When 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 <i>seminal papers in the field</i> 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.<p>In hindsight, I suppose I should have appealed to the fact that critiquing the <i>seminal papers in the field</i> is a serious data set bias and that trying to "learn to critique" on the <i>best papers ever written</i> 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.<p>(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.)<p>Anyhow, <i>this</i> 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.
Love 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."
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.
> 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.<p>Love it.
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).<p>Anyway, the point is, coughs per hour would help us know if audiences simply favor longer or shorter movies at different points in time.
Counting helicopters is a counter indicator.
<a href="http://0at.org/blog/movie_suck" rel="nofollow">http://0at.org/blog/movie_suck</a>
Sitting alone, laughing in a coffee shop while reading this. Good start to the morning.<p>I enjoyed Dune, and believe it should win best picture. Partly because I haven’t seen the other movies mentioned.<p>After learning about the coughgeist, I’m more convinced than ever they will win. Sound research.
Would 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.
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.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/GoAA0sYkLI0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/GoAA0sYkLI0</a>
A good candidate for <a href="https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2021" rel="nofollow">https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2021</a> ?<p>The 2021 Biology winner was:<p>> 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.
Coughing is satisfyingly human and easy to connect to, but is also slightly distracting.<p>So, when it is just the right amount, it makes for awards, but when too much - especially in a thriller - it gets panned.<p>By extension, eating and sleeping could work, though that is boring.<p>Now, if there was just some other vice that wasn't boring.... wait! So <i>that</i> is why porn is so popular ;)
Why it should win best picture:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFQbjQbPq0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFQbjQbPq0</a><p>Do I <i>need</i> another reason?
Ah comedic tennis, funerals and research are a thing.<p>Is there anything so mundane or horrific that we as a species haven’t attempted to make light of it yet?<p>Maybe this dichotomy is what makes us human.
Surely by publishing these findings it will now sabotage the predictions as it will affect the unconscious criteria/bias by raising awareness of it?