Yes, that's quite true. The important thing in both, though, is that they're good, while this algorithm may just as easily recommend something absolutely terrible that happens to contain a lot of the same words and phrases unless it relies heavily on human input for that elusive quality assessment.
I don't get this, though. The idea of "top sellers, best reviewed, genre classics" already exists, and this invention adds nothing to it. On the other hand, the idea of finding books you should read but don't know about seems a problem particularly poorly suited to an automated solution. This is what personal recommendations absolutely excel at, because no algorithm can gauge the cultural impact of a work of art, or the level of craft involved in its making.
Wasn't the "improve your writing" aspect an earlier project? I got the impression that the original project was as you described, but the new thing he's trying to partner with Google on is to take the same basic system and use it to recommend "similar to this book" type things in a storefront setting.
Of course all the problems you listed apply anyway. It's very easy to have a work with all the same pieces as a great work of art, but assembled in such a way that the derivative work is completely unsatisfying.
A great example of something similar that you can try today and watch as it fails miserably is Pandora.com. They categorize music by a number of different elements so they can recommend similar pieces. And their categorization is quite accurate; they correctly surmised after about five minutes that I enjoy symphonic rock with a mix of acoustic and electric guitars, obscure lyrics, complex themes, unusual rhythm patterns and interesting chord changes. They then proceeded to present me with one after another shitty Coldplay or Radiohead rip-off band who had every element down perfectly, but still managed to make amazingly bad music. I much expect this product to be the same thing but with books.
"If you like A Deepness In The Sky, why not try An Ewok Christmas: The Novel! They're both about humans meeting strange aliens, and spaceships, and computers, and why are you giving me the finger?"
If you're talking about news, you're correct. But the original article is applying this to works of fiction, which still take at least a decade to go out of date (if not longer) despite the internet and the hard-on you appear to have for it. This "invention" is not about freeing information, it's basically a fancy way to mathematically calculate that if you like The Hobbit, you might also like The Lord Of The Rings. It might be beneficial to someone looking for more of the same, but it doesn't even seem to serve to further creativity since by design it will not recommend things that will expand your horizons, but will encourage people to stay with the safety of yet another rehash of something they've already read.
And in the history of mankind this has happened: NEVER!
Uh... wrong. You know civilizations have fallen before, right? Ancient trading centers in India destroyed and abandoned when they cut down every tree in a 200 mile radius and had no fuel source left, or civilizations in Africa wiped out when the climate changed and there was literally no alternative to make up for the lack of water. Civilizations absolutely have collapsed due to lack of natural resources. Just because we're operating on a global scale with our current civilization doesn't protect us from the fact that certain problems simply do not have solutions.
I really do live in the PNW, and in fact moved here from Iowa several years back. There are tons of people with SAD in the midwest, and far, far less sun in winter than in Seattle. Plus you get several feet of snow on the ground to deal with as well, and utterly boring, flat countryside to look at. PNW definitely wins.
One distinction people tend not to make, unfortunately, is between Seattle proper and the eastside (Redmond, Bellevue) climate. Seattle has significantly more sun, especially during the winter. I don't know if it's the lake effect from Lake Washington or what, but I can't count the number of times I've left home on a beautiful sunny morning only to be doused in fog halfway across the 520 bridge.
And before you start bashing Economics, how about you take an introductory college course in it? Before I took such a course I also thought Economics was mostly voodoo, but once I got the real scoop my opinion changed. It has some very solid mathematical and theoretical foundations.
That's funny. Yeah, it has some math and some theory... I wouldn't say they're particularly solid. Mostly they rely on concepts like "perfectly informed consumers" and "easily measured externalities" that are nonsensical in the real world. It's not voodoo, but it's an analysis of a system which only loosely maps to reality.
Two things about this kind of argument always make me laugh. First, the market will be helpless if there really is no alternative. And second, when there is an alternative, it may be something so drastically different than our current standard of living that most people who claim to be hardline capitalists will clamor for government intervention to save them from their horrible fate the second they comprehend what "the market's" solution entails.
Invoking the "free market" is just another way to say "humans will find a way to survive". It's probably true, but look at our level of survival in between great civilizations, or in areas of the world where these limited resources are not being exploited, and see if you think that's a solution you'd be happy to adopt. Because that's a completely viable direction for the market to take. Only we may be able to get around that if we as an intelligent group use some of these resources BEFORE they're too scarce to help us develop alternatives, since we have the potential to be a lot less reactionary than a dumb market system.
