Monthly Archives: September 2006

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In Which I Make Notes B’Ivrit

My sister did a wonderful thing for me and sent me a book called Count Your Blessings: One Hundred Prayers For a Day by Rabbi Ron Isaacs. It was a nice, thoughful gift, one that she picked up for me when she took (some of) My Brood to a museam in NYC. Or maybe Philly. I forget which.

I like the book; I really do. Small, compact, it fits in the cargo pocket of my uniform and goes with me wrapped in a Ziplock ™ bag on mission. But there is one thing that struck me right off the bat when I read through it the first time.

There was no commentary. None. Zero. It was just a collection of berachot in a small paperback. Which is not necessarily a Bad Thing, but I don’t think that I have ever seen a Jewish writing on prayer that did not contain commentary of some sort. As “The People Of The Book,” we spend a lot of time commenting, and commenting, and commenting some more on whatever tractate is in front of us.

So I filled in the blanks.

Literally within seconds, I had out a pencil and was scribbling a few notes on the side margins and underneath particular phrases. One berachah in particular was the focus of my attention, part of Refuah, one of the blessings in the Amidah: Baruch atah Adonai, rofei cholei amo Yisrael. Not that there is something particularly wrong with it, I just wanted to expand it some to be more inclusive.

Saying specifically amo Yisrael might lead to the erroneous assumption that this is for The Tribe only; all others need not apply. On my team, there is a theoretical maximum of two Jews, myself and one other who “floats,” that is, fills in when something else pops up that the regularly scheduled crew member can’t make it. (Examples include: being on leave and being in the hospital.) What I wanted to do was have something readily available, something that was both reflective of my specific religious beliefs and something that was inclusive enough to encompass all of the other members of my immediate group.

What I did was to pencil in HaOlam for Yisrael, and make cholay (sick person [translation mine]) plural. Plus, I will usually utter this line of Refuah when I see medevac helicopters flying over, which is a lot more often than I like. I have no way of knowing if the patient is in fact part of amo Yisrael or how many are aboard. This covers the bases all around.

This exercise had the added benefit of me practicing some Hebrew, which was not nearly as rusty as I thought. Maybe it is because of the Siddur and Tanach that My Wife graciously provided me and adorns my shelf here. A little practice helps keep the rust off the mental gears.

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Upgrades and Improvements

As you may have noticed, there is a new theme about the site. This is because I have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4 from *cough* 1.2.2, and, yeah. It was needed.

Naturally, this took a lot longer than it should have, so the site was down for most of the day. I followed the simple five steps outlined on the WordPress site and that was fine. The problem was that the files were a pain to get on the server. Granted, we have “high speed” internet here in sunny Iraq (or at least I do), and granted it is prone to finicky behavior. Since it is satellite, it is susceptible to environmental considerations, like sand, wind, and mortars. For whatever reason, I simply could not FTP the files to the server reliably. Dropped connections, socket errors, and all manner of Very Frustrating Things.

In the end, I simply put them up via a web based interface that my servers have. And that took two plus hours with all the files involved. Fortunately, I missed only one that I know of, and that has been corrected. If you notice anything amiss, please leave a comment.

With all the time available to me, I noticed a couple of things. One, recursion is difficult for the human mind to grasp beyond a few levels. I think this has to do with memory, and that called to mind the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” dealing with the inability of the human mind to grasp large quantities of data for a given channel. So, tracking which files had to go up, which directory was the next one to recurse, and so on, was a bit of a challenge at times.

Two: as I did this, I noticed that I got into a rhythm with keystrokes and the like. Never one to leave well enough alone, I would switch hands with the mouse pad and which hand was doing what keystroke. Without fail, the process would suddenly stall, since now a lot of mental processing was being shifted. While I can and do often mouse left handed, switching in mid-stream would throw a wrench into everything. And I would lose my mental pointers of where I was at and what I was doing. Now, I would recover, and get back into “the zone,” but it was an interesting observation to me of what the costs are of interrupting the flow of things and how long it takes to get back into the groove of things. Nothing like learning things for yourself, which is usually how I learn lessons in life. (Just ask The Wife.)

But things are running now, and all of this was to combat spam. What? Well, the blogging needs of mine were pretty much met with the old version, but I really didn’t have an effective way to trash all the comment spam in a timely manner. I was getting literally thousands of spam comments a week. Too much to do by hand, so I needed some code to limit it, or at least help me throw it out. Nor could I use a handy tool that I wanted to use on the site. It (the version I used) was simply Too Old To Begin The Training. So, I upgraded. And we’ll see if the New Cool Toy I wanted lives up to my expectations.

In the meantime, I’m tinkering with the newer features that I have. I’m undecided about the new theme, though. I kind of liked the older one better, but maybe it was time for a change. There are definitely some parts that I know I want from the other theme, like the calendar display of archives, but with a little toying, I’m sure that can be arranged.

Until then, enjoy!

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Picking Up At Minute 14

There are times that I am simply amazed by life. The random strings and wanderings from one place to another only to wind up with something familiar and a sense that even though it is a really big world, sometimes it is just a small world after all.

So, there I am, trying to catch up to date on a blog that I subscribe to, Chayyei Sarah, and I come across this post. Naturally, I follow the link (interesting perspective on the Israeli war), and check out some of the other interviews.

Particularly the one with Bandit Three Six, who is in The Green Zone. Been close to there, so I checked it out. Looking at the pictures, I notice that I have been to some of those places. Like the Bathouse, which is not actually in the Green Zone, but is in Baghdad at another base.

And I see this.

And this.

Wow.

