Paratexts on a social network site and their relevance in the production of meaning-Results of a qualitative investigation of Twitter-Feeds.

In this paper, paratexts as a component of developmental and marketing processes of movie-productions on Social Network Sites (SNS) are investigated. Paratexts are phenomena that prepare and accompany the reading and interpretation of texts/movies. First, a brief introduction into a complex and ambivalent state of research on paratexts will be given. Then the paper presents the results of a qualitative study, which was realized with the help of Grounded Theory, where marketing-paratexts of movie feeds on Twitter are at the center of the investigation. The research shows that movie-studios are manifoldly active on Social Network Sites and fall back on different paratextual materials that are placed around the medium as an interpretative perimeter. The associated activities are also characteristics of complex interactive processes. In this, recipients are actively involved. Producers/Production-Studios attempt to establish a relationship, whereby Social Network Sites are used as distributional and interactive platforms and as a vital part for preparing and developing a story.

Tobacco Use in Top-Grossing Movies - United States, 2010-2018.

The Surgeon General has concluded that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in movies and initiation of smoking among young persons (1). Youths heavily exposed to onscreen smoking imagery are more likely to begin smoking than are those with minimal exposure (1,2). To assess tobacco-use imagery in top-grossing youth-rated movies (General Audiences [G], Parental Guidance [PG], and Parents Strongly Cautioned [PG-13]),* 2010-2018 data from the Breathe California Sacramento Region and University of California-San Francisco's Onscreen Tobacco Database were analyzed.† The percentage of all top-grossing movies with tobacco incidents remained stable from 2010 (45%) to 2018 (46%), including youth-rated movies (31% both years). However, total tobacco incidents increased 57% from 2010 to 2018, with a 120% increase in PG-13 movies. Tobacco incidents in PG-13 fictional movies declined 57% from 511 in 2010 to an all-time low of 221 in 2018. Although the number of PG-13 fictional movies with tobacco incidents declined 40% during 2010-2018, the number of PG-13 biographical dramas with tobacco incidents increased 233%. In 2018, biographical dramas accounted for most tobacco incidents, including 82% of incidents in PG-13 movies; 73% of characters who used tobacco in these biographical dramas were fictional. Continued efforts could help reduce tobacco incidents in top-grossing movies, particularly in PG-13 biographical dramas, to help prevent youth smoking initiation.

Box Office Forecasting considering Competitive Environment and Word-of-Mouth in Social Networks: A Case Study of Korean Film Market.

Accurate box office forecasting models are developed by considering competition and word-of-mouth (WOM) effects in addition to screening-related information. Nationality, genre, ratings, and distributors of motion pictures running concurrently with the target motion picture are used to describe the competition, whereas the numbers of informative, positive, and negative mentions posted on social network services (SNS) are used to gauge the atmosphere spread by WOM. Among these candidate variables, only significant variables are selected by genetic algorithm (GA), based on which machine learning algorithms are trained to build forecasting models. The forecasts are combined to improve forecasting performance. Experimental results on the Korean film market show that the forecasting accuracy in early screening periods can be significantly improved by considering competition. In addition, WOM has a stronger influence on total box office forecasting. Considering both competition and WOM improves forecasting performance to a larger extent than when only one of them is considered.

Food marketing with movie character toys: Effects on young children's preferences for unhealthy and healthier fast food meals.

This study aimed to test whether movie tie-in premiums (MTIPs) accompanying unhealthy and healthier fast food meals influenced children's meal preferences and their perceptions of these meals. Nine hundred and four Grade 1 and 2 students (aged 5-9 years) from Melbourne, Australia participated in a between-subjects online experiment comprising the following conditions: (A) unhealthy and healthier meals with no MTIP (control); (B) unhealthy and healthier meals with MTIP (current situation in Australia); (C) unhealthy meals with MTIP and healthier meals without MTIP; (D) unhealthy meals without MTIP and healthier meals with MTIP. The latter condition tested a potential regulatory model restricting premiums to healthier meals. Participants were shown a trailer for a current children's movie followed by an advertisement for an associated McDonald's Happy Meal® (conditions B-D) or an advertisement for a children's leisure activity (condition A). They were then shown four McDonald's Happy Meal® options on screen and asked to select their preferred meal before completing detailed meal ratings. Overall, children showed a preference for unhealthy meals over healthier ones. Children were significantly more likely to select a healthier meal over an unhealthy meal when only the healthier meals were accompanied by a MTIP (condition D) compared to the other three conditions. When healthier meals were accompanied by a MTIP, children reported the meal looked better, would taste better, they would be more likely to ask their parents for this meal, and they would feel happier if their parents bought them this meal, compared to when the healthier meal was not accompanied by a MTIP. Results suggest that modifying the food marketing environment to restrict MTIPs to healthier meals should encourage healthier fast food meal choices by children.

Tobacco Use in Top-Grossing Movies - United States, 2010-2016.

