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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.'"
Connection:
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.
Were you to be a glass is half full kind of person, that sounds like a connection. I could entirely accept that enough customers to trigger a connection algorithm are interested in social commentary to the degree that both titles appeal.
Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.
Fortunately, we have a media that's only interested in postive and uplifting stories so they'd never focus purely on the negative, for shock value, without considering other possible alternatives.
And, for added amusement, type "Civ 4" in to Amazon and see what recommendations come up further down the list. It may too be racist. It may be a deeply humorous commentary on lonely guys playing Civ 4. Or it may be some other connection that we haven't figured out yet.
But then that's the whole point of data mining... Finding connections that humans tend to be entirely too preoccupied by their assumptions to be able to see beyond.
Check out the "also try" recommendations. :)
d s+with+guns&sm=Yahoo!+Search&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&fr= FP-tab-web-t
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=ki
Isn't this a corruption of Hanlon's Razor which states that:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
In this case, it could be construed that either the system, or the people making the malicious links are the stupid element - both could come to the racial conclusion by misinterpreting the data. Alternatively, the system might be too smart, working in a logical way such that elements in subject matter for both Planet of the Apes and Martin Luther King both deal with social commentary, alienation and segregation.
Either way, the comments by the spokesperson that the system was malfunctioning and not working as it was supposed to are probably incorrect; it work exactly as it was programmed, but it was either too stupid or too smart for us to comprehend adequately.
you are forgetting that this does not provide a complete cross section of all american or otherwise consumers.
This would only cross section those consumers who shopped online at those various stores. Even assuming one third of americans purchased ten percent of all household purchases on websites, you would have an indicative three percent of all purchases to make up for one hundred percent of all american characteristics? Does it really make sense that people anywhere, US, worldwide or in any particular town or "net-hood" only eat pizza and drink coke or pepsi? are you telling me that places like hard rock cafe don't actually sell food, they only talk about it?
The point i'm making is not that many people order their groceries online, and with the exception of pre-ordering and pre-paying for your food while making online reservations - which is a system i have not heard of, although someone is bound to do it soon - so you're assumption based on the above comment is that all purchases online are indicative of all people in a group somewhere, means that nobody on the planet or whichever region ever eats. So why are we all still here?
Just because an idea sounds good on paper for doing research, this is not a valid idea for judging all consumers. Now i'm going to leave out how the Gartner Group or some other group of a similar rep could do some polling of this nature for another poster to have a chance to refute my own claims, I just want to point out that I see both sides, I just think the parent post was not to well considered. Thanks, my $.02
/ begin side rant
I personally thought that Planet of the Apes was a good sci-fi movie of what if, not a social commentation nor an analogy of slavery. I have never sat down and wondered if it was a possible commentary on post-war (WWII) Europe, or an example of Communism gone bad, or what it would be like if my belly-button lint froze the sun or anything else.
All of those PC people out there that are so hung up on OOOOOHHH, WHAT DID HE SAY? can get off their soapbox and come back to work now. Unless they're too good for work. Like those people who had to get BUSSED from one natural disaster site, only to be in the middle of the next natural disaster site in the US southeast because they DIDN'T WORK SO THEY DIDN'T OWN THEIR OWN CARS. I know that I personally volunteered to drive my whole family from the SE US to somewhere safer, because I didn't want to have so many of our cars helping cause congestion on the highway, knowing what we were getting into, but there's a social commentary waiting to happen, the people whose government assisted living was washed away in New Orleans, LA
This has been a rant provided to you by one pissed off but levelheaded southerner - not a RACIST, just someone who has to work and expects all other able bodied citizens of the planet to as well.
/ End rant, thanks for pardoning me
2^3 * 31 * 647
This is so true! It drives me nuts when people refer to others as "African-American" simply because they are black. It makes Americans look so incredibly dense and uneducated.
My uncle is African-American, as are some of my good friends. They were born in Etheopia, Tchad, Algeria, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and a host of other places IN AFRICA. I have other friends from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. And do you know what? Not a single one of them refers to him or herself as "African-American". They have a national identity, not a continental one!
The Berber is as "white" as an Scandanavian. Some of my Ethiopian friends are incredibly Arab in appearance. One of my South American friends looks Scottish, and the other is a gorgeous raven-haired (white) Jew. nSungu is from Tanzania, and is one of the most strikingly beautiful women I have ever met, with skin that I can only describe as somewhere between cappucino and caramel, while another good friend, from Tchad, has skin the color of charcoal. They're as different from each other as they are from a Korean or an Hmong, yet our society feels comfortable lumping them into a single category.
Let's face it, "African-American" is a horrible descriptor for most people. Using it only serves to differentiate the "them" from the "us". If we stopped focusing so much on what makes us different instead of what brings us together, the term wouldn't even be necessary. If you were born in the Americas, you are "American". If you were born in Africa but emigrated to the Americas, you are "African-American". That's where it ends. Not all black people are African-American, and not all African-Americans are black. Let's stop with the stupid racial stereotypes.