I'm not sure whether the litigators have read this particular section of the Netflix prize rules:
To prevent certain inferences being drawn about the Netflix customer base, some of the rating data for some customers in the training and qualifying sets have been deliberately perturbed in one or more of the following ways: deleting ratings; inserting alternative ratings and dates; and modifying rating dates.
So yes, you can match a set of reviews with someone else, but how will you know that it's really a person and not a random coincidence? 0.5 million review traces give plenty of opportunity for a false positive match. Netflix learned from AOL's data release disaster, which resulted in a few people getting fired.
The problem with fame is that the environment needs to facilitate it. If there were no academic journals and no academics, Einstein wouldn't have anywhere to publish his paper, and nobody would bother reading it to establish its quality. Einstein is made famous because his fame is the basis for taxpayers and parents of college-age kids feeding the institution of academia.
Only fame would degrade the standards in arts to the least common denominator. While DiCaprio and Cameron could get some fame for Titanic, how would they pay all those who edited the film, polished the script, cleaned the toilets? Fame isn't enough to create great works.
Thanks for these statistics. I am reminded of the "Can Music Tell Your Personality?" posting: heavy metal did have a slight correlation with "reflective and complex" music preference dimension, but not as much as genres such as blues and jazz.
The problem is that it's hypocritical. Melinda was a programmer employed at Microsoft, according to the book I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier by Fred Moody.
What has air pollution to do with breeding mosquitoes? And the same goes for "cramped housing conditions". Of course mosquitoes evolve to suck peoples' blood more efficiently.
There are only three factors in the mosquito equation: blood donors (where they feed) and water (where they reproduce). If you don't have puddles lying around, and if there are fish that feed on the mosquito larva, you can control them. If you have wire meshes on the windows (as is customary in North America, but not in Europe), you reduce the number of bites. Because mosquitos can sense body heat, it helps to wear white clothes (that don't radiate at the body temperature) - a trick a Puertorican friend told me. You should also wash yourself, because mosquitoes sense lactic acid. You shouldn't breathe, because mosquitoes sense carbon dioxide that you exhale.
In my travels I've noticed the stealth Indian mosquitos (carry malaria) are noiseless. The Norwegian mosquitoes managed to bit me through two layers of clothing. The Rocky Mountains mosquitoes are puny but plentiful. The European mosquitoes are loud but smart: they attack in the dark.
Re:The same IP / cookie-IP logs
on
Webhost Sues Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is an excellent analysis of the adwords clickfraud problem. A snippet from that page:
Some guy in Hong Kong has set up several domains with song lyrics and other easily accessible content downloaded from other sites. As those guys are damn smart, they have figured a way to force a google cache access to their page into showing any adsense ad. I've been trying to do it myself, and haven't been able to, but the cache does show weird adsense results. Then, they have some kind of bot which accesses those pages and simulates clicks on the ads. They probably click on many "cheap" advertisers & keywords like mine, but every once in a while they might click in a 50 cents or even a $1 ad. I guess they can make quite some cash that way, apart from the legitimate traffic that their site drives. They even use another method based on 'searchportal.information.com' URL hijacking, which hides even more information from advertisers. And they have even improved the bot to fake normal access to web sites.
The singularitarians will disagree with you. It is dangerous not to develop technology that will protect you from other technologies. Namely, only sophisticated technology will protect you: otherwise you're a sitting duck.
Finally someone well-informed.
I wonder what's new here - JPEG specifies arithmetic coding yet nobody uses it because it's patent-encumbered. Now they're proposing yet another patent-encumbered method, and they're comparing with the patent-free backup, now with the arithmetic coder.
Stuffit seems desperate for publicity.
R. Stallman gets enough money and fame, alright. What about the thousands of the silent hard-working geeks toiling away for nothing? Toiling away for the "businessmen" network more easily, and "yuppies" make more money, and "party animals" to have a better sex life?
The geeks gave it all away, and got nothing back. When I try to buy an apartment, nobody cares how much software I gave away. When I buy a car, nobody cares how much software I gave away.
This "freedom" stuff has been going on for a while, and everyone benefitted, except for us.
Take a look at The Rat and the Butterfly.
My suggestions dealt with how to improve the PNG compression beyond the healthy compression rate you get by default, not with how to encode an image in the PNG format.
In all, what are the alternatives? GIF doesn't support truecolor. The alternatives:
It's important to understand that most default PNG exporters are
not very good. You should use a PNG optimizer, such as Ken
Silverman's PNGOUT
or Cosmin Truta's OptiPNG.
Let us focus on the matrix3-3ivx-6364.png image:
Default:
129,002 bytes
OptiPNG: 121,967 bytes
PNGOUT:
113,759 bytes
It may not seem much, but it adds up.
Sometimes you can reduce the bit depth (for gray scale), make a
palette (for drawings and charts that don't need 64 bits of color
depth), and reduce resolution. Some more tricks are at Baseline JPEG and
JPEG2000 Artifacts Illustrated.
That's a very catchy./ headline "Internet use cuts socializing time". The true headline is less catchy: "Internet use cutting into TV viewing and socializing".
The actual text says "57 percent of Internet use was devoted to communications like e-mail, instant messaging and chat rooms" (socializing in my book). It also says "an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes".
So, 57% of 1 hour is 34 minutes. 1 hour of time on the Internet involves 34 minutes of socializing, which is 10.7 minutes more socializing than sans Internet.
