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On Monday, I wrote a post about the New York Times Netflix map, identifying ZIP codes with bizarre rental tendencies and inviting Slate readers to find their own examples. You answered the call, locating a handful of idiosyncratic ZIPs with no interest in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Rachel Getting Married, or the other recent Oscar contenders that dominate the rest of the map.
Some of your discoveries fit into the categories I wrote about on Monday. A number of you noticed, for instance, that ZIP code 55450 is home to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Like LaGuardia and O'Hare, it has a unique list:
1. Battlestar Galactica: Season 3: Disc 3
2. Battlestar Galactica: Season 3: Disc 2
3. Battlestar Galactica: Season 3: Disc 1
That's it; there are only three movies listed on its Top 10, suggesting a single account, and a new one at that.
I had also pointed out the collegiate—some might say sophomoric—taste of ZIP code 80208, which is home to the University of Denver. Slate readers found a handful of other college campuses, all of them with preferences outside the mainstream. Among them are California State University Long Beach (90840; No. 2: Berserk: Vol. 1: War Cry), University of Maryland College Park (20742; No. 5: Sex Drive), and University of Washington (98195; No. 9: Pineapple Express). My favorite college campus, though, is that of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (20064), which several readers came across on the map. Its Top 10 would seem to reflect the interests of a budding journalist, or perhaps the syllabus of a media-studies course:
1. The Truman Show
2. Citizen Kane
3. Broadcast News
4. Control Room
5. Talk to Me
6. Being There
7. Good Night, and Good Luck
8. All the President's Men
9. Talk Radio
10. The War Tapes
Many readers noticed that race seems to play a role in the preferences of some ZIP codes. The work of Tyler Perry (The Family That Preys; Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail), for example, makes a strong showing in several ZIP codes in Greater Atlanta and in the 75237 ZIP in Dallas. Other readers pointed out that military installations were less likely to be enamored of Oscar bait. In Greater Boston, there is Hanscom Air Force Base (01731; No. 3: New in Town); in Maryland, there is Andrews Air Force Base (20762, No. 1: Yes Man).
For sheer wackiness, there's no beating federal employees. See, for instance, 90073, in Los Angeles, home to the Veterans Administration (No. 1: Swimming With Sharks; No. 2: The Big Lebowski). Reader Tony Drollinger e-mailed to flag Minnesota ZIP 55111, which is just east of the aforementioned Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. "I'm an employee of the US Fish & Wildlife Service at Fort Snelling," writes Tony. "This area is comprised of my large federal building (which also houses people from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, and several branches of the military). Next door to us is an Air Force base, and other parts of the ZIP Code house a MN DOT building, the VA hospital, a state park, a public golf course, a private tennis club, and a bar/restaurant." In other words, not many residents, and presumably only a few Netflix accounts:
1. Weeds: Season 4: Disc 3
2. The Notebook
3. Do Not Adjust Your Set: Disc 2
4. Star Trek
5. Touch the Sound
6. 27 Dresses
7. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
8. The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice
9. Highlander
10. Righteous Kill
Thanks to all the readers who wrote in with strange ZIPs. Email me at dvdextras@gmail.com if you find a great one that I left out. In the meantime, I will be adding The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice to my own Brooklyn-based Netflix queue. It features an all-star cast of Noah Wyle, Bob Newhart, Jane Curtin, and is directed by Star Trek: The Next Generation's Jonathan Frakes. How can you go wrong?
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On Saturday, the New York Times posted an interactive map of Netflix rental patterns in 12 U.S. cities, broken down by ZIP code. The map is smartly designed and great fun to explore, yet what strikes you almost immediately is the lack of regional variation. The most-popular movies across each urban area are films that contended in last year's Oscars—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Milk, Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married—plus a handful of less heady titles: Paul Blart, Eagle Eye, Twilight.
