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Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jul 06, 2008 06:09 PM
from the infallible-is-a-very-strong-word dept.
from the infallible-is-a-very-strong-word dept.
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."
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Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between now and 100 years ago becomes more apparent each day. Then, owning books was a sign of affluence, of intelligence. Now? Everything is up to question, and should be. Analyzing books and other public material is just another step in putting intelligence out there for everyone, not just those that can afford it. I applaud it, and all the dangers it brings. Such hurdles are necessary, but we must assault them to overcome barriers that should no longer exist.
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Knowledge, not intelligence.
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Funny)
What about synonyms?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given a relatively free petri dish for information to slosh around in, there seems a shocking lack of condensation of real knowledge out of all the crap.
Wikipedia seems like a step of sorts in the preferred direction.
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:4, Insightful)
...they don't have to struggle to learn something...
Not even mensa is that arrogant. If it's easy to learn and/or comes via the ether, it's probably trivial. Intelligent people have to work every bit as hard, we expect a whole lot more from them.
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Things become easier to learn when you have more context. If I tell someone about a chemical reaction, they may struggle to remember or understand it. If they are a chemist or have at least a grounding in the subject, they'll be able to slot the knowledge in with associated information and thus understand it and recall it more easily. An "intelligent" person has a wider array of contexts or the ability to quickly find an appropriate context. I am fairly intelligent, but I still don't recall who scored what goal in what match the way some people do. These people absorb such information because they have context as much as for any other reason.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but I know their secret, because usually I'm often one of them. The secret, is I've solved the problem already, some day before to research some curiosity I had. It may not have been that exact problem, it may not have even been in that field, but chances are, it was because I had invested work in solving something similar, just not when the audience was watching.
I've known a lot of really smart people, the only real differentiation was the level of curiosity. The more curious would spend time unders
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically. There's no advantage to observation over learning with a focused objective, but I think the key point is that learning is an unconscious process that is primarily carried out intuitively. You can direct your attention towards a subject and think a great deal, but you can't direct your intuition - all you can do is foster an appropriate environment. I've thought of it as a sort of receptiveness for new ideas (which I think are exogenous but are learned only after personal interpretation).
I would q
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What really hits a nerve with me is why the scientific community hasn't opened up all their journals for others to read. I imagine many retired and amateur scientists, engineers, hobbyists, etc, would have a lot of insight into many engineering and scientific problems and also make many discoveries as well. Intelligence is not limited to the credentialed, those of high status or currently employed, many discoveries happen simply by exposure to as many minds as possible, and finding connections and errors in others works..
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Much better to blame the researchers for not publishing in a more open medium. They're the ones who might actually change their habits, after all.
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:4, Informative)
We did.
http://www.plos.org/ [plos.org]
(not me personally, I had no role in this but as a member of the community I applaud)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear you, and I know it's difficult. If it were easy, we wouldn't be talking about it, it would be done already.
I'm just saying that the change must come from the researchers, not the journals. The traditional journals have nothing to gain and everything to lose from going to a more open system, so looking to them for change is the wrong thing. The researchers are ultimately who decides what's reputable and what's not. It will surely take a long time, but if it's going to happen at all then that's where t
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"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."
Then I submit the scientific community creates a project website to buy the rights to these works, I've come up with many ways for funding such an endeavor. The barrier would primarily be geometric (population size vs amount of money each person could donate/give/invest in such a venture) and the attitudes of the people
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Referees and Peer-Review Referees are invaluable because someone has to objectively assess articles for basic scientific merit and rigor. The better journals can recruit referees for each submission that truly grok the subject matter and can often work very productively with an author. Quite a number of important advances are made and pitfalls avoided because a referee insisted that a researcher cover her bases before submission. Of course, nobody claims that PR journals are bullshit-free, but they are certainly far better than un-reviewed sources like arxiv.
