From now on and until October 5th 2009, Microsoft is offering, in addition to the recent price cut, an additional $50 off its Xbox 360 Elite game console. This means that if you’re willing to deal with a mail-in rebate, you’ll only pay $250 for the unit. That’s a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.
You can get a $50 rebate on the purchase of a new Xbox 360® Elite Console from September 22 to October 5, 2009. Not only does Xbox 360 play the best games and provide quality entertainment, but now you can sign up for a mail-in rebate for even greater savings.
In the following video, American astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson explains why people should raise their kids to be scientifically literate. Another brilliant piece of advice (among countless others) from our favorite scientific personality here at [GaS].
A team of seven former rivals has won a three-year contest to improve Netflix’s recommendation system. They pipped another team to the million dollar prize by just twenty minutes.
The contest involved the system the movie rental firm uses to predict which films a particular customer might like, based on how they’ve rated previous titles. As you’d imagine, there are simple ways to do this: a Rocky fan would likely enjoy Rocky II, while someone who gave a zero star rating to Scarface, the Godfather, and Casino probably isn’t going to go crazy about Goodfellas.
The existing Netflix system, Cinematch, built on this simple approach by analyzing customer data to build up more complex patterns: people who hated Rocky probably wouldn’t like Rocky IV, but fans of the original could be split in their attitude to it, so you’d need to look at their attitudes to cheesy 80s action flicks as well as sports movies.
With the average customer rating 200 movies, Cinematch worked very well, but not perfectly. It was particularly thrown by offbeat titles, most famously Napoleon Dynamite, where there didn’t seem to be any way of predicting how much a viewer would like it from their previous responses.
Netflix then launched the prize contest with the target of beating Cinematch’s accuracy by 10 per cent. It’s now finally been won by a team, which includes computer engineers from Austria, Canada, Israel and the United States, who had previously been working for the prize individually.
The team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, broke the 10 per cent mark in early June, at which point rivals had 30 days to beat their score. Another team matched their achievement just 20 minutes later, but with both sides on a 10.06 per cent improvement, BellKor took the million dollar prize.
The second-place team Ensemble, consisting of staff from data analytics firm Opera Solutions, says it’s not too upset about missing the prize as it estimates the value of its own findings at $10 million.
The firm is now running a second contest which will run for eighteen months. Researchers will be challenged to produce a recommendation system which takes account not only of previous movie ratings but also age, gender and zip code.
(Picture, courtesy of Chris Hefele, shows extract from a visualization of Ensemble’s database of movie relationships.)
If you use discreet in-ear headphones on your travels, you probably know the following scene all too well:
Somebody comes up and starts talking to you, or you need to talk to a bus driver to sort out your fare, and as you pull your headphones out, you’re left with the choice of rifling through your pocket to hit pause (all the while holding up a hand to stop the other person talking until you are done), or completing your conversation and then fiddling about trying to rewind the music or podcast to the point where you stopped listening.
Sure, that’s not the biggest problem facing civilization today. But it’s good to know that one firm has produced something close to a solution.
After hyping an announcement it said would “change the way you listen to music forever”, Sony has unleashed what it’s billing as the world’s first motion-controlled earphones.
The MH907 earphones, which only work with Sony Ericsson phones, include motion sensors. When you put both earphones into your ears, the phone’s music player automatically starts up. However, if you then take one earphone out, the music pauses until you replace it.
The same system works for answering and ending phone calls, so if you are listening to music when you receive a call, simply pull out an earphone and replace it to switch from music to voice call.
At this stage, however, it seems unlikely many people will get as far as trying the earphones: the type of listener who’d pay the $57 these are going for is probably unlikely to be willing to use a phone for listening to music. However, if the technology catches on, it’s not hard to imagine similar headphones selling well among owners of more expensive portable media players.
I have a theory. I believe it is impossible to remain sad in the presence of a ukulele. There have been moments in my life where despair has crept in, and in spite of efforts to the contrary, very little has managed to scatter those dark clouds.
Except my ukulele. Taking out that lovely, rustic brown baritone ukulele and strumming–even just a few chords–just does something to me. It makes me happy. It makes me smile. And after a few minutes, I’m singing “Here Comes the Sun” (George Harrison was a consummate ukulele player, and I find it rather fitting that the song is my default uke tune) and feeling so much better.
So, this Monday, I figured I’d one-up the game. Because another thing that makes me ridiculously happy is a good Western. Combine the two, my friends, and you’ve got one mellifluous start to your Monday morning.
But now that this has been running for a few weeks, it seems that Nigeria is Mad at Sony and wants them to withdraw the ad. The country also “demands an unconditional apology from Sony Corporation for this deliberate negative campaign against the country’s image and reputation,” said a spokesman for the Nigerian government.
In addition to demanding an apology, Nigeria offered to transfer the amount of $200 million USD to Sony if they would just provide them with all their banking information.
Oh and by the way, if any Nigerian officials are currently reading this, please don’t take the previous paragraph too seriously. After all, life would be pretty boring without a little bit of humor, wouldn’t it?
Hey Everyone! I haven’t received my own official Geeks are Sexy t-shirt yet, but John Chow, the root of all evil himself, has already received his, and I must admit it looks pretty darn fine on him. The only complain he had about the shirt? He told me the robotic girl should have weared a thong instead of a panty. Shame on you John!
If you haven’t ordered your [GAS] shirt yet, you can do so right here, and by using promo code “geeksaresexy” (without the quotes) at checkout, you’ll get 10% off your purchase. You can also browse our t-shirt partner’s website right here to check out the rest of their awesome designs.
With the average customer rating 200 movies, Cinematch worked very well, but not perfectly. It was particularly thrown by offbeat titles, most famously 
If you use discreet in-ear headphones on your travels, you probably know the following scene all too well:
