Archive for February, 2008

Mechanical Turk

February 11th, 2008 | Category: Posts by Peter Frouman

Lately, I have been playing around a bit with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. For those who have no idea what Mechanical Turk is, the following description provided by Amazon may be useful:

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen’s “Turk” was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet’s doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

I have found the Mechanical Turk service useful for some tasks I needed done but for which I did not have the skills, time or patience.

The first thing I tried was creating a task to translate a short newspaper article from French into English. However, this did not work out very well as I got two submissions that were obviously the product of machine translation from something like AltaVista Babel Fish or Google Translate. The third submission was just barely acceptable but ultimately not usable for my purposes. To make matters worse, since I don’t know much French I couldn’t easily verify the accuracy of the translation. However, Mechanical Turk could certainly be used for translation services (indeed there are a couple companies that have used it for that purpose - however, when I contacted one of them for a quote I never got any reply) if you set up a system to evaluate the quality and accuracy of the translation work.

I had much better success with another type of task: transcribing videos in a foreign language (in this case, French television news reports). I think it helped that I offered a bit more money than most requesters were offering for similar tasks. However, I still paid much less than a professional transcription service would have charged.
More on this later…

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Scientology tax break case back in court

February 11th, 2008 | Category: Posts by Peter Frouman

Last Monday afternoon in a Pasadena, California courtroom, a three-member panel (Judges Harry Pregerson, Kim M. Wardlaw and Ronald B. Leighton) of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case of Sklar, et al v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Court of Appeals Docket #06-729601). A central issue in the case, which has been going on for more than a decade, is a special tax deduction that is granted only to members of the Church of Scientology according to the terms of a secret 1993 settlement agreement between the Church of Scientology and the IRS. Many people believe that it is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for a government agency like the Internal Revenue Service to give special treatment and tax benefits to the adherents of one religion while denying those benefits to members of other religions. Two of those people are former California residents Michael and Marla Sklar. In 1994, they decided to test the idea that Jews are entitled to the same tax breaks that the Internal Revenue Service grants to Scientologists.

In a September 4, 2000, story in Forbes magazine, Brigid McMenamin reported on their case:

Los Angeles accountant Michael Sklar was shelling out $24,000 a year to send his four children to Jewish day schools in 1994 when a four-line Internal Revenue Service ruling caught his eye.

The November 1993 edict declared “obsoleted” the IRS’ 1978 ruling barring members of the Church of Scientology from deducting the “fixed donations” they paid for religious education and “auditing”–a practice in which Scientology ministers ask members probing questions to identify areas in need of spiritual work.

Sklar wondered: If Scientologists can deduct their form of religious education, why can’t I deduct mine? The Orthodox Jew decided to write off 55% of his tuition bills, based on the proportion of time his children’s schools said was spent on religious courses.

The Sklars claimed the deduction on their 1994 tax return and amended their earlier returns to take the deduction. In correspondence included with their return, they stated that they believed that their Orthodox Jewish family was entitled to the same tax breaks granted to Scientologist families. The IRS apparently misunderstood their claim and informed them that, to take the religious education deduction, they would need to submit documentation proving they were members of the Church of Scientology. When they replied that they were Orthodox Jews and not Scientologists, the IRS denied their deduction. Thus began a legal battle that would continue for many years. Eventually, the Sklars were fortunate enough to get pro bono legal counsel from Jeffrey Zuckerman of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle. After a number of unfavorable rulings, including one in the 9th Circuit appeals court in 2004, the case came back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006 and finally came to be heard on February 4, 2008.

In a recent article, Josh Gerstein of the New York Sun reported on the hearing:

A Jewish couple’s bid to take a tax deduction they say the Internal Revenue Service reserves only for members of the Church of Scientology is getting a friendly reception from a federal appeals court, increasing the possibility of a ruling that could create a tax break for taxpayers of many religions who pay tuition to religious schools.

During arguments on the case this week, three judges who ride the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals expressed deep skepticism of the IRS’s position that the way the agency treats Scientologists is irrelevant to the deductions the Orthodox Jews, Michael and Marla Sklar, took for part of their children’s day school tuition and for after-school classes in Jewish law.

“The view of the IRS is it can unconstitutionally violate the Constitution by establishing religion, by treating one religion more favorably than other religions in terms of what is allowed as deductions, and there can never be any judicial review of that?” Judge Kim Wardlaw asked at the court session Monday in Pasadena, Calif.

“That is not at all what I said,” a Justice Department lawyer representing the IRS, Ellen Delsole, said.

“That’s the bottom line,” Judge Wardlaw and a colleague on the panel, Harry Pregerson, both replied. “This does intrude into the Establishment Clause,” Judge Wardlaw added.

Fortunately for those who weren’t able to make it to Pasadena last week, an audio recording of the entire 48-minute hearing is available.

While it is clear to me that that the IRS shouldn’t favor one religion over another by granting its members special tax breaks that are denied to everyone else, the ideal solution in this case would not be expanding the tax deduction to include adherents of all religions but rather to get rid of it entirely. I would go even further and suggest that we should completely eliminate all religious tax breaks. They are part of a perverse and antiquated system that needs to be abolished. I am a member of a Church that is perhaps the only religion in the world that is proud to pay its taxes. It is time for other religions to do the same.

Update (March 2, 2008): While the 9th Circuit has yet to issue a ruling in this case, there is an excellent interview with Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney representing the Sklars, on GlossLip radio.

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