Those google ads at the top of the forum pages give us a picture of how google susses out our perceived interests, but this one is so personal. So, I ordered a book about modeling clay three years ago, and Amazon.ca wisely assumes that my interests have expanded. How’d they know?
Jef
Dear Amazon.ca Customer,
We’ve noticed that customers who have expressed interest in Fun with Modeling Clay by Barbara Reid have also ordered Current Trends in Database Technology - EDBT 2006 : EDBT 2006 Workshop PhD, DataX, IIDB, IIHA, ICSNW, QLQP, PIM, PaRMa, and Reactivity on the Web, Munich, Germany, March 26-31, 2006, Revised Selected Papers by Torsten Grust. For this reason, you might like to know that Torsten Grust’s Current Trends in Database Technology - EDBT 2006 : EDBT 2006 Workshop PhD, DataX, IIDB, IIHA, ICSNW, QLQP, PIM, PaRMa, and Reactivity on the Web, Munich, Germany, March 26-31, 2006, Revised Selected Papers will be released Paperback on November 1, 2006. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 35% by following the link below.
I agree that sometimes those lists certainly bring up some totally inappropriate zingers, but they also bring up some useful stuff from time to time as well; stuff that I wasn’t aware of, or hadn’t been looking for lately. I guess I can live with the occassional wierdnesses as long as there are some gems from time to time.
And I gave up on Amazon.ca long ago. The selection is ridiculously crippled. I can buy more Canadian music from Amazon.com than from Amazon.ca, especially older stuff.
I use it only when ordering library books that are cheaper there than anywhere else in Canada and must, thanks to our purchasing department at work, be purchased from a Canadian source. They get itchy when confronted with conversion rates and Canada Customs paperwork.
Eh, If you throw a handful of darts at the wall some of them will hit the board. It’s all a numbers game and the internet has some pretty big numbers.
And since you bought something from them once, they can side step the Anti-Spam laws and claim the contact as servicing existing customers, and not unsolicited.
It’s very interesting to watch as these technologies evolve.
In a previous life I was a forecast systems analyst. We were always looking for ways to pick-apart the threads that attach to why someone would be motivated to buy something or other.
In the case Jeferson quotes, I’d say that a statistically significant number of buyers of the Clay book also went on to buy the Database book - these statistical algorythms are all very well, but when the statistical sample is small they tend to jump to insane conclusions - e.g. if only 5 folks actually bought the clay book then each of the 5 would cause a 20% trend towards the next book they bought no matter what it was - If 2 of those 5 customers was, in fact, the same person buying presents for twins then the statistic would become a whopping 40%.
There are better cases - for instance In one Australian state there is a very strong link between demand for meat pies and red boot polish - the pies get eaten at football games and the red polish gets used on the old football when it comes out for practice.
Even more wonderful programs are looking at stock market prices and every other stream of data obtainable to help devine causes of market trends. Any numerically described curve gets matched and rematched with every other - a fit often demonstrates a causal factor. Neural Network based programs are trained to learn and detect patterns - everything from fraudulent loan applications to what colour jelly bean gets eaten in July.
They all have these short-comings; they are retrospective and cannot cope with the new stuff that life keeps throwing up, they fail if the sample base is too small, they fail if the historic record is too short, they fail if the history is incorrectly recorded, they fail to discern the difference between true natural demand and artificially induced demand (advertising and promotion). They ultimately destroy themselves by distorting the very market they are trained upon.
That said, they have dramatically reduced waste in industry and commerce. But at the same time have ultra-tuned our essential supply lines to be continually within a hair of disaster - if the computers stopped, our cities would be without food within a few hours.
Nothing new really - Civilization, it seems, has forever been doomed to stumble along on feet of clay.
I can contribute to this thread in a very concrete way.
Last Christmas, I bought three books about modeling figures in clay as a present for a friend, and expensed two databasing and two programming language books for work all on the same Amazon order.
could use a bit of work yet!