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For my readers who use RSS, I apologize. It looks like all four of the RSS feeds for billso.com went down earlier today.

I’m working on the problem. The default feed seems to be the culprit.

In the meantime, please check the web site for new articles.

Updated 13 March 2008, 0640 HT: I’ve fixed the problem, but I had to remove the 6100 and 7010 feeds in the process.

The 6100 and 7010 feeds are being redirected to the main feed at http://rss.billso.com/billsocom so please resubscribe to that feed!

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation earlier today, after he and his suppliers were found transferring large amounts of cash among their financial accounts. See Reuters and the New York Times for more details.

Reporting systems

In the US, banks are required to file Currency Transaction Reports when customers make large cash transactions. The regulation is supposed to discourage these transactions, while alerting the Federal government to possible criminal activities. As a lawyer who has prosecuted corporate crime, Spitzer knew about the US$10000 reporting threshold that triggers these notices – and he posted more than 150 transactions that fell just shy of that limit.

Spitzer also knew about the Mann Act, because he led a successful effort to increase New York State’s criminal penalties for international and interstate offenses, as described in this Times article. When the governor made his interstate date, he violated Federal law and a state law that he championed. RootsWeb has a brief discussion of the Mann Act, and there’s always Wikipedia.

People still matter

Important parts of these reporting systems are not fully automated. People have to take notice and action for these systems to work well. Read more about this in Larry Dignan’s article at ZDnet (via BoingBoing), and in the Wall Street Journal. The second figure in Dignan’s article is a handy flowchart of the system.

Updated 2000 HT 13 March 2008: A former student of mine passed along the following information, which I used to update the post. Banks file Suspicious Activities Reports (SARs) when they find a pattern of transactions:

FYI, there may have been some bad data in one of your sources. It’s not a 10K threshold for SARs. It’s a 10K Threshold for CTRs which is for any cash transaction. SARs are based on potential exposure due to suspicious transactions. The more common thresholds are 5K if you can name a suspect and 25K if you can’t.

From ZDnet: technology companies and restaurants are experimenting with electronic menus. These can be deployed as portable devices like electronic books, or built into a table-top display screen like Microsoft’s Surface technology. Customers could place an order with the electronic menu, play games, and monitor their order’s progress from the kitchen to their table.

Restaurateurs may see reduced error rates and lower expenses if order-taking becomes more automated. Electronic menus might be tied directly into kitchen, POS (point-of-sale) and inventory systems, allowing restaurant chains to develop more accurate real-time sales data.

Seasonal choices can easily be accommodate with an electronic menu. When the kitchen is running low of an item, the menu might indicate that there are only “x servings left” this evening. When the supply is exhausted, the menu suggests an alternative.

Electronic menus could also drive increased impulse sales of high-margin items like beverages and desserts.

The adoption curve for electronic restaurant menus resembles mobile phones in some respects. There may be several iterations of widely incompatible systems before consumers are interested enough to try the technology. Costs are likely to be high.

Waiters and other floor staff may reject the concept completely, especially in Europe. Someone still has to bring the food and beverages to the customer, and those employees may receive lower tips if they did not take the customer’s order.

Europe and Hawaii may be excellent regions to try a key feature of electronic menus. Just like e-books, an electronic menu could support any number of languages through Unicode and graphical displays. A tourist might order competently from an e-menu, instead of guessing at cognates and grumbling about the results. Happy customers are more likely to come back for more, and to tell their friends.