Centives

KFC’s plans to expand into African countries are facing one big hurdle: chickens. Drew Hinshaw writes:

• Chicken farmers in Ghana don’t meet KFC’s professional standards and so chains are forced to import their chicken from other countries.
• However Ghana’s currency is depreciating which makes imports more expensive, menu prices higher, and sales lower.
• To cut costs KFCs in Ghana are encouraging patrons to use shito – a local hot sauce – instead of more expensive imported ketchup.
• Nigeria doesn’t allow the import of chickens. This has driven Nigerian KFCs to add fish to the menu.
• Kenya doesn’t allow chicken imports either. There is just one local supplier who meets the chain’s professional standards and they charge a large premium for it.

To read more about the struggles for KFC and what chain owners have to say about it, as well as why developing a professional domestic chicken industry will be difficult for African countries click here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Marginal Revolution

Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons looked at the people who have to write the State of the Union speech that the President delivers:

• Writing the State of the Union is thought to be one of the most difficult tasks for a Presidential speechwriter. Interest groups and other parties constantly interfere with the hopes of being mentioned in the speech.
• The speech is delivered at 9pm Eastern Time and there are fears that audiences will doze off. So speechwriters not only have to present something of substance, they must also make it interesting and engaging.
• Nixon’s speechwriter used amphetamines to stay alert during a three day writing binge for the 1970 address. Nixon ripped it up.
• The speeches have gotten longer with time. This is in part because people applaud “every time the President sneezes”. Bill Clinton has the record for longest speech.
• When done right the speech can set the agenda. Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil” continues to shape America’s foreign policy.

Read how speechwriters describe the process, how Reagan did things differently, and about the person who will be writing Obama’s speech over here.

Source: Los Angeles Times

As the East Coast of the United States recovers from “Nemo” the importance of weather forecasting has once again become clear. The Economist looked at an elegant solution to an age-old problem: measuring rainfall. Highlights include:

• Rainfall is now measured either through satellites – that lack detail – or old fashion rain collection gauges – that have detail but don’t cover much land.
• Rain can degrade cell phone reception and researchers have now come up with a system that uses cellphone signals to determine the amount of rainfall in an area.
• This provides the detail of rain gauges with the wide coverage of satellites – since most regions have cell phone reception.
• This information can also be measured in realtime unlike both satellites and gauges.
• There are areas without cell phone coverage and perhaps in the future weather forecasters will help build cell stations in those areas to better measure weather data and provide cell phone reception to the people who live there.
• The technology has limitations: it’s not that great at measuring snow or hail.

Read more about the technology, its limitations, and test runs over here.

Source: The Economist

The American military is looking at how its land-based nuclear missile system will work post-2025. Sharon Weinberger described the ideas being discussed so far:

• Nuclear weapons are all about deterring the enemy from daring to hit you in the first place, and so it’s important to convince the enemy that even if they manage to strike the country, the United States can still launch an annihilating counter-attack.
• The current system does this by spreading nuclear missile silos across a vast expanse of land.
• However this system is expensive and requires the maintenance of lots of missile silos dispersed across wide ranges.
• An alternate idea would have a nuclear ‘subway’ that would randomly transport nuclear weapons through various underground tunnels. The enemy would thus never know precisely where the missiles are.
• Another idea would have the missiles transported on specialized vehicles that would venture on public roads or even into off-road areas to prevent the weapons from becoming a static target.

Read more about other ideas, as well as the idea that the military is most likely to pursue over here.

Source: BBC

Centives previously looked at the lengths that Pret A Manger goes to in order to ensure that employees are perky. Perhaps they’re afraid that without this policy their servers will act more as they did in the former Soviet Union, writes Peter Frase:

• When Pizza Hut opened its first outlet in the former Soviet Union in 1990 international managers had to teach local stuff how to smile, make eye contact, and generally interact with the customer.
• A Soviet teenager asked why as a McDonald’s server he was expected to be nice to the customers. After all – he reasoned – he had control of the burgers, and the customers didn’t.
• All of this likely happened because under the Soviet Union people had housing, education, and health care. They had no reason to do a good job and be passionate about their work.
• In the service industry, the product and the worker are inseperable.

Read more about what this says about capitalism over here.

