In my Jpost article today, I talked about the alternatives to Israeli phone ex-monopoly Bezeq. While only Bezeq can still offer traditional PSTN phone service, a host of challengers have arisen to provide consumers with broadband-based home phone services, usually on a POP (pay one price, like at Great Adventure) basis. Until customers can connect to the internet at more than the current 8mb/s (most people here have 5mb/s or less), I wrote that transferring for your home phone service to the internet – which for various reasons is dicey enough in Israel (the infrastructure sometimes hems and haws) – might not be such a good idea, at least until Bezeq’s NGN fast data transfer infrastructure (reputed to provide up to 50mb/s capabilities) reaches your neighborhood. And the truth is, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t all that terrible.

Now. Now they’re not so terrible. As one reader commented on the Jpost site, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t so terrible now because the company has five competitors breathing down its neck, who are actually having an impact on its customer base. For me, with a network of five or six home computers that are always on and active, downloading, processing, or presenting and playing this or that, adding internet-based home phone service would be just another strain on the system (I’ve been down that road anyway, with both Skype – which usually behaves, but sometimes doesn’t – and a dedicated softphone, complete with VoIP box). But for  any folks who aren’t heavy web surfers, saving 50 or 100 shekels a month on their phone bills by switching away from Bezeq. Many are doing so. It makes lots of sense – and can be a very satisfying experience.

That’s because everybody has their “Bezeq story.” You can’t really blame them for the crappy service in the “old days,” before 1984, when the culprit was the government-controlled Ministry of Communications. But you can blame them for the crappy service after 1984, when the Ministry spun-off Bezeq into a separate – but still government-controlled – enterprise.

Even just a few years ago, on the eve of its becoming a private company, Bezeq was still mired in its old ways. Example: You have been able to pay your Bezeq bill by credit card anytime, day or night, over an automated system for nearly a decade. You call their service number (199), press some buttons, and input your credit card number using your keypad. The process is pretty efficient – now. Until about a year and a half or so ago, however, it was much easier to call during business hours and get a real person; that virtual cashier would go on and on for eons, making you repeat input, checking and rechecking things.

Perhaps they planned the system like that for uptight Israelis who expect to be given a hard time by the people they pay for services, but what should have been an easy input-based bill paying exercise turned out to require your full attention for as long as ten minutes! Note that this situation prevailed even during a substantial period when Bezeq was a private company. They’ve cleaned up the input manager now, and it now takes about three minutes to go through the process of changing things.

But that’s not my Bezeq story – instead, this is it: About seven years ago (2002) I was getting ready to leave with my wife and kids for a family trip to U.S. relatives. The flight was to leave quite early, I remember, and we were up long before dawn making last minute preparations. Then it hit me – I forgot to pay the phone bill, which was already overdue by a couple of days! But where was the bill? Already edging on towards late and trying to take care of a plethora of last minute details, I search and searched, but couldn’t find the bill.

When you call Bezeq from your home phone, the computer identifies your phone number and account  – and that feature was active in the 2002 version of the Bezeq online payment system. So no problem, right? You don’t really need a bill; call the automatic payment system, let it identify your account  via your phone number, let it tell you how much you owe, and pay.

That’s the way you would expect it to work – but not at Bezeq circa 2002. While the system could identify who you were, it couldn’t tell you how much you owed! You had to have the bill in front of you in order to input the full – exact, down to the agora – you were supposed to pay. What if you didn’t have the bill, or wanted to pay in advance? Could you, before, say, going out of town and having lost your bill, input a clearly inflated sum like NIS 500 (instead of the NIS 200 the bill usually was), and let them hold it for you on account?

You could try – as I did – and be told that the payment had been recorded in the system. And you would go on your merry way, confident that Mamale Bell was watching out for you. And you wouldn’t even realize you had a problem until you sauntered back home three weeks later and picked up the phone – and heard nothing!

