How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood - Alexis C. Madrigal

Improbable research: The Limerick laureate works his magic In 2003, an independent scholar from New Jersey began submitting limericks for a competition in mini-AIR, the monthly online supplement to my magazine, Annals of Improbable Research. The contest challenges readers to read an off-putting scholarly citation, and explain it in limerick form. Martin Eiger so consistently won that we eventually banned him as an unfair competitor, gave him the title Limerick laureate, and now publish him every month. He handles a huge range of subject matter. An early Eiger limerick summarised a Japanese study called Pharmacological Aspects of Ipecac Syrup (TJN-119) - Induced Emesis in Ferrets: If you're hoping to hash out a thesis,And stuck for a topic: emesis,As triggered in ferretsUndoubtedly meritsMuch more than a mere exegesis. Warwick University mathematician Jonathan Warren's 1999 treatise On the Joining of Sticky Brownian Motion includes a three-page proof of the Non-cosiness of Sticky Brownian Motion.

Before You See 'The Counselor': Watch 1977 Film 'The Gardener's Son,' Cormac McCarthy's First Produced Script While there's still no sign of Ridley Scott's "The Counselor" at either Venice, Toronto or New York (perhaps it'll pop up in Telluride?), the anticipation for the film still remains very high. Not only does it feature a ridiculous cast (Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz and more), it also has a script from one of America's literary titans, Cormac McCarthy. This is something written directly for the screen, not an adaption of a book, but as hardcore fans know, this isn't the first script he's written. Way, way back in 1977 PBS unveiled "The Gardener's Son," as part of their "Visions" series of original programming, and it's a feature length film penned by none other than McCarthy. Nominated for two primetime Emmy awards, the movie has been somewhat forgotten.

Web scraping Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.[1] Web scraping software may access the World Wide Web directly using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or through a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying, in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis. Web scraping a web page involves fetching it and extracting from it.[1][2] Fetching is the downloading of a page (which a browser does when you view the page). Newer forms of web scraping involve listening to data feeds from web servers. There are methods that some websites use to prevent web scraping, such as detecting and disallowing bots from crawling (viewing) their pages. History[edit] Techniques[edit] Human copy-and-paste[edit]

It's Hard for a White Guy to Get Himself Arrested —Kevin Drum on Tue. December 17, 2013 11:26 AM PDT Over at The Atlantic, a former prosecutor named Bobby Constantino has a piece called "I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System." It's oddly riveting. It starts with a description of his former career: In between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. than raised eyebrows and scoldings — I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. In a nutshell, this guy desperately tried to get himself arrested for walking around New York City with a stencil and a spray can (a class B misdemeanor) and had no luck. He finally succeeded, spent a night in jail, and went to court. There's more, and it's worth a read.

Stanford Prison Exp IT BEGAN WITH AN AD in the classifieds. Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks. More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford's Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard. Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. The public's fascination with the SPE and its implications—the notion, as Zimbardo says, "that these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation"—brought Zimbardo international renown. The Superintendent Mark.

50 Best Horror Movies of All Time Come on in, the blood's fine Horror movies aren’t for everyone. You’ve heard it a million times, or else you’ve said it a million times: “I just don’t like them”. What you should say — what’s far more likely — is that you don’t like most horror movies. Truth is, skimming our list of the best 50 horror films of all time on this very special Friday the 13th should do more to convince you than any argument ever will. Methodology: like our books piece, the selections for our Definitive Men’s Movie Collection represent our favorites, “considered in the light of how much they changed our lives, and might change yours.”

The HDF Group - Information, Support, and Software Maybe we need to have less 'faith in humanity' | Elad Nehorai It's everywhere you look, ever since that BuzzFeed post: •21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity •16 Scribbles That'll Restore Your Faith in Humanity •6 True Stories That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity Just example after example of these photo posts, videos, even entire websites, devoted to restoring our "faith in humanity". It seems beautiful if you think about it. So it's no wonder that these posts, these videos, these websites, have been gaining so much traction. First of all, does humanity really deserve to be redeemed? History is replete with examples of people having, if anything, too much faith in humanity. But Hitler's too easy, too obvious. So let's look at something a little more recent. Brown's mother desperately pleaded with the police to look more carefully into his life, but they didn't. No one wanted to admit that this was a person capable of doing something really bad, no matter how many warning signs there were. Now, it goes the other way as well.

Walking Through Doorways Causes Forgetting We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains. “Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.” The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Conducting three experiments in both real and virtual environments, Radvansky’s subjects – all college students – performed memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway.

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MySQL Commands This is a list of handy MySQL commands that I use time and time again. At the bottom are statements, clauses, and functions you can use in MySQL. Below that are PHP and Perl API functions you can use to interface with MySQL. To use those you will need to build PHP with MySQL functionality. To use MySQL with Perl you will need to use the Perl modules DBI and DBD::mysql. Below when you see # it means from the unix shell. To login (from unix shell) use -h only if needed. # [mysql dir]/bin/mysql -h hostname -u root -p Create a database on the sql server. mysql> create database [databasename]; List all databases on the sql server. mysql> show databases; Switch to a database. mysql> use [db name]; To see all the tables in the db. mysql> show tables; To see database's field formats. mysql> describe [table name]; To delete a db. mysql> drop database [database name]; To delete a table. mysql> drop table [table name]; Show all data in a table. mysql> SELECT * FROM [table name]; Show unique records. Sum column. or

Mental Illness, the Video Game - Zack Kotzer There's no end to MedicationMeditation, an unwinnable computer game about treating depression and anxiety. Kara Stone has recently taken up gardening. Her floral dependents—Echinacea, sage, and geranium—have only yet grown into big sprouts, but she finds the activity a nice change from time spent in front of glowing screens. It’s worth noting Stone recently put in a lot of that kind of time while creating her first video game, MedicationMeditation. It’s also worth noting that she’s planted these seeds in discarded antidepressant bottles. “When I was making MedicationMeditation,” she says, “it had all of these ideas of focusing in on your body, but I was sitting there zoning out in front of a computer, snapping back into reality five hours later, shoulders up to my ears, dying for a cigarette. Though making it caused momentary negligence of her own, Kara Stone’s game, of sorts, seeks to make players conscious of their own bodies. There are five of those activities, at the moment.

Shock study, replicates Milgram's findings Nearly 50 years after the controversial Milgram experiments, social psychologist Jerry M. Burger, PhD, has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by an authority figure. Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University, replicated one of the famous obedience experiments of the late Stanley Milgram, PhD, and found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women. "People learning about Milgram's work often wonder whether results would be any different today," Burger says. Milgram found that, after hearing the learner's first cries of pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks; of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator's end, at 450 volts. —K.I.