text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}

In the very first chapter of the Information Retrieval (IR) book, Manning \emph{et al.}\xspace distinguish \textit{\textbf{information need}} from \textit{\textbf{query}}: ``An information need is the topic about which the user desires to know more, and a query is what the user conveys to the computer in an attempt to communicate the information need''~\cite{manning2008introduction}. A search engine returns candidate documents guided by the query, and the user then judges whether a returned document contains an answer to his/her information need.\footnote{In our discussion, we refer to informational queries, and not navigational or transnational queries. For the latter types of queries, users often have clear expectations on the answers.} We all understand the importance of formulating queries that best represent the information need, and the same applies to \textit{dataset creation} for training models, with an aim to tackle real-world problems.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width = 2.8in]{Figures/overview-crop.pdf}
    \caption{Overview of dataset vs reality}
    \label{fig:overview}
\end{figure}

Illustrated in Figure~\ref{fig:overview}, before we can build a model to tackle a real-world problem, we need to formally formulate the problem to identify its input/output, as well as the key constraints. To develop a model, the next essential step is to create a dataset. A dataset serves as a simulation of the real-world task, with the same (or at least similar) input, and the desired output or ground truth labels. The model trained on this dataset can hopefully be used to solve the real-world problem.

A key consideration here is that the model does not see the real-world problem and cannot literally understand the  definition of the problem. The model is trained to address the \textit{problem that is ``defined'' by the dataset}, through the input and the desired output in the dataset. In this sense, a dataset is  analogous to a ``query'' in information retrieval, and the trained model plays the role of a search engine. Assume we are able to train a nearly perfect model on this dataset. Whether this trained model can effectively address the real-world problem \emph{i.e.,}\xspace answering the ``information need'', depends largely on \textit{to what extend the dataset truly reflects the real-world problem}.

In light of the above discussion, in this paper, we
systematically compare and contrast datasets that are similar in formats (\emph{e.g.,}\xspace input, output) and are created for the same or different purposes, but have been widely used as benchmarks for the same tasks. From the perspective of information need, we hope to provide a different angle in understanding the model performance on these datasets. For instance, on some datasets, well trained models significantly outperform human being on the same task; on some other datasets, models are far behind human's performance. Our findings may also be helpful in guiding new dataset creation.

Among the research topics of IR, we study datasets related to two research problems: question answering (QA), and image captioning (IC).\footnote{A direct application of image captioning in IR is to support image search trough queries in  natural language.} Specifically, for QA, we study the differences between the SQuAD2.0 and Natural Questions (NQ) datasets. For image captioning, we compare four datasets, namely, MS-COCO, Flickr30K, SBU Captions, and Conceptual Captions datasets. Among the six datasets, the questions in SQuAD2.0 and image captions in MS-COCO and Flickr30K are annotated by crowdworkers; the questions in Natural Questions and the captions in SBU Captions, and Conceptual Captions datasets are from real users or content providers.

In our analysis, we compare the creation process of the datasets, and try to align the dataset creation with an information need. We argue that if a model is trained on a dataset, then the model is trained to answer the same information need as the dataset is created for. To show the differences between (similar) datasets that are created for different information needs, we perform analysis at both the word and sentence levels. Specifically, at the word level, we compare type token ratios for lexical richness and diversity. Based on WordNet, we also compare word specificity reflected by the depth of word path in WordNet. The percentages of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb are also reported. We note that the distribution of POS (parts-of-speech) tags could be heavily affected by data collection and filtering process during dataset creation. At the sentence level, we compare the distribution of dependencies between words identified by dependency parsing. We also compare the similarity of the syntactic structure between sentences (\emph{e.g.,}\xspace questions or image captions), computed by tree kernel similarity. Lastly, we  report grammatical and/or spelling errors in sentences with an off-the-shelf language tool.

Our word-level and sentence-level analysis between similar datasets shows that: (i) Text from real users or content providers show higher type token ratio, indicating richer and more diverse lexicon usage. Accordingly, text by crowdworkers are relatively easier to be handled by models, thanks to the less diverse lexicon. Based on the depth of word path in WordNet, words from real users tend to be more specific compared to the crowdsourced words, unless a dataset is purposely collected to cover such objectives during creation. (ii) In terms of sentence structure, crowdsourced texts demonstrate very similar distributions among popular dependency types between words, regardless of the text being for question answering or image captioning. In texts from real users, the popular dependency types are slightly more diverse and complex. Further, annotated texts share similar syntactic structures and the tree kernel similarity between these texts are much larger than that from real users or content providers.

The differences from the word/sentence-level analysis do suggest that deep learning models could capture patterns in crowdsourced texts more easily than texts from real users. This could be a reason why models are able to beat human performance on certain datasets. However, we also argue that the creation of the datasets may or may not share the same information needs as in real-world applications. If their information needs are not well aligned, a significant performance drop may be observed.  For example, crowdsourced questions are conditioned on and restricted to the text that are provided during the annotation process. Therefore, the questions may not reflect the information needs searched by real users. On the other hand, crowdsourced captions well serve as general view of an image from the public, hence the captions are effective in supporting image search by natural language. The captions collected from content providers \emph{e.g.,}\xspace the image creators, complement the images with additional contextual knowledge. Hence it is unlikely a model could generate captions solely based on the visual content of an image to match the captions from content providers.

\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related}

The rapid development of deep learning technologies has led to significant performance improvement on various tasks from vision to language. On a few benchmarks, deep learning solutions outperform human being. Examples include  SQuAD2.0 for reading comprehension\footnote{SQuAD2.0 leaderboard \url{https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/}} task, and MS-COCO dataset for image captioning\footnote{MS-COCO  leaderboard: \url{https://cocodataset.org/\#captions-leaderboard}} task. At the same time, researchers have clearly indicated that models have yet to outperform humans in the task itself~\cite{SenS20what,raji2021ai}.