The Surgeon General has concluded that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies and the initiation of smoking among young persons (1). The more youths see smoking on screen, the more likely they are to start smoking; youths who are heavily exposed to onscreen smoking imagery are approximately two to three times as likely to begin smoking as are youths who receive less exposure (1,2). A Healthy People 2020 objective is to reduce the proportion of youths exposed to onscreen tobacco marketing in movies and television (Tobacco Use Objective 18.3) (3). To assess the recent extent of tobacco use imagery in youth-rated movies (G, PG, PG-13*), 2010-2016 data from Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! (TUTD), a project of Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails were analyzed and compared with previous reports.† In 2016, 41% of movies that were among the 10 top-grossing movies in any calendar week included tobacco use, compared with 45% in 2010. Among youth-rated movies, 26% included tobacco use in 2016 (including 35% of PG-13 movies) compared with 31% in 2010 (including 43% of PG-13 movies). The steady decline in the number of tobacco incidents in youth-rated movies from 2005-2010 stopped after 2010. The total number of individual occurrences of tobacco use in a movie (tobacco incidents) in top-grossing movies increased 72%, from 1,824 in 2010 to 3,145 in 2016, with an increase of 43% (from 564 to 809) occurring among PG-13 rated movies. Reducing tobacco use in youth-related movies could help prevent the initiation of tobacco use among young persons.

The Role of Teamwork in the Analysis of Big Data: A Study of Visual Analytics and Box Office Prediction.

Historically, domains such as business intelligence would require a single analyst to engage with data, develop a model, answer operational questions, and predict future behaviors. However, as the problems and domains become more complex, organizations are employing teams of analysts to explore and model data to generate knowledge. Furthermore, given the rapid increase in data collection, organizations are struggling to develop practices for intelligence analysis in the era of big data. Currently, a variety of machine learning and data mining techniques are available to model data and to generate insights and predictions, and developments in the field of visual analytics have focused on how to effectively link data mining algorithms with interactive visuals to enable analysts to explore, understand, and interact with data and data models. Although studies have explored the role of single analysts in the visual analytics pipeline, little work has explored the role of teamwork and visual analytics in the analysis of big data. In this article, we present an experiment integrating statistical models, visual analytics techniques, and user experiments to study the role of teamwork in predictive analytics. We frame our experiment around the analysis of social media data for box office prediction problems and compare the prediction performance of teams, groups, and individuals. Our results indicate that a team's performance is mediated by the team's characteristics such as openness of individual members to others' positions and the type of planning that goes into the team's analysis. These findings have important implications for how organizations should create teams in order to make effective use of information from their analytic models.

Did limits on payments for tobacco placements in US movies affect how movies are made?

OBJECTIVE: To compare how smoking was depicted in Hollywood movies before and after an intervention limiting paid product placement for cigarette brands. DESIGN: Correlational analysis. SETTING/PARTICIPANTS: Top box office hits released in the USA primarily between 1988 and 2011 (n=2134). INTERVENTION: The Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), implemented in 1998. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: This study analyses trends for whether or not movies depicted smoking, and among movies with smoking, counts for character smoking scenes and average smoking scene duration. RESULTS: There was no detectable trend for any measure prior to the MSA. In 1999, 79% of movies contained smoking, and movies with smoking contained 8 scenes of character smoking, with the average duration of a character smoking scene being 81 s. After the MSA, there were significant negative post-MSA changes (p<0.05) for linear trends in proportion of movies with any smoking (which declined to 41% by 2011) and, in movies with smoking, counts of character smoking scenes (which declined to 4 by 2011). Between 1999 and 2000, there was an immediate and dramatic drop in average length of a character smoking scene, which decreased to 19 s, and remained there for the duration of the study. The probability that the drop of -62.5 (95% CI -55.1 to -70.0) seconds was due to chance was p<10-16. CONCLUSIONS: This study's correlational data suggest that restricting payments for tobacco product placement coincided with profound changes in the duration of smoking depictions in movies.

Exploring empirical rank-frequency distributions longitudinally through a simple stochastic process.

The frequent appearance of empirical rank-frequency laws, such as Zipf's law, in a wide range of domains reinforces the importance of understanding and modeling these laws and rank-frequency distributions in general. In this spirit, we utilize a simple stochastic cascade process to simulate several empirical rank-frequency distributions longitudinally. We focus especially on limiting the process's complexity to increase accessibility for non-experts in mathematics. The process provides a good fit for many empirical distributions because the stochastic multiplicative nature of the process leads to an often observed concave rank-frequency distribution (on a log-log scale) and the finiteness of the cascade replicates real-world finite size effects. Furthermore, we show that repeated trials of the process can roughly simulate the longitudinal variation of empirical ranks. However, we find that the empirical variation is often less that the average simulated process variation, likely due to longitudinal dependencies in the empirical datasets. Finally, we discuss the process limitations and practical applications.

[Sexually transmitted diseases and other risks in the adult film industry]. / Les infections sexuellement transmissibles et autres risques dans l'industrie du film adulte.

The adult film industry nowadays represents a legal multi-billion dollar business. The main health risks of adult performers are well known. They mainly include the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV, hepatitis, gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, herpes and papillomavirus. However, despite regular follow-up, the frequency of STD remains significant in this high-risk population since a large part of the industry continues to reject systematic use of condoms. Besides, performers are also exposed to other physical and mental health issues often not known to the public. This article provides a comprehensive review of what is known about STD and other risks among the community of performers in the adult film industry.

Smoking in top-grossing US movies, 2011.

We reviewed the number of incidents of tobacco use (almost exclusively smoking) depicted in movies in the United States in 2011 to compare that with previously reported trends. We counted use or implied use of a tobacco product by an actor in all movies whose box office gross ranked in the top 10 for at least 1 week. Total tobacco incidents per movie rose 7% from 2010 to 2011, ending 5 years of decline; incidents rose 34% per movie rated G, PG, or PG-13 and 7% per R-rated movie. The reversal of progress toward less onscreen smoking in youth-rated movies underscores the need to rate movies with tobacco imagery as R, establishing an industry-wide market incentive to keep youth-marketed movies tobacco-free.