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Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes
- ndsipa_pomu 5y agoAnyone know how many coughs are in CODA? Edit: Just checked on opensubtitles.org and zero coughs!
- snorkel 5y 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."
- grapescheesee 5y agoOddly fascinating.
- bitcharmer 5y 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
- hef19898 5y agoDavid Lynchs version of it is vastly underrated, Villeneuve's Dune is so much better so! Really looking forward to part two!
- mhh__ 5y agoLynch-dune is mostly good, but Villeneuve's is so much better in a beautifully indescribable way that only cinema can really do. 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.
- skywal_l 5y ago> Dune's sounds are absolutely fantastic. Really? I can't understand a word they're muttering.
- mhh__ 5y agoYou're either deaf or unlucky. The copy of Dune I have on my hard drive sounds fine on headphones, speaker, phone, crap TV. Also sound design != Mixing dialogue.
- technobabbler 5y agoA lot of theaters have awful mixes that make dialog harder to hear. Think there was an article about that recently.
- hef19898 5y agoAbsolutely! Villeneuve caught the Dune-universe as I pictured it in my head incredibly well, from visuals over story telling to sound. And it showed just how alien and dangerous / harsh Arrakis is. I'm just a tad worried about Feyd-Rautha so, Sting was just brilliant in that role!
- mhh__ 5y agoArrakis is alien but it's depicted as relatively friendly in the dream-sequences. They used sounds of waves crashing on beaches, which makes a lot of sense as to the Fremen it is their home. My only gripe is that Arrakis doesn't feel hot enough, but I also don't really care.
- ableal 5y agoThe Mongolian Gobi desert seems to top out at 27C - https://www.amicusmongolia.com/climate-average-monthly-temperature-weather-gobi-desert-mongolia.html https://www.amicusmongolia.com/climate-average-monthly-tempe... (Low of -33C, harsh)
- thathndude 5y agoAgreed 100%. Lynch’s Dune is his own, unique style, and it’s solid.
- toyg 5y agoI don't think it's been underrated, in critics' circles, for 15-20 years or so by now. Since the tales about its production, and the related art, have fully emerged, it has been widely re-evaluated - also because Lynch has gone on to become a bit of a sacred cow after Twin Peaks and his later work.
- thathndude 5y agoTwin Peaks was one of my Covid binges. So trippy.
- toyg 5y agoThe original series set the bar for thriller tv series from then on - both on the good elements (always one more secret, one more cliffhanger; living on the edge of fantasy) and the bad (making up stuff as they go along; disappointing finale; unceremoniously cut). 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.
- SeanLuke 5y agoThe Lynch version deserved all the drubbing it received. Weirding modules, heart plugs, and rain on Arrakis: trampling all over the novel. The exposition by way of overdubbing was horrible too.
- usrbinbash 5y ago> vastly underrated 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?
- hef19898 5y agojust speculating (usually set design isn't accounting for anything beyond "looks cool"): - 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
- andrewflnr 5y agoRe: charging into battle, I think the focus of the question was the pug.
- hef19898 5y agoOk, I take Lynch pug and raise you by a guy carrying a shield but no sidearm then. The charging into battoe after breaking formation is similar in both cases.
- sendfoods 5y agowhich other movie(s) by him can you recommend most?
- andy_ppp 5y agoBladerunner 2049 is amazing as is Arrival and Sicario.
- jstx1 5y 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.
- toyg 5y ago> Bladerunner 2049 is so slow with such a bland uneventful story 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MikusR 5y agoBy visuals you mean when it's teal or when it's orange?
- 5y ago
- rado 5y agoIt got progressively bad and by the end the director's touch was nowhere to be seen, just rushing to finish the story and blasting that overbearing Hans Zimmer score. Then the final line "This is only the beginning" came. Meanwhile, “Blade Runner”, “Arrival”, “Prisoners”, “Sicario” are all great.
- eganist 5y agoThat's a hot take. What didn't you like about it, specifically? Aside from the best score ever made by Hans Zimmer?
- tokai 5y agoIt has always weirded me out that Zimmer keeps getting jobs. His overly pathetic drone has always been like a parody soundtrack. But people plays it straight as if he is actually making something that adds to the movies. Dune was peak Zimmer so if you like him I guess it makes sense to call it his best. But to me it was him making fun of himself with a straightface and nobody calls him out on it.
- Tycho 5y agoThe score was actually quite thoughtful, attempting to use rhythm and harmony and vocal style that was fitting for the universe, ie. very far removed from our current styles.
- eganist 5y agoPlease give this a watch with an open mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93A1ryc-WW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93A1ryc-WW0 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.