It is a fact the recent solutions bring in huge performance gain on various tasks. There are also questions about the real progress that has been made in some areas~\cite{Cremonesi_Jannach_2021,raji2021ai}. The authors offer a detailed discussion on the limitations of using influential datasets to benchmark progress in machine learning~\cite{raji2021ai}. Progress made should be justified based on ``how closely our evaluations hit the mark in appropriately characterizing the actual anticipated behaviour of the system in the real world or progress on stated motivations and goals for the field''~\cite{raji2021ai}. In this paper, through comparing dataset creation from the perspective of information need, we aim to give concrete differences between datasets that are structurally similar but are created for answering different information needs. In~\cite{raji2021ai}, the authors also discuss the ineffectiveness of benchmarks that measure the general ability of machine learning models in visual understanding and language understanding.  Furthermore, Miceli \emph{et al.}\xspace conduct analyses from three areas: data quality, data work, and data documentation to illustrate that training models on incomplete or biased datasets may result in discriminatory outputs~\cite{miceli2022studying}.

Torralba and Efros~\cite{torralba2011unbiased} argue that using captured datasets to represent the visual world and focusing solely on beating numbers on benchmarks led researchers to lose sight of their original goal. They analyzed and compared multiple datasets in computer vision, such as ImageNet, MSRC, and PASCAL, and proposed that the datasets have selection bias, capture bias, and negative set bias. These factors cause the model performance dropping significantly when training model on one dataset and testing on another dataset. In addition, the objects in the ImageNet dataset are primarily located in the middle part of an image and are not occluded; hence the pictures do not well represent real-world images~\cite{barbu2019objectnet}. In this paper, our interest is not in image coverage or visual content. Rather, we are interested in the differences in the captions that come from crowdworkers and that come from content providers. The Flickr30K dataset, which is often used for image captioning, is annotated by crowdworkers, where the annotator's stereotypes and unwarranted inferences about the image can make the data biased when annotating~\cite{van2016stereotyping}. In our analysis, we do not consider the bias within annotated captions, but to compare with captions from image uploaders.

The differences between datasets created through crowdscouring and datasets collected from real users or content providers, can also be considered as a kind of ``bias'' to the different information needs.
Researchers in several fields have found that biases in datasets often cause errors or misunderstanding of models' capability.  In visual question answering (VQA) tasks, VQA models often suffer from language prior due to suspicious correlations between answer occurrences and certain patterns of questions~\cite{cadene2019rubi}. For instance, color of a banana is always answered as ``yellow'' regardless of the input image containing a yellow or green banana. In sequential recommendation tasks, a recommender is evaluated using datasets with genuine sequential information. However, Woolridge \emph{et al.}\xspace~\cite{woolridge2021sequence} analyze the timestamp information in commonly used datasets and found that they do not represent a meaningful sequential order, especially the MovieLens dataset. Through word-level and sentence-level analysis, our results may reveal some ``bias'' between datasets that are created through crowdsourcing and content providers.

\section{Question Answering Datasets}
\label{sec:QAanalysis}
We compare two question answering datasets, SQuAD2.0 and Natural Questions from Google. Due to their structure similarity, both datasets have been widely used for evaluating question answering solutions~\cite{SenS20what}.

\subsection{Dataset Creation}
\label{ssec:qaCreation}

\paratitle{SQuAD2.0} dataset is a large-scale question answering dataset created through crowdsourcing, on top of SQuAD1.1~\cite{rajpurkar2016squad,rajpurkar2018know}. In the original paper~\cite{rajpurkar2016squad}, the authors clearly indicate that the formulation of the SQuAD dataset is \textit{reading comprehension} (see Table~1 in~\cite{rajpurkar2016squad}). Briefly, a collection of carefully selected 536 high quality Wikipedia articles are sampled, and their paragraphs are extracted. By reading the extracted paragraphs, crowdworkers are requested to create questions based on the content, and to highlight spans in the passage as  answers. The creation of question-answer pairs was done through the Daemo platform~\cite{gaikwad2015daemo}. The crowdworkers were encouraged to post questions \textit{in their own words} and the copy-paste feature of paragraph was disabled. SQuAD2.0 further includes 50,000 unanswerable questions, and the unanswerable question needs to be relevant to the paragraph content. When marking an unanswerable question, workers can view the corresponding paragraph.

The SQuAD2.0 is widely used to train and evaluate question-answering models. For example, the Retro-Reader model~\cite{zhang2020retrospective} composed of the sketchy reading module and the intensive reading module has an F1 score of 92.978. Google research uses the SQuAD2.0 dataset to verify that ALBERT achieves higher performance in natural language understanding with fewer parameters than BERT-large~\cite{lan2019albert}. At the time of writing, a good number of submissions report better performance than human by either exact match or F1 measure on its leaderboard.

\paratitle{Natural Questions} dataset is large scale training data for  the QA problems. Similar to SQuAD2.0\xspace, the answers of the questions are also from Wikipedia articles. One key difference is that the questions are real anonymized aggregated queries issued to the Google search engine~\cite{kwiatkowski2019natural}. The queries are filtered heuristically to select natural questions. Wikipedia pages that appear in the top 5 search results are given to annotators to select a long answer, a short answer, or to mark null if answers cannot be found. The long answer refers to a bounding box containing the answer on the Wikipedia page, typically a paragraph or table. The short answer is a span or a set of spans, typically entities. Because the questions are real queries,  annotator also needs to judge whether a given question is good or bad; a bad question is incomprehensible and does not express the message clearly.

Long and short answer tasks are evaluated separately. Poolingformer achieves excellent results in both tasks, with F1 scores of 0.798 and 0.616 for long and short tasks, respectively~\cite{zhang2021poolingformer}. Wang \emph{et al.}\xspace propose Reflection Net~\cite{wang2020no} to identify no-answer and wrong-answer situations, and this method achieves the top ranking for short answer task at the time of writing.\footnote{QA Leaderboard \url{https://ai.google.com/research/NaturalQuestions}}

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width = 4in]{Figures/DataCreation.pdf}
    \caption{Information needs and data annotation}
    \label{fig:dsCreation}
\end{figure}
\input{Tables/tbl-QA-Measures}

\paratitle{Comparison.} Despite the structural similarity between the two datasets, \emph{e.g.,}\xspace both contain question-answer pairs, and all answers are from Wikipedia pages, we see very different performances reported on leaderboards (see Table~\ref{tab:QA-measures}). We now compare the source of the questions from the perspective of information need.

