Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes
journal-doi.org
journal-doi.org
In hindsight, I suppose I should have appealed to the fact that critiquing the seminal papers in the field is a serious data set bias and that trying to "learn to critique" on the best papers ever written in a field was less likely to produce a useful "critiquing" skill and more likely to produce some overfitted garbage skill, but, hey, I hadn't taken AI yet! I didn't know how to express that.
(It did produce a garbage skill, too. I tried writing "real" critiques using my brain, but after getting Cs and Ds for the first couple, I learned my lesson, and mechanically spit out "Needs more data", "should have studied more", and as appropriate, "sample sizes were too small". Except for that last one, regardless of the study. Bam. A series of easy As. Sigh. I liked college over all, but there were some places I could certainly quibble.)
Anyhow, this is the paper that needs to be assigned towards the end of the semester, and students asked to "critique" it. It's a much better member of the training data set for this sort of skill.
My professor was a Nobel laureate, so already pretty intimidating. After we each picked a theory and wrote an outline he asked that we review with him. Well, he said, “I don’t know why you’d pick that. That’s going to be too hard.” So I asked if I could change, but he said that it’s too late for that and wished me luck… I was more than happy with the C+ I got.
For a science paper, if it's something people are still reading 30-50 years later, it was apparently good enough. I can always critique the paper for failing to solve String Theory and then draw out from String Theory a mathematical demonstration of how their solution for getting robots to navigate around boxes is very good, but that's more a reflection of me than the paper.
In my freshman Composition class we needed to pick a controversial topic and argue one side. Highest grade on that assignment went to someone who argued that smoking causes lung cancer (this was 2003). The instructor explained that it was the most convincing paper. Those who picked an actually controversial topics got the lowest grades because their arguments were less of a slam-dunk.
https://github.com/journal-doi/cough
https://github.com/the-pudding/cough
https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter (bonus material)
Love it.
> We prefer subtitles over machine-learning-based detection because the presence of a cough in subtitles means it was prominent enough for a person to write it down. Also our postdoctoral fellow was the only one who completed the Tensorflow tutorial.
lol
As a non-native English speaker who can hear I often see movies and shows with English audio and English closed captions, the redundancy helps me. It happens all the time that the CC tell things that you just can’t hear in the movie.
Many—though not as many as it should be—(English-language) movies explicitly include two English-language subtitles, "English" and "English SDH", standing for "English (subtitled for the deaf and hard-of-hearing)". The latter includes subtitling for sounds.
I love it. I can half watch the show while fussing without missing anything. Even when the show has my complete attention, the added detail is kinda great. Not all the time, but enough to keep things interesting.
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000673860-a...
Felt like a fool when I realized it was really super caption for the visually impaired.
Surprised one did, it is a real pain in the arse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q
https://www.loc.gov/collections/wilbur-and-orville-wright-pa...
https://generalaviationnews.com/2011/05/09/fliers-or-liars/#....
Overall, an entirely irrelevant issue.
the only reason i checked was because the layout and typography was too pretty for a real journal site :)
<3 pudding.cool
Anyway, the point is, coughs per hour would help us know if audiences simply favor longer or shorter movies at different points in time.
German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.
This should have been, "German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions, can they?", should it?
= Durationgeist :)
Probably adjusted for the number of nominees per year
I enjoyed Dune, and believe it should win best picture. Partly because I haven’t seen the other movies mentioned.
After learning about the coughgeist, I’m more convinced than ever they will win. Sound research.
To make a parallel between cinematography and special effects - I think at this point people are kind of dismissive of movies that emphasize special effects and there's this old George Lucas quote that "a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing". But swap "special effect" for "cinematography/visuals" and suddenly movies like Bladerunner 2049 are treated like they are masterpieces even though they hardly have any story to tell.
Well, it follows a similarly slow and relatively uneventful story in the original, so that's not really a critique. That's not really the point of BladeRunner, anyway - the point is the ambience, the worldbuilding, and the philosophical questions it raises, which 2049 provides in good amount. It will never have the same cultural impact that the original had, but it is an extremely respectful sequel with incredibly beautiful cinematography.
Some of my favorite movies almost don't have a story at all, neither sfx.
Arrival is truly a masterpiece though. I won’t forget it as long as I live.
Also, any novel from the collection "Story of your life and others"[1] is worth reading and thinking about. Ted Chiang is an exceptional writer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Other...
The movie is filmed in Jordan and Montreal, which have a similar feel to Dune, and I would say that he probably took inspiration from his Incendies days to make Dune.
The movie is based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad, who now works at the very prestigious théâtre national de la Colline as the director.
