Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically 177
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."
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.
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or wisdom, for that matter.
What about insight?
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Funny)
What about synonyms?
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That is fascinating - somebody came up with another way to dig patterns in mountains of data thus creating even more data to dig into and people claim it is intelligence, wisdom or knowledge and that everything changed. It is true of course. One big change between now and then (whenever that would be) is that today any ignorant connected to internet and equipped in basic reading skills is able to claim he posses all the knowledge of the world. Sadly the fact that more people have more and easier access to a
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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.
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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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
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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
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"not just those that can afford it."
Shit Bud, you make it sound like it's the 1200s. Books ARE cheap. Books are just another thing to compete for your money; sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Like with those bankrupt families that have a 50" plasma screen and a couple Navigators in the driveway. They've made their choices. Personally, I've chosen books. No need to assault anything or anybody; there are no barriers other than our own (assuming you're a white male, of course).
Say, you aren't one of tho
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I don't mean to throw stones, but books cost money, many people afford to be on the Internet, yet buying books has become old hat. When you can go on the Internet and get the latest information, books are ... well, a waste of money for the most part. The delay between discovery and publishing and reading is no longer tolerable, not in this throw away society. Look at some science fiction ideals... such delays are always intolerable. I will cite an event that is not even related to show that delay is not rig
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
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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Not sure if that is true - they may include some algorithms that will introduce some small variation once in a while thus allowing the masses not to get scared by unknown but to proceed into new realms albeit slowly. Maybe this would be something tunable too? Whichever way they coded it such algorithms tend to work better with simple people. I do not have anything against simple people in fact I always aspired to be one but I got laugh attacks sometimes when similar tools in music realm try to guess what I
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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I don't mean to throw stones, but books cost money, many people afford to be on the Internet, yet buying books has become old hat. When you can go on the Internet and get the latest information, books are ... well, a waste of money for the most part. The delay between discovery and publishing and reading is no longer tolerable, not in this throw away society. Look at some science fiction ideals... such delays are always intolerable. I will cite an event that is not even related to show that delay is not right: junteenth. It took several years for emancipation news to reach Texas. Is that right? The point is that information and knowledge should be universal, and instant. The great promise of the Internet was just that. If you wish to spend your nights reading information from 2+ years ago, that is your problem. The rest of us want today's information, and now. Good luck with the personal library.
Well, you can access recent scientific articles for example on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, read 10 (out of something like 1000++) and try to understand the subject that interests you. Or you can choose a reliable textbook and read that instead. It won't be 100% up to date, but it will often be easier to understand, probably more objective and will cover a bigger part of the literature than you could in a reasonable time frame.
So, if you're the kind of person that reads 100 scholarly articles just to implement
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Let us think of it as a legitimate goal - to have all information instantly, allow them to come to your consciousness all at once, so that you can be aware of them all at once too, this state has been possible to achieve without google or amazon or even (oh my god is it possible?) internet - the substances used by people already thousands of years ago had the same effect. They are illegal in majority of places /. is read though so spending zillions on needed infrastructure and getting fat in the cellar whil
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I am. Especially when it come to information. And I almost always get it for free.
Except when I find it incredibly valuable, in which case I pay for a hard book copy.
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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While you're at it, complain about university students not making their books less expensive. Your beef is with publishers. They aren't the entire scientific community.
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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The problem is not with the researchers so much as the beuraucracies of univiersities and funding, and the problems of peer review.
Many universities, especially those outside the U.S. use metrics for rating their researchers that are weighted towords publications from Elsevier and others. England is especially bad about this. For that reason many scientists don't have much of a choice in that they are forced to publish there is go without pay.
So totally open spaces raise issues of what it means to be publ
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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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"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
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Is that a bug or a feature? (Score:2)
What really hits a nerve with me is why the scientific community hasn't opened up all their journals for others to read.
Do you know what you're saying? Do you really want to release possible Weapons of Intellectual Destruction on the world?
I look at the titles in the archives of
http://www.misq.org/ [misq.org]
and I'm thinking that some of this stuff is best kept locked in the ivory tower.
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"Information wants to be anthropomorphized."
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.
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, man. Pretty much every point you covered is Wiki-able.
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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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.)
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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
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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.
I like your spirit and agree that there's a lot of really smart, creative people who aren't scientists. However...
One of the dispiriting things about science is how specialized most subjects have gotten. If you're not an expert in a field, its almost impossible to do anything. Even being an expert in a closely related field often isn't good enough. I don't think this is anyone's fault, its just the natural course of development. So I think the days of ameteurs accomplishing very much are behind us in a
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As a member-in-training of the scientific community, I think you'll find that most scientists agree with you. Unfortunately the system right now is hard to break out of. You need to publish in a reputable journal for job evaluation and tenure purposes, but many reputable journals are under the thumb of the publishers.
In mathematics there have been several mass resignations of journal editorial boards in protest over the price. These editors usually then go on to form a brand new, cheaper journal in the same
Historic records, yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Other old journals will likewise have a lot of valuable informa
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There are a few places you can download publications for free. Pubmed and Citeseer usually have access to many papers for free download. Otherwise, sometimes authors put their own draft/pre prints on their websites.
many discoveries happen simply by exposure to as many minds as possible, and finding connections and errors in others works
Is this based on an actual study or your own conjecture?