\input{Tables/tbl-QuestionExample}

Because the questions in Natural Questions\xspace are real queries, we can in general assume that each query represents an information need \textit{for which a searcher is willing to know more}, see Figure~\ref{fig:dsCreation}. Before issuing this query, the searcher does not know the answer. In this sense, the composition of this query is not restricted by or conditioned on the answer. For reading comprehension task, the annotator is given a piece of text, and based on which to ask questions and to annotate answers. Both questions and answers are annotated. The information need in this case is more align to ``\textit{which question-answer pairs better evaluate another reader's understanding of this piece of text}''. The questions are constrained by the given text passage and/or answers in the passage.

Table~\ref{tab:exampleQuestion} lists sample questions from both datasets that lead to the same short answer \emph{i.e.,}\xspace ``football'' and ``winter'', respectively. The first question for football in SQuAD2.0\xspace well reflects its constrained context \emph{i.e.,}\xspace ``The Times on Monday''. The question is not very meaningful if the context is not given. On the contrast, in Natural Questions\xspace, football could be an answer for a ``where'' question. For the ``winter'' answer, questions in SQuAD2.0\xspace mostly indicate ``what season'' while the questions in Natural Questions\xspace mostly use ``when'' as the question issuer may not know whether the answer is a season or a month or even a specific date. We argue that questions reflect information needs, and differences in information needs in the two datasets lead to differences in the questions. As the result, the models developed on these two datasets are unlikely to fit into same real-world application scenarios.

Next, we quantify the differences between questions in the two datasets through word-level and sentence-level analysis. In our analysis, we consider all the questions in both train and development, for both datasets.

\subsection{Word-Level Analysis}
\label{ssec:qaWord}

\input{Tables/tbl-QA-Comparison}
Considering questions in both train and development sets,
the two datasets SQuAD2.0\xspace and Natural Questions\xspace contain 142,192 and 315,203 questions respectively, reported in Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison}.

The average length of the questions (in the number of tokens by SpaCy) is 11.257 and 9.370, respectively. Figure~\ref{fig:QA-lengthdis} plots the distribution of question lengths of the two datasets.  Nearly half of questions in Natural Questions\xspace contain 8 words, and the distribution of question length in SQuAD2.0\xspace is relatively more smooth. As the length of the question is directly affected by the sampling process, we provide this set of results for compulsiveness only. Next, we compare the questions in terms of type token ratio, word type, and word specificity.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width = 3in]{Figures/QA-Length.pdf}
    \caption{Question length distribution in the two datasets.}
    \label{fig:QA-lengthdis}
\end{figure}

\subsubsection{Type Token Ratio}
TTR is a commonly used  measure for lexical density and richness~\cite{richards1987type}. We use the following formula to compute TTR where the number of token type is the number of unique tokens.
$$ TTR = \frac{\#token~types}{\#tokens} \times 100$$

According to Heaps' law, there is a nonlinear relationship between token type and tokens~\cite{manning2008introduction}. Therefore, it is not appropriate to directly compare the TTR of the two datasets, due to their different sizes. Instead, we calculate the Standard Type Token Ratio - STTR~\cite{richards1987type}.  The basic idea is to divide a corpus into multiple chunks of equal size, calculate TTR values of each chunk respectively, and then average these TTR values to obtain its STTR value. If the number of tokens contained in a chunk is fewer than the predefined number, the chunk is discarded. We use SpaCy to get tokens, and calculate the TTR for every 100,000 tokens on each dataset.

The STTR  of the Natural Questions  is 11.749, while the value of the SQuAD2.0 dataset is 8.860 (see Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison}). The larger STTR suggests that lexical density and richness of real questions raised by users is much higher than that created by annotators. In general, high lexical diversity also makes a dataset more challenging.

\subsubsection{Word Type}

In this comparison, we mainly focus on nouns and verbs in the datasets' questions. We use SpaCy to count the number of nouns and verbs in each dataset, and report their numbers in Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison}. Considering that nouns and verbs have many different forms, we also counted the number of stems derived by NLTK's implementation of Porter Stemmer, indicated with ``(stem)'' in Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison}.

Natural Questions has far more nouns and verbs than that in SQuAD2.0, with or without stemming. The more nouns and verbs could be attributed to the larger number of questions in Natural Questions\xspace, and more importantly the higher type token ratio.

To observe the usage of words with different parts of speech in the two datasets, we respond by calculating their percentages. Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison} lists the percentages of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the two datasets. While the distribution is roughly similar in both datasets, especially verb and adjective. The proportion of nouns and adverbs in Natural Questions is higher than in the SQuAD2.0 dataset. Specifically, nouns occupy 25.3\% in Natural Questions\xspace, which is 2.6 point higher than SQuAD2.0.

\subsubsection{Word Specificity}
So far, our analysis of the questions shows that Natural Questions\xspace has a higher type token ratio and higher percentage of nouns, suggesting Natural Questions\xspace to be more diverse and challenging. Next, we use WordNet~\cite{miller1995wordnet} to measure word specificity.

WordNet is a large lexical database of English where words are organized by their meanings~\cite{miller1995wordnet}. A few relations are defined in WordNet between words or more specifically synsets.  In our analysis, we use the super-subordinate relation \emph{i.e.,}\xspace hypernymy, to measure the word specificity. Hypernymy is a relation linking more general synsets to specific synsets. Specifically, we use the \textsf{hypernym\_paths()} function in WordNet library to calculate the average path length of nouns that appear in the questions from each dataset.

The mean depth values of nouns with and without stemming are listed in Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison}. Note that the average depth of nouns in Natural Questions dataset is deeper than that in SQuAD2.0 dataset. This result suggests that the nouns used in the questions asked by real users are more specific than those annotated by annotators. We believe this result is also consistent with the high diversity reflected by type token ratio.

\subsection{Sentence-Level Analysis}
\label{sssec:QAsentenceDiversity}
We compare the questions between the two datasets from the following perspectives: dependency type, tree kernel similarity, and grammar errors.

\subsubsection{Dependency Type}
Dependency parsing reveals the syntactic structure of a sentence (a question in our setting) by analyzing the interdependence between words. We use SpaCy to obtain the dependencies of questions.

From the results, both the SQuAD2.0 and Natural Questions datasets contain all 45 dependency types collectively, in their questions. Specifically,  SQuAD2.0 has 1,600,676 dependencies, and Natural Questions has 2,953,389 dependencies. Table~\ref{tab:dependency} lists the top ten dependency types by percentage in the two datasets. The dependencies of both databases show similar distributions. However, Natural Questions\xspace has a higher percentage of `prep', `det', `pobj', `nsubj', `compound' relations.

\input{Tables/tbl-dependency}

\subsubsection{Tree Kernel Similarity}
In this analysis, we  use tree kernel similarity to quantify structure similarity between questions in each dataset~\cite{collins2002new}. The central idea of tree kernel is to count the number of common subtrees between two constituency parse trees. Figure~\ref{fig:tk} gives an illustration with two simple parse trees. Each parse tree has 6 subtrees and the pair has 3 common subtrees. The tree kernel similarity is the ratio between the number of common subtrees and the normalized number of subtrees in the pair.

We use StanfordCoreNLP to obtain constituency parse trees of questions. Then, we randomly select 10,000 parse trees and use the tree kernel to calculate their similarity. We compute two sets of values with and without the leaf-level tokens. The version with leaf-level token means that we consider the complete parse tree of a sentence. The version without leaf-level tokens is to focus solely on the sentence structure without considering the actual words, \emph{i.e.,}\xspace the POS tags are the leaf-level nodes in a parse tree instead of the words. The average tree kernel similarity of the questions (with leaf-level token) in SQuAD2.0 is 0.088, while that of the Natural Questions dataset is 0.057. This reflects that when crowdworkers annotate questions, they are more inclined to use similar sentence patterns, leading to similar question structures in the dataset. The similarities without considering leaf-level tokens show a similar trend with 0.267 vs 0.241. In short, the questions raised by search engine users are more diverse in terms of syntax structure.

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width =4in]{Figures/treeKernel-crop.pdf}
    \caption{Illustration of tree kernel similarity between two constituency parse trees}
    \label{fig:tk}
\end{figure}

\subsubsection{Grammar Accuracy}

Lastly, we use LanguageTool to detect grammatical errors in questions from both datasets. LanguageTool is an open-source grammar tool that serves OpenOffice's spell checker~\cite{naber2003rule}. It supports grammar and style suggestions in more than 20 languages and comprehensively detects grammar and spelling errors.

Because the two datasets are formatted differently, we filter out errors related to white space and upper/lowercase. As reported in Table~\ref{tab:QA-comparison}, the number of error types in Natural Questions is significantly higher than that in SQuAD2.0, as expected. Due to the different sizes of the two databases, we calculate the average number of errors per question for fair comparison. The average number of errors per question in SQuAD2.0 is 0.043, and in Natural Questions is 0.079. In short, questions searched by users on search engines contain more grammar and/or spelling errors than questions annotated by annotators.

\input{Tables/tbl-CaptionExample}
\input{Tables/tbl-IC-Measures}

\section{Image Captioning Datasets}
\label{sec:IC-datasets}
For image captioning datasets analysis, we consider MS-COCO, Flickr30K, SBU Captions, and Conceptual Captions datasets. These datasets are not created for the same purpose but have all been used for image captioning tasks.  Specifically, image captions in MS-COCO and Flickr30K are by crowdworkers, and captions in the latter two datasets are collected together with the image, or simply image creators.

\subsection{Dataset Creation}
\label{ssec:icdatasets}
The basic statistics of the dataset regarding the number of images and captions are listed in Table~\ref{tab:IC-comparison}.

\paratitle{MS-COCO} (Microsoft Common Objects in COntext) is a large scale image dataset that can be used for image classification, object segmentation, recognition in context, and image captioning~\cite{lin2014microsoft}.\footnote{We used the 2017 version from \url{https://cocodataset.org/\#download}} Here, we are only interested in the image captions~\cite{Chen2015MicrosoftCC} which are collected through crowdsourcing. The authors of the COCO image collection carefully selected entry-level categories, \emph{i.e.,}\xspace category labels that people often use to describe objects, and then searched images from Flickr using a combination of object categories. To label image with captions, crowdworkers were informed to describe all the important parts of the scene, and not to describe unimportant details or things that might have happened in the future or past. Each image contains about five captions. MS-COCO establishes a leaderboard for captioning task. The Oscar (Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training) method~\cite{li2020oscar} is currently ranked first with a BLUE-4 value of 41.7.

\paratitle{Flickr30K} dataset was created for the purpose of constructing a large scale visual denotation graph with images of everyday activities~\cite{young2014image}. Each image in this dataset has five captions from five independent crowdworkers ``who are not familiar with the specific entities and circumstances depicted''~\cite{young2014image}. Flickr30K has been used to evaluate and compare image-captioning models~\cite{you2016image}. Captions in other languages have been extended from this dataset~\cite{elliott2016multi30k,peng2016generating}.

\paratitle{SBU Captions} dataset contains 1 million images with relevant captions from Flickr~\cite{ordonez2011im2text}. Captions are from image uploaders.  During data collection, images are filtered to ensure that their text is visually descriptive. Furthermore, the text needs to contain at least one preposition for the spatial relationship of the objects in the image. The SBU Captions dataset was initially used in retrieval tasks~\cite{hodosh2013framing} and later used for image caption generation~\cite{kiros2014unifying}.

