Do you know how Google PageRank works? Lots of people out there believe they do – many of them have made turned that understanding into a career, working in SEO to get their clients on the all-important first results page. You can have talmudical-level discussion with some of these people; no question that they know their stuff. Some have even gone on the lecture circuit or written books on how PageRank works.

But can they explain how it works in three minutes or less? Probably not – no, make that definitely not, if the websites of many of these experts are any indication. “What kind of question is that,” I hear an insulted SEO expert saying; “Nobody could explain such a complicated technology in three minutes or less!”

Oh yes they can – and they (or rather he) did just that last week, during the finals of the Israel Famelab contest, a part of the British Famelab, established five years ago in Britain, and expanded to several other countries, including Israel, two years ago. Famelab is a contest designed for graduate students and researchers to “help discover the new faces of science.” According to the rules, the candidate must take an interesting (and complicated) scientific topic, and explain it to a panel of judges in just three minutes (!) in their native language. The winners get a laptop and a free trip to England, where they are honored at the Chelthenham Science Festival.

The PageRank presentation was made by Ohad Barzilai, a candidate for a doctoral degree in computer science at Tel Aviv University. Here’s a rough translation of the highlights of how he explained PageRank (original Hebrew here)

“With PageRank, Google lets the internet make its own popularity standings. The standings are determined by links and connections between sites. The sites with the most links get the highest rankings.”

Okay, even the judges knew that part! But Barzilai goes into the gory details; Google’s bots, crawling around the net, mine the data for links and connections, and builds a database over 20 billion lines long (!), with all the link data between sites correlated. But once that’s done, Google then has to determine the quality of those links:

“Here’s an example: You are an employer interviewing two potential employees. One brings with him ten letters of recommendation, and the other brings only one. But that one was written by Bill Gates. Who would you hire, based on that information? Clearly the letter with Gates’ nod is more valuable. When someone giving a recommendation has an important reputation of his own, we give those recommendations more value. But what if you discovered that Gates’ had written 10,000 such letters? Would you still value his recommendation as you did before? Most likely not; as a person gives out more and more recommendations, those recommendations are worth less.

“That is exactly how PageRank works. Google has discovered an amazing thing: If they apply a mathematical equation called a diagonal lemma to the big list of link results, they are able to get a picture of the importance of the links and the sites themselves. The astounding thing is that Google has discovered, using linear algebra, to mathematically quantify the intuitive standings of popularity and relevance. It’s all done automatically without human intervention. This is what Google does, and they do it better than anyone else in the world does today.

Not bad for three minutes! PageRank a very complicated subject, as you can see from here, a college level course that spends a semester discussing it! Making sense out of PageRank in just three minutes is truly an accomplishment. By the way, Barzilai only came in second place for this – the winner discussed memory and face recognition! Some people fear that Israel’s educational system isn’t doing the job when it comes to training students for science and hi-tech. Looks like they just might be wrong!

Not to sound racist, but there’s no way a person raised in a Western country can’t feel some consternation when a person of clearly Arabic background gets on a plane. 9/11 was just too much of a shock to the system, and it’s impossible not to do some personal profiling, even if you try not to.

The same applies to Arabic text. If you’re from the United States or Israel (and probably lots of other countries) it’s impossible not to look at a page of Arabic writing and not get “nervous” – as in, “it must be some anti-Israel/anti-Jewish/pro-terrorist screed.” We’ve come to expect it, especially in Israel. And if you live in an area where there is lots of Arabic on the radio (such as Israel), you get the same suspicions listening to broadcasts of speakers who are dramatically intoning – something.

Other than learning to understand Arabic, there’s little you can do about the audio “threat” (one of my daughters more or less taught herself Arabic, so she can make out what goes on in these broadcasts). But for the rest of us who are too lazy/uninterested/incapable of learning a new language at this point in our lives, there’s Google Translations. There are lots of reasons not to like Google (like the people here say), but one amazing thing Google has done, imho, is Google Translate, where you can paste in text or URLs and get them automatically translated between dozens of languages – like English, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and of course the more “pedestrian” languages like Italian and French (no offense meant!).

