China’s airing of ‘V for Vendetta’ stuns viewers

BEIJING (AP) — Television audiences across China watched an anarchist antihero rebel against a totalitarian government and persuade the people to rule themselves. Soon the Internet was crackling with quotes of “V for Vendetta‘s” famous line: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

The airing of the movie Friday night on China Central Television stunned viewers and raised hopes that China is loosening censorship.

“V for Vendetta” never appeared in Chinese theaters, but it is unclear whether it was ever banned. An article on the Communist Party’s People’s Daily website says it was previously prohibited from broadcast, but the spokesman for the agency that approves movies said he was not aware of any ban.

Some commentators and bloggers think the broadcast could be CCTV producers pushing the envelope of censorship, or another sign that the ruling Communist Party‘s newly installed leader, Xi Jinping, is serious about reform.

“Oh God, CCTV unexpectedly put out ‘V for Vendetta.’ I had always believed that film was banned in China!” media commentator Shen Chen wrote on the popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo service, where he has over 350,000 followers.

Zhang Ming, a supervisor at a real estate company, asked on Weibo: “For the first time CCTV-6 aired ‘V for Vendetta,’ what to think, is the reform being deepened?”

The 2005 movie, based on a comic book, is set in an imagined future Britain with a fascist government. The protagonist wears a mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century English rebel who tried to blow up Parliament. The mask has become a revolutionary symbol for young protesters in mostly Western countries, and it also has a cult-like status in China as pirated DVDs are widely available. Some people have used the image of the mask as their profile pictures on Chinese social media sites.

Beijing-based rights activist Hu Jia wrote on Twitter, which is not accessible to most Chinese because of government Internet controls: “This great film couldn’t be any more appropriate for our current situation. Dictators, prisons, secret police, media control, riots, getting rid of ‘heretics’ … fear, evasion, challenging lies, overcoming fear, resistance, overthrowing tyranny … China’s dictators and its citizens also have this relationship.”

China’s authoritarian government strictly controls print media, television and radio. Censors also monitor social media sites including Weibo. Programs have to be approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, but people with knowledge of the industry say CCTV, the only company with a nationwide broadcast license, is entitled to make its own censorship decisions when showing a foreign movie.

“It is already broadcast. It is no big deal,” said a woman who answered the phone at movie channel CCTV-6. “We also didn’t anticipate such a big reaction.”

The woman, who only gave her surname, Yang, said she would pass on questions to her supervisor, which weren’t answered.

The spokesman for the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television said he had noticed the online reaction to the broadcast. “I’ve not heard of any ban on this movie,” Wu Baoan said Thursday.

The film is available on video-on-demand platforms in China, where movie content also needs to be approved by authorities.

A political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who used to work for CCTV said the film might have approval, or it could have been CCTV’s own decision to broadcast it.

“Every media outlet knows there is a ceiling above their head,” said Liu Shanying. “Sometimes we will work under the ceiling and avoid touching it. But sometimes we have a few brave ones who want to reach that ceiling and even express their discontent over the censor system.

“It is very possible that CCTV decided by itself” to broadcast the film, Liu said. If so, he added, it would have been “due to a gut feeling that China’s film censorship will be loosened or reformed.”

“V for Vendetta” was released in the United States in 2005 and around the world in 2006. China has a yearly quota on the numbers of foreign movies that can be imported on a revenue share basis, making it tough to get distribution approval. Other movies that failed to reach Chinese screens in 2006 include “Brokeback Mountain” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” Chinese moviegoers that year were able to see “Mission: Impossible III” with Tom Cruise and “The Painted Veil,” which was filmed in China and set in a Chinese village.

Warner Brothers, which produced and distributed “V for Vendetta,” declined to comment.

China doesn’t have a classification system, so all movies shown at its cinemas are open to adults and children of any age. A filmmaker and Beijing Film Academy professor, Xie Fei, published an open letter on Sina Weibo on Saturday calling for authorities to replace the movie censorship system that dates from the 1950s with a ratings system.

The airing of “V for Vendetta” raised some hopes about possible changes under Xi, who was publicly named China’s new leader last month. He has already announced a trimmed-down style of leadership, calling on officials to reduce waste and unnecessary meetings and pomp. His reforms are aimed at pleasing a public long frustrated by local corruption.

State media say they have reduced reports on officials’ trips as part of this drive. The official Xinhua News Agency warned this week that media outlets should “learn to play professionally in today’s information age as an increasingly picky audience is constantly” putting them under scrutiny.