But not all of the ZIPs are so boring. Perusing the New York map over the weekend, Slate contributor Mike Shollar came across 11371, in Flushing, Queens, N.Y. Its Top 10:
1. Wall-E
2. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
3. Oz: Season 3: Disc 1
4. Watchmen
5. The Midnight Meat Train
6. Man, Woman, and the Wall
7. Traffic
8. Romancing the Stone
9. Crocodile Dundee 2
10. Godzilla's Revenge
Why such an idiosyncratic list? According to Zipcode.com, 11371 has a population of zero—it's LaGuardia Airport. Presumably, this list represents the taste of a small number of people (a single person?) who registered a Netflix account to a mailstop at LGA. Mike noticed a similar phenomenon in Chicago, where O'Hare has its own zip. The top titles in 60666:
1. Year of the Dragon
2. Transporter 3
3. Somewhere in Time
4. Videodrome
5. A Prayer for the Dying
6. Sixteen Candles
7. Orlando
8. Pale Rider
9. The Breakfast Club
10. Raising Arizona
It's not just airports that have more eclectic lists. College campuses often have their own ZIPs as well. The University of Denver, which resides in 80208, would seem to have particularly collegiate taste:
1. Flight of the Conchords: Season 1: Disc 2
2. W.
3. Volver
4. Weeds: Season 2: Disc 2
5. Appaloosa
6. Weeds: Season 2: Disc 1
7. Defiance
8. Eastern Promises
9. The Visitor
10. The Duchess
Other pockets of resistance to Oscar dominance include, interestingly, the ZIP codes in which some of the major studios reside. Universal City, home to Universal Studios, is in ZIP code 91608. Its Top 10:
1. Twilight
2. Vicky Christina Barcelona
3. Taken
4. I Love You, Man
5. RocknRolla
6. Cloverfield
7. Changeling
8. Body of Lies
9. Sicko
10. True Blood: Season 1, Disc 1
One final zip-code category that produces entertaining Top 10s: areas largely taken up by federal or state government. For example, 80225, home to the Denver Federal Center. Get the sense this list reflects the taste of a single Netflix subscriber?
1. Entourage: Season 1: Disc 1
2. Patton Oswalt: No Reason to Complain: Uncensored
3. Richard Jeni: A Big Steaming Pile of Me
4. Psych: Season 1: Disc 1
5. Heckler
6. Robot Chicken: Season 1: Disc 1
7. Patton Oswalt: My Weakness Is Strong
8. Psych: Season 1: Disc 2
9. Patton Oswalt: Werewolves and Lollipops
10. Psych: Season 1: Disc 3
This is hardly a comprehensive list of ZIP codes with unique taste in cinema. Brow Beat readers: Have you noticed a strange ZIP on the Times's Netflix map? E-mail me at dvdextras@gmail.com, and be sure to send along your best guess at what's afoot in that ZIP. And if you're a skycap with a fondness for the adventure movies of the 1980s or a federal employee with a deep appreciation for Patton Oswalt, we'd love to hear from you as well.
Update, Jan. 13, 8:13a.m.: Click here for more weird Netflix zip codes, discovered by Slate readers.
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And all along, the secret was right there in the stochastic gradient descent. On Friday, a team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” declared itself the winner of the $1 million Netflix Prize, the contest to improve the site’s existing movie recommendations formula by 10 percent. We don’t yet know exactly how the likely winners did it—the winning team is keeping quiet, since other contestants still have a month to beat their entry, according to the contest rules. We do know this: The contest probably wasn’t won thanks to a revolutionary idea about how we form our taste in movies.
While such a concept may still be out there, the Netflix Prize champs appear to have notched a major victory for computer science over psychology. That seems like a safe conclusion based on progress reports team members have published over the years. For a taste, try this sentence: “The values of the parameters are learnt by stochastic gradient descent with weight decay on the Probe data.”
I’m sure BellKor’s final paper will contain some insights into the psychology of taste, so long as you’re willing to ponder the math and computing behind it. A 2008 paper (PDF), for example, outlines how to represent the ebb and flow of a movie’s popularity over time, as well as a model for how an individual’s rating technique evolves. (Cinematch, the model that Netflix uses today, is a simpler formula that correlates lots of data to predict your preferences based on your past ratings.)
As the Times noted over the weekend, the tentative winners are a fusion of four previously independent teams “made up of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers.” The fact that it took the combined powers of four teams to crack the 10 percent ceiling is another telling sign that the Netflix contest won’t produce some elegant, easy-to-parse theory of movie-watching. That shouldn’t diminish the accomplishment. Even if we won’t understand why it works, we should expect real results—that is, smarter recommendations—as soon as the BellKor et al. solution is implemented. The Netflix Prize is a good reminder that the human brain is an extremely powerful computer capable of juggling hundreds of variables, even when it’s thinking about how much it likes Weekend at Bernie’s II.