The current kerfuffle over the iconic description of Obama puts us in mind of last month's piece by our Sameer Pandya, who asked what the limits were to copyright in the remix era. For those out of the loop, artist Shepard Fairey used a photo from then-Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia as the basis for his now iconic image of Barack Obama. As Los Angeles Times blogger Sherry Stern put it in a nice turn of phrase, "(Fairey's) ‘Hope' poster of candidate Obama turned from guerrilla art to refrigerator magnet to a spot on the wall of the National Portrait Gallery." (That's it to the ... Read More
Oscar Prediction: Winslet Wins It
February 3, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Kate Winslet will very likely win her first Academy Award this year, but the Best Actor category is up for grabs, according to a just-posted statistical analysis by Iain Pardoe of the University of Oregon. Pardoe, an associate professor of Decision Sciences in the university’s Charles H. Lundquist College of Business, gives Slumdog Millionaire an almost 6-in-10 chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar. The film’s director, Danny Boyle, has an 8-in-10 chance of winning the Best Director award. “In a nutshell, the predictions are based on a statistical analysis of past Oscar ... Read More
Cracking the Case of Chekhov’s Ambiguity
January 27, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
As a birthday gift to Anton Chekhov, let's try and get the gist of his famous plays right in future adaptations by balancing his style with our sensibilities. On Thursday (Jan. 29), Russians will celebrate the birthday of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), most famous on these shores for four plays written at the end of his life: The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. Chekhov's work remains a prominent — and mandatory — study in Russian schools and on its culture. Outside of Russia, Chekhov remains a popular yet mysterious puzzle many literary artists attempt to ... Read More
Internet Both Spreads, Debunks Rumors
January 23, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In a paper just posted on the Internet, R. Kelly Garrett of the Ohio State University School of Communication and James Danziger of the University of California, Irvine, parse the results of a national telephone survey conducted in the weeks just after the November election. Participants were asked about eight specific rumors concerning the candidates, as well as their use of the internet as a source of campaign information. Above-average users of online news sources were significantly more likely to have encountered the rumors than the survey group as a whole. However, they were also more ... Read More
Oscar Nominees Should Thank Their Collaborators
January 22, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
With a new set of nominations just out, and the usual grumblings about unfair snubs just beginning (how could they possibly pass up “Happy-Go-Lucky’s” Sally Hawkins?!), it’s instructive to read a paper entitled “I’d Like to Thank the Academy, Complementary Productivity and Social Networks.” In the study, published online in December 2006, sociologists Nicole Esparza (then at Princeton, now at Harvard) and Gabriel Rossman of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed all 1,349 Oscar nominations for actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress from 1927 to ... Read More