| Guide To The Perplexing |
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| Written by New Voices | |||||
| Friday, 10 October 2003 | |||||
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Who's The Man(uscript)?, Missionary Proposition, Davening Under The Influence  Who's The Man(uscript)? To Find Out, Israeli Scientists Say, Cherchez La Femme "We seek a weight vector w…" uh-huh. "…such that for each training document, x…" o.k. "… "the vector dot-product wox…" vector-dot what? "…exceeds a threshold T…" huh? "…if and only if x was authored by a female." Ah, so this is about girls, right? Sort of. "By setting the computer loose on a set of about 600 documents," writes Moshe Koppel, professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and co-author of the groundbreaking paper quoted above, "we came up with models that distinguish male from female style." The algorithm developed by Koppel and his fellow Israeli "stylometricians" can determine the gender of any piece fed into it with 80 percent accuracy. What are we saying here? Do men tend to hammer on about hot rods and brewskis while women scribble daintily about shopping, spice, n’ everything nice? Actually, the differences are far more subtle. Koppel’s team sifted through hundreds of texts—half of them by men, half by women—assigning more "weight" to a word the more often it was used in a set. And what did they find separated him from her? Well, words like "him" and "her" for starters. It turns out that women use personal pronouns far more frequently than men ("I," "you," "me," etc.) while men are more likely to use determiners ("a," "the," "that") and quantifiers ("more"). These are the little parts of speech we barely even think about. And that is exactly the point—the patterns are unconscious and therefore more revealing. Koppel’s work has, ahem, engendered some controversy. After the paper was rejected for being "sexist" by what Koppel politely dubs a "prominent journal," co-author Anat Shimoni inserted her middle name—"Rachel"—into her byline. No accusations of woman-bashing have surfaced since. But can Koppel and his hungry little algorithm withstand the Herculean tests New Voices wished to set for them—determining the gender of this very piece, for instance? We cackled; we schemed. We even thought of being fiendishly naughty and alternating authors, male and female, by paragraph. And then we asked Professor Koppel. "For purely technical reasons, we can’t deal with categorizing newspaper articles at the moment. It’s got to do with limitations of our parts-of-speech tagger—you don’t want to know the details," Koppel wrote back. Oh, but we did. Patiently, the professor explained: "The differences between male and female writing are present in all genres but in each genre the differences are, um, different," he wrote. Non-fiction requires more sophisticated techniques and Koppel has not yet adjusted his system to fully handle it. Relenting, we turned our minds to the Good Book. Perhaps Koppel’s gender detector could confirm the controversial claim that at least some passages in the Hebrew bible were the work of a female hand (or, to put it in religious terms, that God’s a chick). But again we struck out. "We have not developed the gender technique for Hebrew," Koppel informed us. He supposed the experiment could be tried, but "that won’t happen before your deadline." So we settled on fiction: 1) Koppel grimaced and lurched back in his seat. It was there, waiting for him, just one more step. His leather chair creaked. On-screen, the unfinished algorithm flickered, as though winking at him. It had been a thorn in his side for so long, a playground taunt for the others to snicker at through every conference and symposium. Now he had them in his coded fist. When his back was turned, they would whisper something else: "did you hear? He did it." But Koppel wasn’t ready. Slumped to his side, fingertip at his cheekbone, he stared at the screen like a painter before the easel, taking in the piece before his one final brushstroke. 