Tag: tv
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Prediction Markets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, and More
Each year I get caught up in the big film and television awards, trying to watch as many as possible and speculating on the various winners. I just discovered Gold Derby, a fun site for following and predicting the Hollywood ‘races’ yourself. Gold Derby takes predictions on everything from the Oscars to RuPaul’s Drag Race,…
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Video Clip Search Tool
As both a movie lover and a Xennial, I still (unashamedly) send a lot of video clips and gifs when texting with friends. If nothing apt comes up immediately, there’s a couple of sites I use where I can enter any phrase and immediately get a clip of it being said in various films and…
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Learning storytelling from a Sitcom writer
What is a story? How can you tell better stories? There is a wealth of knowledge and research into story telling, story structure and techniques for enhancing narrative. The classic text is The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but this tome has been is criticised for being dense and academic. Syd Field‘s book Screenplay has influenced…
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Child Development: Content, Not Medium, Matters (Why Sesame Street Beats Teletubbies)
Debates have raged over the last couple of years on the effects (detrimental or not) of television, computer games (violent or not) and the Internet on a child’s cognitive development. Taking excerpts from a review article that provides an excellent summary of the topic, Jonah Lehrer makes it clear: for a child’s cognitive development, the medium doesn’t matter but the content…
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Motivation and the Cognitive Surplus
This short discussion between Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink on cognitive surplus and motivation is full of little insights and allusions to interesting pieces of research. This, from Dan Pink, is a wonderful overview of the research into motivation, presented in typical Pink clarity: We have a biological drive. We eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re…
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Technological Affluence and Happiness (Everything Except TV is Good)
In a study probing the association between ‘technological affluence’ and general well-being it was found that computers, mobile phones and music players increased self-reported levels of happiness, while television ownership decreased it. That is: the ownership of most modern technological goods makes us happy, except for televisions, which make us sad. Using self-reported life satisfaction…
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The Rise of Cooking Shows, the Fall of Cooking (and Happiness)
I almost ignored this bit-too-long piece on the rise of the TV cooking show and the simultaneous fall of the home cooked meal (via @borrodell). That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them…