Slashdot Mirror
When Purchase Recommendations Go Bad
nixman99 writes "An article on MSNBC describes what happens when 'View Similar Products' recommendations go bad. From the article: 'The company said it was alerted to the problem early yesterday afternoon after word began spreading among bloggers. When visitors to Walmart.com requested Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading Similar Items. Those films included Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.'"
It's because people are way to fucking sensitive, and the corporations know it.
It's similar to the whole sexual harassment thing. All it takes these days is a hint of it, to get someone fired. No matter if it's intended or not, just the suggestion that it might be inappropriate, and wham!
Sometimes, I think people look for the worse possible thing they can find, just so they have something to complain about.
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.
That would explain the recommendation if it were to come up on Amazon.com, but Walmart.com used a less intelligent linking system. From AFA (another f'ing article), Wal-Mart manually assigns DVDs to categories, and then will pass on the recommendation if you're browsing from the same category. So it has nothing to do with user habits.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Oh the ignorance.
For your information, since your school failed to teach you history, slavery was used in europe long long before anyone discovered your small island.
Slave trade was arguably the most important part of the entire reason the wikings undertook so far journeys. However, the wikings used primarily used people from eastern europe as slaves.
All other cultures in europe also used slavery, primarily from neighbouring countries.
The only thing unique with american slavery was its size in numbers and also that you went so far as to go to a different continent to pick them up. We europeans rather just went to some neighbouring country to round them up.
The only thing unique with american slavery was its size in numbers and also that you went so far as to go to a different continent to pick them up. We europeans rather just went to some neighbouring country to round them up.
Actually, the Dutch, and last time I checked we were still Europeans, spent a lot of time transporting slaves from Africa to the Americas. Even back then the dirty work got outsourced...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Maybe because back when racism was still very much overt in the early 2/3rds of the 1900s, blacks were often likened to monkeys and apes, by white people. Many racist whites/hate groups still do. Heck black soldiers fighing over in France during the World War were ridiculed by people asking could they see their {monkey} tails.
I wrote the code for IGN.com which makes these sorts of links. The process is entirely statistical and has no bias whatsoever. I wrote the code and then sat back and watched as associations occurred like "Ultima V" being linked up with "Ultima IV" and "Ultima III". The program didn't do any text comparisons. It didn't check genre or anything like that. It just made associations between games that people like based on statistical correlation. It sort of seems magical, but it's really just statistics.
Cow Cube
Amazon.com bases their reccomendations on pages visited, not just the products which were purchased.
Well, from TFA, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" also linked to African American themes. Hmmmm... not sure where the glass is half-full here. "A way out of poverty" would be a stretch.
Although TFA article pointed out that *later in the day* "Planet of the Apes" linked to other innoucuous titles such as "Everybody Loves Raymond," I suspect this was just PR damage control.
From Wikipedia
The term "African American" has been in common usage in the United States since the late 1980s, when greater numbers of African Americans began to adopt the term self-referentially. Malcolm X favored the term "African American" over "Negro" and used the term at an OAAU (Organization of Afro American Unity) meeting in the early 1960s, saying, "Twenty-two million African-Americans - that's what we are - Africans who are in America." Former NBA player/coach Lenny Wilkens is another who used the term as a teenager when filling a job application. Many Blacks began to abandon the term "Afro-American", which had become popular in the 1960s and '70s, for "African-American," because they desired an unabbreviated expression of their African heritage that could not be mistaken or derided as an allusion to the afro hairstyle. The term became increasingly popular, and by the 1980s, Jesse Jackson and others pressed for its adoption and acceptance.
Cosell was informed, and he did apologize. As I recall, he was very hurt by the implication that he was a racist. IIRC, he pushed for black athletes in modern sports and believed his character demonstrated that he wasn't racist, but that didn't stop accusations.
p e-to-Man_small.jpg?
Is this racist, http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020318/A
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill