In my last blog, I explained my “Animal Spirit Model,” which I used to consider Paddock the Vegas shooter and the fictitious character Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) in the 1980 horror movie “The Shining.”  In this blog, I will be considering the character of Mrs. Torrance - Jack’s wife (played by Shelley Duvall).  Below I present the computer generated description for Mrs. Torrance followed by her animal spirit on Excel.  The descriptor program responds to the settings on the…

How might a person go about studying something elusive like serial murder or terrorism?  I have no formal exposure in this area.  Much of the technology that I mention in this blog is meant for another purpose.  That other purpose is to study characters in movies, which for me is a great diversion.  In particular, I like to map out where certain characters might be found (or lost - i.e. missing characters): the settings they occupy, their roles, their relationships.  It goes without saying…

I find myself habitually using the term "metrics." When I first started blogging, I normally used this term only in reference to performance metrics. These are not ordinary "readings" but rather criteria-driven amounts - the criteria being performance. Over the years I have come to recognize that data-gathering is normally premised on some type of criteria. When compiling revenue data, it should be noted that analysts are seeking out data pertaining to revenues. The quest is predefined. The…

I sometimes ask myself while musing over the need for a particular service, "I wonder if this is commercially viable?" If the service is routine and the required software is rather inexpensive, perhaps there is little need for a company to outsource. I cannot think of any company that would routinely outsource work normally performed on a spreadsheet. I suspect that decades ago some companies hired specialists to handle spreadsheets; this seems much less likely today in light of the…

In recent blogs, I wrote about using codified narrative as a form of data. I also discussed using attribution models to systematically evaluate codified narrative for ontological constructs: e.g. "child abuse" "physical confinement" "cannibalism." I provide a brief overview of these topics a bit later in the blog. The third important piece to make use of narrative data involves "attribution profiling" in a process that I call "catching scent." Following the odour of data involves…

In this blog, I will be discussing the use of attribution models in relation to codified narrative. For this purpose, I will be referring to the plots of two films: the 1974 horror classic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”; and a 2014 dark comedy called “Tusk.” I have my own codification system called BERLIN: this is short for “Behavioural Event Reconstruction Linguistic Interface for Narratives.” An attribution model supports the inference of meaning from data. Imagine a student one day going…

I have been using the term "mass data assignment" in my blogs. I thought I should offer the community some simulated examples. These are simple simulations: all the data is in one place in an agreeable format. The file contents are meant to be easy to peruse. When I was younger, there was a television series called "Stargate SG-1." I have a number of seasons on DVD. In this series, a special branch of the U.S. Air Force visits offworld sites using stable wormholes: teams enter the wormholes…