My Nerdiness

I'll admit I'm kind of a nerd sometimes. There are things that have deep scientific or mathematical theory behind them I find them deeply interesting. So while going through my RSS feed today I came across this article about Neflix offering $1 million to whoever can improve their recommendation system by 10%. Make sure to read the New York Times article if you find this interesting... I know I certainly did. I thought this was a really cool example about Bayesian theorem on conditional probability application but after reading some other nerdy blogs it might not be... I'm kind of confused now; need to do more reading. **Sarah, if you guys learn about Bayesian in your statistics class you can show this to your prof for some brownie points.

All I remember about Bayesian from statistics class is that it uses past data and application of regression analysis to determine future probability. In the case of Netflix, it's using past ratings to determine what movies the viewer might also find interesting. Other companies like Amazon uses this application as well to see what else you might want to buy. What's funny about the article is that the movie Napoleon Dynamite is throwing off the result by quite a bit... same applies to a few other polarizing films that people either love it or hate it.

While I was asking around the office to see if anybody would know Bayesian off the top of their head since it was close to the opening bell and I didn't have the time to try different searches in Google (at first I thought it was Keynesian but he's an economist so I knew I was wrong), Eric mentioned something about using that for trading... interesting; more in-depth thoughts later.

I also came across this item on a list of recommended gift for music lovers this Christmas. It's a shirt with a playable drum set on it and the sound comes through its built-in speakers. It's only $29.99... I'm really tempted to get it but I could also foresee some problems this causes, such as people coming up to touch or punch me to play w/ the drum set themselves. Nonetheless, I think it's really cool.