Villeneuve has been dreaming of making his Dune since he was a boy and it shows. ignoring the visuals, the tone is just so much more ominous and alien than Lynch's. One thing that really dates old movies versus their modern counterparts (of sorts) is the sound design. Dune's sounds are absolutely fantastic.
Really? I can't understand a word they're muttering.
Also sound design != Mixing dialogue.
I'm just a tad worried about Feyd-Rautha so, Sting was just brilliant in that role!
My only gripe is that Arrakis doesn't feel hot enough, but I also don't really care.
(Low of -33C, harsh)
> He found that in the wide belt contained by the 70-degree lines, north and south, temperatures for thousands of years hadn't gone outside the 254-332 degrees (absolute) range
That's -2 F to 137 F in the arctic circle.
> Kynes and his people turned their attention from these great relationships and focused now on micro-ecology. First, the climate: the sand surface often reached temperatures of 344° to 350° (absolute). A foot below ground it might be 55° cooler; a foot above ground, 25° cooler.
That's 114 to 125 degrees Fahrenheit for "a foot above ground".
So once again, yes, very hot.
New Dune is completely different beast, can't wait till second part comes. That universe is rich for other stories, tv series etc. which seems to be the direction all major studios are moving to.
If you compare (say) 2049 and dune you can tell that the latter has been made to hold the audiences hand a lot (blade runner didn't make it's money back). Now he's sold the concept I imagine he'll have more confidence/freedom with part 2.
In Lynch's the Harkonen's were brutal. In Villeneuve's Dune Gurney had to explain to us that they were brutal, because no actual brutality made it to screen. Baron Harkonen was lower energy than Jeb Bush.
Villeneuve basically just took Lynch's Dune and drained the colour out of both the imagery and the performances.
The biggest criticism of Lynch's Dune us that it doesn't make any sense, and I still totally lost the plot 2/3 of the way through the new Dune as well.
Also Lynch’s Dune descends into farcical whimsy, it’s not a good movie, although it has some good costume and set design.
Not entirely relevant, but mentions many of the same issues, although presumably there is more about how investors drive some of the outcomes.
Lynch didn't trust the audience enough. The wierding modules, the amount of voice-over, the limitations of the special effects of the time, etc. Also, the studio didn't fully trust the material, forcing Lynch to cram everything in one movie. The movie starts off well-ish enough. But after Paul and Jessica escape the Harkonnens, we just sort of yadda yadda years away and jump to Paul getting ready to attack Arrakeen. I think only the last 30 or so minutes is after the escape (excluding credits). Could be longer, but the jump is jarring. The movie moves at a decent clip otherwise. Set up with the emperor whinging about the Atreides, the Atreides getting ready to leave, the arrival, establishing the Atreides are not the Harkonnens, the coup, the escape, the time jump montage, the final attack.
Villeneuve's movie covers up to the escape and that's it. Villeneuve's film is 19 minutes longer. So Villeneuve basically had the opportunity to expand the beginning of the story by about an hour. He's going to be able to cover the same ground as the last 30 minutes of the Lynch movie with at least 2 hours.
The issue is that Villeneuve kind of wastes his time. We see Dr. Yueh. And that's really it. We never get even a mention of imperial conditioning or why it's shocking that it's Dr. Yueh that betrays the Atreides. Piter is seen, but I don't think ever named. We don't meet Feyd at all in the movie. We get way more backstory about a bull's head than we do any character.
If we had more of Lynch's development and Villeneuve's aesthetic, we'd have a near perfect version of the film.
I have only watched a couple of episodes of series 3 but by now I've seen enough Lynch to dread his output, narratively speaking.
Sorry but no, it really really isn't.
Just a few highlights:
* Why would soldiers sent to fight on a Desert-Planet wear black, vulcanised, full body rubber Hazmat suits?
* What on Earth is a "Wyrding Module" supposed to be?
* What exactly is achieved by charging into battle while holding a pug on ones arm?
* It says "Ornithopter" in the books, implying something vaguely animal-shaped, not a hovering metal box.
* Why do communication devices in the far future resemble telephones from the early 1900s?
* What exactly was the point of bringing the late-stage navigator to the meeting in a room-sized spice-tank, when his subordinate did all the talking anyway?
