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http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks
Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
Frequent Make contributor Tom Owad just published a mind-blowing how-on on
his website explaining how to mine Amazon's wish list database to uncover
"subversives."
Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours
of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the
reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens.
I downloaded all the files to an external 120 GB Firewire drive in UFS
format. The raw data occupied little more than 5 GB. I initially wanted to
move all the files into a single directory to facilitate searching, but as
the directory contents exceeded 100,000 items, the speed became glacially
slow, so I kept the data divided into chunks of 25,000 wishlists.
Next comes the fun part what books are most dangerous? So many to
choose from. Here's a sample of the list I made. Feel free to make up your
own list if you decide to try some data mining. Send it to the FBI. I'm sure
they'll appreciate your help in fighting terrorism.
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