Priorities in Saginaw, MI

The Saginaw News published my letter here.

Here is the text, for readers' convenience:

A letter on Friday, June 26, to The Saginaw News urges readers to donate to the Saginaw fireworks display to make it better than Bay City's. Two days later, the editorial board published a story noting that 65 Saginaw County school teachers have been laid off.

With Saginaw's dismal economic outlook, we must be careful where to place our pride. Instead of spending roughly $70,000 on fireworks to compete with our neighbor, perhaps we can donate $20,000 of that to Bay City for some outstanding Tri-City fireworks, and Bay City can respond by opening up more space for Saginaw vendors.

This would strengthen bonds with Bay City, and we can then donate the remaining $50,000 to our public schools to keep more of our talented teachers' jobs or help attract even more talent to the area.

Nobody will move to Saginaw because it has the best fireworks one night of the year. But with small compromises like this, we can compete to have the best schools in the area 365 days of the year - something that would actually encourage smart families to stay in Saginaw.

Covert Operations Against Iran

With the recent election in Iran, you have to admit that the widespread protests were a bit of a surprise. It seems safe to say that the US has a much greater interest in the outcome -- and a much greater role in the events -- than they are letting on.

The official line (CBS News) is basically that we expect that Iran recognizes that

"the world is watching... I want to repeat it that we stand with those who would look to peaceful resolution of conflict, and we believe that the voices of people have to be heard, that that's a universal value that the American people stand for and this administration stands for.

Obama continues,

"But the last point I want to make on this - this is not an issue of the United States or the West versus Iran. This is an issue of the Iranian people. The fact that they are on the streets under pretty severe duress, at great risk to themselves, is a sign that there's something in that society that wants to open up.

So the US is emphatically and conspicuously not taking sides.

On the other hand, by late 2007, Congress had agreed to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran (last year, I'd made a quick note about these operations). These operations

"are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations

Indeed, these minority groups are involved in the protests.
Granted, these covert operations were initiated under a very different administration than the Obama administration; but a Counterpunch article by Paul C. Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury in the Reagan administration, seems to put these doubts to rest.

New Mars Candybar

Mars has come out with a new candybar aimed at women called the "Fling", according to this article by All Things Considered on NPR.

The marketing includes "Pleasure yourself" postcards and refers to the 10 included candybars as "fingers".

At first I thought that the Fling's marketing (as depicted in this article) would not succeed; an initial marketing campaign with risque overtones might be one thing, but to make the connection explicit for the life of the product (on the packaging) seemed commercially risky, since the connection between sex and chocolate is flimsy. Then I realized that we've had cereals with monster (and leprechaun) themes stick around for over three (four) decades. No connection between fantastic creatures and cereal as far as I can see, and yet somehow it has worked.

The company is running an experiment in California for now, and it appears to be running well. That said, I am betting that the Fling will not be around for longer than 3 years -- not because of the content (they have a right to market however they want), but because it's not clear which void it's filling in the current marketplace. It appears that they're trying to create a market, something I'm not convinced will work too well in this case.

The factory warranty on your car is about to expire

A little while ago I posted on these calls and letters I've been getting about the factory warranty on my car being about to expire.

This company was
finally hit by the FTC।

Their tactics were aggressive: they called people indiscriminately and misled people on the phone. Nate Anderson writes:

They didn't bother targeting people who had recently purchased vehicles; in fact, they did no targeting at all... [One telemarketer's training manual states: ] "Transcontinental’s training manual states that if asked the question, "Who Are You?," telemarketers are to respond: "We are the Warranty Service Center. We provide warranty services for ______ (Ford, GMC, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, etc.) throughout the United States and Canada."

I thought for a while that they were legitimate, since I'd bought used 2005 car a few years ago, and it seemed feasible that there really was a warranty about to expire. Then I learned that everyone else, even people without cars, were getting these calls too.

The State Department and dissent

Today I saw the UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon speak at Princeton.  I became curious about how people generally enter foreign service jobs and poked around a bit on the State department's web page.  I found this FAQ, which had an interesting (but reasonable) tidbit about dissent in such positions:

25. Does the system tolerate dissent?

As public servants, Foreign Service Officers must publicly defend U.S. government policy, despite personal reservations. There is an internal channel through which an employee may present dissenting views on specific foreign policy issues. If an officer cannot publicly defend official U.S. policy, he or she has the option to resign.

I'm curious about what this internal channel for presenting dissenting views is.

Update: this public state department dissent guide details this channel.  

