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Comment Re:What are you rating in IMDB vs Netflix (Score 1) 164

by arvindn (#21494037) Attached to: Anonymity of Netflix Prize Dataset Broken
Yes, such differences in meaning exist.

However, when you're talking about dozens of movies, all you need is a correlation. Our algorithm is powerful enough to tolerate a large amount of noise. If you read the paper, we were able to match up users between imdb and netflix with a very high level of confidence, in the sense that the best match was 15-30 standard deviations away from the second best match. In statistics terms, that's a insanely close match.

--Arvind Narayanan
Google

Outcry Over Google's Purchase of Doubleclick 242

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fear-of-change dept.
TheCybernator writes to mention that several activist groups have cried out in protest of the Google buyout of Doubleclick reported in recent news. "'Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick will give one company access to more information about the Internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world,' said the complaint lodged with the Federal Trade Commission. 'Moreover, Google will operate with virtually no legal obligation to ensure the privacy, security, and accuracy of the personal data that it collects.' The complaint was filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center along with the Center for Digital Democracy and the US Public Interest Research Group, all of which are involved in online privacy issues."

Real-Time Computer-Based Translation in Iraq 338

Posted by timothy from the remember-the-curse-of-the-babelfish dept.
[TheBORG] writes "The U.S. military has been testing software on laptops that translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English to have conversations with Iraqis without the need to have a Arabic linguist on hand. 'This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.'" (See this related story from last year about this daunting machine-translation task.)

Facebook Raises Another $25M 197

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the tech-money-is-back-in-style dept.
conq writes "BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has just raised another $25M from Venture Capital. Along the same lines, Rupert Murdoch has bought a minority stake in SimplyHired and just two days ago the social networking site, Visible Path said it raised $17M from Venture Capitals."

Google Wins Rights to Aussie Algorithm 211

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the new-tool-for-the-belt dept.
rcbutcher writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Google has just acquired the rights to a brand new text search algorithm invented by a University of NSW student. From the article: "Orion works as an add-on to existing search engines to improve the relevance of search and won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year. [...] Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant."

Google Music Store Inches Closer? 282

Posted by Zonk from the launch-it-already dept.
smallguy78 writes "Forbes is once again reporting on Google plans to launch its own competitor to iTunes, a Google music store. From the article: 'The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.'" We have touched on this subject previously. This most recent report would seem to indicate the launch will happen sooner rather than later.
User Journal

Journal Journal: The section stories column is stupid

Journal by arvindn
From what I've seen, the section stories column on the right of the main page seems to show a section selected at random, and this selection is changed once every few minutes. This is stupid. Some sections are far more active than others, but all get the same amount of time on the front page. And lets face it, most of us click the section stories only if they appear in this column, not bothering to check out each section page.

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