\paratitle{Conceptual Captions} dataset contains about 3.3M image and description pairs~\cite{sharma2018conceptual}. Its images and original descriptions were obtained from Web pages. Image and caption pairs were extracted, filtered, and transformed through an automatic pipeline~\cite{chambers2010flumejava}. The image descriptions are from the Alt-text elements in HTML, with careful filtering. Google AI provides a leaderboard for the image captioning task on Conceptual Captions.\footnote{Conceptual Captions \url{https://ai.google.com/research/ConceptualCaptions/}}

\paratitle{Comparison.} All the four datasets contain image-caption pairs and all have been used to develop and evaluate image caption generation. Images in all datasets are from public domain; specifically, images in Conceptual Captions are from web pages and images in other three datasets are from Flickr. The captions are from two different sources: through crowdsourcing in MS-COCO and Flickr30K, by content providers in SBU Captions and Conceptual Captions. Although we do not find a paper comparing the four datasets in one set of experiments, the results reported in different papers with the same measures in Table~\ref{tab:IC-measures} clearly indicate that SBU Captions and Conceptual Captions are more challenging datasets.

Table~\ref{tab:CaptionExample} lists example captions from the four datasets that contain a keyword ``football''. As expected, crowdworkers aim to objectively describe an image, similar to ``translating'' an image into a piece of text. Based on the description, if we have seen similar scene before, we are able to visualize the picture in our mind. The \textit{information need} during annotation process could be ``\textit{how someone else would describe this image}''. The captions generated in this way do not provide additional information on top of the given picture, if we ignore the modality difference. In this sense, this information need is a good fit for a typical ``image search by natural language'' task.

Captions by content providers, \emph{e.g.,}\xspace SBU and Conceptual captions, provide additional context to an image. Visual content and its accompanying caption complements each other and together tell the full story about the scene or event. For the same reason, captions cannot be fully discovered solely from the visual content of the image. As the result, image captioning models trained on such a dataset is less likely to give very meaningful results, if evaluated against the captions from content providers. As both the images and the captions are from content providers, there is no ``information need'' between an image and its caption in this setting.

\input{Tables/tbl-IC-Comparison}

\subsection{Word-Level Analysis}
\label{ssec:ic-word}

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width =3in]{Figures/IC-Length.pdf}
    \caption{Caption length distribution in four datasets}
    \label{fig:IC-lengthdis}
\end{figure}

Similarly to the QA datasets, in this section, we compare the four image captioning datasets at word level. In terms of caption length distribution, the captions in the four datasets range from 10.3 words on average in Conceptual Captions to 15.4 words in SBU Captions. Again, because the caption lengths are heavily affected by data filtering and instructions to crowdworkers, we show the length distributions in Figure~\ref{fig:IC-lengthdis} for comprehensiveness purpose.

The standard type token ratios of MS-COCO, Flickr30K, SBU Captions, and Conceptual Captions datasets are 3.818, 5, 11.421, and 8.575 respectively, listed in Table~\ref{tab:IC-comparison}. Clearly captions collected from content providers contain richer and more diverse lexicon. In particular, SBU Captions has comparable STTR with Natural Questions, and both their texts are from real users. The high STTR in SBU Captions is also reflected from the extremely high number of nouns and verbs, compared to the other three dataset. Note that, the number of captions in SBU Captions datasets is not the largest (see Table~\ref{tab:IC-comparison}). In our experiments, we do note that SBU Captions contain more noisy words and SpaCy gives error POS tags, \emph{e.g.,}\xspace 19'inch is labeled as verb. Although it is extremely hard for a tool to produce perfect POS tags, such errors also reflect the diverse lexicon in captions collected from content providers.

On the distribution of different types of words \emph{e.g.,}\xspace noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, the image captioning datasets tend to have high proportion of nouns compared to the two question answering datasets. In particular, MS-COCO dataset has 32.2\% nouns, partially due to the way that the images were collected, \emph{i.e.,}\xspace through searching Flickr by using category labels as keywords. The percentage of nouns in SBU Captions is the lowest, as many captions by content providers provide additional context of an image rather than simply describing the visual content in the image, see Table~\ref{tab:CaptionExample}.

With the highest STTR and the largest number of nouns, it is expected that the words in SBU Captions are more specific, with the deepest word path by WordNet. MS-COCO has a relatively deep word path as well. One possible reason is that the images are collected to cover concrete objects commonly seen in our daily life.

\subsection{Sentence-Level Analysis}
\label{sssec:sentenceDiversity}

We obtained 6,995,575, 2,144,562, 15,387,646, 34,405,270 dependencies by SpaCy from MS-COCO, Flick30K, SBU Captions, and Conceptual Captions, respectively. The top 10 types of relations are listed in Table~\ref{tab:dependency}. It is interesting to observe that the order and proportion of the top ten dependencies of the MS-COCO dataset and the Flick30K dataset are very similar. In particular, `acl' - clausal modifier of noun, only appears in the crowdsourced captions among the top ten relations. SBU Captions dataset contains some more complex relationships, such as `npadvmod' – noun phrase as adverbial modifier, and `nummod' – numeric modifier.

In fact, all crowdsourced texts share similar popular dependencies regardless of questions or image captions (top half of Table~\ref{tab:dependency}). `det', `prep', `punct' and `pobj' are always among the top four relations in the three crowdsourced datasets, with similar ranking. While `det' is one of the most common relations, it does not rank in the top position in data collected from content providers. In general, among data from content providers, `compound' has a relative higher ranking than that in crowdsourced datasets, suggesting the texts are relatively more complex.

MS-COCO and Flickr30K share similar tree kernel similarity of 0.102 and 0.113 respectively. Both similarity values are much larger that that in SBU Captions and Conceptual Captions for 0.06 and 0.051 respectively. Again, tree kernel similarity measures similarity between sentence syntactic structure in the form of a parse tree. If not considering tokens in tree kernel similarity computation, the similarities from the two crowdsourced datasets remain much larger than the two datasets where data are collected from content providers. In short, captions written by content providers are richer in terms of sentence structure.

We also applied the same LanguageTool on the four image captioning datasets to detect grammar and spelling errors. However, due to differences in dataset filtering, the errors detected do not show a clear pattern in these experiments. The errors per caption is reported in Table~\ref{tab:IC-comparison} last row, where errors related to upper/lower cases and white spaces are not counted. If considering such errors, then the average number of errors per caption in SBU Captions and Conceptual Captions datasets are significantly higher.