Why nothing? Because Bezeq had cut off your service. And why had they cut off your service? Because you didn’t pay your bill. But Ms. Bezeq lady, you beg, I lost the bill and input much MORE than I owed, so you would get your money! It’s just not fair! To which the Bezeq lady would reply, in more or less words, “tough.” To get your service back, you had to pay your bill PLUS a cutoff fee, EVEN THOUGH your payment was seemingly accepted at the time of payment by the system!

And you, left holding the bag, seethe with rage. And you tell the Bezeq lady, “All right for you. But one day the government is going to allow competition, and on the first day they do, I am dumping you for anyone else that can offer home phone service, even if they charge more money than you!”

So much for dreams of sweet revenge. Nowadays, it would seem that the revolution is over, that Bezeq has joined the family of humanity and positive human relations. But people like us remember – and our day will come yet!

I’ve fallen behind on my blogging schedule of late. I was in the U.S. for most of August, and you know how that is – hanging out with the kids, running around to the stores, etc. Visiting the family is wonderful, but it’s no vacation!

I was all set to get back into the swing of things, when the almost unbelievable happened – my wife’s sister, Abigail Radoszkowicz, passed away, at the age of 53. Abigail was the editor of the Op-Ed page of the Jerusalem Post, which wrote a lengthy and emotional obituary for her. I’ve made a web page with the obit, plus letters and e-mail messages that the writers Abigail worked with sent to the Jpost in response to the tragedy. People who visited my wife as she sat shiva said they couldn’t recall ever reading an obit with such emotion and sadness. She was clearly loved by her colleagues – and yet, she was always sure she was going to be “the next one” to be fired!

She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer only in the middle of July – barely six weeks before she died. It was a very aggressive cancer, that spread to the liver and kidneys, until her body basically broke down on the Thursday (Sept. 3) that she passed away. She died very late Thursday night, and her husband, trying to arrange for a funeral for the next day, was told that there was no room in Jerusalem’s main cemetery, Har Hamenuchot – so she was sent to Har Hazeitim (Mt. of Olives), usually reserved for only the most righteous. While to look at her you wouldn’t think she was one of the “hidden tzaddikim,” apparently G-d knew better – and He arranged for her to be buried in a place worthy of her.

There’s lots I can say about Abigail – as a journalist, a sister in law, and a family member (the latter two are not necessarily the same, as most of us know). She was an intellectual who didn’t flaunt her knowledge, a cultured person who didn’t look down at the “masses,” and a religious (almost Chareidi) mother who encouraged her kids to explore the world. Abigail got me my start in the Jpost many years ago, where she got me an interview with the head of the ads department – from where I moved into systems administration, and finally writing. It’s only now, after the week of the shiva, that the loss is sinking in.

To read the obit (if you missed it in the Jpost), and the letters to the editor, please click on http://abigail.cyberjew.net/

As an almost certified paranoiac, I haven’t been posting for that last three and a half weeks – the exact amount of time I was away with the family in the U.S. I didn’t want to write anything that would give away the fact that I was out of town (and that the house was for the most part empty) like this guy did, giving crooks a green light for their home invasion. You could probably find out my address, if you googled hard enough! Note to all potential thieves: We’re home now, so don’t bother coming around!

What did I bring back from the States, you ask? Plenty: Lots of “stuff,” but even more stories, not all of them happy. Most people who live in Israel and go to the U.S. buy stuff, because it’s often cheaper there, and they have more of a variety. For example: I picked up a nice flat screen TV for the bedroom, only $285 at Wal-mart (which I should have returned, because I saw it a week later at Costco for $225!). We got a bunch of other stuff too, lots of it from the Dollar Store (and Kohl’s, which had some great sales!)

But the stories – those weren’t as much fun as the shopping. Many of the stories had to do with trying to get some help with products and services, and getting pushed around by phone correspondents who were clearly from someplace outside the U.S., who could do nothing more than read a script (usually in very poorly accented English, I might add). I alluded to one of these situations in a JPost article; I was trying to get Verizon, the service provider for my parents’ DSL internet connection, to fix a connection issue.

