‘The Dark Knight’: The best movie of all time or not quite? July 29, 2008
Posted by Anurag Gaggar in Internet, Movies, Statistics.Tags: batman, best movie, hollywood, IMDb, Movies, the dark knight, top 250
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The Dark Knight
‘The Dark Knight‘ has been breaking all records at the box office. It grossed more than $155 MM in the opening weekend and has been the fastest to reach the $300 MM mark (US collections, both). It is also at the top of the list of the Top 250 movies of all time on IMDb (at least, as of July 30). I saw the movie on the last weekend and liked it very much. However, I find myself unable to compare it with the likes of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ’The Godfather’ or ‘The Matrix’ and would not rate it as the best movie of all times. I tried to look further into the ranking system at IMDb.
The list of Top 250 movies on IMDb is based on rankings of registered users, who can vote on a scale of 1 to 10 for any number of movies. The selection and ranking for the top 250 movies is then done based on an average of individual votes, but with a slight twist to take care of anomalies.
1. Only the votes from the regular voters is considered for this selection.
2. There is a minimum cut-off of votes (currently 1,300) for a movie to be eligible for selection in the list.
3. A true Bayesian estimate is taken for the weighted average of the votes. In layman terms, the average is moved up or down based on the number of votes polled. Less number of votes carry less weight. So, a rating of 8.5 based on 20,000 voters is better than a 8.5 based on 2,000 votes.
All seems good with the above logic.
IMDB Top 250 movies list
I looked for some more details to help understand the rise of ‘The Dark Knight’ in the rankings chart.
1. The movie is currently rated at 9.4/10 based on 166k votes (all votes and not just the votes from regular users), ahead of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (9.2/10, 349k votes) and ‘The Godfather’ (9.1/10, 298k votes). It was rated close to 9.7 after the opening weekend and has come down from those levels in the last week as the vote count has increased. My sense is that Batman fans or the lovers of this genre of movies were the first to flock to cinema halls to see it and got more than what they had hoped for and were happy to award stellar reviews to the movie. The initial hype attracted a lot more people to the movie, who liked it but were more cautious and less liberal with their appreciation. The rankings may well go down a li’l bit more before settling down at a stable value and the movie might lose the top slot in the months to come.
2. 50 of the top 250 movies, or 20%, have released in the period 2000 – 2008. The last eight and a half years have produced more top movies than any 10 year period in the past. Whether the creativity and quality of the films is at an all time high is a debatable topic, however, I see another reason for this. Internet users (and IMDb users as well) and their online activity has been growing at an amazing pace. A lot of younger folks now have access to internet and are participating in the online world. Many of them wouldn’t have seen most of the other top movies to make a fair assessment. Also, a lot of the older folks, who would’ve seen and loved movies like ‘The Godfather’ or ‘Casablanca’ in their youth, wouldn’t be so active in the online world to make their opinion count to the same extent.
3. Extending on the point above, the ranking of ‘The Dark Knight’ is based on 166k votes, 7.1% of which are from people aged less than 18 and who have rated the movie at 9.6/10. If you look at corresponding numbers for the next 2 movies in the list, the stats are – ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ [349k, 2,6%, 9.4] and ‘The Godfather’ [298k, 3.3%, 8.9]. The younger audiences are making their impact felt by being more active and vocal on the internet.
The best movie of all times or not, it is still worth a watch for Nolan’s direction and Ledger’s brilliance, as the Joker. May his soul rest in peace!
[Update: 19th Aug, 2008] : ‘The Dark Knight’ has slipped to the 3rd spot on the Top 250 movie list on IMDb.
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Would time travel ever be possible? July 27, 2008
Posted by Anurag Gaggar in science, technology.Tags: chronology protection, paradox, science, technology, time travel
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Time travel is a fascinating and complex concept. It’s difficult to imagine something so radical, something that can generate a realm of paradoxes – what if someone traveled back in time and killed his biological father before he was conceived (bad chap this guy, but still, makes you think). The evolution of science and technology has successfully and consistently produced things which were inconceivable in the past – a couple of hundred years back, people could have laughed at the concept of talking to a person miles away with a device that could fit in their pockets. So, could time travel be a reality in the next hundred years or more? A very simple and effective (as far as I was concerned) argument to prove it would never be possible to travel across time is that – since no one from the future has traveled back in time to our times and met us, it proves that this technology, even if possible to build, will never be developed and used.