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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)
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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I thought they put that in as an Easter egg... the Patriot Act isn't a novel. Though some Eastern bloc countries allegedly used 1984 as a HOWTO, or a specification of an ideal government.
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Citations please. I'd love to know uses 1984 as a blueprint of sorts.
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Hmmm, you're right. I generally think one or two sentences ahead of what I'm typing. I generally re-read what I type before sending or posting but apparently not this last time. Cheers mate!
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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
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By "Eastern bloc" I meant the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe.
This page [msu.edu] talks at some length about a Soviet dissident and his reactions to the novel. Basically, he found it hard to believe Orwell lived in Britain, not Russia. That doesn't (much) support my assertion that the Soviet government used the book as a blueprint (or at least, thought it had a lot of good ideas), but I did say "allegedly" :-)
Unfortunately for your hopes of moving to somewhere sane, I live in Britain.
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Even easier: the Soviet Union was established in 1922, and "1984" was published in 1948.
Now unless you want to claim that the USSR had time-travel, that alone should be enough proof the book was not a blueprint of any sort.
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If you already read, you don't need this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...and if you do not read, you won't want this.
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Also, now that I've played with the "beta" a little I want to see the graphs for Finnegans Wake.
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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!!!
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I don't know about that. A lot of my books are like television is to other people: simple entertainment. There are times when I want to have my horizons expanded, or to learn something new and nifty. But there are other times when I just want to forget about everything that happened at the office today, and when I do, it's kind of amazing how often I pick up a book that involves a guy with a staff blowing things to smithereens. And if there's a tool that will point me to even more guys with staves blowin
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Actually, the algorithm at Booklamp could be used to put to have your horizons expanded. According to the site's FAQ ("Can I have BookLamp find me books that are different than a certain book, if I want to?" [booklamp.org]), they plan a feature to find books just out of your comfort zone, to "Press your limits":
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Oblig. quotes from Ink and Incapability
J: Not this one, sir. It is a book that tells you what English words mean.
G: I *know* what English words mean; I *speak* English! You must be a bit
of a thicko.
E: Would this be the long-awaited Dictionary, sir?
G: Oh, who cares about the title as long as there's plenty of juicy murders
in it. I hear it's a masterpiece.
E: No, sir, it is not. It's the most pointless book since "How To Learn
French" was translated into French.
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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The difference, of course, is rooted purely in the awkwardness of the speaker.
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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Question one: How does it rate Hemmingway?
Question two: How does it differentiate between Hemmingway and Imitation Hemmingway [wikipedia.org]?
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It's probably no less efficient than analysing email to check for spam. If you're interested in ch34p C0rel S0ftw4re, you may also have an interest in v1agra and rep1ika r0lex watches.
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I agree 100%. I suspect a more useful data mining system would use book *reviews*, mined from Amazon and all the other sites that post them. In addition to providing an overall barometer for quality, it could identify reviewers whose tastes run similar to your own, and use that as a starting point for recommendations.
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Exactly ... which is why I read the summary as "Fast-talking kid talks fools out of their money."
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No computer will be able to definitively sort books by 'quality' as that is very subjective even within groups of people with otherwise similar interests.
But-
You know, it's OK to read middling-to-bad books every now and then. How are you supposed to know that Infinite Jest is a fantastically well-written book if that's all you've read? Or maybe all you've read are Stephen King novels. What good is it for a S.K.-only reader to say that S.K. is a good author if all they've read are are S.K., Michael Crichton,
Yet Another Pointless Dot-Com (Score:4, Insightful)
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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?"
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.
Smart computer (Score:2)
This computer should do fine, assimilating every book ever written. We'll just need to hire someone to periodically delete every Agatha Christie novel from its database.
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Who's Agatha Christie? Never heard of her...
Seriously though seeing that reference made me smile :)
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.
Copyright Infringment detection anyone?? (Score:2, Interesting)
His prototype sounds in a way like Netflix's suggestion system for movies, where you vote your favorites and it'll suggest other ones based on your liking. But books are much more complicated, so I can see how his detailed analysis tool can really be the ultimate suggestion tool. I wonder if people will use this to discover copyright infringement on a new level. Hmm... my book and your book are a 99.5% match. Gee where did the .5% discrepancy occur. My character is a 19 yr old hobo, so is yours. My sto
Need more books? (Score:2)
How about Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]? They've got lots of books that have already been scanned.
Already been done... (Score:2)
http://www.baetzler.de/cgi-bin/country.pl [baetzler.de]
http://www.outofservice.com/country/ [outofservice.com]
Feels backwards (Score:2)
The best books I've read are the ones that broke away from what I had read before. The ones that gave me a new experience, and new view on things. I really really don't want to read copies of books I've already read. I want something out of the ordinary. I'll stick to my old methods if you, Mr. Algorithm, don't mind.
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Except that, this algorithm can be used to find books that broke away from what you'd read before [slashdot.org].
Re:a tool (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It already exists. (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, the honour of the first printed scrolls goes to the Chinese. Examples of scrolls printed using movable type (wood cuts of chinese ideographs) date to the 600's. the oldest know book is also Chinese, from 868. [wikipedia.org]
They also invented toilet paper 1500 years ago ...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex [wikipedia.org] notes "The basic form of the codex was invented in Pergamon in the 3rd Century BCE".