For a week I was bounced around the world, speaking to phone attendants in India and Mexico, for the most part, who had no answers for me, and no interest in getting my problem solved. As I wrote, these people, from a third world background, have more serious survival issues to deal with than fixing my connection in time to allow me to attend my videoconferencing meetings. And of course, with each subsequent phone call, my tone got louder and louder. You could just picture the phone attendant pulling out her “angry customer script,” reading back the responses she was supposed to give when the customer starts yelling (I bet that script gets a lot of use!). Finally, I managed to get through to someone in the American call center, and the problem was resolved a day and a half later.

Verizon was far from the only runaround I was subjected to – I had “incidents” with several cell phone service providers, and even the customer service in some stores wasn’t up to par. I could even swear that 7-11 was using an inferior grade of coffee – it just wasn’t that good! Not to mention the much higher prices everywhere. Eleven bucks to cross a stupid bridge (the Verrazano)? Fuhgeddaboutit!

As I wrote in the Post, Hebrew has apparently saved Israel from the scourge of outsourcing. It’s unlikely that workers in India or other outsourcing centers are going to bother to learn Hebrew in order to serve the local market, so we’re unlikely to be subjected to the scourges resulting from dealing with uncaring foreigners half a world away. Instead, we’re subjected to the scourges of dealing with uncaring Israelis a half kilometer away! But it’s not the same; you have a common cultural basis which you can pull out of your pocket when you deal with a local person (we’ve all had some experience in this, like the secretary who takes pity on you because she knows you’re getting the kids ready for Shabbat).

Ironically, as a reader reminded me, Israel has a significant outsourcing operation as well; although much less active here now, New Jersey-based IDT runs dozens of call centers here in Israel. But the Israeli call centers are far different than the Indian ones, because here the centers recruit from among American immigrants – so when a caller reaches an Israeli center, they really are talking to someone with whom they can identify, and who can identify with them. Based on my frustrating experiences with call center people over the past few weeks, that identification apparently counts for a lot more than we realize.

Lest you think the Arab boycott of Israeli goods has passed from the earth, rest assured that it has not – and its latest victim is Israeli cellphone application maker Trixcell. This is the company that makes professional-looking magic tricks for cellphones that anyone can do. I’ve interviewed the guys from Trixcell (Shlomi Grandes and Menny Lindenfeld, who is a world-renowned professional magician) a couple of times, and have written a couple of articles and blog posts about them.

The tricks are really good (check out the videos on their site), and what’s most amazing to me is that this is the first time in history that sleight of hand is now possible for everyone; before, you had to spend weeks, if not years, perfecting the kinds of tricks you can perform using your cellphone and Trixcell’s illusions. What Photoshop did for graphic art and Quark xPress did for page layout, Trixcell is doing for magic – namely, putting it in the grasp of the non-professional, thus breathing new life into it and opening up many more markets for the profession.

But in my latest conversation with the Trixcell guys, they told me that their applications – which are sold in 90 countries around the world – have been banned in Egypt, because someone figured out that they were an Israeli company. Apparently they left the name of one of their developers in the credits of an application, and an Egyptian customer of Mobinil, the country’s largest cell service provider, complained that there were Israelis involved in the tricks. Not wishing to seem too “Jew-loving,” apparently, Mobinil dumped the Trixcell tricks. Grandes told me that it never occurred to him and Lindenfeld to hide the origins of their applications, and they had no intention of doing so either. He also told me a couple of things I promised not repeat; his official comment was “Israel has a peace treaty with Egypt, and even if they criticize Israel there, Trixcell only deals with business, not politics, so it’s a very unfortunate reaction on their part.”

