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History of weird phone calls

I’ve notice a pattern of weird phone calls over the last few years.

Feb 11, 2008: A female Wymount resident received a suspicious phone call in her home at 1:30 p.m. The male caller claimed to be from the psychology department and said he could try to help her relax. He got her to turn off the lights and lay down on her bed. The phone call ended when the girl’s cell phone battery died. BYU Police told her she should notify her phone company next time she receives a call so that they can trace it. (Source)

Nov. 7-9, 2007: Nine female students, living in Heritage Halls, reported receiving suspicious calls from a man who claimed that he was a BYU student doing an experiment for a psychology class. The police think this man is from California and is the same man who has been making these calls for the last four years. (Source)

Oct. 23, 2007: A 19-year-old female student, living in Taylor Hall in Helaman Halls, received a suspicious phone call from a man claiming to be a psychology student who asked her to participate in an experiment for his psychology class. She had read the police beat tip of the week in The Daily Universe on October 12, and hung up on him. (http://newnewsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/66075)

Oct. 17, 2007: A female student living in Wyview Park received a phone call from a suspicious man. The suspect claimed to be a psychology student conducting a project, and attempted to put her in a hypnotic trance. She gave him a false name when he asked for her name. When she finally told him she had had enough, he immediately hung up. (http://newnewsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/65969)

October 12, 2007 Tip of the week: Over the last three years, several students, mostly female students, have been receiving calls from a suspicious male individual. He calls at night, asks what they are doing, how they are dressed and if they will participate in an experiment, a study for his psychology class. He asks them to lie down on the floor then asks a series of questions and tells them to relax. An investigator from the police department has talked to a professor on campus, who is an expert in hypnotism. He says it is not possible to hypnotize someone over the phone. Some students have fallen asleep, woken up and weren’t sure what happened but whether they were really hypnotized or not is questionable. (Source)

July 4, 2007: A man was reported making a suspicious phone call to a female in Helaman Halls in which he claimed he was doing a psychology project and then proceeded to hypnotize the female student on the other end of the line. The roommate of the female came home to find her asleep on the floor. The female is reported of reacting strangely when certain words are spoken. Incidents of a similar nature have occurred about two dozen times in the past. There are no suspects, but the incident is still under investigation. (http://newnewsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/64793)

Feb 9, 2006: A female student living in Hinckley Hall, in Helaman Halls, received a phone call from an unidentified male claiming to be conducting a survey for a psychology class Feb. 9. The caller asked the student if she was relaxed and if she was doing homework. The student hung up after the caller asked her to lie down on her bed to get more comfortable. The police suspect the call is connected to numerous similar calls made over the last two years. (Source)

May 19, 2004:Two females living at WyView reported separate accounts of attempted hypnotism on the telephone from a male suspect May 19 at 9 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m., respectively. The victims reported a male-voiced caller representing himself as a psychology major conducting a survey. The victim of the second incident said she became suspicious when the caller said he was going to hypnotize her. Both victims hung-up the phone on the caller.

Never once did he call anyone in Deseret Towers, according to these limited reports.

July 18, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Categories: Interesting, Psychology
Comments: None yet

iGoogle gadget color themes

Dear iGoogle,

I’ve been building Google gadgets for a while now, and there is one thing I’ve struggled with: getting a gadget’s colors to match the colors of its container’s theme. That seemed like a mouthful, so let me break it down.

Suppose my iGoogle theme has lots of natural colors: green and brown. A gadget on that page would look better if it contained green and brown elements. But if my iGoogle theme had pink and purple colors, a gadget with green and brown elements might not look the best. A gadget’s color scheme should match the color scheme of the iGoogle container theme.

Already the iGoogle provides a few substitution variables like the __BIDI_* variables. The gadget container should pass color substitution variables along to the gadget as well. For example, __COLOR_LINK__ could be the substitution variable for link colors, allowing the iGoogle theme to set a common link color to all of the gadgets on the page. There could be a handful of different __COLOR_* variables that would be passed along for button colors, highlight colors, text colors, etc.

July 14, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Categories: Dear Google
Comments: None yet

hAPI hAPI joy joy

Dear Google,

Let me tell you why you are a winner in my book. Three letters, A-P-I. I think opening up your services through developer APIs is what gives Google an edge over your competitors. It is what makes Google more than just a web site. It makes Google a web service. Your latest efforts to make Google data more mashable is a good example of your continued efforts to support nice APIs.

Thank you for your efforts and keep up the good work.

June 30, 2008 at 12:19 am
Categories: Dear Google
Comments: None yet

Aerodynamic trucking

Today I passed one of those big trailer hauling semis, and I started to wonder about what it might be carrying. Bread that I might buy at the grocery store? My next couch? Fertilizer for the farm down the road?

Truck driving down the road

Then I started to think about how incredibly not aerodynamic the trailer is. Anyone who has participated in a pine wood derby knows that a big block on wheels isn’t the best way to go. If you’ve felt the wind come off the end or sides of one of these trucks as it drives by, then you have felt the energy that is lost because of the inefficient design of the big box trailer.

I suppose they are made that way because that is the most inexpensive way to make a trailer. But with diesel prices near $5 per gallon, maybe it’s time to re-think that.

If big-rig trucks were more aerodynamic, then they would get better gas mileage. If they get better gas mileage, then that reduces the cost of delivery for the products they are delivering. This, in turn, can keep consumer prices slightly lower. Lower prices helps the economy.

So much of our economy depends on the distribution of goods, that maybe it is time to think uniquely about making our means of distribution more affordable.