\section{Discussion}
\label{sec:discuss}

Nowadays, leaderboards from large scale datasets have attracted significant attention from many researchers. While performance gains on leaderboards is a good way to show progress made on a dataset, whether the gain is from the capability of a model in addressing a similar real-world task or the gain is from better fitting the particular dataset is not clear. In this paper, we compare datasets based on the information needs to which each dataset was designed to answer. We show that, even if two datasets demonstrate very similar structure similarity, and a model can be easily adapted from one dataset to another, the two datasets may represent two completely different kinds of real-world problems. Therefore, the trained models are meant to answer different information needs. As authors indicated in their dataset paper, SQuAD was designed for reading comprehension~\cite{rajpurkar2016squad} and Natural Questions dataset is to provide a large scale QA dataset~\cite{kwiatkowski2019natural}. The datasets were created to answering two completely different information needs. We argue that the models trained on these dataset means to answer their corresponding information needs as well.

Our detailed analysis of the datasets covers both word-level diversity and sentence-level diversity among them. Specifically, the standard type token ratio values of the datasets that are annotated by  crowdworkers are much lower than those of the datasets that are collected from real setting. Therefore, a trained model has a higher chance to better fitting a crowdsourced dataset. At  sentence level, the similarity of sentence structure among annotated datasets is higher than sentences collected from real users. Moreover, for image captions from content providers, they cover additional context information about the image which is not observable from the image's visual content. Again, the similar sentence structure and similar dependency types make annotated dataset relatively easier to model. The differences between datasets revealed in our analysis partially explain the high and low performances obtained on different datasets \emph{e.g.,}\xspace from their leaderboards. On the other hand, if two datasets are not created for answering the same information need, then the values on leaderboards are not comparable as the models are trained to tackle different real-world problems.

Note that our analysis and discussion is not to discourage dataset creation through crowdsourcing. For instance, the objective  descriptions in MS-COCO and Flickr30K effectively enable natural language search on images. Other than the image creator,  viewers of an image typically share similar objective view of its visual content. In this case, the crowdsourced captions well reflect the real-world problem setting through the matching information need. Whether the images in the dataset sufficiently represent the images we see in the real world is a separate issue from our discussion.

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclude}
Recent years have witnessed a trend in developing datasets to enable many more interesting studies on various problems. This is evidenced by the resource papers in SIGIR, and the datasets and benchmark track in NeurIPS conferences. At the same time, there is also a trend to reconsider model performance, as models outperform human benchmarks on datasets for various tasks. In this paper, we discuss dataset vs reality from the perspective of information need. We support our discussion with word-level and sentence-level analysis of datasets that are similar in format and have been used for similar tasks. We believe that all datasets are created as the result of great effort from researchers, and we are not coming to a conclusion on which dataset should or should not be used. We are also not meant to discourage dataset creation through crowdsourcing. We hope that our analysis shed a light on how to better interpret  model performances on datasets, particularly from the perspective of to what extent the information need to be answered by a dataset matches the information need in a real-world application. In other words, before using a dataset in experiments, we hope that researchers could consider which real-world problem the dataset truly reflects, from the perspective of information need.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Michigan State (7-5) vs. Oregon (8-4), Monday, 3 p.m. EST (Fox).
Both teams were ranked in the top 15 of the AP Top 25 earlier this season and had much higher aspirations than the Redbox Bowl. But ending the season with a win against an opponent with pedigree would provide a silver lining to an otherwise disappointing campaign.
Michigan State (7-5, Big Ten) vs. Oregon (8-4, Pac-12), Dec. 31, 3 p.m. EST.
Michigan State: QB Brian Lewerke threw for 1,868 yards and eight TDs but with 10 interceptions this season and was sidelined with a shoulder injury late in the year. But there is plenty of time for him to get healthy. DE Kenny Willekes is the Big Ten defensive lineman of the year.
ROSEMONT, Ill. (AP) — Northwestern's Pat Fitzgerald is the unanimous choice for Big Ten coach of the year.
East Lansing — Kenny Willekes knows a little something about coming out of nowhere.
The former walk-on went from an unknown defensive end who was starting to turn heads last spring to starting 12 games as a sophomore in 2017 and earning third-team All-Big Ten honors while recording 14.5 tackles for loss, including seven sacks.
So, when Willekes brings up a name that hasn't been talked about much, it's worth paying attention.
Most valuable player, offense: There are a few directions to go here as it's hard to overlook the impressive stretch QB Brian Lewerke had in the middle of Big Ten play and the receivers, as a whole, played a big role in MSU's success. But the choice her is junior WR Felton Davis. He led the team with 51 catches for 658 yards and eight touchdowns, which ranked third in the Big Ten. He proved to be Lewerke's favorite target in the red zone and had three two-touchdown games while ranking sixth in the Big Ten in receptions per game (4.3).
EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Nobody has to tell Michigan State's Kenny Willekes how poor his team's pass rush was last year.
After the Spartans had four sacks against Western Michigan last weekend — bringing their season total to five — the sophomore defensive end admitted he understood the significance of stats like that.
"I do. I do. That's been a big focal point for us this offseason," Willekes said. "Having five already, two games in, is huge."


text:
Live Fjernsyn > Tv-kanaler > Sierra Leone > SLBC
SLBC Live streaming
SLBC 3.7/5 - 7 stemmer
Om SLBC
Beliggenhed: Sierra Leone
SLBC på sociale netværk:
The Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) is the national radio and television broadcaster in Sierra Leone. It is owned by the government of Sierra Leone and is a branch of the Sierra Leone Ministry of Information and Communications. It is theoretically regulated by the Independent Media Commission (IMC). The SLBC primarily broadcasts the national television and regional radio service from its headquarters in the New England neighborhood of Freetown. Regional stations provide FM radio services in Bo, Kenema, Kailahun, Makeni, Magburaka and Koidu.
AYV Empire
Sierra Leone / Offentlig Tv
AYV Media Empire is Sierra Leone's foremost media house dealing in the business of media broadcasting in Radio, TV,...
KTV Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone / Nyheder Tv
KTV Sierra Leone is an online media platform with a sole purpose of breaking news and rumours that covers African...
The Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) is the national radio and television broadcaster in Sierra Leone. It...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Spring is in the air! The 2019 Faith Renewal Programme at Knock Shrine begins in February and offers a variety of events based on music, family, parish enrichment and spiritual retreats.
These events are aimed at adults and include a series of one-day retreats and workshops to encourage prayer, deepening of faith and spiritual rejuvenation.