2) Adjectives were feminine, right? The paragraph was chock-full of disgusting adjectives. Colors, smells, qualities. God, adjectives made him want to puke. But tonight, adjectives might make him a very wealthy man. He snuck a glance at the shiny gray one-way mirror. No sign of the grim, impatient CEO’s behind it, but he knew they were there, waiting for his final verdict—a verdict that could make or break his fledgling career. Yes, they were the greedy suckers who thought he could figure this out, but if he were wrong, he’d be the greedier sucker who was unemployed. Adjectives. Yes, a girl wrote this, definitely a girl. He stood up slowly, ready to make his announcement. We ran these literary gems through "The Gender Genie," an online version of Koppel’s algorithm. The results? Drum roll maestro, please…hmm. The algorithm correctly identified the author of piece number one as a red-blooded male. The verdict came up masculine for the second piece too. Just one problem—it was written by a double-X chromosomer. Though "psyched" to learn she "wrote like a guy," our lady scrivener started to wonder if perhaps her annual physicals hadn’t been quite rigorous enough. Granted our experiment wasn’t exactly scientific. But before she makes a dash for the clinic, we humbly submit to Professor Koppel that a little "stylometric" tweaking may be in order. Try "The Gender Genie" yourself: www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html Missionary Proposition The weapons come printed on colorful paper, the soldiers wear T-shirts, and the war-drenched arena is a Toronto street corner. But make no mistake: the battle being joined on the field of Ontario as New Voices goes to press is a high-stakes face-off between missionaries and their rivals, vying with one another for the souls of Jew folk. The casus belli is the new "Behold Your God" campaign launched by Jews for Jesus, a missionary organization that wishes Jews to accept Nazareth’s favorite carpenter as their messiah. The missionaries, recognizable by their bright yellow T-shirts, have targeted what they claim are the 66 cities outside of Israel with Jewish populations above 25,000. To date, they have launched offensives against 22 of these Semitic strongholds, inundating the unsuspecting Jews of such disparate cities as Tehran, Istanbul, Minsk, Budapest, and Detroit with thousands of leaflets. They have also aimed persuasive phone calls at residents with such recognizably Jewish names as "Katz." According to the German publication Aufbau, the leaders of "Behold Your God," which is scheduled to run for another two years, have a $22 million war chest at their disposal. But these commandos for Christ are not alone as they make the rounds of crowded street corners, ball games, and other high-traffic areas. Trailing them while they hand out yellow leaflets designed to "make the Messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue to our Jewish people" is a self-described "counter-missionary task force" named "Jews for Judaism." Intent on persuading Jews to stay in the fold, Jews for Judaism follows hard on the missionaries’ heels, attempting to cover the same stretches of sidewalk and pass out their own literature (printed in blue) to every pedestrian besieged by the yellow hordes. Because neither side is able to identify solely Jewish targets, an unfortunate amount of brochures from both sides are directed at non-Jews in accidental "friendly fire." But Jews for Judaism has a more difficult task than one might think: to engage the enemy, they have to find it. The proselytizing units keep their routes confidential, forcing their pursuers to cruise around Toronto in a donated van in the hope of picking up the scent. Having tracked Jews for Jesus to their latest point of attack, the intrepid counter-missionaries then deploy their literature, targeting the same passersby. Back at HQ in a north Toronto suburb, staff members field cell phone tips and dispatch brochures and rested volunteers to the field. It is a constant struggle: "We’re playing cat and mouse," their Toronto branch leader, Julian Ciss, told Canada’s National Post. But they remain committed to the hunt: "We have 80 volunteers ready at a moment’s notice," Ciss told Aufbau. "We have sorties going out twice a day. The problem is, [Jews for Jesus volunteers] are out earlier in the morning and stay out later at night." In theory, the war is to be waged in the mind of the (un)believer. But with the two groups proselytizing and counter-proselytizing in such proximity, tensions on the street are running high. Jews for Judaism is careful to speak only to their pedestrian targets, and not to engage the other side in direct combat. Even so, according to Aufbau, Jews for Jesus has called in the Toronto police, claiming harassment. But to no avail. Ammunition is plentiful as both sides dig in. Jews for Jesus would seem to have the upper hand with an arsenal of 300,000 leaflets, its adversaries only able to muster 55,000 copies of their competing tract—"Missionary Impossible." But Toronto’s Jews have rallied around their local Jews for Judaism chapter. September 6 was declared a "Stand Up for Judaism" Shabbat, with rabbis around the city asked to warn their congregations of the impending danger. And B’nai