Some detectives specialize. Detectives whose specialty is detecting kissing might benefit from the method described in this study: “Detecting Kissing Scenes in a Database of Hollywood Films,” Amir Ziai, ArXiv 1906.01843, 2019. The author reports: “We experimented with a variety of 2D and 3D convolutional architectures such as ResNet, DesnseNet, and VGGish and developed a […]
The 2022 Insect Fear Festival is coming. Run! Jump! Fly! One way or another or another, get to it on Saturday, February 26, 2022! The festival is organized by swarms of entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year it begins with a special presentation by Ig Nobel Prize winner Justin Schmidt, creator of […]
Neil Martin scared up a bunch of psychological research about how people respond to scary movies: “(Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films,” G. Neil Martin, Frontiers in Psychology, epub 2019. The author, at Regent’s University London, UK, explains: “Despite a century of horror […]
What power over the minds of humans lurks in bug-human-hybrid superhero movies? One study, at least, asks that question. The study is: ” ‘Spidey Can’: Preliminary Evidence Showing Arachnophobia Symptom Reduction Due to Superhero Movie Exposure,” Yaakov S.G. Hoffman, Shani Pitcho-Prelorentzos, Lia Ring, and Menachem Ben-Ezra, Frontiers in Psychiatry, epub 2019. The authors, at Bar-Ilan […]