An American business consultant and author with high-level Chinese contacts said there is no less commitment to one-party rule in China, so any media reforms will only go so far.

“You can’t have a totally free media as we would have in the West and still maintain the integrity of a one-party system,” said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who wrote the book “How China’s Leaders Think.” He said he thinks restrictions are being eased, “but it has to be limited.”

The new leadership has to tread carefully, Kuhn said, because in the age of the Internet, talk about reforms won’t be forgotten.

“High expectations, if they are not fulfilled, will create a worse situation,” he said.

___

AP researchers Flora Ji and Henry Hou contributed to this report.

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DealBook: Upstart Exchange in $8.2 Billion Deal for N.Y.S.E.

8:39 a.m. | Updated The owner of the 220-year-old New York Stock Exchange on Thursday agreed to an $8.2 billion deal that would give control of the longstanding symbol of American capitalism to an upstart competitor.

NYSE Euronext said that it would sell itself to the IntercontinentalExchange for about $33.12 a share in cash and stock. The combined company would have headquarters in both ICE’s home of Atlanta and in New York.

The takeover signals the revival of consolidation within the world of market operators, after a wave of deals dissipated amid concerns over antitrust and nationalist sentiment. ICE itself had partnered with NYSE Euronext’s main rival, the Nasdaq OMX Group, in an $11 billion hostile bid for the Big Board’s parent, only to see that offer blocked by the Justice Department.

NYSE Euronext itself had sought to combine with Deutsche Börse, creating a global giant in the trading of derivatives. But that merger was stymied by European antitrust regulators.

Thursday’s deal is expected to run into fewer problems. ICE and NYSE Euronext have little overlap: the former focuses on the trading of commodities like energy products, the latter on stocks and derivatives.

Indeed, while the New York Stock Exchange, with its opening bell and floor traders, has been the public image of a stock market for two centuries, it is NYSE Euronext’s businesses in the over-the-counter trading of derivatives — including the Liffe market in London — that is the main attraction in the merger talks.

As part of the deal, ICE will consider spinning off NYSE Euronext’s European stock market operations.

Shareholders of NYSE Euronext would own about 36 percent of the combined company.

ICE’s chief executive, Jeffrey C. Sprecher, would keep that role in the newly enlarged market operator. NYSE Euronext’s chief, Duncan L. Niederauer, would be president.

Both companies relied on armies of advisers. ICE was advised by Morgan Stanley; BMO Capital Markets; Broadhaven Capital Partners; JPMorgan Chase; Lazard; Societe Generale; and Wells Fargo. It received legal counsel from Sullivan & Cromwell and Shearman & Sterling.

NYSE Euronext was advised by Perella Weinberg Partners; BNP Paribas; the Blackstone Group; Citigroup; Goldman Sachs; and Moelis & Company. It was counseled by Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Slaughter & May; and Stibbe N.V.

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Jury awards $6.9 million to boy molested by L.A. Unified teacher

A jury has awarded $6.9 million to a 14-year-old boy who was molested by a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher when he was a fifth-grade student.

The judgment, among the largest ever awarded in a district molestation case, comes at a time when L.A. Unified faces close to 200 pending molestation and lewd conduct claims arising from another teacher's alleged conduct at Miramonte Elementary School.

Tuesday's jury award stems from acts committed by Forrest Stobbe, a veteran teacher at Queen Anne Place Elementary School in the Mid-Wilshire area. In September 2011, Stobbe pleaded no contest to two counts of a lewd act on a child and to continuous sexual abuse of a child younger than 14. He is currently serving a 16-year sentence in prison.

The case turned on how much responsibility the school system bore, and whether district employees should have recognized warning signs that Stobbe posed a threat to the boy. Attorneys for the school system insisted that district staff acted in a professional and appropriate manner and could not have known what Stobbe was doing.

Stobbe molested the boy beginning in October 2008, when the 10-year-old was his student, and continued to abuse him through the following July, when he was arrested.

Early in the school year, Stobbe befriended the boy, earning his trust, then began to molest him in his classroom in episodes that became more brazen and invasive. He also gave the boy numerous gifts.

Stobbe also ingratiated himself with the victim's family, buying the boy season passes to amusement parks, where he would take the boy, then molest him before dropping him off at home.

The family appreciated the teacher's interest so much that the boy's father asked his son if Stobbe should become his godfather. It was then that the boy told his father of the abuse, the father testified.

