Accounting for Taste. Hello, James Gleick, said Amazon. Take a peek at your brand new music recommendations. I peeked. Amazons computers predicted that I would like the Beastie Boys, Adiemus, Frank Sinatra, Harvey Danger, and the Dave Matthews Band. Ibm Ds3000 Storage Manager Software'>Ibm Ds3000 Storage Manager Software. What an impressive list All right, I dont actually care for any of these, but still. These Wacky Web Tales are geared for grades 3 and above. Check back monthly for new tales Fellow grammar snobs, I feel I must resign from your ranks. Sure, weve had some good timesnot just when we judged the masses, but especially when we. Free Educational Fifth Grade Games and Apps for Kids. It was quite a shot in the dark, considering Id never been to Amazons music department before. This is the way its going on the Internet if marketers want your money and your time and your eyeballs, they feel they should figure out who you are and what you like. Not only does their software try to calculate your taste in music by keeping track of the music you buy, it even tries to work out your taste in music from your reading habits. JIlKeVStI/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Grammar Rock Game' title='Grammar Rock Game' />This could be a parlor game If you like Vladimir Nabokov, maybe youll also like Igor Stravinsky If you like War and Peace, maybe youll like the 1. Overture If you like E. L. Doctorows Ragtime, maybe youll like Scott Joplins ragtime One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and 1. Maniacs Consumer Reports and Crash Test Dummies Kafkas Metamorphosis and the Beatles We like to believe that our souls are our own and theres no accounting for taste. So its disconcerting to find that, on line, theres suddenly lots of it. Amazon has its Book. Matcher, the music store CDnow has its Album Advisor sooner or later every merchant of just about everything will follow suit, analyzing your private likes and dislikes with real time recommendation engines based on collaborative filters and fuzzy logic. The basic idea is the same everywhere. Say you favor turtlenecks, convertibles, nautical history, bebop, and zinfandel. No doubt you are proud of your rare good taste, but its a big world, and somewhere in a million entry electronic commerce database are a few other people with the same preferences. If you knew that your doppelgngers were raving about the latest Mike Leigh movie, wouldnt you want to give it a look In the jargon of the collaborative filter game, these weird pals are your community and your trusted associates. Their taste might be more in tune with yours than the few people you trust in your own small circle of friends. The whole thing is just a mildly clever database look up, but maybe it works, at least for some people and some kinds of taste. I/51GJ9ZY0EDL._SY450_.jpg' alt='Grammar Rock Game' title='Grammar Rock Game' />Improve your vocabulary, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation with these fun English games The brief essay on this page, Accounting for Taste, was written by James Gleick, former editor for the New York Times, lecturer at Princeton, and author of three. It has no intelligence about the content of the merchandise Mozart and Madonna might be flavors of ice cream, for all it knows. It only has the beginnings of what could become a formidable electronic dossier your purchasing history plus your volunteered comments about what you love and what you hate. Dragon Ball Z Mugen For Mac on this page. At CDnow, for example, a customer can choose buttons for I own this already or Not for me the computers, of course, watch and learn. Its scary. Is ones entire psyches most secret landscape really a fairly public thing, given just a few pieces of information asks Douglas R. Hofstadter, the cognitive theorist and author of Gdel, Escher, Bach. If you know that I love Chopin and Bach and am totally cool to Beethoven, can you predict that I love Cole Porter and Fats Waller but am indifferent to Oscar Peterson and Charlie Parker, and hate Elvis PresleyWhat is disturbing, to spell it out, is the idea that ones taste, which seems like such a personal thing, connected with and determined by ones inmost being, should have, in a way, a mechanically, nearly deterministically, knowable nature. Maybe were not quite knowable at that. And these are computers, so the mistakes they make can look very, very stupid. When they go off the rails in a sensitive area like taste, some people get angry. The worst thing of all, says one irate customer, Russ Korins, if you like Third Eye Blind who sing Semi Charmed Life, that song that goes doo doo doooo, doo doo DOO do, and Graduate, a mainstream version of Avenue A rebel rock, screaming, Can I graduate then what do they also recommendThe Four Seasons by A. Vivaldi. At CDnow, they take this sort of thing in stride. You cant argue with the customer they know what they like, says Evan Schwartz, director of product management. People love to click on Not for me, Not for me. When customers click, and especially when they buy, they add to the storehouse of information about that mercurial, irrational, chaotic thing we call taste. As knowledge builds up, maybe the computers will stop recommending Vivaldi to Third Eye Blind fans. Or maybe it will turn out that Vivaldi and Third Eye Blind have some kind of century bridging affinity, even if no musicologist could say exactly what. Concise Historical Atlas there. Or maybe its a moving target, and last years Third Eye Blind fans have a different sensibility from this years. You might think of these growing databases as merchandising dossiers. Marketers are keeping a file on you, and if its not as tangible or incriminating as your F. B. I. file, its too personal for comfort. These exhaustive lists become much more than mere lists they act as electronic psychoanalysts, writes David Shenk in his recent book, Data Smog. Under pressure from privacy advocates, most companies in the collaborative filtering business pledge not to share information without customers consent. Even if the trail of your reading history leads your bookseller to conclude that youre on the verge of buying a new red Porsche Boxster or a blue Gap dress, Amazon promises not to tell the car companies or the special prosecutor. Still, if we have learned anything, we know that information tends to get around. Do I really want the whole Web to know Im a Beastie Boys, Frank Sinatra, Harvey Danger kind of guyI didnt even know that myself.