About six weeks ago, I was at the Newark Museum, working on a radio story, when my cell phone rang. I couldn't get to it in time, nor did I recognize the telephone number under "calls missed." It was loud and chaotic and I was busy. But I called back anyway.

I'm glad I did.

It was Brooke Allen, a neighbor of mine, and he was boiling with excitement about some project he was working on. He started going on and on (a thing Brooke does), and I said, "Look. Make it short. I have to get back to work." Well, the bottom line was Brooke thought this project was significant enough that he wanted to hire his own personal reporter to follow it. And that personal reporter, as you may have guessed, turned out to be me.

Brooke's project was hiring a computer programmer. Brooke trades stocks, but he does it all quantitatively. He uses math, computers and psychology to beat the market; algorithms, not opinions. Over Christmas, Brooke had a skiing accident, and while his foot was up, he wrote a computer game -- called the Behavioral Finance or BF Game -- to simulate stock market behavior. He wanted to hire a young programmer to run this game for him, de-bug it, and get it out on the internet, so that he could learn even more about how people behave in markets.

But Brooke works in a somewhat arcane computer language called APL (A Programming Language), which was taught in colleges back in the 70's and not much since, and there aren't too many people who know it. So he decided that if there wasn't a market in APL programmers, he'd create one.

He put an ad in The New York Times, got 300 applicants, gave them a test by e-mail, narrowed the field to 38, invited them in for pizza and to play the BF game and then gave them an unusual proposition: they could stick around, learn APL and maybe get a job with him.

His company had some raw space that wasn't being used. So Brooke gave the job candidates a can of paint, some cheap chairs and tables, and they built a classroom.

I spent much of the next four weeks behind a video camera recording the whole thing.

As I began telling my friends this story, it reminded them of the TV show "The Apprenctice." So I started watching it -- and recording it for Brooke, who couldn't be bothered with such piffle.

What I was recording in Jersey City was, in its own way, a reality show. But as the weeks progressed, the differences became clear. While the conceit of the Trump show is that somebody has to get fired every week, the conceit of Brooke's show was to keep everybody in. When one of job candidates was about to withdraw from the project because the BF Game had crashed her computer, Brooke gave her a computer to replace it so that she would stay in.

In the end, when the class had finished, 12 people had stayed for the whole thing. Brooke brought each of them in for an interview, one by one. But instead of asking them which of their peers they'd fire -- as Trump does -- he asked which of their peers they'd hire. One name came up in every interview. And that was the person Brooke decided to hire.

Today, in New York City, he's going to try to get jobs for the rest. He's introducing them to members of APL community, people who work in that computer language and might need smart young programmers. Pete Donnelly, who runs Dyalog, a UK company that sells APL commercially, has even flown in.

Over the weekend, I forced Brooke to watch "The Apprenctice." On Monday, in one of the 196 e-mails I have received from Brooke since this process began, Brooke described his alternate vision:

Now if we could just get a TV game show, where instead of starting with a bunch of people every week and firing someone, we start with one person and they have to find a way of gainfully employing a new person each week. Since each new person will have to do the same, if it grows by a power of 2, we could end a 26 week series with 67 million people employed, rather than 25 people fired.

That's how the guy thinks.

Here, by the way, is the press release for the event. If you know any unemployed programmers, or business reporters looking for a good story, pass it on.



