Bad recommendations
On Slashdot today, I saw a MSNBC article on product recommendations gone bad. Specifically:
When visitors to Walmart.com requested "Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series" on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading "Similar Items." Those films included "Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK" and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson."
While I'm firmly against racism, I have some sympathy for Wal-Mart, as I've written and deployed an automated recommender system, which had its share of humorous results, although fortunately no offensive ones that I'm aware of.
This also brings to mind Jeffrey Zaslow's classic Wall Street Journal article, What to Do When Your TiVo Thinks You're Gay.
Re: Bad recommendations
If the request had been for the original motion picture set, I
wouldn't have thought matches to films depicting civil rights issues
from an African-American perspective were racist or even bad matches.
The "making of" PotA film features a comment from one of the directors
stating the appeal of "Conquest" to African-Americans living in Los
Angeles, who identified strongly with the apes who rebelled against
their human masters. In fact, when I was growing up in a mostly
African-American neighborhood in NYC, the day I saw "Conquest" in a
local theatre, the mostly African-American audience were cheering the
apes on, just as the director described.
gregbo