The evidence against Stobbe included a jar of petroleum jelly in his school desk that tested positive for the boy's DNA. The boy told police that Stobbe used the jelly as a lubricant for sex acts.

The plaintiffs argued that there were abundant warning signs that should have alerted Stobbe's supervisors.

More than two years before his arrest, Stobbe was observed alone with a girl in his car. He allegedly told the principal that he had parental permission to give the student a ride, but that was never verified. He also had private lunches with students in his classroom, which was against school rules.

In another incident, an angry student pushed Stobbe down a flight of stairs, injuring the teacher. The student later declined to talk to police, who consider him another possible victim.

In November 2008, a girl in Stobbe's class complained that the teacher was making her feel uncomfortable. Stobbe, she said, was stroking her hair, putting it into a ponytail and had once touched her buttocks.

Principal Mary Ann Hall testified that she called the police department, which advised her to handle the matter on her own — a claim the Los Angeles Police Department disputes. If police had been alerted to allegations of such contact, the department would have launched an investigation, said Det. Moses Castillo, who supervised the investigation after Stobbe's arrest.

Hall, who has since retired, testified that she properly notified her supervisors. Attorneys for the family asserted that Hall either failed to do so, or that her supervisors failed to act on the information.

In the end, the panel of six men and six women found that L.A. Unified was 30% responsible for total damages, which they calculated at $23 million. The other 70% of the liability was assigned to Forrest Stobbe, but attorneys said they had no plans to collect from the imprisoned former educator.

Responding to the verdict, a district spokesman emphasized the district's commitment to the safety of children.

"We take our duty to protect our students seriously and are continually looking for ways that we can strengthen our screening and reporting processes to ensure that no child is ever hurt in this way," general counsel David Holmquist said. "Although we can't change what happened in this case, we remain committed to doing everything in our power to promote healing and improve trust with those impacted."

Issues in the Stobbe case — alleged lack of oversight, missed warning signs — could come into play with the Miramonte cases.

There, parents questioned teacher Mark Berndt's propensity for taking pictures of students, an issue that administrators did not pursue. Photos later emerged of blindfolded students allegedly being spoon-fed Berndt's semen, among other alleged wrongdoings.

Berndt has pleaded not guilty to 23 counts of lewd conduct.

Damage claims — the precursor to a lawsuit — have been filed by 126 students and 63 parents. There are also six lawsuits on behalf of 37 students and one involving 11 parents.

"Some of the same issues in the Miramonte case are highlighted here," said attorney Don Beck of the San Diego firm Estey & Bomberger, which represented the family of the victim in the Stobbe case. "The same lack of monitoring teachers, the same lack of supervision that allowed these events to happen."

howard.blume@latimes.com

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The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World

There used to be an established order to the world. A structure to things. You couldn't print a gun like a term paper. It was impossible to wreck a nuclear production plant with a few lines of code. Flying robots didn't descend on you in the dead of night and kill you in your home.

But that order has been upended. Cheap videos in California help spark riots in Cairo. Lynchpins of the Middle East now rant about 'Planet of the Apes' in public, and Iranian generals trash-talk David Petraeus over SMS. The world has gone a little haywire — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Here are our choices for the 15 people most responsible for making it that way.

Who did we miss? What did we get wrong? Sound off in the comments, or find us on Twitter or Facebook.

— Noah Shachtman

Above:

One day you're pitching a biography of a top general. The next you've brought down a CIA director, stalled the career of another top general and ensnared numerous federal agencies — and yourself — in a sprawling investigation-cum-media circus. Paula Broadwell didn't mean to wreck any careers, but she accomplished something that no U.S. adversary could: remove David Petraeus from the U.S. government.

Broadwell, a former Army intelligence officer, developed an unhealthy attraction to Petraeus. What started out as spinning for Petraeus' Afghanistan strategy and a florid book became a full-blown affair once Petraeus became director of the CIA. All that would have stayed between the two lovers — had Broadwell not used an anonymous e-mail account to berate Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite whom Broadwell considered unduly flirtatious with the military brass. Kelley turned to an FBI agent she knew, Frederick W. Humphries II, to open a cyber-stalking investigation.

The feds don't usually pursue cyber-stalking cases. And this one ended without any charges filed against Broadwell — but not before uncovering poor data hygiene from Broadwell's famous paramour. Petraeus and Broadwell shared a password on an e-mail account and would pass messages to each other by saving e-mails as drafts. What's more, Broadwell got into the habit of talking openly about sensitive CIA operations, like its response to the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. It's unclear whether there will be any charges filed against either Broadwell or Petraeus over classified material discovered on Broadwell's computer.

