Slashdot Mirror
Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically
destinyland writes "A year ago, Aaron Stanton harangued Google over his new project, a web site analyzing patterns in books to generate infallible recommendations. In March he finally finished a prototype which he showed to Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, and he's just announced that he's finally received a big contract which 'gives us a great deal of potential data to work with.' The 25-year-old's original prototype examined over 200 books, plotting 729,000 data points across 30,293 scenes — but its universe of analyzed novels is about to become much, much bigger."
From the FAQ:
"Does 1984 really match the U.S. Patriot Act?
No, that is an easter-egg. A bit of a joke on our part."
Seek and ye shall find.
The researchers publishing these papers typically don't get much more than citations - the money mostly goes to publishers like Elsevier. Blame them instead.
blahplusplus: What really hits a nerve with me is why the scientific community hasn't opened up all their journals for others to read.
We scientists would absolutely love to have all of the journals opened up for free access to everyone. But, you see, the publishers own the copyright to our articles. The system requires us to give them the copyright, in order to get our stuff published. Then you, me, and everybody else has to pay to read recent research.
Thankfully, some established journals are going open-access.
That's very promising. But the fact remains that publishers such as Elsevier own the copyright to many decades-worth of scientific literature. And they're not about to give any of it away.
We did.
http://www.plos.org/
(not me personally, I had no role in this but as a member of the community I applaud)