As a Seattle resident, I can tell you that 1) the bookstores have no such thing, and 2) the weather is a hell of a lot nicer than a lot of other places. Even in the middle of winter, sure it'll have clouds and light rain for half the day, but the other half will be at least partly sunny. And the benefit is that we're technically considered a rain-forest while the Bay area is a barren desert. You'd be amazed how much a little greenery makes up for some bad days.
I want both. Punish the government for asking in the first place, and punish the corporations for giving in out of greed. And don't just fine the corporations... we need jail time on all sides.
Except that if everyone thought that way, we wouldn't have "safe states" anymore. Each individual vote may not make a difference, but collectively they do.
Personally, I'm becoming convinced that America is a sinking ship, and the only thing left to do is to sit back and enjoy the ride as we slowly spiral into gleeful ignorance and mediocrity.
Why are so many people obsessed with who's more likely to win? I caucused for Obama because Hillary's policies are completely unconscionable, and if Hillary does somehow worm her way into the nomination, I and a whole lot of other independent voters are going to vote 3rd party.
what does that graph show? Because if you add up search.msn.com and search.live.com (MS' actual search engine site) they add to more than www.google.com...
For search it's not so surprising. In any space supported entirely by advertising, it's the companies buying placement who are your actual customers. The people using your product and viewing the ads are actually a part of your product. If you can get the economics to work out so you pay them a portion of the product's income for their participation, you can increase your user base and benefit your actual customers, the advertisers.
I don't really like the implications, but it's an unavoidable fact with some things.
I know for a fact there are companies out there where you can get more like 5% or 7% yearly increase without too much effort. You have to be 1) good at your job and 2) working at that company, though...
Are you suggesting that the peculiar teachings of a slave religion gave people enough of a sense of self-worth to trigger a cultural shift from feudalism to self determination? Interesting...
I don't see how this is any different than with DDR and DDR2. At first, the new technology was barely faster (sometimes not at all) then the old one, was not very widely supported, and of course cost more.
At first? I didn't know this had even changed yet. As far as I can tell, DDR2 is still more expensive than it's worth in anything but ridiculously high-end systems.
That picture of "Microsoft" is a demo lab at a conference. The article actually has 0 pictures of a typical work-space from that company. Makes me wonder how accurate their other ones are...
It is a shame we haven't figured out how to capture all those cow farts as there would be a fix to the energy crisis right there!
According to Ralph Nader, the problem is that we haven't figured out how to attach a box to the cow's asshole yet. But vote Nader next election, and you'll get that asshole-box!
Possibly true, but then you'd still need a Windows/Linux/whatever OS. It'd just have a "desktop" mode for when it's docked with a normal keyboard and reasonably sized screen, and a "mobile" mode for when it's on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's quite true. The important thing in both, though, is that they're good, while this algorithm may just as easily recommend something absolutely terrible that happens to contain a lot of the same words and phrases unless it relies heavily on human input for that elusive quality assessment.
I don't get this, though. The idea of "top sellers, best reviewed, genre classics" already exists, and this invention adds nothing to it. On the other hand, the idea of finding books you should read but don't know about seems a problem particularly poorly suited to an automated solution. This is what personal recommendations absolutely excel at, because no algorithm can gauge the cultural impact of a work of art, or the level of craft involved in its making.
Wasn't the "improve your writing" aspect an earlier project? I got the impression that the original project was as you described, but the new thing he's trying to partner with Google on is to take the same basic system and use it to recommend "similar to this book" type things in a storefront setting.
Of course all the problems you listed apply anyway. It's very easy to have a work with all the same pieces as a great work of art, but assembled in such a way that the derivative work is completely unsatisfying.
A great example of something similar that you can try today and watch as it fails miserably is Pandora.com. They categorize music by a number of different elements so they can recommend similar pieces. And their categorization is quite accurate; they correctly surmised after about five minutes that I enjoy symphonic rock with a mix of acoustic and electric guitars, obscure lyrics, complex themes, unusual rhythm patterns and interesting chord changes. They then proceeded to present me with one after another shitty Coldplay or Radiohead rip-off band who had every element down perfectly, but still managed to make amazingly bad music. I much expect this product to be the same thing but with books.
"If you like A Deepness In The Sky, why not try An Ewok Christmas: The Novel! They're both about humans meeting strange aliens, and spaceships, and computers, and why are you giving me the finger?"
If you're talking about news, you're correct. But the original article is applying this to works of fiction, which still take at least a decade to go out of date (if not longer) despite the internet and the hard-on you appear to have for it. This "invention" is not about freeing information, it's basically a fancy way to mathematically calculate that if you like The Hobbit, you might also like The Lord Of The Rings. It might be beneficial to someone looking for more of the same, but it doesn't even seem to serve to further creativity since by design it will not recommend things that will expand your horizons, but will encourage people to stay with the safety of yet another rehash of something they've already read.