Internet increases the amount of socializing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure whether the litigators have read this particular section of the Netflix prize rules:
So yes, you can match a set of reviews with someone else, but how will you know that it's really a person and not a random coincidence? 0.5 million review traces give plenty of opportunity for a false positive match. Netflix learned from AOL's data release disaster, which resulted in a few people getting fired.
The movies they attach are not very good.
I have some Python source code for doing similar things with the case of European nations on http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/animated_mds_co.html (there is an animated GIF there).
A bit more discussion about my methodology is at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/06/nations_of_euro.html
The problem with fame is that the environment needs to facilitate it. If there were no academic journals and no academics, Einstein wouldn't have anywhere to publish his paper, and nobody would bother reading it to establish its quality. Einstein is made famous because his fame is the basis for taxpayers and parents of college-age kids feeding the institution of academia. Only fame would degrade the standards in arts to the least common denominator. While DiCaprio and Cameron could get some fame for Titanic, how would they pay all those who edited the film, polished the script, cleaned the toilets? Fame isn't enough to create great works.
Thanks for these statistics. I am reminded of the "Can Music Tell Your Personality?" posting: heavy metal did have a slight correlation with "reflective and complex" music preference dimension, but not as much as genres such as blues and jazz.
The problem is that it's hypocritical. Melinda was a programmer employed at Microsoft, according to the book I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier by Fred Moody.
What has air pollution to do with breeding mosquitoes? And the same goes for "cramped housing conditions". Of course mosquitoes evolve to suck peoples' blood more efficiently. There are only three factors in the mosquito equation: blood donors (where they feed) and water (where they reproduce). If you don't have puddles lying around, and if there are fish that feed on the mosquito larva, you can control them. If you have wire meshes on the windows (as is customary in North America, but not in Europe), you reduce the number of bites. Because mosquitos can sense body heat, it helps to wear white clothes (that don't radiate at the body temperature) - a trick a Puertorican friend told me. You should also wash yourself, because mosquitoes sense lactic acid. You shouldn't breathe, because mosquitoes sense carbon dioxide that you exhale. In my travels I've noticed the stealth Indian mosquitos (carry malaria) are noiseless. The Norwegian mosquitoes managed to bit me through two layers of clothing. The Rocky Mountains mosquitoes are puny but plentiful. The European mosquitoes are loud but smart: they attack in the dark.
I guess people search for what they can't find.
Some guy in Hong Kong has set up several domains with song lyrics and other easily accessible content downloaded from other sites. As those guys are damn smart, they have figured a way to force a google cache access to their page into showing any adsense ad. I've been trying to do it myself, and haven't been able to, but the cache does show weird adsense results. Then, they have some kind of bot which accesses those pages and simulates clicks on the ads. They probably click on many "cheap" advertisers & keywords like mine, but every once in a while they might click in a 50 cents or even a $1 ad. I guess they can make quite some cash that way, apart from the legitimate traffic that their site drives. They even use another method based on 'searchportal.information.com' URL hijacking, which hides even more information from advertisers. And they have even improved the bot to fake normal access to web sites.
The singularitarians will disagree with you. It is dangerous not to develop technology that will protect you from other technologies. Namely, only sophisticated technology will protect you: otherwise you're a sitting duck.
This is the goal of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.
They have a few relevant pieces of material, such as FRIENDLY AI and 3 Laws Unsafe.
Finally someone well-informed. I wonder what's new here - JPEG specifies arithmetic coding yet nobody uses it because it's patent-encumbered. Now they're proposing yet another patent-encumbered method, and they're comparing with the patent-free backup, now with the arithmetic coder. Stuffit seems desperate for publicity.
R. Stallman gets enough money and fame, alright. What about the thousands of the silent hard-working geeks toiling away for nothing? Toiling away for the "businessmen" network more easily, and "yuppies" make more money, and "party animals" to have a better sex life? The geeks gave it all away, and got nothing back. When I try to buy an apartment, nobody cares how much software I gave away. When I buy a car, nobody cares how much software I gave away. This "freedom" stuff has been going on for a while, and everyone benefitted, except for us. Take a look at The Rat and the Butterfly.
- 158,054 matrix3-3ivx-6364.tif
- 234,175 matrix3-3ivx-6364.psp
- 333,364 matrix3-3ivx-6364.tga
- 381,094 matrix3-3ivx-6364.iff
- 386,262 matrix3-3ivx-6364.pcx
- 522,240 matrix3-3ivx-6364.raw
The default unoptimized PNG was 129,002 bytes.- Default:
129,002 bytes
- OptiPNG: 121,967 bytes
- PNGOUT:
113,759 bytes
It may not seem much, but it adds up. Sometimes you can reduce the bit depth (for gray scale), make a palette (for drawings and charts that don't need 64 bits of color depth), and reduce resolution. Some more tricks are at Baseline JPEG and JPEG2000 Artifacts Illustrated.That's a very catchy ./ headline "Internet use cuts socializing time". The true headline is less catchy: "Internet use cutting into TV viewing and socializing".
The actual text says "57 percent of Internet use was devoted to communications like e-mail, instant messaging and chat rooms" (socializing in my book). It also says "an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes".
So, 57% of 1 hour is 34 minutes. 1 hour of time on the Internet involves 34 minutes of socializing, which is 10.7 minutes more socializing than sans Internet.
Internet increases the amount of socializing.