Twitter used to predict box office hits

Micro-blogging service Twitter can be used to predict the future box-office takings of blockbuster films according to researchers at Hewlett Packard.

The computer scientists studied 3 million messages known as tweets about 25 movies including Avatar.They found the rate at which messages were produced could be used to accurately predict the box office takings before the film opened.Further analysis of the content of the messages could predict ongoing success.Our predictions were incredibly close. Bernardo Huberman head of the social computing lab at HP told.

For example, he said, the system predicted that zombie film The Crazies would take $16.8m in its first weekend in the US. It actually took $16.06m.

The team forecast that romantic drama Dear John would take $30.71m in its first US weekend. It took $30.46m.The unpublished research has been posted on the Arxiv website.

Social sentiment

The team were able to make their first-weekend revenue predictions by analysing the torrent of tweets about a particular film in the run up to its release.We developed algorithms to analyse these tweets and measure the rate at which they were produced said Dr Huberman.

Our intuition was that the faster people tweet the more likely they are to go and see it.The teams were then able to forecast the ongoing success of a film including its second weekend revenues, by doing what is known as sentiment analysis.

This analyses the content of tweets and decides whether it is positive, negative or neutral.It's tapping into collective intelligence said Dr Huberman who carried out the work with Sitaram Asur, also of HP.The team trained their system using Amazon's Mechanical Turk an online tool that pays people to perform small tasks that computers would struggle to complete.We got people to classify tweets and we used that to calibrate the sentiment analysis explained Dr Huberman.Again the system tracked the fortunes of movies and outperformed other predictive systems such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange he said.For example analysis showed a boom in positive sentiment about the Oscar-nominated The Blind Side after it was released but showed the opposite effect for New Moon which initially sold well but rapidly lost viewers.

"Word of mouth builds audience," said Jan Saxton, vice president and senior films analyst at Adams Media Research.

She highlighted the film My Big fat Greek Wedding, which she said became the "film of the year" in 2002 by recommendations.If word of mouth becomes a faster more effective marketing tool then the effect on the movie business could be profound.Both Dr Huberman and Ms Saxton said that the demographic of Twitter which tends to be young tech-savvy and reasonably affluent - may limit the utility of the system for analysis of some trends, such as those aimed at children.

However Dr Huberman believes it could be of use in forecasting other trends, such as how well a gadget or product will sell.Elements such as sentiment analysis are also being used by other groups.

For example it is being used by an organisation called Tweetminster to monitor the UK general election to work out whether online buzz correlates with the winners.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Details

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) refers to a range of negative consequences of development that result from maternal drinking during pregnancy. Can children with FASD suffer from many problems, including epilepsy, characterized by spontaneous recurrence of unprovoked seizures, which affects 0.6 percent of the general population. The new study found a much higher prevalence of epilepsy or a history of seizures in individuals with FASD.

The results will be published in No. 2010 in June of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research and is now available to view early.

"There are very few studies have examined the relationship between seizures and epilepsy among individuals with FASD," noted James Reynolds, a senior scientist in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queen's University. Reynolds is one of the authors of the study.

"Many patients with epilepsy have a history of exposure to an insult before birth, so we reasoned that prenatal exposure to alcohol can be such an insult epileptogenic", said Peter Carlen, a neurologist and senior scientists to the division of neurobiology fundamental in West Toronto hospital, and another of the authors of the study. "Secondly, there is considerable overlap in the structures of the brain that is deficient as a result of chronic exposure to alcohol before birth and those that are associated with seizures, particularly in the hippocampus in the brain. Third, the previous studies failed to examine other complications that occur in mothers who drink alcoholduring pregnancy, such as the effects of drinking on the seizure activity. Finally, previous studies used small sample sizes and failed to clear definition of seizures and FASD ".

"Recently, scientists began to investigate whether fetal exposure to alcohol increases the risk for the development of behavioral health and other neurological problems," said Dan Savage, a professor of rulers' and chairman of neuroscience at the University of New Mexico. "Has already begun is evidence to suggest that children who suffer from FASD are more prone to alcoholism, drug abuse and depression later in life. While it is too early in the history of relatively young of this field of research to evaluate whether maternaldrinking during pregnancy increases the risk of neurological disorders related to aging, such as stroke or Parkinson's disease, several recent studies retrospectively on a large scale and to study whether fetal alcohol exposure increases the risk of epilepsy. "
This study, researchers looked at the history of 425 individuals (254 males, 171 females), aged between two and 49 years old, from clinics FASD Mon Were examined relations between the confirmed diagnosis of FASD and other risk factors - such as exposure to alcohol or other drugs, type of birth, trauma - for co-existence of epilepsy or a history of seizures.

"This study revealed a much higher prevalence of epilepsy and the date of seizure in individuals with a diagnosis of FASD", said Stephanie H. Bell, a researcher at the Center for Neuroscience at Queen's University, and author of the book corresponding to this study. "In the general population, is expected to be less than one percent to the development of epilepsy; with FASD, was six percent and 12 percent of epilepsy and one or more seizures in their lives. The subjects were more prone to epilepsy, or a history of seizures and, if exposure to alcohol occurred in the first three months of pregnancy or throughout the entire. "

"Although this report supports the growing impression that the fetal exposure to alcohol may predispose the immature brain to the development of epilepsy, the results do not prove a direct cause-and effectrelationship FASD and epilepsy," he warned Savage. "The establishment of a direct link between these clinical conditions would be a tough challenge given our incomplete understanding of how ethanol damages the developing brain and what changes in the tissues of the brain neuropathological lead to the development of different types of epilepsy."

However, Savage said it is clear that alcohol can cause damage in the brain of the fetus. "To what extent this damage and lead to negative consequences for neurobehavioral depends on the likely large number of factors, including the size and patterns of ofdrinking during pregnancy, and the presence of risk factors of pregnancy, such as smoking, drug abuse, poor prenatal care, and the presence of other diseases affecting the health of the mother, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, "he said. "As risk factors accumulate, the risk of negative consequences also increase nerve growth."

And missed often "epilepsy and / or seizures in children in the assessments of clinical," noted Carlen ", and if untreated can lead to cognitive problems increasing or unacknowledged. In the long run, it can also lead to problems in attention, memory, and the risk of heart unattended and dangerous. Many of the children may not have a tendency to epilepsy and has no physical signs of FASD, but the doctor must be aware of the alcohol exposureduring pregnancy when considering the health of their patients and diagnose the causes of certain. "

Sania-Shoaib marriage only on April 15

It was a wild goose chase for the dozens of media personnel in Hyderabad, after word spread that the wedding of tennis star Sania Mirza with Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik was to be performed on Friday itself.The advancement of the wedding actually slated for April 15 had galvanised the press corps which had stationed itself in front of Sania's house to get a ‘quote' or a ‘byte' from the family members. The confusion cleared only by evening after her family members sent text messages to news channels which went on running scrolls about the marriage taking place on Friday.Sania's father Imran Mirza made a single-line statement: All wedding ceremonies will begin only on April 13.

The proposed wedding of Sania and Shoaib had been mired in controversy after a Hyderabadi woman. Ayesha Siddiqui claimed that the cricketer had already married her and that he could marry Sania only after divorcing her first. Shoaib's denial of the claim led to registration of a criminal case against him and his passport was seized by the police.

The controversy subsided after community elders intervened to convince both families to agree to an amicable settlement under which Shoaib ‘divorced' Ayesha.Friday's confusion over the wedding date arose after a popular Urdu daily carried a story and news channels and agencies picked up the story leading to a media hysteria.