Petraeus, the most celebrated general of his generation, resigned in humiliation. The FBI inquiry also turned up what the Pentagon called "flirtatious" e-mails between Gen. John Allen, the outgoing Afghanistan war commander, and Kelley, which has now blocked Allen's promotion to NATO commander. What's more, the coming reshuffle in President Obama's national security team has reopened a debate into whether the CIA should back away from Petraeus' torrid pace of drone strikes. Next time a cabinet official sleeps around, he'd better make sure his mistress keeps the affair offline.

— Spencer Ackerman

Photo: AP/Nell Redmond

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Tom Hooper, Mychael Danna join crowded slate of Palm Springs honorees

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Les Miserables” director Tom Hooper and “Life of Pi” composer Mychael Danna are the latest awards-season hopefuls to be added to the slate of honorees at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, PSIFF organizers announced on Tuesday.

The two will join a list of honorees that in recent days has expanded to include Helen Mirren, Richard Gere, Bradley Cooper and Sally Field. Other awards will go to Helen Hunt, Naomi Watts, Robert Zemeckis and the cast of “Argo.”

Hooper will receive the Sonny Bono Visionary Award, named in honor of the singer/producer/actor and Palm Springs mayor who launched the festival. Past recipients include Danny Boyle, Quentin Tarantino, Baz Luhrmann and last year’s winner, “The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius.

“Tom Hooper brilliantly transforms the classic stage musical ‘Les Misérables’ into a cinema marvel,” said festival chairman Harold Matzner in a press release announcing the awards. “By asking his amazing cast of actors to sing live on film, Hooper allows them to connect even further with their characters, resulting in emotional powerhouse performances that are enthralling audiences worldwide.”

Danna, who has won acclaim for his score to Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” will receive the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing, a PSIFF honor that in the past has gone to T Bone Burnett, Alexandre Desplat, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman and Diane Warren.

Danna previously wrote music for Lee’s films “The Ice Storm” and “Ride With the Devil.” “Mychael Danna is a pioneer in creating original compositions that are as dramatic and innovative as the films in which they are featured,” said Matzner in the release.

PSIFF’s Awards Gala will take place on Saturday, January 5, and the festival will run from January 3 through January 14.

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Irish Government Set to Allow Abortion in Rare Cases

DUBLIN — The Irish government said Tuesday that it was preparing to allow abortion under limited circumstances in an effort to comply with demands by the European Court of Human Rights to clarify the country’s legal position on the issue.

Cathal Mcnaughton/Reuters

A vigil was held in Dublin on Monday in memory of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist who died after being denied an abortion.

The proposed legislative and regulatory changes would allow abortion only in cases where there is a real and substantial risk to a woman’s life — as distinct from her health.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that abortion was permissible when risk was present, but the government never passed a law to that effect.

Addressing Parliament after the announcement, Prime Minister Enda Kenny was at pains to emphasize that the proposals would allow abortion only in certain cases. He added that the threat of suicide could be among them.

The abortion debate has convulsed Ireland for decades, but calls for change reached a crescendo after the death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, in October. Dr. Halappanavar arrived at a Galway hospital in severe pain and was found to be miscarrying. Her fetus had a heartbeat, making termination of the pregnancy illegal under Irish law. She died of septicemia a week after admission.

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Kodak to Sell Digital Imaging Patents for $525 Million

(Reuters) - Bankrupt camera maker Eastman Kodak Co agreed to sell its digital imaging patents for about $525 million to a consortium led by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corp, a key step to ending its bankruptcy.

The photography pioneer said a portion of the payment will come from 12 intellectual property licensees organized by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation.

A sale of the roughly 1,100 patents, which Kodak has said could be worth as much as $2.6 billion, has been a key element of the Rochester, New York-based company's plans to shift its focus to commercial packaging and printing from photography.

The agreements are subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

The Kodak bankruptcy case is in Re: Eastman Kodak Co. et al, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-10202.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware and Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

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Newport Beach dock renters may withhold holiday love

Marcy Cook embraces the holiday season. The tell? Start with the teddy bears dressed as Santa. More than 1,500 stand sentry around and inside her Newport Beach waterfronthome. Garland and strings of lights threaten to strangle the place like kudzu.