But, I recently realized things weren’t so simple. For one, the argument above only proves that time travel into the past would never become possible, one could still travel forward in time. And to make matters more complex, Professor Stephen Hawking notes that time travel might only be possible in a region of spacetime that is warped in the right way, and that if we cannot create such a region until the future, then time travelers would not be able to travel back before that date. In his lecture here, he mentions:
“A possible way to reconcile time travel, with the fact that we don’t seem to have had any visitors from the future, would be to say that it can occur only in the future. In this view, one would say space-time in our past was fixed, because we have observed it, and seen that it is not warped enough, to allow travel into the past. On the other hand, the future is open. So we might be able to warp it enough, to allow time travel. But because we can warp space-time only in the future, we wouldn’t be able to travel back to the present time, or earlier.“
He concludes by saying – “…rapid space-travel, or travel back in time, can’t be ruled out, according to our present understanding. They would cause great logical problems, so let’s hope there’s a Chronology Protection Law, to prevent people going back, and killing our parents. But science fiction fans need not lose heart. There’s hope in string theory.“
Needless to say that I am confused. I am trying to read up more on this. If I find something interesting (and comprehendible), I’ll post it here.
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Making Telemarketers Pay July 26, 2008
Posted by Anurag Gaggar in India, marketing.Tags: dnc, do not call registry, marketing, telemarketing
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For most telemarketers in India, someone’s privacy and the right be to left alone ends the day he/she takes up a phone connection. To counter the menace of excessive telemarketing, TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) had started a Do Not Call Registry few months back, but it has been largely unsuccessful in its pursuit – hardly surprising given the lax penalty clause. Quoted from the DNC website:
“To discourage the telemarketers who make calls to the numbers registered in Do Not Call List, a provision has been made whereby Rs.500/ – shall be payable by the telemarketer to the service provider for every first unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) and Rs.1000/- shall be payable for subsequent UCC. There is a provision for disconnection of the telemarketer telephone number / telecom resource if the UCC is sent even after levy of Rs.500/- & Rs.1000/- tariff.“
Paying Rs.1,500 and having the connection disconnected is hardly a worrisome situation for a telemarketer. Phone connections are easy to get and before you get multiple complaints from people for a specific phone number, a telemarketer could have made thousands of calls from it. Phone operators’ interests are directly aligned with those of the telemarketers (the more calls they make, the more they earn) and getting their whole hearted support to penalize (if disconnection of a phone line can be classified as penalty) them would have always been difficult.
DoT (Departement of Telecommunication) suggested setting up of a Do Call Registry (DCR) some time back. It proposes to enlist only those people who wish to receive such calls. It doesn’t really sound like a successful proposition, and perhaps thats why it hasn’t seen the light of the day.
On a related note – I came across this interesting academic article from Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, who proposes a different approach to solve the problem of intrusive marketing. To quote:
“Telemarketers don’t bear the full costs of their marketing because they do not compensate recipients for the hassle of, say, being interrupted during dinner. Telemarketers bear the cost of their speaking, but not of residents’ listening. It can still be privately rational for a telemarketer to disturb 30 people, if he or she can succeed in making a high-profit sale to the 31st. Because of these externalized costs, telemarketers have an incentive to call too often.“
He proposes allowing people/households to choose how much they want to be compensated for receiving telephone calls. A person can choose zero compensation and can be contacted by any telemarketer freely, or he/she can choose an infinite compensation and be not contacted for any solicitation. But, more importantly you can select a value somewhere in between and thereby, control the number of calls that you receive, talk to more (for lack of a better word) genuine telemarketers and be compensated for it.
There might be operational or even philosophical issues with this idea, but making telemarketers compensate you for all the annoyance they cause, sounds like a good idea to me!
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