Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes • Hacker News Board

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#131

Post by carapace » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

bitcharmer wrote: post #3

Like 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

Dune 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.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#132

Post by Cd00d » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #110

hiccuphippo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 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.

During the apocalypse, I leaned on video for "company" while doing chores. I stumbled onto the Descriptive Video Service, which I guess is super duper Closed Captions. 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/…

I accidentally turned this on at the beginning of Toy Story 4. The narration had me convinced that the movie was taking place in a future where Andy was in film school and we were watching him working through his first film based on his childhood toys.

Felt like a fool when I realized it was really super caption for the visually impaired.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#133

Post by Erwin » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

A good candidate for 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.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#134

Post by ouid » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

spiffytech wrote: post #128

a_shovel wrote: post #68

When 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.

The best part of the Batman factor is that since it relies on data from the future it destroys the model's predictiveness!

Au contraire, it just predicts a new thing. Viggo Mortensen as Batman.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#135

Post by mitchdoogle » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

hiccuphippo wrote: post #64

0xfeba wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: > 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

In 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.

I feel like the terms "subtitles" and "closed captions" are interchangeable in this instance

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#136

Post by morganvachon » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 8:15 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #37

morganvachon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the few movies of the last two decades that brought me to tears at the reveal towards the end. Once it hits you, you'll look back at the entire movie in a different mindset and it's emotionally jarring. It also helps not having read the source story.

Consider editing your comment to not mention anything spoiler related. I feel the movie hits different if you’re not expecting anything. Arrival is truly a masterpiece though. I won’t forget it as long as I live.

Too late to edit now unfortunately. I had tried to word it so it wasn't spoilery, I guess I failed on that.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#137

Post by hef19898 » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #127

hef19898 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just 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…

Re: charging into battle, I think the focus of the question was the pug.

Ok, 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.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#138

Post by theejazz » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 8:54 PM UTC

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #85

omarhaneef wrote: post #52

Before 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.

They said they normalized the cough count, which I'm assuming means time adjusted?

> We calculate the Coughgeist for each year by determining the median expulsion count of that year’s nominees and then normalizing it.

Probably adjusted for the number of nominees per year

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#139

Post by SeanLuke » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #119

SeanLuke wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in the novel, Arrakis really is hot. In the Appendix, it's stated that the sand surface reached 76.85 Celsius (170.33 F).

Sand surface =/= ambient temperature, with all the research that went into Dune, I think Herbert was aware of that

[sigh]. You could have just googled this, but from the Appendix:

> 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.

Re: Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

#140

Post by theshrike79 » Tue, Mar 22, 2022, 9:44 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #59

theshrike79 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need big names if you want big bucks nowadays. 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.

Not saying they had to go no-name though, plenty of good known actors out there who hasn't been in a bunch of blockbuster movies recently etc. But I get what you're saying. Sad, because it really detracted from the movie for me.

Mid-price movies disappeared when streaming became a thing.

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.