- tokai 5y agoI have seen it. Appreciate you sharing it though. Point is I don't buy his angle. To me it wasn't a fresh take on sounds of the future. It meshed bad with the movie and was a bunch of trite tropes like detached arabic-like wails and dry buzzers. Soundcloud is full of amateur electronic artists doing it better. But in the end its all taste, and I wouldn't call the movie (and soundtrack) bad. Just not anything near good. I'm kind of envious of you who like it.
- technobabbler 5y agoIt was really beautiful but the pacing was horrible for modern attention spams. I loved the movie, but only because I read way too many of the books and played all the games and watched every Dune before it. My partner had no idea what was going on and fell asleep 1/3 of the way through... even though she is normally a movie completionist. 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...
- thorin 5y agoI can't stand the Avengers/Marvel style of pacing and switch off immediately with the constant CGI and fighting scene. 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.
- criddell 5y agoIf somebody is going in expecting a space western like Star Wars or Star Trek, then I agree with you about the pacing. I think the movie moved along beautifully. 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.
- Tenoke 5y ago>It was really beautiful but the pacing was horrible for modern attention spams. 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.
- gunshai 5y agoI hear this criticism a fair amount. I felt the polar opposite. I felt like Dune was made for me. I really enjoy that engrossing feeling of scale(both visually and aurally) that I am constantly bombarded by. 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- carapace 5y agoDune is very very pretty, and there are some good performances in it, but over all I found it a terrible movie and a bad rendition of the source material. I think it's so visually and aurally overwhelming that folks don't notice how lousy it is. 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.
- blindmute 5y agoDune is not a good movie though, unfortunately. It's like 1/3 of a good movie. By any conception of storytelling, it doesn't constitute a story. As its own piece of media, without knowledge of the book, it doesn't stand as a coherent work. Compare it to something like Fellowship of the Ring which could be watched alone.
- ape4 5y agoCounting helicopters is a counter indicator. http://0at.org/blog/movie_suck http://0at.org/blog/movie_suck
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoI count 0 helicopters in the entire film.
- TreeInBuxton 5y agoTechnically, I suppose they're ornithopters
- twic 5y agoWhat do you mean, all these pictures are superb: https://twitter.com/chopperfireball https://twitter.com/chopperfireball
- V__ 5y 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.
- 0xfeba 5y 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
- hiccuphippo 5y agoIn my experience Closed Captions almost always describe sounds, specially if they happen offscreen or things like the type of background music; Subtitles don't, I assume they expect you can hear the sounds.
- chockchocschoir 5y agoWhich makes sense, "Closed Captioning" (CC) is different than "Subtitles", in that the purpose of CC is to provide on-screen text (captions) for deaf/near deaf viewers, while subtitles is captions for just dialogue.
- soneca 5y agoAlso, Closed Captions always describe sounds and lines of background dialog (like TV) that I definitely can’t hear in the sound. 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.
- mcv 5y agoSubtitles frequently describe entire background conversations I can't hear when I'm watching at home. Maybe I should turn up the sound to a ridiculous level.
- usehackernews 5y 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.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoI'm never going to be able to watch a movie now without counting coughs
- hallway_monitor 5y agoWell I hope you can count to three. Or 9 if you're watching a thriller
- yummypaint 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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/
- usrbinbash 5y 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?
- belter 5y agoRaising you the original: DUNE (1984) - Brian Eno - Prophecy Theme: https://youtu.be/t4onBqilHvc https://youtu.be/t4onBqilHvc
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoFlow state achieved.
- inopinatus 5y ago… because of a fifteen second ad for chocolate?
- Sophira 5y agoThe video is the "Sardaukar Chant", not an ad for chocolate.
- inopinatus 5y 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
- FirstLvR 5y 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
- twic 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 ;)
- omarhaneef 5y 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 5y agoThe German word for 'time' is 'Zeit', so that would be 'Zeitgeist' :)
- hhmc 5y agoWouldn't want to leave the joke unexplained now, would we
- bhaak 5y agowaffl is likely a German speaker. So of course not. German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.
- Garlef 5y 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 5y agoAs a non-German speaker I found the joke about the joke informative and humorous.
- cfcosta 5y agoSame, I then went back to the original comment and thought "damn, that's a clever joke".
- mothsonasloth 5y 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 5y 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 5y agoThe best part of the Batman factor is that since it relies on data from the future it destroys the model's predictiveness!
- ouid 5y agoAu contraire, it just predicts a new thing. Viggo Mortensen as Batman.
- jollofricepeas 5y 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.
- edmcnulty101 5y agoI wonder if the COVID effect will have desensitized people to coughs so the coughgeist is way higher than usual.
- interestica 5y 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 5y 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.
- rmnclmnt 5y agoIs "march fools day" a thing now?
- lanewinfield 5y agorelated: https://everymoviecough.com/ https://everymoviecough.com/
- throwawayp0rn 5y ago
- jerf 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago[deleted]
- Erwin 5y 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 5y ago