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Hello all.  We’ve been asked by several of the Netflix Prize teams if they can use the MovieLens datasets in training their algorithms.  The answer is yes! We’re happy to encourage algorithmic experimentation using our datasets — and you don’t even have to share any of your winnings with us :).  We only ask that you credit the MovieLens datasets on your web site, and in any written descriptions you write of the resulting algorithms.

Compete well!

John

In a “too delicious to be true” story, Amazon has used one of its Kindle’s features to erase copies of the book 1984 from their customer’s devices. Yes, that 1984, the one about the futuristic society that controls and audits everything their citizens read or speak.

Apparently a third-party seller uploaded an illegal version of 1984 to the Amazon web-site, and some users purchased it.  When Amazon found out the version was illegal, they refunded the purchase price *and deleted the copies of the book from the Kindles*.  Almost too funny to be true.  (One of the users was a 17 year old high school student whose notes on the book were also erased by Amazon when the deleted his copy of the book.)

Amazon has already promised not to do something like this again.  However, the story makes clear the deep danger in aggressive digital rights management.  If the owners of the content can control what you read, when you read it, and how you read it, our access to media becomes only a temporary “right” that can be granted and taken away at a whim.  We need to create a set of rules that ensure that information can never be controlled in this way.

One extreme example of the need for rules to protect the free flow of information is the hubbub over the new version of Hemmingway’s “A Movable Feast”.  Depending on who one talks to, Hemmingway’s grandson Sean has either edited the book to make it truer to how Hemmingway really felt about his first wife or has altered Hemmingway’s text to change history about that relationship.  (It helps muddy the water that the first wife is Sean’s grandmother.)  The publisher is releasing the new version, which will now be compared endlessly by scholars to the 1964 original.  What would happen in the digital world of the future?  Would the publisher be able to change the text of everyone’s original version to the new updated content?  Presumably noone would lobby for such a world … but if we aren’t careful to constrain contracts between publishers and digital device owners, we could accidentally end up living in it!

How wonderful that Amazon made this mistake with the book 1984.  It’s not the greatest of the anti-utopian novels — that’s Huxley’s Brave New World! — but perhaps we were too quick to accuse it of wandering too far from reality …

John

Atul Gawande has a terrific article in the New Yorker about how the way doctors organize themselves into social groups affects the effectiveness and cost of the medical care.  (I first got turned on to Gawande by my daughter Karen, who gave me two of his books to read.  He’s very thoughtful and very smart about the problems of medical care — and a terrific writer who does freelance editing jobs on the side as well.)

There are tons of interesting thoughts in the article, which is a great read, as well as insightful.  Here I’ll just piece together the high-level flow of the argument around the structure of doctor’s organizations within a locale.

1) The most expensive areas of the country for Medicare are 2-3 times the cost of the least expensive.  If these most expensive areas could be changed to cost the same as the average areas, most of the expense problems of Medicare could be solved.

2) The most expensive areas of the country do NOT get better health outcomes than the less expensive areas.  They do provide substantially more “services” — hospitalizations, tests, surgeries, etc. — but patients don’t have live longer, aren’t healthier, and aren’t happier with the results.

3) By comparing expensive locales with less expensive locales, we can rule out most of the obvious causes of the difference.  The expensive locales are very similar in types of patients, the problems those patients have, the training their doctors received, etc.

4) One key difference is that in the LESS expensive locales the doctors have organized themselves to create a medical system that changes substantially the motivations.  Doctors are evaluated on long-term patient outcomes, and cannot make themselves richer by performing additional procedures on patients.  The doctors work together collaboratively to learn how to better serve patients.

Fascinating article.  Check it out!  (Yes, it is a stretch for this blog.  Perhaps we could argue that the connection is in understanding how big a difference social structure makes in the performance of an organization.  In our work we’re building computer tools to support those social structures; in this article, the doctors are inventing the structures themselves.)

John

Interesting article about pay-per-tweet technology from izea, the company that already leads in pay-per-blog.  Seems like an awkward way to fund a social medium, having people pretend to like stuff because they’re getting paid to pretend.  Of course, we’re used to that from our funding for radio and television and publishing and …  Interesting that books, for instance, work on a completely different model, and that most movie revenue still comes from direct pay.  What’s different about the media we refuse to directly pay for, and the media we are willing to directly pay for?  Is it possible to change one into the other?

If the hidden price model is the only choice, we should seek a set of ethical rules for it.  Perhaps the adverts could just be clearly marked as being for-pay.

John