The statistical approach to choosing winning movies.

I don't know if Canada's greatest musician, Doug Bennett, had it exactly right, but he was close when he lamented, "Nobody wants better, they only want more." (Here, number 17)

The New York times has an article about a man who statistically analyzes hit films to help producers make the next hit.  It seems the method would both work and suck.  Yes, a sweet spot of enough sex and violence and with some slight semblance to a plot would be profitable  but  only in regards to university-aged boys who haven't seen the same things in a dozen other movies yet.

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

Sci Am on student science and creativity

As a child, I loved Farley Mowat's books on his childhood ( Owls in the Family, The Dog who Wouldn't Be) and loved the way he lived the way I wanted to.*  I have grown up being interested in science but not actually doing any science.

Kiera Wilmot attempted to learn by doing and was arrested for it.  Yes, the experiment she did was dangerous, but a felony?  I don't think so.  In other locations, I have written about 'Libel Chill'.  Here is Science Chill.

The exact details are unknown but the incident led to a minor explosion, hurt nobody and damaged no property. This relatively harmless bit of curiosity led to Ms. Wilmot being handcuffed, arrested and expelled from the school. Irrational State Overreach: 1, The Much Touted American Edge in Science: 0. Whatever else the school was trying to achieve, it definitely succeeded in squelching independent scientific curiosity in its students.

Now let’s get one thing straight. The student was playing with a potentially hazardous mix and she was not using proper protective equipment. She definitely deserved to be reprimanded and perhaps even punished in some way, maybe by putting her on probation. But when you arrest and expel students for slaking their scientific curiosity, whatever the other consequences of that action, be advised that you are almost certainly sacrificing a valuable scientist at the altar of arbitrarily wielded state and school power....And to Kiera Wilmot I say, please don’t give up on yourself because the system failed. Remember the deeds of George Washington Carver and Percy Julian who came before you; both of them rose to prominence in spite of the system and not because of it.

I have all discussed the finding that schools do not encourage creativity but, at best, can only work to reduce discouragement.

Completely as a tangent, the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber was charged with using a WMD.  I hope Wilmot is spared that fate.

Back to schools attempting to encourage creativity:

In a recent survey conducted by Mary-Catherine McClain and Steven I. Pfeiffer, while 90% of the state definitions of giftedness in the United States include “intelligence” as an area or category of giftedness, only 54% include creativity. Even worse, only 9 states actually require displays of creativity for inclusion into gifted education programs.
Part of the problem may be our identification methods for creativity. One prominent method is the use of portfolios. Typically, students who demonstrate exceptional talent in music and art receive the opportunity to produce a portfolio. Unfortunately, this leaves out many highly creative students whose area of passion (e.g., social entrepreneurship, video game design, contemporary dance, sushi chef, etc.) isn’t so easily identified.

This article links to another which offers a description of especially creative students:

Creatively gifted students may be spontaneous, expressive, intuitive, and perceptive, with evidence of intellectual sophistication and childlike playfulness. They are very likely to be curious, open to new experiences, and innovative in many areas of their lives. They may express originality in thoughts, and are probably unafraid of what others might think of their ideas. Most likely, these students have a wide range of interests and abilities, and may be comfortable with ambiguity and disorder. Likely to be unconventional, creatively gifted students are imaginative, and may challenge the status quo. By late adolescence, truly creative individuals usually have significant creative accomplishments that have earned them recognition by experts in their domain.

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* I am aware that he has faced many questions about what exactly was fact and what was fiction.  As a child I believed it all and was not harmed by such beliefs.

Writing on Mobile Devices (mostly for education)

Edudemic has an article defending the use of mobile devices to write full, coherent essays.

My first or second generation Kindle (with the small domed-keys below the screen) is not great for long writing, but that is partially because it is hard to access numbers or special characters, including the comma and question mark.  I have not used Google Docs with it (I am not sure you can as Docs requires multiple windows open)  but another problem is transferring the completed work.  There is no Wordpad or the like that is easily copy-and-pastable into other devices.  Still, the Kindle is great for holding nearly complete documents and proofreading and annotating them.

