Australia,” he said.

“So at the moment the take-up has been extremely low and that’s been influenced entirely, really, by the First Home Owners’ Grant.

“I think of new home loans around 30 per cent nearly at their peak, were devoted to first home buyers, so really the first home saver scheme was swamped very much by the First Home Owners’ Grant.”

Ben Phillips believes the savings scheme would grow in popularity if it was better advertised by the Government.

“So long as the Government advertises the program solidly over the coming… the remainder of this year and early into next year, I think you’ll see a much stronger take up,” he said.

“There certainly is quite a strong incentive to take up that scheme as opposed to put money aside into normal deposit accounts. So I think next year you’ll see a vast improvement in that scheme in terms of the numbers and the amount of money flowing into those accounts.”

However, an ABC News Online article last year revealed there are also many restrictive conditions attached to the accounts that would discourage large numbers of prospective first home buyers from taking up the tax savings.

The most restrictive of these conditions is the requirement to contribute to the account for at least four years before withdrawing the money to buy a home, or else see the account balance go into superannuation.

Source: First home saver scheme 'overshadowed'

Pat La Rock covered the crew’s first jam! Thrown by Thinh peep game:

Part 1:
A highlight reel of the jam that Thinh threw down in San Diego. Pretty ill stuff can’t wait for the one in the Bay. This is only part 1 or as I should say Thinhs perspective. Stay tuned tomorrow for Mad The Villain’s Remainder One experience.

Part 2:
Here is the second volume of the Remainder One Jam. This time it focuses on Mad The Villain and the exhibition battle that he was doing that day. The Mighty Mad gives his thoughts and his skills in this Remainder One clip.

I used to live in Caen, France.  There is a parking garage downtown where lots of British and American tourists park their cars, so naturally there is a sign to remind people to bring their ticket with them to pay at the automated teller before leaving.  This sign is official and it was put up by the management of the parking lot.  I first noticed the sign about two years ago, the typo was never corrected.

submitted by Valerie Dabliz

(CFD.net.au – Contract for Difference, Share, Forex, ETFs, Commodities Traders) – $7 billion to $80 billion. The remainder is made up of medium-term notes. “The evidence is that investors continue to value commodity exposure for portfolio diversification and as an inflation hedge,” Barclays said in the report. “Heading into the fourth quarter, we expect this trend to conti … $7 billion to $80 billion. The remainder is made up of medium-term notes. “The evidence is that investors continue to value commodity exposure for portfolio diversification and as an inflation hedge,” Barclays said in the report. “Heading into the fourth quarter, we expect this trend to continue, with commodities continuing to capture a growing share of the global investment portfolio.” The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 commodities rebounded 15 percent this year after posting a record 36 percent decline in 2008. Assets under management at commodity hedge funds increased 6 percent this year to $60.61 billion as of the end of August, according to Hedgefund.net. To contact the reporter on this story: Stuart Wallace in London at swallace6@bloomberg.net Last Updated: October 9, 2009 01:57 EDT

Source: Commodity Assets Rise to $224 Billion, Barclays Says (Update1) By Stuart Wallace Oct. 9 (Bloomberg)

Oregon suspends RB LeGarrette Blount for remainder of season for punching Boise State player.

Source:
http://www.sportingnews.com/college-football/article/2009-09-04/oregon-rb-legarrette-blount-suspended-for-season

I recently swore to myself I wouldn’t buy any more books until I had read at least three from my TBR bookcase (and yes, it’s not a bookshelf but a whole bookcase) but I couldn’t resist popping into my favourite charity bookshop and found four (!) books that I just had to have. I am weak, weak, weak.

I find I often go into bookshops to cheer myself up and to find a bit of peace and quality time. If I have a stressful day at work I pop into the Waterstone’s in Piccadilly before I head off home. If I’m on my way home from my sister’s I pop into the Highgate Oxfam bookshop. Sometimes I find nothing, but the very act of browsing somehow releases the tension in my mind and shoulders. And this weekend I was lucky/unlucky depending on whether you consult my mind or my wallet.

So what did I get?

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – I have heard many wonderful things about this book from friends, book blogs and reviews and have been wanting to read this for a while.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy – I first heard about this book while perusing Scott Pack’s very entertaining blog Me and My Big Mouth. You can also read articles about McCarthy here and here. Incidentally, the copy I bought was signed by the author himself, woo hoo!

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino – I read her novel Out several years ago and was seriously impressed! She makes the mundane very sinister. I no longer look at housewives in the same way.

Age of Misrule by Mark Chadbourn – has been mentioned with awe several times in the sff blogs I read. I unsuccessfully entered a competition to win a copy several weeks back, and so when I saw this one, I knew it was fate.

