"I suppose I could have decided that it was my destiny to remain childless, that it was somehow meant to be. But I hate the phrase "meant to be," loaded with its small, smug assumptions, its apathy and fake stoicism. I believe that where things can be fixed, they should be fixed."
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Hollywood & the Net
from "Obama Win Helps Tech, Could Hurt Hollywood," by Art Brodsky at The Huffington Post
Hollywood is at a crossroads in the policy world as it decides how to leverage its usual influence within a Democratic administration. In one direction is the traditional path of taking the offensive on perceived copyright wrongs...The alternative path is to look toward the future of the industry...Dan Glickman, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), earlier this year came out squarely against Net Neutrality. He called it "regulating the Internet"...Hollywood's other major initiative is to search for copywrighted material online by having AT&T and other willing Internet Service Providers peek at everyone's data packets...
Hollywood is at a crossroads in the policy world as it decides how to leverage its usual influence within a Democratic administration. In one direction is the traditional path of taking the offensive on perceived copyright wrongs...The alternative path is to look toward the future of the industry...Dan Glickman, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), earlier this year came out squarely against Net Neutrality. He called it "regulating the Internet"...Hollywood's other major initiative is to search for copywrighted material online by having AT&T and other willing Internet Service Providers peek at everyone's data packets...
Saturday, November 29, 2008
How You Know it's Freedom: You Feel like You've Been Released, Apparently
from Werner Herzog's Wheel of Time
Herzog: And why do you release a bird here?
Monk: Because all the living beings are equal. All creatures have a right to become a Buddha, but to become a Buddha, you have to be free.
Herzog: And why do you release a bird here?
Monk: Because all the living beings are equal. All creatures have a right to become a Buddha, but to become a Buddha, you have to be free.
The Netflix Prize & The "Napoleon Dynamite" Problem
from The Netflix Prize Rules:
We're quite curious, really. To the tune of one million dollars.
Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we've developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies. We use those predictions to make personal movie recommendations based on each customer's unique tastes. And while Cinematch is doing pretty well, it can always be made better.
Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven't tried. Some are discussed in the literature, some aren't. We're curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions. Because, frankly, if there is a much better approach it could make a big difference to our customers and our business.
from "If You Liked This, You're Sure to Love That" in November 23rd's The NYT Magazine
The more Bertoni improved upon Netflix, the harder it became to move his number forward. This wasn't just his problem, though; the other competitors say that their progress is stalling, too, as they edge toward 10 percent. Why?
Bertoni says it's partly because of "Napoleon Dynamite," an indie comedy from 2004 that achieved cult status and went on to become extremely popular on Netflix. It is, Bertoni and others have discovered, maddeningly hard to determine how much people will like it. When Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like "Lethal Weapon" or "Miss Congeniality" and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he's usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like "Napoleon Dynamite," he's off by an average of 1.2 stars.
The reason, Bertoni says, is that "Napoleon Dynamite" is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It's the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.
Worse, close friends who normally share similar film aesthetics often heatedly disagree about whether "Napoleon Dynamite" is a masterpiece or an annoying bit of hipster self-indulgence.
We're quite curious, really. To the tune of one million dollars.
Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we've developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies. We use those predictions to make personal movie recommendations based on each customer's unique tastes. And while Cinematch is doing pretty well, it can always be made better.
Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven't tried. Some are discussed in the literature, some aren't. We're curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions. Because, frankly, if there is a much better approach it could make a big difference to our customers and our business.
from "If You Liked This, You're Sure to Love That" in November 23rd's The NYT Magazine
The more Bertoni improved upon Netflix, the harder it became to move his number forward. This wasn't just his problem, though; the other competitors say that their progress is stalling, too, as they edge toward 10 percent. Why?
Bertoni says it's partly because of "Napoleon Dynamite," an indie comedy from 2004 that achieved cult status and went on to become extremely popular on Netflix. It is, Bertoni and others have discovered, maddeningly hard to determine how much people will like it. When Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like "Lethal Weapon" or "Miss Congeniality" and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he's usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like "Napoleon Dynamite," he's off by an average of 1.2 stars.
The reason, Bertoni says, is that "Napoleon Dynamite" is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It's the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.
Worse, close friends who normally share similar film aesthetics often heatedly disagree about whether "Napoleon Dynamite" is a masterpiece or an annoying bit of hipster self-indulgence.
Jody Rosen on Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak
"With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology...Kanye can't really sing in the classic sense, but he's not trying to. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn't just sharpen flat notes: It's a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness, and upping the pathos. In "Bad News," Kanye's digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he's become less than human."
From Rolling Stone
Will 2009 Be the Year of the Werewolf?
by Logan Hill
[File under creatures]
In the eternal battle between werewolves and vampires, the latter will look back and say, "2008 vas vonderful! Twilight! True Blood! Ah! Ah! Ah!" But there are signs of a werewolf rebellion. Book critics are howling over Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth, a werewolf noir written entirely in free verse (it's brilliant). Hollywood will kick off 2009 with Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, in which werewolves fight vampire slave masters. Then the already lupine Benicio Del Toro will star in a reimagining of Universal's 1941 classic The Wolf Man - and do multiplex battle with Hugh Jackman's X-Men Origins: Wolverine (not technically a lycanthrope, but still more wolfman than large weasel). Then maybe we'll see the lesbian werewolf teen flick Jack and Diane, long rumored to star Ellen Page. Why the hairy surge? Vampires are decadent, boom-economy monsters who live off the blood of others. In other words, stockbrokers. Werewolves, by contrast, are hairy blue-collar loners, contemptuous of civilization, motivated by hunger and bitterness. When society gets too corrupt, werewolves bite rich bastards in the ass.
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