Linked List: April 11, 2016

Monday, 11 April 2016

Sean Malto Skateboard Documentary Shot on iPhone 

Some truly gorgeous shots, and an interesting behind-the-scenes video too.

Lytro’s 755 Megapixel Cinema Light Field Camera 

Lucas Matney, writing for TechCrunch:

Today, the company introduced Lytro Cinema, which is the company’s effort to woo those in the television and film industries with cool camera technology that makes their jobs easier.

The Lytro Cinema camera gathers a truly staggering amount of information on the world around it. The 755 RAW megapixel 40K resolution, 300 FPS camera takes in as much as 400 gigabytes per second of data.

Amazing technology.

‘Finally’ of the Week 

The Next Web headline: “SpaceX Finally Lands Its Rocket on a Drone Ship After Delivering Bouncy Castle for ISS”.

If the finally in that headline doesn’t make your eyes roll, your eyes aren’t hooked up right.

The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialog by Gender: 2,000 Scripts, 25,000 Actors, 4 Million Lines 

Fascinating research and data visualizations by Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, for Polygraph:

But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?

To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.

Internet Mapping Turned a Remote Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell 

Kashmir Hill, reporting for Fusion:

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.

If this sounds reminiscent of the story about the house in Atlanta that keeps getting reported as the location of missing cell phones, that’s because Hill was the reporter on that story too.