Egyptians may be willing to boycott Israeli magic tricks – and Ariel detergent, since it shares a name with a former Israeli prime minister, and has a logo sort of looks like a Star of David (Proctor and Gamble, no stranger to logo lunacy, changed Ariel’s logo in order to de-emphasize the ‘Israeli’ connection). Maybe none use Motorola phones, because of the company’s Israeli connections, preferring Nokias or Sony-Ericssons.

But how do they handle Intel? I mean, since most of Intel’s processors were designed at least partly in Israel (nearly all of the company’s laptop processors were), and since so many computers carry an “Intel Inside” logo, what computers do Arab Israel-haters use? AMD? Well, some boycott sites do instruct their lackeys to do just that. But then, they probably didn’t hear about AMD’s eventual intention to open a research center in Israel, since “AMD considers Israel as a center of knowledge and innovation, and we do consider making a strategic investment here.” But you have to believe that at least some people – even among those advocating boycotts of Israel – are using Intel-based computers. If you ask me, it’s chutzpah of the first degree – using the computer or laptop brought to you by Israeli brainpower to advocate a boycott of that same Israeli product! Bizarro!

Whether it means something politically or economically, I can’t say – but something fundamental has apparently changed in the  Israeli attitude to the dollar. In the old days, dollars were seen as the ultimate hedge against shekel inflation (many apartment  renters used to have to pay a year’s rent up front, in dollars!), but now, apparently, respect for the greenback is at an all time  low. How else do you explain it when discount supermarkets are using dollars as a sales gimmick?

In Israel, groceries aren’t cheap (although not necessarily overly expensive), but you really don’t want to stock up if you’re  paying full price. So, you wait for a sale, and then you buy in quantity. Each chain has its own sale “style” – buy one or two  items and get one free, coupons, cash back on a credit card, etc. Smart shoppers can sometimes reduce their food bill by 10% – 20% through savvy use of the discounting system, hopping from store to store looking for bargains.

That means there’s little brand loyalty for supermarket chains in Israel, and the stores know it; they realize that price trumps  convenience, prizes, or green stamps for most customers. So, they run a sale when they want to drum up business. And this is the story of one of those sales.

Not far from my house there’s a branch of a chain called Victory. Some chains go for an affluent crowd (they usually open in more affluent neighborhoods), but Victory generally sticks to the “periphery,” catering largely to Russian immigrants and working class Israelis, from what I can tell. No matter – everyone wants a bargain, and since we were in the area, we decided to check out some of their bargains.

The deal this time was unlike any I have ever seen in Israel: On a wide range of goods, you paid full price, but at checkout time, you got a cash refund – in U.S. dollars! Not the dollar equivalent in shekels, but real live actual dollars! With the dollar hovering around NIS 4 these days, that meant a discount of about 4 shekels on the participating products. The photo, for example, says you get a dollar back if you buy three packages of marshmallows. Each package is 6 shekels, so you end up paying 14 shekels for the three – a discount of a little less than 20% on each package, by my reckoning. Not too bad, but there were a lot of really good buys, with some prices halved, taking into account the dollar deal. Altogether, we got $22 U.S. dollars after everything was added up – about 80 shekels – off a total bill of 550 shekels (they didn’t look like phonies, either).

If you ask me, it’s a genius move! Israelis like to travel (especially to Turkey), so you figure some of them are going to use their “earnings” at the duty free on their way out of town this summer, while others who can’t afford to go anywhere get to feel like “big shots,” with a couple of greenbacks in their pocket (they can also take their dollars to one of the numerous currency exchange places and get shekels). It’s certainly a different promotion, at least for supermarkets. Victory probably bought the dollars last week, when the exchange rate was lower, so they aren’t discounting as much in shekels as they would if they were running a straight sale. And those who hold on to their dollars could technically get an even bigger discount long term, if the dollar strengthens to NIS 4.10 or 4.20 again.

But once upon a time, only affluent Israelis – and of course, “rich Americans” – walked around with dollars. A reflection of the power of the word “America,” and all that stands (stood?) behind it. And now dollars have been reduced to a supermarket gimmick, the equivalent of a throwaway coupon. The “American century” may not be over just yet, but is the dollar’s?