Google Translate has helped me out numerous times – including just this afternoon, as I was writing a feature story on Israeli boxing. As part of the story, I wanted to mention the tragic death of a former Israeli Golden Gloves champ, Karim Nayif Bathish, who was killed a couple of weeks ago in an auto accident. I really wanted a picture of Bathish, but couldn’t find one anywhere – on the English and Hebrew sites, that is. Then I got the bright idea to Google Bathtish’s name in Arabic, seeking out articles about him on Israeli websites in Arabic. As a local hero in Nazareth and Haifa, you’d figure there would be a couple of articles. And indeed there were – complete with picture. The articles were quite factual, and the talkbacks were all what you would expect (mourning for the victim, etc.).

This isn’t the first time I’ve used Google Translate to research an article on Arabic language websites – I actually wrote an article in the JPost about it last year. And of course, I can’t help but check out other stories than the ones I was searching for on these sites. Let’s just say that while some fill the post-9/11 stereotype, most don’t. Believe it or not, “they” are not as obsessed with us as we think they are!

The thrust of my boxing article is how the organization tries to promote co-existence (most of the boxers are Arab or Russian kids). The director of the organization, Dr. Shahade, told me than in 20 years of running the Israel Boxing Association, there hasn’t been one ethnic/religious fight among the boxers! That’s great for kids who are in shape enough to box – but how can the rest of us avoid tension? Maybe Google Translate is the arena for us!

In Israel, the authorities are very focused on collecting taxes (I guess authorities everywhere are). As such, the authorities have set up a variety of mechanisms to make sure that they get their money. Thanks to a computer snafu, though, they managed to get some money that wasn’t theirs – including mine!

Most people in Israel (salaried workers) have their income taxes automatically deducted; technically, they don’t have to file a tax return, unless they have an exceptional expense or deduction (average charitable contributions, credits for dependents, etc. are all factored in already). Independent operators/freelancers/self-employed people, on the other hand, file annual returns. Every two months, you are supposed to pay an advance to the Tax Authority; they give you a little book of receipts where you are supposed to fill in the amount of money you earned, and pay a percentage as income tax. That percentage is determined at the beginning of the calendar year, and is based on your previous year’s income.

It makes as much sense as any collection system, but it’s expected that there is going to be some money owed by either side, since by definition a freelancer/self-employed person does not earn the same amount each year from the same employer (otherwise they might as well take a salary). Between varying income, changing business expenses, new dependents (ie children), and other factors, you could be eligible for a hefty refund – or have to pay a hefty amount to cover your obligation.

Having done this for a few years now, I can also say with authority that it depends on the accountant you have, too. I have a good one. Not that he’s a crook or anything, he just knows his way around the tax codes, and has been able to get me a significant refund each year for the past three years!

According to his reckoning, I was supposed to get about 5,000 shekels back this year. They usually send these refunds out by February, but here it is May, and I haven’t gotten mine yet. What I have gotten, though, are dunning letters demanding that I pay them 2,400 shekels!

Now, let it not be said that I don’t do my part as a taxpayer; there are lots of deductions I don’t take on purpose. I’d rather pay them and have them leave me alone. When I got the first letter (they don’t start threatening until the third), I called up my accountant and asked him what had gone wrong – assuming he had miscalculated or something. “Let me check my figures,” he told me – and called back a couple of days later to tell me that he had been right, and the tax people owed me money! “I even called the tax official in charge of your account,” he told me, “and he agreed completely.” So what happened? “Must have been a glitch. I’m sure they’ll clear it up in a couple of days.”

Nope – and I’ve now gotten a fourth letter! I was all set to write them a check, when I saw the article describing exactly what happened. In his annual report, Micha Lindenstrauss said that the Tax Authority had “lost” the deduction eligibility information for a whole slew of taxpayers when implementing a new IT system. Apparently, there a series of different computer systems that the Authority is trying to unite in a single system – a project that has been going on for the last 18 years (!) – and it still isn’t ready.  Now the question is, do I give up, or try to get my money back? Can’t we put some hi-tech entrepreneurs to work on this?