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Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes
- snorkel 4y agoLove it! The sordid truths of data science laid bare! "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."
- yummypaint 4y agoWould love to see more satire like this for different research areas. It's just subtle enough that the realization builds slowly, like reading one of those internet stories that ends with pulling up in bel-aire.
- cturtle 4y agoIf you haven't already seen it, you may enjoy SIGBOVIK, The Association for Computational Heresy [0]. An annual conference mostly focused on computer science, but any field is welcome. I immediately thought of SIGBOVIK when reading this paper. [0]: http://www.sigbovik.org/ http://www.sigbovik.org/
- socksset 4y ago"Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training" is pretty classic https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/
- omarhaneef 4y agoBefore anyone takes this too seriously -- and it is surely too late for that -- I should point out that they did nothing to disambiguate the length of the movie. It may not be the coughgeist but the ... er ... timegeist (they should have a german word for it). Anyway, the point is, coughs per hour would help us know if audiences simply favor longer or shorter movies at different points in time.
- waffl 4y agoThe German word for 'time' is 'Zeit', so that would be 'Zeitgeist' :)
- hhmc 4y agoWouldn't want to leave the joke unexplained now, would we
- willis936 4y agoThere's a metajoke in here somewhere. https://youtu.be/llE7wT1BKt8 https://youtu.be/llE7wT1BKt8
- bhaak 4y agowaffl is likely a German speaker. So of course not. German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.
- Garlef 4y ago> 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?
- enkid 4y agoAs a non-German speaker I found the joke about the joke informative and humorous.
- cfcosta 4y agoSame, I then went back to the original comment and thought "damn, that's a clever joke".
- JoBrad 4y agoThat still requires some calculating before comparing movies, since it's much harder to compare a short film to a bladder buster. Using an average runtime as standard length F, then calculating coughs (C) per F would yield a value that can be more easily compared between films, regardless of length.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoI wonder if the COVID effect will have desensitized people to coughs so the coughgeist is way higher than usual.
- interestica 4y agoHow about this (/s): During a pandemic, people are hyper aware of coughing in their environment. It becomes a subconscious trigger (like a baby's cries). Every time a cough occurs in a film, it causes that same shift and elevated processing -- and has the side effect of making a viewer better pay attention/enjoy a scene.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoSo instead of desensitization, coughing becomes comfortable, reassuring, or perhaps even attractive due to it's being such a common part of life...hence the coughgeist may be reduced due to the appreciation of each cough.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoAnyone know how many coughs are in CODA? Edit: Just checked on opensubtitles.org and zero coughs!
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoI'm never going to be able to watch a movie now without counting coughs
- hallway_monitor 4y agoWell I hope you can count to three. Or 9 if you're watching a thriller
- grapescheesee 4y agoOddly fascinating.
- bitcharmer 4y agoLike most films directed by Dennis Villeneuve I found Dune to be a work of art and visual masterpiece. His recount of how they prepared the set and the scene for the Gom Jabar ritual just shows how commited he is and how much passion he puts into his work. Absolute delight to watch. https://youtu.be/GoAA0sYkLI0 https://youtu.be/GoAA0sYkLI0
- sendfoods 4y agowhich other movie(s) by him can you recommend most?
- foo_foo_can_do 4y agoprisoners, incendies
- andy_ppp 4y agoBladerunner 2049 is amazing as is Arrival and Sicario.
- jstx1 4y agoBladerunner 2049 is so slow with such a bland uneventful story and I don't think that cinematography or visuals are enough to compensate for a weak story. I just found the whole thing incredibly boring. 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.
- ape4 4y agoCounting helicopters is a counter indicator. http://0at.org/blog/movie_suck http://0at.org/blog/movie_suck
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI count 0 helicopters in the entire film.
- TreeInBuxton 4y agoTechnically, I suppose they're ornithopters
- twic 4y agoWhat do you mean, all these pictures are superb: https://twitter.com/chopperfireball https://twitter.com/chopperfireball
- V__ 4y ago> Editor’s Note: The claims in this paper have not been verified because the researchers have refused to yield their full dataset and methodology, citing “intellectual property rights,” “the sanctity of the First Amendment,” and “the Wright brothers never had to show their work.” We are publishing their paper here because they won’t stop mailing hard copies in triplicate to our homes and offices. Love it.
- somat 4y agoBut... The Wright brothers did show their work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpQAGQiv4Q https://www.loc.gov/collections/wilbur-and-orville-wright-papers/about-this-collection/ https://www.loc.gov/collections/wilbur-and-orville-wright-pa...