While everyone (here, at least) is talking about how Barack Obama “stuck it” to Israel, there were a few lines in his speech that must have unnerved the Islamic radicals. Like the man said – he plans to tell the truth to everyone who needs to hear it, and that includes things like rights for women in the Muslim world, fighting terrorism, and demanding an end to anti-Semitism, especially Holocaust denial. All three of these phenomena are (pardon the term) “sacred cows” for many Muslims (Holocaust denial goes far beyond Iran), and we should expect Obama to lean on Islamic countries and leaders for change in these areas, as much as he appears ready to lean on Israel to make a deal with Mahmoud Abbas and company.

So just how will this “leaning” take place? What could Obama do to convince anti-Israel and anti-Semitic states to change their ways, which have been set in centuries of tradition (long before there was a State of Israel)? He could start with the health situation in the Muslim world, and just how far behind Israel even the more advanced Muslim states, like Iran, really are. For example, Iranians are among the world’s biggest sufferers of diabetes – about one-third of adults in Tehran have disturbed glucose tolerance or diabetes, according to a 9500-person study last year, and the problem is prevalent throughout the country. Many Tehran residents are obese, and there is a history of both Type I (Juvenile) and Type II diabetes in many families.

Israel, on the other hand, is one of the world leaders in diabetes research, and Israeli research has contributed to a number of treatments used to combat diabetes in Iran. For example, Israel’s D-Cure program has been operating for several years, coordinating research efforts at Israel’s top institutions. “In many fields in diabetes research, Israel is leading the world – in looking for islet cells, and alternatives to beta cells,” said D-Cure president Prof. Itamar Raz, who is also president of the Israel Diabetes Association and head of the Diabetes Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. Among the topics researched by D-Cure are cures and treatments related to both Type 1 and II diabetes. An Israeli innovation – the Oramed Insulin Capsule is an orally ingestible soft gel insulin capsule that the company believes will help Type II diabetics reduce the dependency on insulin shots and even prevent them from needing them at a later stage of the disease – is being tested now and will revolutionize treatment for Type II sufferers when approved.

And Israel’s Andromeda Biotech is about to embark on a phase III clinical trial of one of the most promising potential cures for Type I diabetes in the world, DiaPep 277, a synthetic peptide of 24 amino acids derived from the sequence of the human heat shock protein 60 (Hsp60). Heat shock protein therapies are considered among the best possibilities for a diabetes cure, and Iran has conducted its own research in these areas – often treading the ground broken by Israeli scientists! Interestingly, a link describing such research at an Iranian university has been taken down – fortunately, it’s available as  Google archive. Was it taken down because the Hsp60 research is so clearly connected to Israel?

When politicians run back and forth overseas to discuss pressing world problems, the press says that there was a “flurry of diplomatic activity.” In the case of Israel and Iran, there are many who believe that “flurry” will turn into a full-blown blizzard (with a subsequent “nuclear winter?”).

Like everything else in our wired world, the business of predicting has been taken over by “the experts” – in this case, the prediction markets, who use “The Wisdom of Crowds” to figure out the future. For example, right now at Intrade, which runs prediction markets for almost anything, from politics to wine vintages, has two Israel-related topics right now: Will Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist (nobody seems to think so) and if Israel or the US will attack Iran.

On the latter question, the predictions are all over the place, depending on which site you look at. The folks at Hubdub seem to think so, while at Intrade, they’re not so sure. Inkling users are much more optimistic that no war will take place. And at StrategyPage, where the watchword is “many minds make quick work of uncertainty,” the many minds don’t even believe that Iran is anywhere close to obtaining nuclear weapons! (They’re pretty bullish on gold, though – I guess they didn’t read my post questioning the whole gold mania thing).

