Question

This is the first noun in the title of a paper that presents “hedged requests” and “tied requests” as short-term adaptations for reducing variability in latency. An article titled for this noun includes an anecdote about Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void, which languished in obscurity until Amazon recommended it with Into Thin Air. Large-scale systems that mitigate worst-case latency are said to have “[this word]-tolerance”, a term coined in a Luiz Barroso and Jeff Dean paper titled for this word “at Scale”. Wired editor Chris Anderson popularized a term including this noun for the business (*) strategy of e-tailers that sell many (-5[1])different items in smaller amounts. (-5[1])The kurtosis of a distribution measures how “fat” or “heavy” (10[1])these things are. (10[1])For 10 points, name this word for the parts of a probability distribution far away from the center, (10[1])which for power-law distributions (10[1])is described as “long”. ■END■

Back to tossups