| Rooney Mara gets the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo look Fans of Stieg Larsson's Millennium books might have feared the casting of Mara, but she seems to look the partTo those of us who have enjoyed Stieg Larsson's obscenely successful Millennium books as an opportunity to wrap ourselves up in an exotic Scandinavian world of Nazis, spy rings and all-powerful hacker cliques, the news that Hollywood is set to adapt the films into a Daniel Craig-starring trilogy raised a fair few eyebrows. Not least was the hiring of the rather wholesome-looking Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, the razor-sharp heroine of the series. While Noomi Rapace never quite looked the part either in the Swedish film versions of the trilogy, Mara seemed a little too ... well, gorgeous to portray a character depicted in the books as tiny and sparrowlike.Thanks to fan site rooney-mara.com we can now – perhaps – put those fears to rest. The site has published pictures of Mara as Salander, complete with dyed jet black hair, on the set of the first film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She looks very, very strange indeed. It's possible the photographs were taken from an unfortunate angle, or in poor light, but, if not, no one can accuse director David Fincher of having glammed up Salander for the US market. She looks like death warmed up.Stieg LarssonBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Jackson to start shooting 'The Hobbit' in February By 2010-10-16T03:06:52ZLOS ANGELES (AP) -- It's time to celebrate again in Middle Earth.... hosted.ap.org |
Rihanna leaves manager, now under Jay-Z's umbrella By MESFIN FEKADU 2010-10-20T21:20:48ZNEW YORK (AP) -- Rihanna is now under Jay-Z's umbrella.... hosted.ap.org |
Social networks offer free access to the beating pulse of the nation | John Naughton Forget opinion polls and focus groups – data-mining on sites such as Twitter offers the best, and cheapest, way of tapping into the zeitgeistOne of the few comical aspects of the spending review is the frantic attempts by all concerned to predict how the victims of Osborne's axe will respond. The major newspaper groups and the Tory party will of course be deploying the usual – expensive – steam-age tools: opinion polls and focus groups. The cash-strapped Labour and Liberal Democrat parties may have to resort to cheaper techniques – inspecting the entrails of slaughtered goats, perhaps. In the interests of levelling the playing field, therefore, this column offers them a better idea: intelligent data-mining on Twitter.It's taken a while for the penny to drop, but finally the world is waking up to the fact that the phenomenon of social networking might actually tell us useful things about what's happening out there in the world beyond the Washington Beltway and the Westminster village. Not only that, but the resulting data might even be useful for predicting what's likely to happen.Last March, for example, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, two web scientists from HP's Palo Alto lab, published a fascinating paper showing that the chatter on Twitter can be used to forecast box-office revenue for movies. They analysed 2.89m tweets by 1.2 million users referring to 24 different movies released over a period of three months. They discovered that the rate at which movie tweets are generated can be used to build a powerful model for predicting box-office revenue. They also found that predictions derived in this way are "consistently better than those produced by an information market such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the gold standard in the industry".To take just two examples, Transylmania, which opened on 4 December 2009, had the lowest average tweet-rates (2.75 tweets per hour) of all the movies analysed and went on to become the lowest-grossing opening for a movie playing at more than 1,000 sites, making only $263,941 in its opening weekend. (It was subsequently pulled from cinemas at the end of the second week.) At the other extreme, two movies that made big splashes in their opening weekends – Twilight: New Moon (grossing $142m) and Avatar ($77m) – had averages of 1,365.8 and 1,212.8 tweets per hour respectively."Big deal," I hear you say. "Who – outside of Hollywood – cares about movie box-office figures?" Well then, how about the stock market? Last week another interesting paper appeared on arxiv.org, the stupendous online archive depository for research preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. It's by Johan Bollen, Huina Mao and Xiao-Jun Zeng of the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University at Bloomington, and it suggests that data-mining on Twitter can significantly improve predictions of stock-market movements.Bollen and his colleagues set out to investigate whether public sentiment, as expressed in large-scale collections of daily Twitter posts, can be used to predict the stock market. They used a standard psychological tool to measure mood along six dimensions – calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness – and then analysed nearly 10m tweets posted by 2.7 million users between 28 February and 19 December 2008 to extract indicators of mood implicit in tweets. They then looked for evidence of correlation between different kinds of mood and movements in the Dow Jones industrial average.They concluded that the predictive accuracy of standard stock-market prediction models was significantly improved when certain mood dimensions were included (for example "calm" and "happiness" as one measure of mood), but not others – "general happiness" being one example.Once upon a time, this kind of research would have attracted only the derisive snorting of technophobes. Why should we take seriously the 140-character vapourings of geeks and media types? What we really need to know is what "ordinary" or "normal" people think. The problem with that kind of technophobic scepticism is that cyberspace is increasingly coming to look like the "real" world. The demographic characteristics of Twitter's 200 million users (or of Facebook's 500 million) are undoubtedly still a bit skewed compared with those of the population as a whole, but over time that will change: these social networks will increasingly be made up of folks like you and me. In which case, the communications that go on between their members will become the best guide we have to the zeitgeist.If Ed Miliband wants to have a finger on the pulse of the nation, then the smartest thing he could do would be to hire a few geeks and set them to work.InternetTwitterFacebookSocial networkingStock marketsJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'Harry Potter' Works Magic as Russell Crowe's Star Fades If Hollywood moguls needed final proof that the movie franchise is king and that the venerable notion of star power is kaput, they found it by glancing at the weekend's box-office numbers feedproxy.google.com |