So, is there wisdom in crowds? Most definitely, say people who know the business – such as Noam Danon of Qmarkets, and Israeli company that provides prediction network technology to small and medium sized businesses. I interviewed Danon last summer for Israeli21C, and he told me about the dozens of large corporations using them to set business policy – very successfully. As he says:

“Over the past four or five years, prediction markets have become a buzzword in many large organizations; Google, HP, Nokia, Siemens, the Best Buy retail chain, and many others use them to get an idea of where they should be investing their time and money. All those companies have large departments that specialize in working out prediction markets within the organization.”

Why would prediction markets give an accurate forecast for businesses, but not for Middle East conflicts? Obviously, money is a big motivator – when you have to decide how and where to invest assets, you are going to take the whole prediction process far more seriously. As far as Israel and Iran are concerned, the speculation either way could indicate that people look at the issue academically – after all, there have been no nuclear attacks since World War II, and it seem inconceivable that anyone would want to go down in history as being behind the next one (even the Iranians, North Koreans and Pakistanis, apparently). That, it seems to me, is the verdict of the crowd – with guaranteed MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) if Iran threatens/attacks Israel and/or vice-versa, both sides are doing a lot of “blustering” (another weather word!). Let’s hope the crowd is right on this one!

Thanks to the internet, we can share our most intimate ideas and thoughts with people all over the world. With Twitter, the privilege of getting thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to check out what you think is important in life is accelerated and democratized even further, since you don’t even have to bother with a blog if you want to reach “your public.” In a sense, we’re all celebrities now – just like Tom Wolfe predicted forty years ago, in the midst of the “Me Decade.”

That term, so closely associated with the 1970s, came from the name of an article Wolfe wrote for New York Magazine (it’s a great story, and if you’ve never read it, click on the link!). The article investigated some of the (then) new phenomena that really took hold during that decade – things like religious and secular cults, the sexual revolution, huge divorce rates, and the first stirrings of Christian “Moral Majority” style politics. Wolfe traces these developments to the Sixties, but by the mid-Seventies, they were part of the mainstream, no longer reserved for the hippies.

Americans have always been rugged individualists, and during the Seventies, Wolfe says, they took that individualism and combined it with the money they earned during the (then) “Thirty Year Boom” after World War II to start engaging in activities previously reserved only for the rich and powerful – namely,

“remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes.”

In other words, all Americans could now become part of that class of aristocrats who could see

“my life becoming a drama with universal significance . . . analyzed, like Hamlet’s, for what it signifies for the rest of mankind.”

Wolfe called the new attitude to “Me” the “Third Great Awakening,” comparing it to previous religious movements that changed the face of the world. The “liberation of the self” was a kind of religious movement – it was the liberation of the repressed who for so long had been treated like “the proletariat” by their self-proclaimed social betters. Now, everyone was important, said Wolfe – it was the logical end-product of democracy.

At the end of the article, Wolfe asks:

“Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own.”

A great question, at the time, and Wolfe’s article was one of the most influential in the late seventies (at least two professors in my college had us do assignments on it!). But it’s now been forty years since that article was written, and the results of the Me-based  Third Great Awakening can now be analyzed.

Most social analysts agree that the internet is the most democratic vehicle for expression in human history. For better or worse, anyone can proclaim him/herself an expert on anything – whether or not they have a graduate degree or years of experience in a field. Of course, if you want people to take you seriously, it helps to have the credentials.

But short of declaring myself a medical doctor or lawyer (or other government-licensed professional), I can pretty much brand myself any way I want. And thanks to blogs, Google (thanks to which we have SEO and can theoretically be seen by hundreds of millions) – and especially thanks to Twitter, I can believe and say anything I want about myself, and broadcast my “Me-ness” to tens of thousands, or even millions. There are so many “marketing experts” out there who claim to have “the secret” to making millions on-line, and maybe they do. But a world (and a platform, like Twitter), where everyone is an expert can only be possible in a world after the Me Decade.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it! I remember a discussion on a Quark xPress newsgroup from about ten years ago, where one of the posters once mourning the “lower quality” of publishing as a result of DTP. In the old days, the guy said, you had to be an “expert” – using the hot type, setting up the plates, etc. Now, any kid could make their own newspaper or magazine, and it was ruining business! As one of those “DTP kids,” I felt bad for this gentleman, who was obviously losing out in what had become an outmoded, dinosaur business. But why shouldn’t I have an opportunity to have my say if the technology allows it?

