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Comment Re:It's time to play... Name That Person! (Score 2, Interesting) 65

Actually you could probably learn a lot about a person from how they rated certain movies...

Did you watch Michael Moore's film "Capitalism: A Love Story"?

Rating of 5 => You are most likely very liberal

Rating of 1 => You are most likely very conservative

Other things I could potentially learn about you: your religious beliefs, how much time you spend watching movies etc...

Personally, it would not bother me if someone saw my ratings of the films (probably a 1 in my case) or if you knew that I am pretty conservative. The issue is a matter over control. I should be the one who has control over that information, unless netflix explicitly tells you that they give this information out to other customers.

Comment Re:It's time to play... Name That Person! (Score 1) 65

In the original netflix competition the data they did not release birthdays, zip codes or gender. Every movie and user was given a unique (presumably random) id. Essentially the data you had to work with was a bunch of tuples: (movie id, user id, rating (1-5), date) Netflix claims they even added some random noise (changing the dates/ratings a little bit) to preserve anonymity. Turns out even this isn't enough to guarantee anonymity...it turns out you can cross reference this data with imdb to look for similar date/ratings patterns and re-identify a lot of the people. See the paper: "How to break the Anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.100.3581&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Comment Re:Nice try (Score 1, Flamebait) 736

Please, refute:

a) That North America was covered by an ice sheet until about 10,000 years ago. See Wikipedia
b)That Mars is suffering "climate change" too. See here

Now please prove that the retreat of glaciers in North America was caused by cavemen driving SUVs and burning fossil fuels and not by some unknown natural phenomenon.

Earth

Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked 882

huckamania was one of many readers to write with the news that the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit was hacked, and internal documents released. Some discussion and analysis of the leaked items can be found at Watts Up With That. The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine. Some of the emails would seem to raise concerns about the science as practiced — or at least beg an explanation. From the Watts Up link: "[The CRU] is widely recognized as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Consisting of a staff of around thirty research scientists and students, the Unit has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models. An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server. Here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today: 'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.' The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails apparently from the CRU. If proved legitimate, these bombshells could spell trouble for the AGW crowd." Reader brandaman supplied the link to the archive of pilfered data. Reader aretae characterized the emails as revealing "...lots of intrigue, data manipulation, attempting to shut out opposing points of view out of scientific journals. Almost makes you think it's a religion. Anyone surprised?" And reader bugnuts adds, for context: "These emails are certainly taken out of context, whether they are legitimate or fraudulent, which adds to the confusion."

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