Tag: New York Times

Netflix's Napoleon Dynatime Problem

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The company Netflix has a very sophisticated and accurate recommendation system.  They also have $1 million prize for anyone who can make it better.  One interesting thing is that apparently the movie Napoleon Dynamite is screwing up the Netflix’s rating system.  There’s a good article in The NY Times called “If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That” that discusses this, saying:

The reason is that “Napoleon Dynamite” is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It’s the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.

Worse, close friends who normally share similar film aesthetics often heatedly disagree about whether “Napoleon Dynamite” is a masterpiece or an annoying bit of hipster self-indulgence.

It’s funny that movie can be so widely loved or hated.  I think it’s probably a generational thing with the younger you get the more you’re apt to like it.  Clearly, you either “get it” or you don’t

Other movies mentioned in the article that are causing the Netflix system problems and are equally hard to classify and polarizing are:

It’s an interesting list and to think about other movies that i’ve found to be divisive.  I can think of Grindhouse and Serenity.  What else?

Related articles:
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How many people can you know? What's your Dunbar number?

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In the same NY Times article i just wrote about, there’s a great section the “hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time” and compares that number between humans and apes.  It reads:

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known.

The big question then is: Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

I find my social networks work against/for this number in 2 ways:

  1. For my good friends the relationships are strengthened through social networks and Twitter. I learn more about them and we’re able to interact more often
  2. There are weak friends that i normally would discard and never talk to again but instead they hang around on Facebook and Twitter and i gradually grow to learn more about them.  Over time they turn into actual friends or i delete them and they turn into nothing.
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Being Digitally Close

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There is an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago called “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” and i think it’s one of the best pieces i’ve read in a long time at explaining why Facebook Status, News Feed, Twitter and other new digital platforms are useful and popular.

The online area that the article talks about is “incessant online contact” or as some call it, “ambient awareness.” In the offline world people pick up on moods by little things like body language, sighs, little comments, etc..  In the online world this is being done by microblogging tools like Twitter (140 character updates), Dopplr (where are you traveling?), Tumblr (what web items do you like), and Facebook’s Status Feed.  The article asks the question that i get asked all the time, Who cares?:

For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your Image representing Twitter as depicted in CrunchBaseblow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.

This is indeed how many people view it.  But the genius of the article is how it explains the subtle usefulness of the information:

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

This is exactly how it works.  Now, i don’t have ESP through this but i do enjoy the knowledge of how my friends’ lives are progressing. These tools have enabled that to happen and it has certainly enhanced my relationships with them.

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