Not a bad haul for under ten quid.

Zoe had these five numbered cards:

How many five-digit numbers can she make that are divisible by 9 without having a remainder?

Divide 25 by 8, the number of broadsheets THE2NDHAND’s published since September 11, and you get 3 with a remainder of one, the number of readings we have ever scheduled on that date, before or since. Sept. 11, 2009, join us back in Birmingham for a release event for broadsheet 32, featuring a short story by Patrick Somerville, at Greencup Books; details forthcoming.

Speaking of Greencup — the bookstore, an island of unfiltered music and culture in the deep south — they need your help. They’re trying to raise $3,000, at least, to make needed repairs to get their space to code and stay in business. At the very least, if you’re in or near Birmingham visit the book shop and event space just over the Richard Arrington Blvd. viaduct from downtown and buy some books. Or make a donation — all donations are tax deductible — here: http://www.greencupbooks.org/.

The Chicago Printers’ Ball last Friday saw our rep in the Opium magazine Literary Death Match emerge as the last writer standing — THE2NDHAND’s 30th broadsheet author Spencer Dew (Songs of Insurgency) read this piece, then, when he aadvanced to the final round, managed to identify more pics of dead authors than the competitor. “The other fellow yelled out ‘Ernest Hemingway’ before I did,” Dew says, “but I got Michael Crichton, Saul Bellow, Shel Silverstein and … someone else.  I guess video of the whole thing will be posted soon, at which point I’ll link to it on my site.” It’s not up yet but keep an eye out for it. (Side note: Dew was handed the Chicago crown by former champ, and also a somewhat frequent contributor to THE2NDHAND, Jill Summers.)

Finally, if you haven’t yet managed to pick up Brit Tom McCarthy’s 2007 novel Remainder, consider it. It’s a fantastic tale that, following a fellow Brit’s concurrent treatment of amnesia in the, er, fantastical The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel, is a titillating refreshment that feels more real, true, than the latter. I can’t recommend any novel released in recent years more highly. If only one could reenact McCarthy’s writing of the book. . . it might lead to a finale even more compelling than the original. (Read the book: you’ll see what I mean.) McCarthy is also one of the men behind the lit group the International Necronautical Society; check it out.

I once worked in a company specializing in embedded electronics for industrial applications. In one particular project, the device communicated through a RS-422 cable to the computer and seemed to return weird data once in a while, causing unwanted behavior in the control computer whose programming did not provide for this unexpected data. So I took upon myself to test the communication channel as it seemed that the on-board software was operating properly and did not contain serious bugs. I added a check-sum to the data packet and it turned out that some packets came in indeed corrupted despite the supposedly superior electrical characteristics of the RS-422 link.

After a few days’ work, I implemented the communication protocol that could detect and repair certain errors while reverting to a request to retransmit if the data was too damaged. I then started gathering statistics on error rate, number of retransmit, etc, and the spurious behavior on the controller’s side went away. My (metaphorically) pointy-haired boss opposed the modification because “we didn’t have any of these damn transmission errors until you put your fancy code in there“. Of course, this was an epic facepalm moment. I tried to explain that the errors have always been there, except that now they’re caught and repaired. Needless to say, it ended badly.

Notwithstanding this absurd episode, I kept using check-sum to validate data whenever no other layer of the protocol took care of transmission errors. So, this week, let us discuss check-sums and other error detection algorithms.

The simplest type of check-sum, the check sum simply adds all numbers (or bytes, or bits) and reports that sum as the check-sum. This, unfortunately, doesn’t give you much power for error detection. Indeed, it’s very easy to understand that simply computing the sum of a series of number doesn’t tell you much. There are many ways of getting a given sum in the presence of multiple errors. Even a simple inversion goes undetected.

A bit more protection is given by Luhn’s algorithm. Luhn’s algorithm on a series of digits (let us consider only digits as it generalises to any radix anyway) starts with an initial sum of , which may be 0 or salted. Every odd-position digit is added once to , each even-position digit is added twice to . For example, the digit series 6,4,2,5,1 would be summed up as . Then, is returned as the check-sum. We could reformulate the operation as:

An example of this simple type of check-sum is the Canadian Social Insurance Number, whose numbers are chosen so that the check-sum is . Needless to say, the validity of the number as a social security number cannot be limited to the verification of the check-sum alone; it has to be checked against the national registry—it’s ridiculously easy to generate a SIN that passes the check-sum test.