"We decorate a little bit, if you haven't noticed," said Cook, 69. "It's the highlight of the year for us."

Each Christmas, Newport Harbor is ablaze in lights as homeowners go to extraordinary lengths to complement the city's annual Christmas Boat Parade — an indelible tradition that renews itself Wednesday night and continues through Sunday.

But this has been a stressful season here along the tranquil waterfront lined with multimillion-dollar homes.

An increase in city rental fees for residential docks that protrude over public tidelands created a furor when it was approved last week by the City Council.

It also prompted a call to boycott the boat parade and festival of lights by a group calling itself "Stop the Dock Tax."

"It costs us thousands of dollars to voluntarily decorate our homes and boats to bring holiday smiles to nearly 1 million people," organization Chairman Bob McCaffrey wrote to the city. "This year, we are turning off our lights and withdrawing our boats in protest of the massive new dock tax we expect the City Council to levy."

Pete Pallette, a fellow boycott proponent and harbor homeowner, told city leaders the group would call off the boycott only if the council delayed voting on the rent hike. "Otherwise," he vowed, "game on."

In a place where homes come with names and mega-yachts bob in the harbor, it might appear the wealthy are wielding a weapon most often reserved for the masses. A holiday blackout, proponents say, will underscore their displeasure.

Newport's dock fee, which has stood at $100 a year for the last two decades, will now be based on a dock's size. The city says rents will increase to about $250 for a small slip to $3,200 annually for a large dock shared by two homeowners.

"People have been paying $8 a month all these years to access what is public waters," said Newport Beach City Manager Dave Kiff. "That's a pretty good deal. The City Council didn't think the increase it approved was too extreme."

Many did.

They packed council meetings when the hike was discussed, accusing the city of an excessive money grab.

They brushed aside the city's rationale: Statelawmandates cities charge fair market rents for the private use of public lands, and Newport Beach was only now catching up.

And they were unmoved by arguments that the extra revenue will go exclusively to badly needed repairs to a harbor that, despite outward appearances, needs a lot of work.

The city's five-year plan for the harbor calls for $29 million in long-overdue maintenance. Its silt-filled channels haven't been fully dredged since the Great Depression. Ancient, leaky sea walls protecting neighborhoods need to be repaired or replaced.

"We have the makings of a perfect storm like they did on the East Coast" during Superstorm Sandy, said Chris Miller, the city's harbor resources manager. "The sea walls are nearing the end of their useful life."

Even with the rent increases, Newport's dock owners will contribute a tiny fraction of that cost — the rest coming from the federal government and the city's general operating fund.

As dock owners fumed over having to pay more, others recoiled at the proposed boycott of the boat parade, which dates to 1908 when a single gondola led eight canoes illuminated by Japanese lanterns around the harbor. It has now swelled to a decent-sized armada of dozens of boats — some carrying paying customers — that circle past the decorated harbor-front homes.

"The boycott is ridiculous," said Shirley Pepys, whose frontyard on Balboa Island has been taken over by a family of penguins dressed for a Hawaiian luau.

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Mahout, There It Is! Open Source Algorithms Remake Overstock.com

SALT LAKE CITY — Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.

Bagley is a software developer with Overstock’s fledgling O Labs, a mini-research-and-development operation tucked into the fifth floor of the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters, just outside the office of CEO Patrick Byrne. O Labs was founded to incubate projects that can push the company in new directions, and MyCurrent was the first of the lot. A personal news reader may seem like an odd thing to emerge from an online retailer, but that’s largely the point. And in the end, the project pumped new life into the company’s primary retail operation.

In building MyCurrent, Bagley and his O Labs cohorts stumbled onto an open source software project known as Mahout. Founded in 2009, Mahout provides the world with a set of freely available machine learning algorithms — algorithms that give computing systems at least a modicum of artificial intelligence, letting them adjust their behavior according to what’s happened in the past. Inside O Labs, the idea was to use Mahout as a means of examining the news stories you’ve enjoyed in the past and then selecting stories you’re likely to enjoy, well, right now.

‘We’re saving $2 million a year with Mahout, and that never would have happened if not for the sort of experimental stuff we’re doing in the labs We’re discovering things that can then have benefit across the company.’

