• Mood: amused
• Music: U2 - Mysterious Ways

Collaborative Filtering and Sexual Cryptography

Collaborative recommendation is an approach to computer-assisted decision making (decision support) that is based upon observation and analysis of decisions made by many users of an information system in order to build a combined model of users' preferences. One example of this is collaborative filtering, where recommendations are digital documents. Collaborative recommendation is also used to help people pick out music, videos, books, etc.

For example: in August of 2000, I searched for a book titled Applied Cryptography, because I wanted to learn more about cryptology, a subject studied by my friend and colleague Michael Huth (author of Secure Communicating Systems: Design, Analysis, and Implementation). Well, I went to Barnes and Noble and was told:

Customers who bought:
Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, second edition by Bruce Schneier
also bought:
Secrets of Sexual Body Language by Martin Lloyd-Elliott

which kindasorta makes sense if one is a literal-minded computer geek (IOW, a likely buyer of the first book).

I only wish I'd been a big enough geek at the time to take a screen shot. :-D

In other news: A suggestion psotted in silmarillion by tamburlaine (Julia, aka Celebrinwen)</b> - Adrien Brody [1] as Túrin Turambar in the (hypothetical) Silmarillion mini-series. I'd pictured Túrin as being a little stockier, if not bearded as Anke-Katrin Eiszmann has him, but I suppose the casting could work well. What do yew lal think?

[1] Ya happy now, angelislington? :-)

--
Banazîr