Source: Jacobin

Amazon is planning to launch its own currency called Amazon coins. Matthew Yglesias argued that developmental economics helps provides some insight into why it’s doing this:

• Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon are trapped in a war of ecosystems. Apple has the advantage because it launched its app ecosystem before the other players in the game and so developers build apps for that ecosystem.
• In response to this Microsoft offers subsidies to particular developers who will build for its own ecosystems.
• This is similar to a centrally planned system as Microsoft picks the apps that it thinks consumers will demand.
• Amazon, on the other hand, announced with its system of coins that it would be giving out millions of coins for free.
• Thus they will artificially stimulate demand for apps. In anticipation of this demand, app developers have a reason to start building for the Amazon ecosystem.
• And where will Amazon get the money for this? By issuing debt. Its credit rating is so good that it can essentially borrow money for free to give a short term fiscal boost that ultimately turns its ecosystem into one that is self-sustaining.

Yglesias ends by noting that national governments could learn a thing or two from Amazon’s strategy. You should read the entire piece here.

Source: Slate

We have too many online logins. Governments are looking for a way to not only mitigate that problem but also to find a way to verify the people who use the internet. Here’s what they’ve come up with so far:

• Poor countries and several European countries prefer government issued ID cards.
• Those in America, England, and Canada though are suspicious about the government controlling all that information. They’re also skeptical about the cost.
• Instead they prefer to give over identification responsibilities to corporations. The reasoning is that institutions such as banks and mobile operators already have a fair amount of information about us and can use that information to identify us online.
• The way it would work is that there would be one standard adopted by all. You could choose to verify your identity through your bank or your mobile operator. The company behind it would earn a small fee every time your identity is verified through them, and government would save on the costs of running the system themselves.
• The American government has given $9 million to a pilot project that tests this out. The aim is to have half of all Americans using this system by 2016.

Read more about the conundrum that governments face, the privacy issues that this raises, and why this might improve (or hurt depending on your face) your dating prospects over here.

Source: The Economist

Ever wondered how it’s possible to get freshly squeezed orange juice all year round despite the seasonality of orange growing conditions? It’s because the entire process of producing the orange juice is a lot less natural than you would first think writes Duane Stanford:

• Coke – the company behind “Simply Orange Juice” – uses satellites to monitor orange groves to determine the ideal time to pick them.
• The squeezed juice is then kept in giant solos, chilled to about 0 degrees C for up to eight months. In season juice is mixed with out-of-season juice.
• When the juice is ready to be packaged it is sent through a 1.9 kilometer underground pipeline to Coke’s bottling plant.
• Then an algorithm is used to determine the recipe of the orange juice that is bottled.
• This algorithm was designed by the same person who designed Delta’s flight scheduling system. It analyzes up to 1 quintillion variables to determine the optimal orange juice blend.
• This algorithm changes daily as the weather and other conditions change to get the right mix of acidity, sweetness, and other attributes through adjustments to the ratio of ingredients and the addition of natural flavors and fragrances.

Read more about the orange juice production process over here.

Source: Business Week

Via: Kottke

Dell has opted to go private, delisting its shares from the stock exchange with the help of money from Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft, and the founder, Michael Dell. What does all this mean? Chris Umiastowski had some answers:

• Silver Lake Partners have a history of participating in such deals and that’s why they’re involved.
• Microsoft isn’t directly investing any money. Instead it has given the consortium a $2 billion loan. This does not give Microsoft voting power in the company.
• Microsoft might have had some conditions attached to the loan. If it did though those haven’t been announced.
• Dell benefits because it no longer has to worry about day to day fluctuations in the share price and can make long term strategic bets without worrying about investors who want short term payoffs.

You can read more over here. Over at Slate Matthew Yglesias points out that the move also allows Dell’s owners to avoid a large amount of taxes.

Source: WPCentral

Scientists say that they have discovered the remains of Richard III, King of England from 1483 to 1485. Those bones were then used to reconstruct his face to see what he would have looked like. The BBC looked at how this is done and how accurate the process is:

• The position of the teeth and eye sockets show us with a high degree of certainty the shape of the mouth and eyes.
• The nose used to be tough to predict because it’s mostly made of cartilage which quickly decays. However a recently discovered formula accurately predicts the shape of the nose based on the underlying bone structure.
• The ears are hard to get right. It’s possible to tell where they’re positioned and whether or not the individual had ear lobes, their shape can’t be determined.
• The amount of fat on the face, eye colour, skin colour, and hair style all have to be invented.
• There’s a tendency for reconstructed faces to look young. This is because the bones don’t give any indications of the age lines the person had.

Read more about the process, its accuracy, and how one reconstructed face ended up looking like Sir Patrick Stewart over here.

Source: BBC