Steven Rosefielde describes this pathway cynically in Russia in the 21st Century:

Dissent Channel, a product of the Vietnam War era, is an established vehicle for the submission of dissenting views on important policy issues.  Messages in this channel are not subject to clearance procedures and are distributed to the top policy officials of the State Department, but not to other parts of the government.  Dissent Channel rarely changes policy, but is a venting mechanism (and a way of identifying troublemakers).  It has been used more often than one might think...

Are these messages available to Freedom of Information Act requests?  Rosefielde's attempt failed; he received this message in response to a FIA request for one of his own dissents in this channel:

release and public circulation of Dissent Channel messages, even as in your case to the drafter of the message, would inhibit the willingness of Department personnel to avail themselves of the Dissent Channel to express their views freely

Teflon leader nicked by slump

Brazil’s ‘Teflon’ Leader Nicked by Slump

So I haven't even read the article yet, but the headline and photo are great.

Amazon Mechanical Turk suggests uses of Amazon Mechanical Turk

It seems that Amazon Mechanical Turk is suddenly becoming very widely used (or perhaps my recent change of scenery and my surroundings just make it seem that way).  My research group uses it to label examples for machine learning applications, for example, but I was wondering what other sorts of original, interesting things we could learn from this tool... So I asked MTurk for an anwer to this question.  Asking 50 mturk workers for their two cents' worth (literally), I found some interesting user-suggested results.  Here are some of the most interesting.

1. Ask people to tweak recipes, perhaps restrict it to people who can understand recipes. Give a general outline for a food recipe and have people submit ideas for changes to it [...]
2. I think Amazon Mechanical Turk would be a great tool for allowing others to review and comment on a draft of an e-mail. Sometimes you write something and don't know how it will be perceived and Mechanical Turk would be a fast way to get feedback and understand how your message will be viewed by the recipient.
3. You could ask people what motivates them to work on the Mechanical Turk. That should get some interesting responses. :)
4. Many people have security cameras they are not monitoring. You could have a selection of images periodically taken by these video cameras sent to Amazon Mturk for review. Have a selection of "is there a person here" or "no person" or "it is an animal". If a human, then the home owner is notified and the owner receives the image and the option to call police. This could also be tied into a home security system [...]
5. As a former teacher, I know how time consuming grading test papers is. Wouldn't be great if teachers could electronically post a test, the answer key and the test papers from students? They would be corrected by many people at once and it would take minutes instead of hours.
6. Locate the best real estate buys in the USA.
7. Research several cell phone service plans (AT&T, Verizon, T-Moble, Sprint) etc.) and tell me which is the best value for a family plan for 4 people. The plan should have 1400 minutes, free nights & weekends, & unlimited texts.

A couple were philosophical:

1. well first start with what do you really need out of life?
   
2. You can answer in your words the meaning of life. Furtheremore, create a book upon yours and others responses.

Then there were some more bizarre, illegible, or simply useless bits of information some workers would seek:

1. do you want to be a actor and why ?  (Female, India)
   
2. what is the highest number which can be made by using five 3......... (Male, India)
3. I always wondered if someone could ask for lotto numbers, and if the number win, the requester share the prize with the AMT workers who participate in the task. (Male, Uruguay)

Other results included finding out ways to make mturk better for users (workers mostly), ways to learn about peoples' feelings on saving and the economy, and more standard, obvious existing uses of MTurk (getting feedback for your company's product or website, labeling data, etc.)

Things I didn't see, which I expect happens on mturk:

• Answers to homework problems

Things I would like to do which I didn't see in these suggestions:

• Have users review legislative bills or provide feedback on political events to understand which aspects of the public forum should be discussed more. 

I also was curious about whether many of the users might be English speakers in sweatshops in third-world countries. Here's a demographic breakdown of the users, based on the information they've provided.

The question was posed late on a Friday night/Saturday morning (Eastern), so we got the weekend night owl and Saturday morning demographic in the US, along with daybirds in other countries.  Users ranged in age from high teens to 59, mean 30, median 26 (although one user suggesting real estate buys claimed to be 5).  Twenty four of fifty were female, although the females tended to be a bit older than the males.  About 36 were from the US, 9 from India, and the rest from various and sundry other places.

So it appears that it's mostly just bored American adults who answered my query, willing to work for $0.64 / hour.  Judging by their responses, I think most were probably being honest about their ages and locations.

The full CSV is available here.

Honda warranties

Judging by how hard Honda has been trying to get me to renew my car's warranty, I'm guessing it must be a huge profit machine for them.

I've gotten calls from them roughly about once every three weeks for about 6-10 months, and I've just gotten another FINAL NOTICE from them in the mail warning me about the factory warranty.  The notice warns on its cover that tampering with it could result in a $2000 fine or 5 years' imprisonment.

I don't believe in insurance, so I'm not renewing.