Greg Linden and Daniel Lemire have both written a little about the Netflix Prize and whether the systems that are doing the best are really worth anything. The KorBell system that recently won the Progress Prize consists of 107 different parts in an ensemble system (Note: the team of Bob Bell and Yehuda Koren at AT&T goes by BellKor and KorBell on the Netflix leaderboard). The paper is interesting for two reasons: the ensemble method being used and the fact that only about 3 or 4 of those components are doing the heavy lifting. Actually, I have no idea whether the actual ensemble algorithm they use would be especially interesting to anyone else, but as I have no experience with ensembles in this context, it was interesting to me. (more…)
Archive for 14 December 2007
Creative Commons
Posted: 14 December 2007 in UncategorizedTags: copyright, creative commons, licensing, spam, spam blogs
D’Arcy Norman has a great post on the Creative Commons license and why to choose only CC:By rather than some of the stricter licenses. This blog has been using CC:By since I began it, so it was nice to see someone with similar sensibilities putting out a much clearer statement of why it’s a good idea than I could.
People are free to reuse anything I write on this blog or the pictures I take, may God help them, so long as they attribute what they have done to me. So far the only ones who have used my stuff are spam blogs that mysteriously republish just about everything I write, often attributing it to some other author’s name but posting a link back to my site. Very bizarre.
