[]
It was a tossup between a game-theoretic examination of the
toilet seat problem and the UnSuggester, which takes the
title of a book you like and tells you what books to avoid.
I gave it "Applied Cryptography" and it told me to stay away
from "The Devil Wears Prada," whcih is something I had kind
of planned to do, anyway.

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community

Melinda Shore wrote:

I gave it "Applied Cryptography" and it told me to stay away
from "The Devil Wears Prada," whcih is something I had kind
of planned to do, anyway.

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

Okay, *that's* weird. I plugged in "And the Ass Saw the Angel" and
it spit out "The Devil Wears Prada" as the number one unsuggestion.

--
Shelly (Warning: see label for details)
http://www.cat-sidh.net (the Mother Ship)
http://esther.cat-sidh.net (Letters to Esther)

Melinda Shore wrote:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

Also, I'm disappointed and saddened that there are so few entries
for "The Diary of Anne Frank," which was my first attempt.

--
Shelly (Warning: see label for details)
http://www.cat-sidh.net (the Mother Ship)
http://esther.cat-sidh.net (Letters to Esther)

In article ,
shelly wrote:
Also, I'm disappointed and saddened that there are so few entries
for "The Diary of Anne Frank," which was my first attempt.

Well, we aren't exactly a nation of readers. I read a bunch
of economics blogs and there's a libertarian one I really
like even though I'm not a libertarian, because the author
is an extremely literate, clever, enjoyable nerd, and his
positions have an unusually high degree of internal
consistency.

So in the process of wondering about how many people in an
airport are actually local residents he accidentally said
some negative things about Minneapolis even though he
actually likes it and in a follow-up post he laid out some
great things about Minnesota in general, and in the comments
section someone mentioned Vince Flynn as a Minnesotan he
(the commenter) thought was particularly great. Now, I
don't know if you've bothered to read Vince Flynn, but aside
from his use of right-wing political assassins as American
heroes he's basically completely illiterate and I have to
assume that the commenter singled out Vince Flynn either
because he likes the plots or because he's most comfortable
with monosyllabic words.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community

In article ,
Suja wrote:
'Desiring God: Meditations of a Christion Hedonist', which actually sounds
interesting. In fact, most of the top works are somehow theologically
related. What the hell?

"Network" stuff is very hot right now, and they're analysing
the individual data sets in their databases and clustering
stuff that tends to appear in the same data sets. That
means that you're pretty much at the mercy of the tastes of
the people who choose to enter their libraries into that
website, a self-selecting group that could very well have
some unattractive reading habits (says Melinda, who has some
unattractive reading habits). It might be revealing to do
the same kind of network analysis of the people who uploaded
their libraries - for all we know, the site was announced
in a church newsletter or something and the newsletter's
readers are overrepresented in the population of site users.

On the other hand it just *might* be a clue as to why the
"War on Terror" is going the way it is, since there's heavy
use of the same kind of analysis to identify terrorists.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community

"Melinda Shore" wrote in message

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

Okay, so I tried it. Put in 'Wide Sargasso Sea' (by Rhys) and my #1
unsuggestion is

'Desiring God: Meditations of a Christion Hedonist', which actually sounds
interesting. In fact, most of the top works are somehow theologically
related. What the hell?

Then I tried the BookSuggester, and tried the same input. Here is what I
got out.

To the Lighthouse (I haven't read this one, but generally don't like
anything by Virginia Woolf)

The Mill on the Floss (Hated It)

Mrs. Dalloway (Hated It)

The Portrait of a Lady (Hated It)

Sons and Lovers (Didn't hate it, didn't particularly like it either)

The funny thing is that I have read and either intensely disliked or was meh
about 13 of 16. Of the remaining 3, the only one I am even remotely
interested in reading is The Remains of the Day. I have read other things
by Ishiguro and liked it.

Suja

Melinda Shore wrote:

Well, we aren't exactly a nation of readers.

Well, no, we aren't. But Anne Frank? It is for to weep!

I once had to go to a pretty pointless seminar on "What's wrong with
management?" The only thing I took away from it, and that was
because it was amusing under my then-current working circumstances,
was that "A fish rots from the head down." But, hey, I hear that
the whiny smirker has actually held a copy of Camus' "The Stranger"
in his very hands, so maybe he'll become less rotten by osmosis?

So in the process of wondering about how many people in an
airport are actually local residents he accidentally said
some negative things about Minneapolis even though he
actually likes it and in a follow-up post he laid out some
great things about Minnesota in general, and in the comments
section someone mentioned Vince Flynn as a Minnesotan he
(the commenter) thought was particularly great. Now, I
don't know if you've bothered to read Vince Flynn,

Never heard of him. After Googling and finding out he's a
consultant for "24," I think it's a safe bet that I'm better off
remaining ignorant of his, um, oeuvre.

but aside
from his use of right-wing political assassins as American
heroes he's basically completely illiterate and I have to
assume that the commenter singled out Vince Flynn either
because he likes the plots or because he's most comfortable
with monosyllabic words.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm betting they tend
to go hand-in-hand.

--
Shelly (Warning: see label for details)
http://www.cat-sidh.net (the Mother Ship)
http://esther.cat-sidh.net (Letters to Esther)

In article ,
Suja wrote:
Having been there and done that, I must say that there is something very off
in their clustering algorithm. Or maybe it's how they derive the 'Un' part
that's off.

Well, back when I was doing graduate work in information
retrieval, clustering (although not by network analysis) and
vector-space (measuring angles between term vectors)
techniques were two of the things we were looking at. And
the ugly truth is that pretty much any of these analytical
approaches underperformed just taking a list of terms in a
document, stripping off prefixes/suffixes, ordering by term
frequency, and dropping the 25% most frequently occurring
terms and 25% least frequently occurring - that is to say,
building an index from the words that appear in the
document. It could very well be that network analysis gives
crappy results, too.
--
Melinda Shore - Software longa, hardware brevis -

Prouder than ever to be a member of the reality-based community

"Melinda Shore" wrote in message:

"Network" stuff is very hot right now, and they're analysing
the individual data sets in their databases and clustering
stuff that tends to appear in the same data sets.

Having been there and done that, I must say that there is something very off
in their clustering algorithm. Or maybe it's how they derive the 'Un' part
that's off.

I tried again with The Alienist, and got back VERY similar stuff, although
near as I can tell, there is virtually no similarity between the two books I
used as input (unless you count how one is the story of the mad woman in the
attic, and the other is about a serial killer, who couldn't possibly be
altogether right in his head). This time though, they threw in a couple of
books on programming and compiler design for good measure.

some unattractive reading habits (says Melinda, who has some
unattractive reading habits).

Ditto. I haven't had time to read anything that can be considered 'deep'.
Hell, these days, I'm lucky to get around to the Comic pages in The Post.

Suja

Melinda Shore wrote:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester


Oh boy, do I love that thing. I may spend all afternoon with it. Thanks.


--Lia