- yellowstuff 4y agoThere was a lot of skepticism that their planes were real, even years after they had first flown publicly. Information spread more slowly in those days. https://generalaviationnews.com/2011/05/09/fliers-or-liars/#:~:text=European%20newspapers%2C%20especially%20in%20France,or%20they%20have%20not%20flown https://generalaviationnews.com/2011/05/09/fliers-or-liars/#....
- marcosdumay 4y agoThey just took their time, and it became a joke because other people were already flying around when they came in public saying they were flying first. Overall, an entirely irrelevant issue.
- skrebbel 4y agowow looks like the entire domain https://journal-doi.org/ https://journal-doi.org/ was made just to make this look like a real journal article, love the attention to detail. the only reason i checked was because the layout and typography was too pretty for a real journal site :) <3 pudding.cool
- 0xfeba 4y agoAlso: > 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
- usehackernews 4y agoSitting alone, laughing in a coffee shop while reading this. Good start to the morning. 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.
- usrbinbash 4y agoWhy it should win best picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFQbjQbPq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFQbjQbPq0 Do I need another reason?
- FirstLvR 4y agosure the music was fine, it might win best achievement on music score, or music edition... but best picture? you cannot evaluate a picture from the music lol
- belter 4y agoRaising you the original: DUNE (1984) - Brian Eno - Prophecy Theme: https://youtu.be/t4onBqilHvc https://youtu.be/t4onBqilHvc
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoFlow state achieved.
- inopinatus 4y ago… because of a fifteen second ad for chocolate?
- Sophira 4y agoThe video is the "Sardaukar Chant", not an ad for chocolate.
- inopinatus 4y agoAh, right you are, thanks. 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
- twic 4y agoThe best bit about this is that the authors registered that entire domain purely so the article could have a vaguely official-looking URL.
- PennRobotics 4y agoGoing to a wrong URL shows the Github Pages 404. Searching Github: https://github.com/journal-doi/cough https://github.com/journal-doi/cough https://github.com/the-pudding/cough https://github.com/the-pudding/cough https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter (bonus material)
- Qub3d 4y agoGoatCounter is great! I use it for metrics on my hobby site (which are visible publicly): https://dotbun.goatcounter.com/ https://dotbun.goatcounter.com/
- sam_goody 4y agoCoughing is satisfyingly human and easy to connect to, but is also slightly distracting. 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 ;)
- mothsonasloth 4y agoSurely by publishing these findings it will now sabotage the predictions as it will affect the unconscious criteria/bias by raising awareness of it?
- a_shovel 4y agoWhen their initial theory of cough count produced a trend line that didn't really work well, with some major outliers, they introduced the implausible, ad-hoc mechanisms like the Thriller Tripler effect and the Batman effect to make it fit. This is the part that isn't just parodical silliness, but has actual applicability. This is something you might see in a bad research paper.
- spiffytech 4y agoThe best part of the Batman factor is that since it relies on data from the future it destroys the model's predictiveness!
- ouid 4y agoAu contraire, it just predicts a new thing. Viggo Mortensen as Batman.
- jollofricepeas 4y agoAh comedic tennis, funerals and research are a thing. 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.
- rmnclmnt 4y agoIs "march fools day" a thing now?
- lanewinfield 4y agorelated: https://everymoviecough.com/ https://everymoviecough.com/
- throwawayp0rn 4y ago
- jerf 4y agoWhen I took my AI class, my professor would assign one paper a week and we had to turn in a "critique" of that paper. These papers were, of course, the seminal classics in the field, because what else would you want your intro class to be reading? I complained a bit to the professor that it was a bit silly to critique the seminal papers in the field and if you want to be sure we read it, we could just turn in a summary (which our critiques typically started with anyhow), but we were supposed to learn how to critique papers. 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.
- ViViDboarder 4y agoI had to do something similar in a Physics class of mine. We had to write a paper critiquing and arguing against a well known physics theory. I was really into Special Relativity at the time, so picked that one. 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.
- turdnagel 4y agoHad a very similar experience in philosophy classes. The good thing about critiquing seminal works is that there's often a rich body of criticism already available. I found the only way to do well in those classes, since I lacked the mental horsepower to produce my own seminal critiques, was to parrot the literature that was out there already.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Erwin 4y agoA good candidate for https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2021 https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2021 ? 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.
- Markjacqueline 4y ago