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Amazon, Oprah, and The Long Tail

I noticed something new, or at least new to me since I live in a bubble right now, on Amazon.com today. There is some statistical analysis of the books that they sell, provided the books are in the Search Insideâ„¢ program.

Take for example this book. Clicking on the Text Stats link at the top next to the Explore tag, or scrolling down to the Inside This Book section, brings the buyer to some fun facts about the book. Such as the complexity of the book, defined in a number of ways from Fog Index to the number of words with three or more syllables. Now, this is potentially useful information to a potential buyer, say a proactive parent looking to see if the book is suitable for a given reading level. Granted, it is only a piece of information, and tells us nothing of the information content, only the words used.

[Ed. Note: The choice of book for this example should not be taken as anything more than my whacked out sense of humor for what makes a good title. The Wife and I are doing fine, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could if I was actually home with her, but you get the idea.]

A couple of things struck me about this, particularly since the Inside This Book section was immediately followed by “What do customers ultimately buy after viewing items like this?” and a list of books with percentage rankings of what books were bought after this page view. Savvy marketing, giving information like this. The problem, though, is that the information is misleading.

While the word counts might be correct, and the glossy word frequency map (called Concordance by Amazon) is so cute I could hug it, the data given is not in context, and the information is therefore absent. Okay, the Fog Index is 40 bazillion. What exactly does that mean? The simple definition given by Amazon is that “[i]t indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand the passage.” Great, what does that mean? And how do we arrive at that? A simple search on Wikipedia leads to more information.

Never mind that not all formal schooling is created equal. Go ask any public school teacher or involved parent. But I suppose it is a start, although it seems to me that not enough information about the readability indicators is provided to anyone who would find value in this data.

The other item that I noted, the statistical percentage of buying a given book after this, is also misleading. The thing about statistics, and probability, is that there is no memory. Supposing I take a list of books that were bought, and we go through the whole bit about making sure that it is a random sample I am taking and that my sample size is high enough, we can come up with a number that says there is an X chance of the following behavior that can be expected. Nice. And I should expect that in the future, since what actions happen now does not affect the future actions since there is no memory.

Except that this is more of a systems analysis than a statistical probability. People are thinking agents, so we get a system that shows Complexity rather than probability. Essentially, what happens is that the buyer is a thinking agent, or better yet, is an agent that responds to input from the surrounding environment. And now, we have memory in the system, so probability is not the best indicator since it will change over time.

A buyer will see that “a lot” of people buy this given book. Therefore, it is either good or otherwise worth buying. Everybody else is doing it, why don’t you? Now, the buyer has a chance X of buying it, does, and skews the probability. Which influences the next buyer, further skewing the numbers. This is a positive reinforcement cycle. And to boot, there are additional constraints on the buyer complicating the neat arrangement, such as funds available, preferences about authors, what Oprah recommended that month, etc.

All this makes it nice marketing. A nice number is put up, the system is influenced, and voila! A bestseller is born. The influence of Oprah with her book club generates such power that publishers fall over themselves to land a given book on Oprah’s list. The numbers put up by Amazon also influence sales systemically, although probably not to the degree that Oprah does. But the buyer is also not likely to be educated about what the numbers mean, and likely to lapse into the natural human response of dealing with information that is not understood right away: smile and nod. To do differently is to admit ignorance, and that is something people seem loathe to admit.

I have to wonder what Phillip K. Dick would make of all of this. Marketing influencing buying behaviors subtly, using the power of computers to crunch a lot numbers fast over the past purchases of a lot of people, has that potential tint of forcing a product on the market that might not otherwise be supported. This theme was also the subject of James Tiptree’s short story ”The Girl Who Was Plugged In. Naturally there is the potential for abuse, in the sense of graft and corruption to get a product in the key spots for mass marketing. We assume that Amazon’s numbers are impartial. Or that Oprah’s staff is on the level. And if these assumptions were not valid?

The counter balance for this is what has been come to be known as The Long Tail. Simply put, in a power law distribution, there will be a few that have a lot of whatever it is that is being measured. Most will have little. This is exactly what happens in wealth distribution in an economy, so we get tidbits like “80% of the wealth is held by 20% of the population” to make something up. The real kicker is, if we look closer, we can get something like “40% of whatever is held by 3%,” to continue the use of our example. This means that 60% is held by the remainder, which is a solid majority at 97% of whatever population we are sampling.

Let’s go back to books. Suppose that 40% of sales are held by the top 100 books, and the top five publishers. Now, there are many more books and publishers, but they appear to be frozen out of the market, garnering small sales and market shares. The glass ceiling has been reached, and cracking that top portion of the market seems just out of reach. Or is it? Combined, all the other publishers and books are the majority of sales, 60% in our example.

So the key is to combine all the niche markets that a given publisher reaches. This is the way to survive the seeming market lock and even grow in size. If you are a small publisher, and you do a few small runs, you have fixed and variable costs. The fixed costs are setting up for the runs, which are a one time costs and pretty heavy. The variable costs are the ink and paper, which scale with the size of the run. So, classically, if you make a large run, or a run of a certain minimum size, you dilute the cost of the setup. Otherwise, the cost of setup makes the run an economic loser.

But if you reduce the setup cost, or eliminated it entirely, then you are playing on variable costs alone, and the small runs are now worthwhile. Living in the Long Tail then, your book publishing company can do many small runs of obscure books. Granted, none is going to be Earth shattering in the volume of sales, but combined together, they will rival the top players.

So, Phillip K. Dick need not roll over in his grave. There is an offset to the glass ceiling and break out of the bottom of the system. Or rather, what appears to be the top isn’t, and it is just a matter of perception as well as learning to cope with what really is the case.