Biometry authenticated ATM and Banking

Ameya was on the way to his college. He had to reach in time because he had his exams. But on his way, he had to withdraw cash from an ATM. He got the money but forgot the ATM card inside the machine and went off to write his exam. He was in the middle of his exam when he realized had missed the card in the machine. He came out of the exam to waste his valuable time calling up the Bank to block the ATM card. However, he had lost Rs.15,000 as someone else had withdrawn it already.

With Credit Cards, the situation is much worse. Information about Credit Cards is on sale on various unauthorised websites and we keep hearing the news of credit card rackets quite frequently.

Why not use biometric authentication instead of physical cards? This will eliminate the need for physical card and any passwords. The fingureprint will serve as a complete authentication.

One would have to develop a mathematical function to convert the image of fingureprint into a unique number. The mathematical function should be such that it should generate the same unique number corresponding to a fingureprint of a person. Also, the same number should not be generated for any other person, making it unique. The unique number can be 100 or 200 or even 1000 digits long, or even more. Parts of this number may represent various characterics of the fingureprint, like first 20 digits for the size, next 20 for the central curved lines, next 20 for periferal lines etc.

Once this unique number is generated, it can be encrypted and sent to the database for comparison to retrieve the corresponding bank account. This would save the bandwidth required to send the image of fingureprint and also save the processing time to compare the images.

Such fingureprint readers can be attached to laptops and mobile phones as well to make the access feasible.

Coupon based tax cuts to boost weak economy

Designing tax-cuts to boost economic activity

With the current slowdown in the economy, various monetary and financial measures were taken to boost economy.

While tax-cuts is one of the easiest ways of fiscal boost, it is also one of the least effective, as the taxpayers mostly end up saving this money rather than spending.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com found that tax cuts delivered the least bang for the buck, with a dollar's worth of a temporary nonrefundable tax rebate worth $1.02 with a one-year lag. Permanent tax cuts yielded less than 50 cents of additional spending.

In contrast, actual spending increases were worth $1.36 if they were disbursed as aid to state governments; $1.59 if the money went on infrastructure; $1.64 for extended unemployment benefits and as much as $1.73 from an increase in food stamps. [Ref: Reuters news, Dec 11, 2008]

An obvious solution that would pop up is, why can't there be other coupons or stamps like the one we have for food; To be used just until the economic recession lasts. Once the economy recovers, the coupons would cease to exist.

There can be coupons for consumer durables, coupons for non-food departmental store purchases, coupons for clothes or anything else. These coupons can be fully or partially tax exempt and may be valid for 6 months to 1 year depending on the government policy.

Thus, since only the purchase of coupons is (fully or partially) tax exempt, every dollar spent on such tax cuts would certainly result in increased spending. Secondly, since the coupons have a definite expiry date, the user would have to spend fast in order to benefit from the tax-cut.

Your comments on the post are most welcome.