Weekly Recomender Log

This week I moved to Charleston, SC - at least my Google persona is in Charleston! I searched the real estate market and settled into the James Island neighborhood. My new zip code is 29412. I am beginning to feel right at home.

This is a very strange process for me. Over the last several years, I have been concerned about privacy and have only given out demographic data if I had a very good reason. Now I am clicking like mad!

Another strange notion for me is all of the ads I am seeing. I tend to bock ads. But not now, everybody in Charleston want to sell be something. I must be important, everybody want to get to know me.

I noticed that when I search on "James Island, SC" that I got a lot of adds from Realtors that were promoting them selfs as James Island but when I click, I was taken to their generic Charleston site where I was invited to search again for James Island.

The BellKor solution to the Netflix Prize

http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/ProgressPrize2007_KorBell.pdf

Here's the tell all story of how the leaders in the NetFlix Prize did it - A step by step guide to all the 107 steps to glory. Glory in this context is defined as a RMSE score of 0.8712.

I don't begin to understand more than one underlying point of this document. And, that point is that none of their individual optimizations worked near as well as a blending of the methods.

These people don't mind telling you how they do their work. A background document can be found at:

ftp://ftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/icdm07/Data/3018a043.pdf