The idea can be extended to using other multipliers than 1 and 2 in the sum. The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, uses either 10 or 13 digits codes to uniquely identify a book. With the correct ISBN alone, you can order a book from your favorite bookshop without ambiguity. The ISBN-10 algorithm computes the sum:

Which yield the last digit of the code (with X encoding 10). The ISBN-13, however, is a Luhn check-sum using 1 and 3 rather than 1 and 2.

Luhn’s method generalizes to any number of digits (and to other bases as well), but is not very strong. Much stronger than Luhn’s method, the CRC, or cyclical redundancy check, computes the “check-sum” as the remainder of the division of the message, considered as a big integer, by a divisor polynomial. There are number-theoretic reasons to call the divisor a “divisor polynomial” but let us not go there right now (if you’re really interested in the mathematics, see here). For all practical purpose, the divisor is a small integer. The divisor is chosen in order to give a remainder on 16, 32 or 64 bits. While the long division of a very big number (the message) by a small integer (the divisor) seems cumbersome, some efficient algorithms exist that will compute the CRC very efficiently, and without doing any arbitrary precision arithmetic.

However, if the CRC is much better than the simple check-sum and Luhn’s algorithm, it is not infallible. As it encodes the message’s structure on a very small number of bits compared to the message itself, it cannot possibly trap every errors. But it turns out that for a good divisor polynomial (there are a few standard ones), it will detect quite many errors. It detects all errors of exactly one bit. It will detect all errors of two bits if the errors are separated by more bits than the order of the polynomial; for a polynomial of order , they must be bits apart. It will also detect all error bursts of bits or less. However, it doesn’t do well with long series of leading zero bits, as deletion and insertion of leading zeroes will go undetected.

The CRC is the preferred method of computing check-sums in a number of applications (from Zip files to Ethernet packets) but there’s a number of ad hoc check-sum algorithms out there, not all equally fantastic. For example, the Adler32 function is meant to be efficiently computed; but yields incomplete coverage for messages that are too short. I also presented an ad hoc hash function in a previous post that is reasonably good while amenable to efficient implementations¹.

*
* *

Which brings me to the topic of check-sums and hashes. In UEID, I presented a few hash function families. I discussed secure hash functions like MD5 and SHA in the context of providing a unique descriptor to a piece of data. That’s also the goal of a check-sum. A hash function wants to yield a different value whenever the message changes, ever so lightly, which is also a the goal of a check-sum function.

It should be clear by now that a (good) check-sum and a (good) hash function are the same both the exact same thing: they map a series of bits (the message) onto a smaller series of bits (the check-sum/hash) in a way that captures as many changes as possible in the messages.

*
* *

It turns out that inventing a good check-sum/hash algorithm is extremely difficult—even Don Knuth got his ass bitten on this one². Unless you want to invest a considerable amount of time developing and thoroughly testing your own check-sum/hash function, I would advice to use one that already exist, that have been examined by experts, and that has Open Source implementations available.

¹ I tested its behavior in the context of hash table look-ups, and it exhibited a most cromulent behavior. See here (in French).

² Donald Knuth &mdash The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching — Addison-Wesley, 1973.

John Woo will remain in China for his next film on WWII, which takes a theme in the American volunteers recruited to aid the Chinese Air Force prior to the US participation in WWII; Veterans of the Korean War will be special guests during opening ceremonies for the Great Texas Balloon Race this year; Japan received the first Chinese individual tourist after change in its law; Taiwan is ready to receive more investment from China.

John Woo Divebombs Into WWII Again With ‘Flying Tiger Heroes’, MTV Blog, July 6, 2009

Balloon Race honors Korean War veterans, News-Journal.com, July 3, 2009

Taiwan Opens 100 Industries to Chinese Investment (Update2), Bloomberg, June 30, 2009

First individual Chinese tourists visit Japan, AFP, July 8, 2009

Articles below discuss return of WWII veterans from Burma to China, Taiwanese President Mao’s potential meeting with Chinese President Hu, and Chinese businessmen’s visit at Taiwan:

WWII Veterans Return from Burma after 67 Years, China Degital Times, May 31, 2009

Taiwan president may meet China’s Hu – paper, Malaysia Star, June 11, 2009

China sends large group to buy Taiwanese goods, Associated Press, May 31, 2009

The artciles below include: Statement by  President Obama’s nominee to the Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Remarks by the US Special Representative for North Korea Policy at the Korea Society Annual Dinner;  Review of “The Uses and Abuses of History” by Margaret Macmillan; and Japan’s Reform of the Ministry of Defense Reform:

President Obama’s Nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, US Department of State, Jun 10, 2009

Getting the history and the politics wrong, Tribune

Remarks at the Korea Society Annual Dinner, US Department of State, June 9, 2009

Defense Ministry pushes for more policy control, Japan Times, June 5, 2009