If there’s anything Twitter proves, it’s that there’s room at the top for everyone. Just like anyone could be an expert on DTP or marketing, and everyone can have their own blog, Twitter lets everyone take advantage of technology to market or brand themselves any way they want. The ability to be who YOU want – and to get others to take it seriously – is the ultimate end-product of the Me Decade, and Twitter is the tool that makes it happen!

I wasn’t looking to become the “poster boy” for Jewish-Arab coexistence when I set out north with my wife last Friday. After 19 years of marriage, we couldn’t resist an invitation from friends celebrating a family event in a Galilee hotel over Shabbat. Our 18 year old daughter, on leave from her National Service job in the Herzl Museum in Jerusalem, was primed to watch our three year old, together with their siblings (15, 14, and 11). Needless to say, we were extremely worried about how “the baby” would take the absence of both parents for the first time in her life (at least one of us had always been with her when the other was traveling or away), but as it turned out, that was to be the least of our worries – the kids, including the youngest, all had a blast.

Other troubles were waiting for us down the road. To get to northern Israel from our part of the country (western Shomron/Sharon), the most efficient route is to take Route 6 north to its current terminus, and then Road 65 east and north. That road, the easternmost within “Green Line” Israel, passes through an area called Wadi Ara, part of a geographic construct called “the triangle.” Its residents are almost exclusively Muslim Arabs, and the centerpiece of the area is a town called Um el-Faham. The most recent news stories about this area came out a couple of months ago, when several Israeli activists got permission to hold an “Israeli flag parade” in the town; the High Court authorized the parade, after police had turned down requests to hold it over and over. It turned out police were right, to some extent; there was minor rioting, and police worked hard to keep the small group of Jews and the much larger group of local residents protesting the parade at bay.

In general, though, Jews – especially people “like us,” observant residents of what some would call a “settlement,” would stay far away from Um el-Faham, and probably never even get within 10 kilometers of the place – if not for Road 65. As it turned out, however, that is where my car decided to break down. What happened and who’s to blame (I have a whole theory about that) are less important than the fact that the car essentially became undriveable an hour and a half before Shabbat – when we still had an hour or so to go to get to our destination!

Kids in yeshivas and day schools – and even secular kids here in Israel – all know the tales of how people sacrifice for the Sabbath, dropping valuable merchandise, money, wallets, etc. in order not to violate the holy day. But in those stories, the traveler always seems to be in a forest or other relatively quiet or calm area, and since in the old days travelers could be on the road for days at a time, they usually carried at least some provisions with them. We, on the other hand, were in the heart of one of the biggest Arab areas in Israel. The date, it’s useful to note, was May 15 – the date Israeli Arabs commemorate as “Nakba Day.”

But all that was a million miles away from our minds. We were preparing for a fun weekend, our first chance to see how the “other half” (the half whose kids stay home when the parents go away!) live. A/C running, music on the radio, it was like a dream. And then the nightmare began. It started with a “funny noise” (I should know better by now what the noises lead to!). But the car seemed OK, so I ignored it. All of the sudden, a little past a place called (I kid you not) “Al Aryan,” the car started kicking and bucking. Impossible to steer, with the temperature gauge shooting up in seconds, I figured we had to get off the road right away. But where? Fortunately, Road 65 is a major commercial strip, so there are businesses and strip malls every few kilometers. Now I needed a gas station – some place to park the car and check out the problem.

And that’s when I met Musa – the Um el-Faham mechanic who saved the day. Which story I will relate in part two (when I get around to writing it!).

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!