Uh... wrong. You know civilizations have fallen before, right? Ancient trading centers in India destroyed and abandoned when they cut down every tree in a 200 mile radius and had no fuel source left, or civilizations in Africa wiped out when the climate changed and there was literally no alternative to make up for the lack of water. Civilizations absolutely have collapsed due to lack of natural resources. Just because we're operating on a global scale with our current civilization doesn't protect us from the fact that certain problems simply do not have solutions.
I really do live in the PNW, and in fact moved here from Iowa several years back. There are tons of people with SAD in the midwest, and far, far less sun in winter than in Seattle. Plus you get several feet of snow on the ground to deal with as well, and utterly boring, flat countryside to look at. PNW definitely wins.
One distinction people tend not to make, unfortunately, is between Seattle proper and the eastside (Redmond, Bellevue) climate. Seattle has significantly more sun, especially during the winter. I don't know if it's the lake effect from Lake Washington or what, but I can't count the number of times I've left home on a beautiful sunny morning only to be doused in fog halfway across the 520 bridge.
That's funny. Yeah, it has some math and some theory... I wouldn't say they're particularly solid. Mostly they rely on concepts like "perfectly informed consumers" and "easily measured externalities" that are nonsensical in the real world. It's not voodoo, but it's an analysis of a system which only loosely maps to reality.
Two things about this kind of argument always make me laugh. First, the market will be helpless if there really is no alternative. And second, when there is an alternative, it may be something so drastically different than our current standard of living that most people who claim to be hardline capitalists will clamor for government intervention to save them from their horrible fate the second they comprehend what "the market's" solution entails.
Invoking the "free market" is just another way to say "humans will find a way to survive". It's probably true, but look at our level of survival in between great civilizations, or in areas of the world where these limited resources are not being exploited, and see if you think that's a solution you'd be happy to adopt. Because that's a completely viable direction for the market to take. Only we may be able to get around that if we as an intelligent group use some of these resources BEFORE they're too scarce to help us develop alternatives, since we have the potential to be a lot less reactionary than a dumb market system.
As a Seattle resident, I can tell you that 1) the bookstores have no such thing, and 2) the weather is a hell of a lot nicer than a lot of other places. Even in the middle of winter, sure it'll have clouds and light rain for half the day, but the other half will be at least partly sunny. And the benefit is that we're technically considered a rain-forest while the Bay area is a barren desert. You'd be amazed how much a little greenery makes up for some bad days.
I want both. Punish the government for asking in the first place, and punish the corporations for giving in out of greed. And don't just fine the corporations... we need jail time on all sides.
To be able to attract more skilled workers, like they're bitching about in the article...
Except that if everyone thought that way, we wouldn't have "safe states" anymore. Each individual vote may not make a difference, but collectively they do.
How would a wand find an explosive? They're magnetic substance detectors, which C4 is decidedly not.
Personally, I'm becoming convinced that America is a sinking ship, and the only thing left to do is to sit back and enjoy the ride as we slowly spiral into gleeful ignorance and mediocrity.
Why are so many people obsessed with who's more likely to win? I caucused for Obama because Hillary's policies are completely unconscionable, and if Hillary does somehow worm her way into the nomination, I and a whole lot of other independent voters are going to vote 3rd party.
what does that graph show? Because if you add up search.msn.com and search.live.com (MS' actual search engine site) they add to more than www.google.com...
For search it's not so surprising. In any space supported entirely by advertising, it's the companies buying placement who are your actual customers. The people using your product and viewing the ads are actually a part of your product. If you can get the economics to work out so you pay them a portion of the product's income for their participation, you can increase your user base and benefit your actual customers, the advertisers.
I don't really like the implications, but it's an unavoidable fact with some things.
They thought of that... you don't get the rebate until after the store's window for returns is over.
I know for a fact there are companies out there where you can get more like 5% or 7% yearly increase without too much effort. You have to be 1) good at your job and 2) working at that company, though...
Are you suggesting that the peculiar teachings of a slave religion gave people enough of a sense of self-worth to trigger a cultural shift from feudalism to self determination? Interesting...
Yep, sorry... I must have been thinking of DDR2 vs DDR3, which was the entire point of the article...
That picture of "Microsoft" is a demo lab at a conference. The article actually has 0 pictures of a typical work-space from that company. Makes me wonder how accurate their other ones are...
Possibly true, but then you'd still need a Windows/Linux/whatever OS. It'd just have a "desktop" mode for when it's docked with a normal keyboard and reasonably sized screen, and a "mobile" mode for when it's on its own.