conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Gina, Russia, Billie with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Fires'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first paragraph for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Fires
  An hour earlier, Donovan had been on scofflaw duty, out ticketing cars parked in front of fire hydrants near his firehouse, Engine Co. 18 in Greenwich Village. When the company was called out on an alarm, Donovan raced back to check the house journal for the address of the call, jumped in his car, and headed for the corner of 23rd Street and Broadway. While Donovan drove to the scene, the men of Engine 18 entered the Wonder Drug store on 23rd Street with Ladder Co. 7. The bulk of the firefighting operations that night wasn't actually on 23rd Street, but a block south, on 22nd Street, in a building that was connected to the Wonder Drug building by a walkway on the third floor. There was a basement fire on the 22nd Street side, too hot and smoky for even Rescue Co. 1 to get water on it, and the crews on 23rd Street were supposed to check the connected building for signs of fire extension. They'd found a few small pockets of flame but not much, barely a pool-hall haze of smoke in the air. What they didn't know was that the basement on 22nd Street had been illegally extended forty feet beneath the 23rd Street building, where a blazing fire was eating away at the ceiling holding up the rear of the pharmacy. A wooden ceiling, which insulated the flames, kept them from heating the pharmacy's concrete floor above and thus alerting the men of Engine 18 and Ladder 7 to the fire below them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In some ways, gauging fire coverage is a bit like judging a pitcher. A pitcher's basic job is to limit the other team's offense enough that his own team can score more runs and win the game—so it would seem that an external measurement like a pitcher's win-loss record is the best indicator of how he performed in a given season. But a pitcher's win-loss record is so dependent upon factors that are completely out of his control (namely, how many runs his own team scores) that more internal measurements are needed. One of the first developed was earned run average (ERA), the average number of earned (i.e., not caused by a fielder's error) runs a pitcher gives up for every nine innings he pitches. Ultimately, the external result—how many games a pitcher wins and loses—is the most important thing to a team, but by gauging a key internal statistic, ERA gives a fairly accurate indication of which pitchers are the most likely to give the best external results.
  Internal measures of success, though, are useful only when they have a strong correlation with the more important external measures. Earned run average is a far-from-perfect statistic, but the fewer runs a pitcher gives up, the more games he's likely to win. The problem with response time is that a fire company's job goes far beyond getting from the firehouse to the alarm box. Firemen need to find which building the fire is in, coordinate with other companies, gain access to the fire, rescue anyone stuck inside, stretch and hook up hoses, prevent the fire from spreading, and put it out, and how quickly they do this varies from neighborhood to neighborhood and building to building. In poor neighborhoods in particular—where aging buildings spread the flames faster, overcrowding meant more potential victims, and heavy doors and bars installed on the windows to prevent break-ins made access difficult—driving was often just a fraction of the time spent before a company could actually fight the fire.
  RAND realized the problems with relying solely on response time, and researcher Ed Ignall later wrote a memo to seventeen fellow researchers and FDNY officials, laying out the difficulties: "We do not have good measures of the extent of fire when fire companies arrive... delays in discovering fires are sometimes long, sometimes short... Some fires grow quickly, others grow slowly," and he warned that "effects like these can cripple a naive approach to estimating the value of response time."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last two paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Famously bankrupting the ultimate quant hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, run by a pair of Nobel Prize-winning economists and former colleagues of Mayor Bloomberg's from the investment bank Salomon Brothers.
  The Olympic bid was spearheaded by investment banker Dan Doctoroff, who later became Bloomberg's deputy mayor and is now the president of Bloomberg's media company, and by Lindsay's former chief of staff Jay Kriegel, who helped fight off attempts by Congress to prevent the city from using eminent domain and giving the land to developers.