- Hazmat suites can contain climate control, and the Tuareg wear dark clothing as well
- Wyrding Module: In Lynch's words: He didn't want Kung-Fu on sand dunes
- No idea what you mean, but charging into battle has since been proven to be viable tactic by the Avengers, so it has to work
- Ornithopter refers to the propulsion, like a bird, instead of a simple helicopter; I'd have to watch Lynch's Dune so to see how those actually look like in his film; Villeneuve nailed them pretty well
- Same reason why the first Enterprise under Archer used fancier screens than the ones under Kirk or Picard; IMHO Lynch borrowed a lot of his aesthetics from WW1, and the Dune universe is surprisingly low tech anyway
- The navigator: A wild guess, I always understood it as a way to show the importance of Spice and Arrakis to the Guild when they had to send one of their Navigators to talk directly to the Emperor instead of using proxies
But carrying a small dog (a pug) while charging into battle? What exactly is the point? Where is the logic? Even if its the royal dog, when the compound is overrun by the archenemy of the duke, the royal family unaccounted for, the most effective weapons sabotaged, the last thing his most capable military commanders would think of doing, is saving the royal pet. And even if that was the intention, how does carrying it into the thick of the fight achieve that?
Yes, we accept absudities in movies, if they make sense in the setting. If Cpt. Rogers were to carry a pet hamster around in his pocket for seemingly no reason, while fighting Hydra, it bet the acceptance of this would be kinda low, Marvel or no.
Heck, there was one guy that stormed the beaches of Normandy with a sword, internet meme culture considers that be cool. Reality had stranger things happening then a lot of fiction. And still people complain about fictional people in a fictional story not acting logical. As long as the fictional logic is in itself consistent, and that includes visuals and style of the fictional world, I'm fine with it.
I promise it's worth your time. Being honest, I fell in love with the score before I even knew it was Zimmer's, and once I found out, my first thought was "of course."
To each their own, but if you want an idea of what went into the score, that video above is insightful.
For me it had been better to pick less well-used actors than Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem etc. Just robbed it of some of the mystique I think.
Unless you're a studio onto yourself, there's no way you can get $150M+ of funding for movie with only no-names as leads.
But I get what you're saying. Sad, because it really detracted from the movie for me.
We either get low-budget stuff (10-20 million), mostly horror. Or movies that are huge gigantic blockbusters that MUST succeed.
The mid-price stuff is gone. The ones that have enough budget to make a director's vision come true, but not so much that it brings in people from The Company suggesting their pet things to be added.
...did we see the same movie? It's a Villeneuve piece through and through.
That dude had a certain style, cinematic intellectualism with beautiful cinematography. It's definitely not for everyone. Dune is that unique blend of world building, political intrigue, religious exploration, coming of age, and a tiny bit of action. Hard to get all of that in one movie, and the trailers made it seem more Star Wars than Blade Runner.
It's the sort of movie to watch when you're seeking quiet contemplation, not popcorn pulp...
I was completely gripped with the new Dune but God help her if she tries to watch Lawrence of Arabia, Tarkovsky (e.g. Stalker), or 2001. For me it works, I appreciate others might not like it but I thought the style was great.
I didn't expect to like it because I didn't really like the book. For me, this is one of the few times where I think the movie is better than the book.
It's also pretty horrible from past audiences' point of view given that they'd expect to see more than a prologue in a 155m film. Villenueve makes truly beautiful movies but it comes at a cost.
I am glad that a film like that can even be made these days given that I think you're right about modern attention spans.
This is because directors usually don't have anything to do with the trailers (in fact, it's typically outsourced to companies who specialize in making them). Trailers tend to reflect what the studio execs want people to think the movie is about, which trends towards "what gets the most people to buy tickets?"
Sadly, I don't think this will ever change.
I did enjoy the movie, though. Villeneuve really did the book justice, and I cannot wait for part two.
For one thing, most of the characters are elided, they appear but they have so few lines and so little consequence that they might as well have been left out. Thufir Hawat especially was woefully neglected. Piter De Vries? No one even says his name! If you haven't read the book you wouldn't know who David Dastmalchian is supposed to be.
The 2021 Biology winner was:
> Susanne Schötz, Robert Eklund, and Joost van de Weijer, for analyzing variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat–human communication.
So, when it is just the right amount, it makes for awards, but when too much - especially in a thriller - it gets panned.
By extension, eating and sleeping could work, though that is boring.
Now, if there was just some other vice that wasn't boring.... wait! So that is why porn is so popular ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFQbjQbPq0
Do I need another reason?
DUNE (1984) - Brian Eno - Prophecy Theme: https://youtu.be/t4onBqilHvc
This sounds like an hour of throat singing, which whilst technically interesting, I don’t quite see (or rather, hear) how it guarantees an Oscar. No-one coughs at all
Is there anything so mundane or horrific that we as a species haven’t attempted to make light of it yet?
Maybe this dichotomy is what makes us human.
Edit: Just checked on opensubtitles.org and zero coughs!