This function is especially important for readers in multidisciplinary fields (myself included) that often read papers on subjects in which we are not expert enough to know what constitutes sound science. When I read about some group that has extracted and crystallized some protein, I'd like to know that someone competent at the relevant techniques has scrutinized their methods because I haven't the faintest clue (I'm a physicist by training, a biophysicist by necessity).
Prestige and Selection Another important function of the journals is to select articles by importance. If a paper makes Nature or Science, that's usually a good indicator that they've made an important advance. The benefits of this selection are twofold: first, readers can keep tabs on work at the forefront without wading through lots of papers. It sounds lazy, but most of us cannot read every paper that is published and are quite glad to outsource some filtering to the journals.
Secondly, it allows authors to demonstrate to people outside their immediate field what caliber work they've done. Even among people in the same department, it's not immediately clear what qualifies as a breakthrough work (as opposed to incremental work, which I don't trash in the least bit, but it's not really the same hat) -- prestigious journal cites are a good substitute, especially when the alternative is to either become an expert in the field or find one and ask.
Review Articles Most journals have an in-house staff to write articles reviewing the state of a particular field/technique/whatever. This is also an invaluable services because sometimes one needs a broad, textbook-level summary instead of a large number of discrete, deep papers on a topic. Given that science is done in small, insular little bits, it's natural that there is room for someone to aggregate and summarize those bits and put them into a larger perspective.
Editing Another thankless job (the snarky comments about the /. eds belie the fact that editing is hard work). Dupes are weeded out and researchers with poor language skills (especially when writing in an adopted language) are given help communicating their ideas. Confusing or unclear language is massaged back into form, figures are well-presented and well-labeled, text is formatted to be easy on the eyes, references are given in a standard form. These things count more than most /.ers realize (Knuth was on to something guys . . )
Access Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, man. Pretty much every point you covered is Wiki-able.
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno, man. Pretty much every point you covered is Wiki-able. [Citation needed]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Access Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
This is simply not true. I work at a very large university, and it still amazes me to find that some electronic journals have not been purchased by the university. When I need these articles pronto, I must email friends at other universities. But what about smaller colleges? Enthusiasts? (I doubt there are that many biochemistry enthusiasts, but I'm sure there are a few who would love reading the new Methods in Enzymology or Nature, Science, Cell, what have you. The field needs these enthusiasts.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal.
Quick addendum, I don't think you understood my meaning. The prestige comes from the quality of the articles that you've written, not acceptance into an elite journal. The point is that the elite journal provides a very useful proxy for assessing the quality of the work. A researcher's publication history provides a very good measure of the quality and focus of his work which would otherwise be difficult to gauge (it would require become expert in the field(s), reading all the articles and then judging the
Historic records, yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Other old journals will likewise have a lot of valuable informa
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:4, Insightful)
...will encourage people to stay with the safety of yet another rehash of something they've already read.
Like most people since mass printing became possible. There are many authors whos work would give you great satisfaction, but who you will never read. Perhaps by at least giving people a good selection of tailored recomendation; the quality of that selection could hopefully improve.
The span of taste is wide and varied. More so than what any bookstore could provide (unless it is online). However when you take things online you encounter another problem; there is truly a vast (and growing) number of books avalible for purchase; trying to create a system for automated recomendation is a logical goal. Even if a system like that doesn't encourage reading things outside your established field of interest. If you arrive at a point where you need something different, a good system should be able to let you browse the top sellers, best reviewed and established classics of any genre. I have no doubt that after various tries, failures and breakthroughs, and as technology improves; consumers of litterature will be given a good online, digital tool for searching through databases and lists of material they might enjoy.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Interesting)
the idea of finding books you should read but don't know about seems a problem particularly poorly suited to an automated solution.
Er... -1,Wrong* : You don't seem to be considering the impact of statistical analysis and Very Large Sets of Data (C)(TM). It's becoming increasingly possible not only to know that 125K other people all over the world bought books B, C and D along with book A that you purchased, but now you can also index and analyse their content so it will be even easier to fine tune.