Brith Canada has recently begun a "Proud to be Jewish" campaign, featuring a hotline to field cries for help from embattled Jewish souls. Still, at press time, Jews for Jesus had already claimed a body count of ten Jews who "came to faith in Jesus." Will all of Jewish Toronto fall to the Lamb of God, or will its defenders beat back the messianic onslaught? The struggle has only begun. Davening Under The Influence New Pamphlet Decries Orthodox Assimilation at Secular Colleges "No parent would complacently put his child in a clearly dangerous physical situation," Rabbi David Lebor, a teacher at Yeshivat Shaalvim, an Israeli yeshiva program, recently told the Jewish Week. "Why do the same in a dangerous spiritual situation?" The spiritual danger in question comes from that age-old den of depravity: the college campus. In a recently published online manifesto, Harvard graduate students Gil Perl and Yaakov Weinstein seek to alert the Orthodox community to the perils of sending their children to secular universities. The tract—"A Parent’s Guide to Orthodox Assimilation on University Campuses"—identifies multiple causes and effects, but, as far as the authors are concerned, it all adds up to one thing: Orthodox students are forsaking minyans for margaritas and Orthodoxy for an open mind. While Perl and Weinstein harp on the dangers of drugs, alcohol and pre-marital boot knocking, the menaces don’t end with debauchery. In a section of the pamphlet titled "The Onslaught of Ideas," the authors also warn parents to fear the sinister specter of free thought. In class, students encounter dangerous notions, such as the theory that the Torah’s authors were perhaps mere mortals, or that the Genesis story may—gasp—be more myth than bona fide history. Even Hillel is singled out for criticism: Jewish student centers, according to Perl and Weinstein, allow students to "morally equate" different religious and spiritual practices, can be insensitive to the needs of their Orthodox students, and—most dangerous of all—provide the opportunity for interdenominational dating. Though some college students and campus professionals dispute the authors’ findings, their pamphlet has aroused concern among many Orthodox parents and teachers. Is Orthodoxy so fragile that exposure to other lifestyles will lure young Jews away? Perl and Weinstein evidently think so: they advocate that before college, parents ship their students off to the safety of Israel for a year or two. And when students do head for the dorms, it should be a dorm near home (students will apparently be less attracted to "public halachic deviance" in places where they might be recognized). Finally, they encourage "consciousness-raising": parents (ever the anti-drug) should explain to their children that abstinence is the only way to practice safe secularism. But rather than seeking to pre-empt the natural curiosity of college students, why not trust that those who value their Judaism will return more committed than ever? "Witness" the Amish, who, seeking to create a community of adults that are Amish by mature choice, send their progeny on rumspringa, or "run around," when they hit sixteen. Amish teenagers are free to saturate themselves in modern-day decadence and return to an Amish lifestyle if and when they choose. And when the Amish run around, they get around: while on rumspringa, Amish youth commonly drink up, hook up, and shoot up. Some wait years before returning to a religious lifestyle. But return they do: according to a May, 2002 New York Times article, over 90 percent of young Amish choose to become Amish adults. A Jewish run around? (Actually, we’d probably have to call it a "schlep around.") Why not? After all, peyos grow back. Young yeshiva buchers could feast on bacon double cheeseburgers and shrimp cocktail; they could flirt with shiksas and flip light switches on Shabbat. They could even sponsor a new series of events at their campus Jewish center: Saturday speed-boating, interfaith mixers, pork-n-ice cream socials. More crucially, they could experience the sense of possibility unique to the idealism and, yes, naiveté of the undergraduate mindset. Atheism and sensuality might lure some youngsters away from Orthodoxy for good; but if so, would these really have been the ideal members of an Orthodox community anyway? If and when these young Jews did return, they would do so because they truly valued Orthodoxy—and not because they had never peeked past the wire to see what was beyond the eruv. Don’t be influenced by us: check out Perl and Weinstein’s pamphlet yourself at www.rabbis.org/secular.htm
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