text:
This Year Was the Turning Point for Intelligent Television
By Sarah Fonder
Despite the oft-repeated assertion that this is the Golden Age of Television, TV has typically not been too kind to smart, well-written shows. When a network puts an underdog series like Bunheads or Happy Endings on the cutting board, it's hard not to go from panic to complete resignation. Too many of us have had to get used to the phrase "brilliant but cancelled," and for a long time it's looked like daring television just isn't all that lucrative. Thankfully, recent reports prove this might finally be changing: believe it or not, critical darlings are actually making money.
The past few weeks have seen the once underrated Breaking Bad move from cult hit to definite success, and previously hesitant advertisers are taking notice in a big way. After a record-breaking season premiere, The New York Times reported that ad space in the final episodes of Breaking Bad is so highly coveted that a 30-second commercial is worth $300,000. These kinds of high-end ad fees are incredibly rare for cable, usually reserved for network television shows with way larger audiences (ad space for juggernauts like American Idol runs around $500,000). One could chalk this success up to the fast-paced narrative that made shows like Lost into huge hits, but the slow-burning Mad Men also broke viewership records for AMC in its season six finale.
And AMC itself has proved to be worth a lot for a channel that prides itself as a thinking person's network. Though its shows don't have the massive ratings of Dancing with the Stars or NCIS, AMC's content has done so well that they've gradually been able to charge cable companies more money to host it. And those companies are paying, whether they like it or not: last year, Dish Network almost dropped AMC after a rise in prices, but complaining subscribers proved the channel was worth the investment. AMC's dedication to smart TV has paid off: Mad Men and Breaking Bad sweep the Emmys year after year, and The Walking Dead was the tenth most popular show of the 2012-13 season.
The other big success story is Netflix, which saw more growth than ever after the decision to add good original programming. The company earned $1 billion in just the first quarter of this year, and the Emmy-nominated House of Cards is a big part of why. After its release, it quickly became Netflix's most popular show, drew huge amounts of viewers, and kept them there. "Some investors worried that the House of Cards fans would take advantage of our free trial, watch the show, and then cancel," Netflix told TechCrunch. "However, there was very little free-trial gaming — less than 8,000 people did this — out of millions of free trials in the quarter." This doesn't even include the runaway success of Orange Is the New Black, though Netflix hasn't released information on how it has affected the network. The show has, however, helped double TV revenue for its production company Lionsgate, along with sister shows Mad Men and Nashville.
There are a few possible explanations for why good TV is suddenly showing an increase in financial viability, and one of which could be its accessibility. Streaming content on Netflix, Hulu, and VOD means viewers don't have to leave home for a good story, and the rise of binge-watching proves audiences are eating it up. A recent article from Film School Rejects theorizes that streaming content might be one of the reasons big-budget blockbusters haven't done so well this summer. Landon Black called Orange Is the New Black "perhaps the most talked-about media object this summer…[and] while I have no way to prove that more people would have seen 2 Guns had we not been watching the former stars of American Pie and That '70s Show on streaming 'television,' it certainly seems that TV in its myriad forms has regained its rightful spot in offering a truly competitive screen like it did in the 1950s."
Another reason could be that shows like Breaking Bad are reaching some important, occasionally hard-to-reach demographics. According to the New York Times, "[the show's] viewership in the 18- to 49-year-old audience bracket…beat CBS, NBC, and ABC combined" for its season premiere. Advertisers are also attracted to Breaking Bad's success with male viewers, who account for 60 percent of the show's total audience. A large concentration of male viewers has also attracted advertisers to shows on AMC's competitor FX, a network that's also earned a reputation for strong, unique programming. "FX's playbook consists of luring creative people with the promise of artistic freedom rather than a financial windfall," the Times said in a 2012 write-up. That creative promise inspired Louis C.K. to turn down a seven-figure deal for a network TV show, and that seemingly big risk helped turn him into a household name.
After years of big risks and little financial payoff, the buzz of critical hits is now attracting both viewers and advertisers. The cultural worth of shows like Breaking Bad is probably already evident to most Flavorwire readers, but it would be pretentious and reductive to say that this kind of TV is valuable merely because of its critical acclaim. However, praise doesn't come from nothing, and thankfully, so many of these surprise hits are beloved because they tell compelling, important stories. Shows like Mad Men ask us to look at our nation's legacy, while Breaking Bad, Homeland, and Orange Is the New Black confront us with its rough present. Because of their subject matter, shows like these are relevant in ways American Idol or NCIS never can be, and fortunately for TV lovers, they're attracting bigger audiences than ever before. After years of talk, it looks like fans of the Golden Age of Television can finally put their money where their mouths are.