Imagine this: On the first iteration (first purchase) it can only out-of-the-blue recommend to you those books more consistently purchased along with the one you chose. But on subsequent transactions it can remember what you bought and compare the contents of the books. Now if you bought The Silmarillion, Kontakto and The Unfolding of Language over time, it would be possible to suggest that you read Shakespeare's works in their original Klingon once it realizes that you are equally interested in languages as in fictional civilizations.
I agree with you that the day an algorithm can make value judgements on the artistic merits of any work is still far ahead, but there was just recently a story about this FireFox plug in that sumarizes user reviews. Combine the two and...
* Didn't we have this conversation before, or is it just a popular .sig? If there was a "-1,Wrong" moderation, you would be told that the info is wrong but you would lose any insight provided by a direct reply of somebody that bothers to correct you AND post the right facts. With Slashdot being a discussion forum, it's on its best interest to actually promote discussion so you most likely will never see that mod option implemented.
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Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Typically the way we learn and get good at just about everything is that we go a little bit beyond where we're comfortable and we sustain an effort there. After a while our comfort level moves. Just like if I read enough on one subject typically I'll get caught up with a tangent subject and eventually move into that.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's getting to the point that you need a 2+ year filter just to dampen the noise in the signal.
And let's give a shout out to all of the library homiez. While I'm affluent enough to afford the occasional impulse book at the store with the built-in coffee shop, I do recall many an hour of random wandering in the public library in my youth.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it took several years for Union troops to arrive in Texas and enforce emancipation. Until Texas was reconquered, the proclamation didn't apply because the state was neither a part of the United States nor under its jurisdiction. At the most, you can only claim a lag of about three months (Lee surrendered in April of that year), though
Newspeak (Score:5, Funny)
I love how the prototype version in the link gives a 98% match between George Orwell's '1984' and the text of the USA Patriot Act!
Re:Newspeak (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Newspeak (Score:5, Informative)
"Does 1984 really match the U.S. Patriot Act?
No, that is an easter-egg. A bit of a joke on our part."
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd do anything to get a decent government again.
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." --Will Rogers
If you already read, you don't need this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...and if you do not read, you won't want this.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Also, now that I've played with the "beta" a little I want to see the graphs for Finnegans Wake.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Also, now that I've played with the "beta" a little I want to see the graphs for Finnegans Wake.
My GOD ... it's a Mandelbrot set!!!
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wholeheartedly agree! Take for example two phrases which are equivalent...
"Eighty seven years ago our ancestors ..."
and
"Four score and seven years ago our forefathers ..."
They say the same thing but what a difference in eloquence.
Re:I'll believe it when I see it (Score:4, Interesting)
It may be that what makes a book great is hard to identify, but what makes a book really bad is much easier to identify. In that case, such an algorithm won't help with recommending high quality works for you to read, but it could be very useful in saving you from wasting your time with obviously bad books (ie it would help with initial triage).
Remember, there are a lot more bad books than good books, so if you had to go through all the books to find the good ones, then you'd spend most of your time just looking a bad books and rejecting them.
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Yet Another Pointless Dot-Com (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yet Another Pointless Dot-Com (Score:4, Insightful)
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?"
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algorithm bombing (Score:4, Insightful)
how long before someone figures how to fool the algorithm, and we all start reading books about enlarging our genetalia, but in a classy way?
It already happened (Score:3, Informative)
...considering the quantity of "classic" tripe that I had to read in high school and college. Who needs an algorithm when you have English teachers who follow flawed formulae?
thhhpt! (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoever modded this to 'troll' never took the English classes I had. Yo.
Who is Joe? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is one persistent son of a bitch on their forum, Joe, who seems to be their nemesis. I wonder what his angle is.
Other than that, I like their approach - involve the community *really* early on.
Apart from Joe.
Re:a tool (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It already exists. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)