The Bank of Finland’s Finnish Payment Habits 2010 project predicts that Finnish payment habits will face substantial changes. The causes for these changes include: the standardisation and integration of European payment systems, development of payment services-related legislation and regulation at EU level, changes in payment services-related cost factors and pricing, and new opportunities offe...

(i) There is a delay by the intermediary in making payment to the SNF. (ii) Due to an exceptional situation, there is a temporary delay in the SNF’s preparation and submittal of bills to the intermediary beyond its normal billing cycle. (2) Approval of payment. An SNF’s request for an accelerated payment must be approved by the intermediary and HCFA. (3) Amount of payment. The amount of the acc...

Currently enacted child support guidelines primarily focus on maintaining children’s economic well-being when a single household is split into two. This article argues that this focus discounts another consideration which, when combined with the current analysis, could further advance children’s well-being: the ability of parents to pay. An analysis of payment characteristics demonstrates that ...

With the rapid development of the Internet and information technology, electronic commerce system is flourishing. In electronic commerce, customers use electronic money (e-money) instead of cash. E-money in wide use includes electronic cash, electronic checks, electronic coupons, and so on. E-money is fixed at face-value and is backed by banks. The fact that e-money is not issued in the actual ...

This chapter presents the ISO/IEC MPEG-7 Multimedia Content description Interface Standard from the point of view of managing semantics in the context of multimedia applications. We describe the organisation and structure of the MPEG-7 Multimedia Description schemes, which are metadata structures for describing and annotating multimedia content at several levels of granularity and abstraction. ...

One of the main challenges faced in design and construction phases of tunneling projects is the determination of maximum allowable advance step to maximize excavation rate and reduce project delivery time. Considering the complexity of determining this factor and unexpected risks associated with inappropriate determination of that, it is necessary to employ a method which is capable of accounti...

Current DRM systems do not provide flexible payment methods, requiring the user to handle the payment by hand. For instance, when the user needs to pay for watching a movie, she needs to decide which available payment method is the most optimal and suitable. This is a rather cumbersome process for the user that can be avoided by the specification of payment policies. A payment policy automates ...