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…and I Heart Huckabees, Lost in Translation, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Sideways, according to this well-written in-depth New York Times Magazine article Sunday. In one contender model, Napoleon Dynamite accounts for 15% of the total error, and a small group of mainly independent movies above totals more than half the remaining error. To paraphrase the article: when a previously unknown team introduced one significant improvement, singular value decomposition, and smashed into 4th place, other teams soon followed suit and now all top ten use the technique.

Writer Clive Thompson wondered: The question haunting Netflix as well as recommendation engines used by Amazon and iTunes: Just how predictable is human taste? If we can’t understand our own preferences, can computers be any better? Sometimes the way singular value decomposition groups movies makes sense, but other times no rationale seem apparent. The algorithms find connections so deep and subconscious, even customers themselves wouldn’t recognize why.

Map, visualize, and explore the development of housing. In this Trulia real estate mashup in Microsoft Virtual Earth, see how Detroit and modern industrial cities thrive and die property by property through the rise and decline of housing. See in the timeline how economic boom and bust create waves of building. Detroit center city has now laid quiescent, dormant, for over 70 years.

Add multiple Camera Raw formats, live zebra preview and color histograms, motion triggers, time-lapse, extra-long exposure, stacked exposures, 1/25000 shutter, 1/64000 flash sync, auto-bracket, framing grids, longer video, calendars and tons more to your consumer Canon camera using the free, opensource, camera-hacking project CHDK. The Kit enhances embedded Canon Digic II and III firmware by loading the hacks from a memory card whenever you wish to use it. To turn it off, restart the camera. To stop using it, delete the files. It’s easy and non-permanent.

The Kit can also run scripts to trigger and perform actions, for programmable interval time lapse or motion trigger fast enough to capture lightning. Programmers can write their own, and better yet, programmers already have written large collections ready for download. Since many programmers actively develop the Kit, new features debut regularly.

For a straight-forward guide, see this Wired How-To Wiki too.

Laws require corporations, as legal entities owning property, entering contracts, and assuming debt, have a governing board of directors, accountable as a fiduciary to its shareholders, members, or the public. These governing boards organize and operate according to articles of incorporation, bylaws, resolutions, and policies, oversee corporate purpose and plans, select and supervise management, ensure sufficient resources for the organization, and ensure compliance with laws and regulations. This linked page outlines and links many more pages covering governance and policy; roles and responsibilities; operations and systems; accountability and ethics; staffing, compensation, communications and the issues of running an organization. It also covers director training as a comprehensive overview and exemplar of how boards should work. The scope and volume of information make it suitable for a weekend workshop with additional homework in addition to a checklist and toolkit to introduce best practices.

Some websites import friends utterly wrong, but Flickr gets it right. Their revised finder no longer asks for your password to other sites before logging in as you to fetch your address book. Such interactions can compromise password and site security. Most people reuse the same small set of usernames and passwords. A not-so-small number of sites store cleartext passwords; they can even mail it back to you. Regardless how well sites execute security, a breach at any other site can compromise security across many user accounts across many sites.

Several weeks ago a Web 2.0 company launched a Gmail backup app that asked for addresses and passwords, which at least 1777 unwitting folks provided. In addition to backing up Gmail as expected, the app also socked away the address and password combo. When the scheme was exposed, the company claimed debugging code made it to production inadvertently.

I can see scenarios where governments may be the least of our worries. Much more likely are significant others’ jealous exes who are also system administrators, and hacked sites with weak security. The sooner we move away from passwords and shared-secret systems, the safer we’ll be.

Flickr now joins that cause and can dig up friends across instant messenger and e mail address books at Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Google Mail without asking for your password on these other systems. For those already logged into the target site, the follow-ups ask only to authorize the transaction. For those not yet logged into the target site, note the url. Requests for passwords come only from the target site itself, as with OpenID.

After a few minutes, Flickr found missed and misplaced friends, nearly doubling my Flickr contacts to over 100. This is how finding friends should work. Other sites, take heed.