The Kindle was never intended for content creation.  How about the iPad?  The Edudemic article discusses one concern I had (I have touched an iPad, but little more); keeping your fingers floating above the keyboard.  Apparently practice makes that problem less intrusive.

a journalist manifesto and multi-dimensional analysis of sci-fi stories

On twitter, Ed Yong offered a link to a practical set of guidelines for journalists.

I wrote these 25 commandments as a panic response 15 or more years ago to an invitation to do some media training for a group of Elsevier editors. I began compiling them because I had just asked myself what was the most important thing to remember about writing a story, and the answer came back loud and clear: "To make somebody read it."Ultimately, there's no other reason for writing. Journalists write to support democracy, sustain truth, salute justice, justify expenses, see the world and make a living, but to satisfactorily do any of these things you have to have readers. Fairness and accuracy are of course profoundly important. Without them, you aren't in journalism proper: you are playing some other game. But above all, you have to be read, or you aren't in journalism at all....3. So the first sentence you write will be the most important sentence in your life, and so will the second, and the third. This is because, although you – an employee, an apostle or an apologist – may feel obliged to write, nobody has ever felt obliged to read.
4. Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.

Gord Sellar also offers some advice on how to balance the complexity of your story along various axes.  He starts by comparing the tastes of things, noting that nobody wants a food that has all the flavors and equal strength but rather specific combinations or flavors. Then he suggests there are five dimensions of a story: complexity of worldbuilding, density of prose, plot complexity, fast-paced action and depth of characterization.

The main point to be drawn from his post is that you shouldn't try to be strong in axes all the time.  I think he has perfectly described my one complaint with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.  While I love much of his other work, this one tried to do it all.  I specifically recall an attempt to describe fast-paced action (...hmm, I don't recall that many specific details after all) of Eliza's son attempting to rescue a princess by jumping from his own horse to that of a pursuer's.  Thrilling stuff, but I missed how exciting it could have been because of the mass of details- the world-building overwhelmed the story.

Sellar's graphs reminded me of ecological comparisons of species but I can't recall the exact name of the graphs.  They had something to do with the axiom, "Complete Competitors Cannot Coexist".  "Multi-dimension volume of traits"? "Hyper-volume"?...Oh, well.

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Updated later:"
Find a whole lot more on Science Writing at the Guardian.

NPR on the Torrance Test

More Than 50 Years Of Putting Kids' Creativity To The Test

Audio and text available at the link.

Creative people are complicated: this barely qualifies as news.

At the Huffington Post is an article about how complex creative people are.
 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is, as always, quoted:

...creative people "show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

More from the article:

Introversion / Extroversion

• All participants showed interest in physical activities but also reported requiring "alone time."

• Most participants reported "overthinking everything" and being hypercritical, exhibiting critical attention to detail and a careful method of planning everything.

• ...

Openness / Sensitivity

• The musicians in Grimes's sample reported being in the zone onstage, and being able to "tune out" external stimuli unrelated to the task. At the same time, Grimes found a lot of the musicians reported a heightened sensitivity to their surroundings and their experience of sound, lighting, scents, etc.

• All of the musicians reported some degree of unusual perceptions, especially relating to high sensory sensitivity.

• ...

I don't want to quote too widely, but it is a good introduction to the subject.

Science Writing

From Scientific American:

The vertical trajectory is the one taken by people who, perhaps from a very early age, knew they wanted to become writers or journalists, perhaps specifically science journalists. They major in journalism in college (perhaps double-major in a science as well), work on their school paper, start internships early in their local papers (or radio or TV stations), then go to a Master’s program in science journalism. ...
The horizontal trajectory describes people who start out in science, with every intention of making a career in research. But, as tenure track is now an alternative career in science, most science students need to find other options. Some of them – those who always liked to write, wrote diaries as kids, etc. – will explore the option of becoming science writers.

The article continues and offers advice on how and where to start the horizontal trajectory.