Links For January 10, 2014
How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood
How do you systematically dismember thousands of movies using a bunch of different people who all need to have the same understanding of what a given microtag means? In 2006, Yellin holed up with a couple of engineers and spent months developing a document called “Netflix Quantum Theory,” which… spelled out ways of tagging movie endings, the “social acceptability” of lead characters, and dozens of other facets of a movie. Many values are “scalar,” that is to say, they go from 1 to 5. So, every movie gets a romance rating, not just the ones labeled “romantic” in the personalized genres. Every movie’s ending is rated from happy to sad, passing through ambiguous. Every plot is tagged. Lead characters’ jobs are tagged. Movie locations are tagged. Everything. Everyone.
The Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation
People of all cultures wear business suits and collared shirts to survive. But when one is of the dominant culture, adopting the clothing, food, or slang of other cultures has nothing to do with survival. So as free as people should be to wear whatever hair and clothing they enjoy, using someone else’s cultural symbols to satisfy a personal need for self-expression is an exercise in privilege.
Nominees for the The 16th Annual Independent Games Festival have been announced.
The American Dialect Society voted “Because” as its word of the year for 2013.
“This past year, the very old word because exploded with new grammatical possibilities in informal online use,” [Ben] Zimmer said. “No longer does because have to be followed by of or a full clause. Now one often sees tersely worded rationales like ‘because science’ or ‘because reasons.’ You might not go to a party ‘because tired.’ As one supporter put it, because should be Word of the Year ‘because useful!’”
libdrc project – open source integration library for the WiiU GamePad.