— Judd Bagley

Mahout worked well — so well that Overstock decided it could be used to generate the product recommendations for users on its main website. The company was using a commercial recommendation system from a company called Rich Relevance, but a few months ago, says Saum Noursalehi, who oversees O Labs, it replaced this system with an engine based on Mahout and a sister platform known as Hadoop, a hugely popular open source system that uses a sea of ordinary computer servers to process massive amounts of data.

The tale highlights the benefit of a blue-sky R&D operation. Overstock was founded in 1997 and went public in 2004, and Byrne — the company’s swashbuckling chief exec — created O Labs about a year ago to feed a bit more of the entrepreneurial ethos back into the company. “We’re saving $2 million a year with Mahout, and that never would have happened if not for the sort of experimental stuff we’re doing in the labs,” says Bagley. “We’re discovering things that can then have benefit across the company.”

But it also shows how Hadoop and related open source tools continue to evolve and push even further across the web and into businesses. Mahout — which was specifically built for use with Hadoop — is little more than 3 years old, and it has already attracted the attention of several big-name web operations, including not only Overstock, but AOL, Foursquare, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Amazon.

Originally bootstrapped by Yahoo and Facebook, Hadoop mimics two sweeping software platforms that Google built to underpin its search engine. It’s widely used across the web, and now it’s pushing into other businesses as well, thanks in part of Hadoop-minded software startups such as Cloudera and MapR. It can be used to analyze data, but it can also crunch massive amounts of data for use in live applications — such as the Overstock recommendations service.

Hadoop has also spawned a wide range of sister projects, including Hbase, a database for storing particularly large amounts of information; Hive, a means of querying data crunched by Hadoop; Zookeeper, a means of synchronizing Hadoop and other platforms across a large cluster of servers; and, yes, Mahout, one of the newer projects. Hadoop is named after a yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of the project’s founder, Doug Cutting, and the Mahout moniker plays off this bit of trivia. In India, a mahout is someone who rides an elephant.

According to Ted Dunning — a MapR engineer who works on the Mahout project — the project has been adopted by “dozens” of sites to help drive user recommendations, including Amazon, one of the companies that pioneered such recommendations more than a decade ago. It’s unclear how Amazon is using Mahout, but according to a job listing on LinkedIn, it has been used by the team that oversees Amazon’s “Personalization Platform” — i.e., the software platform used to personalize content across the site.

But Dunning is quick to point out that Mahout is still a young project. And it’s important to realize that it is merely a library of algorithms — something you use to build larger applications. “It’s not a product. It’s not a package. It’s not a service,” he says. “Batteries are not included. And you will find rough corners. Various aspects of Mahout are better or worse in terms of code maturity. Some parts are literally student projects — and are really bad. Others parts are absolutely production quality.”

So, even though Overstock is saving $2 million a year in dropping its commercial recommendations tool, its switch to Mahout did involve development costs. But Overstock’s Saum Noursalehi tells us that the company built its system on its own — without paid help from the likes of MapR or Cloudera. The team that runs the project spans about six developers and a product manager.

According to Noursalehi, Hadoop logs everything that any Overstock customer does on the site, and then it feeds this data into a system based on Mahout. The Mahout library includes hundreds of algorithms, and Overstock is in the process of A/B testing many of these to determine which work the best. It’s also starting to “cluster” recommendations, creating groups of people who are likely to respond to certain types of recommendations.

“You might find the people living in certain zip codes are high-income people,” Noursalehi says, “and their recommendations might be slightly different than those we provide to people in other regions.” Similarly, the company is looking to create clusters around members of its loyalty program or its most active customers.

In other words, Overstock is behaving like an online retail operation. The difference is that it’s generating these online recommendations with open source algorithms.

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“The Office” head Greg Daniels sells tennis comedy to Fox

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “The Office” might be preparing to close up shop, but the series’ creator is most definitely still open for business.

Greg Daniels, who birthed the American version of “The Office” – which is preparing to wrap up its run at the end of this season – has sold a half-hour comedy to Fox via Universal Television and his own Deedle-Dee Productions.

The project was sold through Daniels by Tom Gormican (“Are We Officially Dating?”) and Richie Keen (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”), who are also writing.

The as-yet-untitled project will revolve around Richie, a so-so tennis pro who returns to his college town to get a fresh start on life. There, Richie finds himself torn between living the carefree life with his bar-owning brother and growing up to pursue Kristen, the love of his life.

Daniels will executive-produce the project via his Deedle-Dee Production, along with Gormican and Keen.

Deedle-Dee’s Howard Klein and Tracy Katsky are also executive-producing, along with Oly Obst.

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