(Image source)

June 25, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Categories: Business, Financial
Comments: None yet

Displaying ads on Google Code project pages

Dear Google Code,

A few months ago I suggested allowing projects hosted on Google code to display advertising in order to collect revenue and support their project. One of the problems I saw in this model was that it could encourage project forking just so individuals could collect advertising revenue.

While collecting advertising revenue might work with projects with just a single developer, full-community projects with multiple developers would make it difficult to decide how to divide up the money among many developers.

What I might suggest instead, is that projects hosted on Google Code can display advertising, but rather than collecting the revenue themselves, they can decide to donate the money a non-profit organization that supports open source software. Google can pre-approve and generate a list of these non-profits groups, such that the open source project can simply select their favorite organization to receive the profits.

This is a win for everyone. Google can increase (maybe only insignificantly) its advertising market share. The non-profit groups receive extra financing, allowing them to further open source software development. Developers don’t win anything directly other than satisfaction for helping a non-profit (although considering many open source developers write software purely for satisfaction, this is not a small bonus), but developers will benefit from the overall strengthening of the open-source community. Google can also win on its taxes by being able to write-off the financial donations to the non-profits.

Please, Google, consider Google Code advertising that can help provide financing for open-source non-profits.

June 19, 2008 at 8:53 am
Categories: Dear Google
Comments: None yet

Definition of desperate

What does it mean to be desperate? I think it involves ignoring the natural order and process of things.

Being desperate to get married involves short cutting some of the natural steps that normally come in the progression of a relationship in order to get married faster.

June 16, 2008 at 10:04 am
Categories: Interesting
Comments: None yet

PDF support in Gdata API

Dear Google Docs,

Recently you added PDF support to Google docs. This is such a great feature that people instantly want it third-party apps which connect to Google Docs through the Gdata API. Please add the ability to upload PDFs through the Gdata API. If that support is already there, perhaps you should update your list of supported document types. Thank you for your help, and I look forward to integrating this new feature into my third-party app.

June 16, 2008 at 8:39 am
Categories: Dear Google
Comments: One

Hillary is out of the race and out of money

Hillary Clinton recently ended her bid for the presidency. She has incurred over $20 million of debt from her campaign, the largest presidential campaign debt in history. I guess it’s a good thing that she is out–think of what she would have done had she managed more than just a campaign budget… like the national budget? Scary.

June 9, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Categories: Politics
Comments: None yet

Wells Fargo, stop calling me

Dear Wells Fargo,

I really want a bank that just keeps my money safe and accessible. I don’t want you calling me many times selling some soft of subscription package to your many programs. I signed up for the national do-not-call list, which means that I really don’t like being bothered my various offers made by calling me. Just because I bank with you, doesn’t mean that I really want to be bothered by you.

Tonight you called me, hiding the caller identification of the source call. Thats just plain sneaky, and something I wouldn’t expect from a bank that I would like to trust.

If you call me, I will refuse any offer you present. Please stop calling me. I told that last caller not to call me again. If I receive any more phone calls from you that do not directly concern my financial accounts, I will strongly consider moving my funds to a different institution.

July 17, 2008 update:
BOB, in comment 10180, was very nice to describe to me Wells Fargo’s privacy policy. According to his suggestion, I went to their website and found my privacy settings already set to the following:

My Wells Fargo Privacy Settings

My Wells Fargo Privacy Settings

So my question now is the following? Were my privacy settings always prohibiting contact? Or were they changed by the Wells Fargo representative who called me last with whom I requested that they no longer call me?

The good news is that I haven’t been called in quite a while. Also, now I know that any calls I may receive in the future are in contradiction to my privacy settings and against Wells Fargo’s privacy policy.

Does anyone know where I can find similar privacy settings on the Discover Card website?

May 27, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Categories: Financial
Comments: 8

Best democrat for swing states

Hillary Clinton’s latest claim why she is the better candidate:

“The states that I’ve won total 300 electoral votes,” she told about 300 people in a high school gymnasium in Maysville, the birthplace of the actor George Clooney. “The question is who can win 270 electoral votes? My opponent has won states totaling 217 electoral votes.” (Source: New York Times)

Additionally, Clinton discounts Obama’s wins in red states: states that traditionally vote republican, such as Utah, Idaho, Texas, and others.

While I believe Clinton’s claims are somewhat silly, I’ll humor the idea for just a moment to do some of my own math.

There are 8 states who have, in the last four presidential elections, voted for the republican candidate twice, and the democratic candidate twice. These states are: Nevada, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states)

Now if we consider these 8 swing states, the number of electoral college votes each of these states contributes toward the general presidential election, and the democratic candidate who had the most popular vote, we arrive at these numbers:

  • Nevada, 5 votes, won by Clinton
  • Louisiana, 9 votes, won by Obama
  • Arkansas, 6 votes, won by Clinton
  • Mississippi, 11 votes, won by Obama
  • Tennessee, 11 votes, won by Clinton
  • Kentucky, 8 votes, yet to be determined
  • West Virginia, 5 votes, won by Clinton
  • Ohio, 20 votes, won by Obama

The totals are: Clinton - 27, Obama - 40.

These numbers seem to indicate that Obama has the best chance to pick up more electoral college votes from these swing states.

Even if we broaden our definition of a swing state to include any state that has been mixed in the presidential voting anytime in the last four elections, Obama still beats Clinton, 71 to 57.

May 19, 2008 at 10:53 am
Categories: Politics
Comments: None yet
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