Category: business

A lawsuit filed against Netflix for releasing anonymized data as part of a celebrated scientific contest identifies what the suit calls the “Brokeback Mountain Factor” as a reason that Netflix should not have released information about ratings given to movies, including Ang Lee’s celebrated film about a pair of closeted mid-century gay Wyoming cowboys.

For nearly three years, science and tech blogs eagerly followed developments in a celebrated contest.

Thousands of research teams from 186 countries submitted entries to the contest which offered a hefty prize of $1 million to the winner.

The contest was run by the movie rental business Netflix, which charged contestants with developing a way of predicting user movie preference that would be at least ten percent better than the proprietary process Netflix was using.

“Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service,” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer, according to New York Times.

The contest was hailed as a successful example of a web phenomenon called “crowd-sourcing”. The contest was a math geeks’ dream with a challenge to improve a specific example of large-scale predictive modeling.

But a Dallas lawyer and privacy activist insists that the contest was also a dark example of a company releasing private data to the public, including—the suit claims—information that might have allowed a closeted lesbian to be identified. He has filed a class-action lawsuit against Netflix charging that the company violated the privacy of its customers by releasing the data that was used for the contest, Wired reports.

Wired, which published several stories and blog posts on the contest throughout its nearly three-year run called it “the latest example of companies successfully crowd-sourcing R&D work by offering a prize for the best solution.”

More...

The official opening of a gay pub in southwest China's Yunnan Province has been delayed. The bar in the tourist city of Dali had been set to open Tuesday, the 22nd World AIDS Day. But extensive nationwide publicity has delayed to opening, China’s news agency Xinhua reports.

“The pub will open sooner or later,” said its founder Zhang Jianbo, who was a doctor from the Dali No.2 People's Hospital.

The pub, nestled in a small alley, had started trial operation last month. It was run by more than 10 volunteers from the Good Friend Working Group in Dali, according to Xinhua.

“At that time, some 20 to 30 gays would drop in to learn more about AIDS prevention,” Zhang told the news service. “They showed recognition and a sense of belonging,” he said.

But a widely disseminated report about the bar in Beijing News put an intense media spotlight on the bar and on one of its sources of funding—Dali’s local government health department.

More...

The government of a Chinese city has announced plans to open a gay bar as part of what city officials call an outreach effort to the area’s gay residents. The English edition of China’s People’s Daily reports that officials say the bar will become “common room for partner education”.

The bar will be opened on Dec. 1—World AIDS Day—by the city health department in Dali, which is described by Reuters as “a picturesque city on a lake in southwestern Yunnan province”.

Zhang Jianbo, the bar’s founder and manager, told the Global Times that the bar will serve as a platform to raise awareness of its gay clients about safe sex practice, according to People’s Daily.

“We might not even sell beverages in the bar. We will turn the bar into a tribune to offer lectures and training to gay people in order to reduce AIDS infections among them,” he said.

Dali has one of the China’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS . Chinese officials recently announced that sexual transmission has now become the primary route of HIV infection in the country. According to official statistics, 32 percent of new cases of HIV infection in the past year were reported among gay and bisexual men.

Jiang Anmin, vice director of the Dali Health Bureau, estimates that there are between 1,500 and 2,000 gay men in Dali, People’s Daily reports.

More...

Unless Congress acts before the end of the year to renew the law the federal estate tax will disappear for one year in 2010 before returning with a much higher tax rate in 2011. Congress is currently rushing to modify the donut-hole in the current law, by passing a temporary extension of the current law.

But, unless additional changes are made to it, the law will continue to place a much higher burden on the surviving spouse of a gay or lesbian couple, a new report from Williams Institute finds.

“As Congress turns to legislation in December to address the estate tax before it disappears in 2010, it should address these inequalities for same-sex couples and their families,” said Michael D. Steinberger, the author of the study. He is quoted in a statement from Williams Institute.

A same-sex survivor is assessed an average of $3.3 million more in taxes upon the death of a spouse than similarly-situated different-sexed married couples, according to the report.

“Regardless of your views about this tax, it is a costly implication of legal discrimination against gay and lesbian couples,” said Michael D. Steinberger, the author of the study.

The estate tax sometimes referred to derisively as a “death tax”—especially by Republican politicians who campaign for its outright repeal.

More...