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Marx's Das Kapital
A Biography: Books That Changed the World
By: Francis Wheen
4 out of 5 stars 3.8 (60 ratings)
Capital: Volume 1
A Critique of Political Economy
By: Karl Marx, Samuel Moore - translation, Edward Aveling - translation
Narrated by: Derek Le Page
It can be said of very few books that the world was changed as a result of its publication - but this is certainly the case of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818-1883). Volume 1 appeared (in German) in 1867, and the two subsequent volumes appeared at later dates after the author's death - completed from extensive notes left by Marx himself.
Classic Economics Text - A Good Listen
By Earth Lover on 04-01-18
By: Karl Marx
Narrated by: Greg Wagland
'It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings'. The Communist Manifesto is, perhaps surprisingly, a most engaging and accessible work, containing even the odd shaft of humour in this translation by Samuel Moore for the 1888 English edition.
My advice, set speed to 1.5
By Lily Milam on 04-05-17
Following Marx's death in 1883, Engels was able to step into the breach and, drawing on Marx's extensive notes and writings, complete volume 2 of Capital, leading to its publication in 1885. Here, Marx turns his attention to the money owner, the money lender, the wholesale merchant, the trader and the entrepreneur or 'functioning capitalist.'
The Chapo Guide to Revolution
A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason
By: Chapo Trap House
Narrated by: Felix Biederman, Virgil Texas, Brendan James, and others
In a manifesto that renders all previous attempts at political satire obsolete, The Chapo Guide to Revolution shows you that you don't have to side with either the pear-shaped vampires of the right or the craven, lanyard-wearing wonks of contemporary liberalism. These self-described "assholes from the Internet" offer a fully ironic ideology for all who feel politically hopeless and prefer broadsides and tirades to reasoned debate.
my beautiful boy virgil has a voice like an angel.
By Dale on 08-22-18
The Conquest of Bread
By: Pyotr Kropotkin
Narrated by: Peter Kenny
In The Conquest of Bread, first published in 1892, Kropotkin set out his ideas on how his heightened idealism could work. It was all the more extraordinary because he was born into an aristocratic land-owning family - with some 1,200 male serfs - though from his student years his liberal views and his fixation on the need for social change saw him take a revolutionary path. This led rapidly to decades of exile. It is a passionate, even a fierce polemic for dramatic social change.
"All is for All"
By Gabriel on 01-02-19
By: David Ramsay Steele
Narrated by: Louis Rukeyser
In his monumental work, Das Kapital, Karl Marx (1818-1883) tried to show that capitalism was both inefficient and immoral. His key to explaining capitalism is his labor theory of value, which he developed from ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
Should Rename As Das Kapital Cliffnotes Unabridged
By Jeff on 01-31-12
The Wealth of Nations
By: Adam Smith
Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy, The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.
Amazingly accessible
By Monte on 03-12-12
Trump Under Fire
By: Michael Wolff
Narrated by: Holter Graham
With Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff defined the first phase of the Trump administration; now, in Siege, he has written an equally essential and explosive book about a presidency that is under fire from almost every side. A stunningly fresh narrative that begins just as Trump's second year as president is getting underway and ends with the delivery of the Mueller Report, Siege reveals an administration that is perpetually beleaguered by investigations and a president who is increasingly volatile, erratic, and exposed.
Read the Mueller Report first...
By Carolyn Talbot on 06-08-19
Why Marx Was Right
By: Terry Eagleton
Narrated by: Roger Clark
In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking 10 of the most common objections to Marxism - that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on - he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are.
A Brilliant Narrator
By Stephen on 08-11-18
On Anarchism
By: Noam Chomsky, Nathan Schneider (introduction)
Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
On Anarchism provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
By Jacob King on 06-18-14
Socialism...Seriously
A Brief Guide to Human Liberation
By: Danny Katch
Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg
Danny Katch brings together the two great Marxist traditions of Karl and Groucho to provide an entertaining and insightful introduction to what the socialist tradition has to say about democracy, economics, and the potential of human beings to be something more than bomb-dropping, planet-destroying, racist fools.
Seriously Entertaining and Seriously Sincere
By Susie on 04-20-16
Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie
Narrated by: Johannes Steck, Gert Heidenreich
Die Party ist vorbei. Der Crash ist da. Aus der Bankenkrise 2008 wurde über Nacht eine Krise der Weltwirtschaft. Da ist guter Rat teuer, und man beginnt sich an die Spekulationsblasen und Krisen der Vergangenheit zu erinnern. Kapitalismuskritik ist wieder in Mode, bleibt aber meist an der Oberfläche. Doch wie keinem anderen Ökonomen ist es vor 150 Jahren Karl Marx gelungen, die aberwitzigen Bewegungen des Kapitals und seinen Hang zur Selbstzerstörung zu beleuchten.
Good abridged German reading.
By Leonardo DaWagner on 05-13-18
Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
By: Corey Robin
In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality - while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses.
Interesting and informative book, but narrators voice is difficult to listen to
By Peter Shrosbree on 12-13-18
James Bond, Book 1
By: Ian Fleming
Narrated by: Dan Stevens
For James Bond and the British Secret Service, the stakes couldn't be higher. 007's mission is to neutralize the Russian operative Le Chiffre by ruining him at the baccarat table, forcing his Soviet masters to "retire" him. When Le Chiffre hits a losing streak, Bond discovers his luck is in - that is, until he meets Vesper Lynd, a glamorous agent who might yet prove to be his downfall. This audiobook includes an exclusive bonus interview with Dan Stevens.
Stevens Makes This a much Better Listen
By TDH on 02-08-15
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
By: John Maynard Keynes
Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
First published in 1936, Keynes' ideas had evolved during the difficulties following World War 1 in Europe, and the US crash and the Depression of the 1920s-'30s and the misery of mass unemployment. He deplored the situation where a few individuals or companies stored massive wealth while vast numbers experienced poverty and insecurity (his alarm bells ring today!) and sought to promote initiatives where governments could intervene with social projects to keep money fluctuating.
Get the paperback
By Brendan Clune on 02-27-19
By: Albert Camus
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of the most widely read novels in the world, with millions of copies sold. It stands as perhaps the greatest existentialist tale ever conceived, and is certainly one of the most important and influential books ever produced. Now, for the first time, this revered masterpiece is available as an unabridged audio production.
Is amorality bad?
By Rolando on 03-10-14
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
A History of Nazi Germany
By: William L. Shirer
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer's monumental study of Hitler's German empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of the 20th century's blackest hours. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of a vital and enduring classic.
Held my interest for 57 hours and 13 minutes
By Jonnie on 11-08-10
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
By: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall - translation
Narrated by: Nigel Carrington
This series of 28 lectures was given by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, during the First World War and first published in English in 1920. The purpose of this general introduction was to present his work and ideas - as they had matured at that point - to a general public; and even though there was to be considerable development and change over the ensuing years, these talks still offer a valuable and remarkably approachable entry point to his revolutionary concepts.
Simply Spectacular
By Thomas on 09-05-16
In this brilliant book, Francis Wheen, the author of the most successful biography of Karl Marx, tells the story of Das Kapital and Marx's 20-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867 to muted praise. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries, from George Bernard Shaw to V. I. Lenin, changing the direction of 20th-century history.
Wheen shows that, far from being a dry economic treatise, Das Kapital is like a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created: capitalism. Furthermore, Wheen argues, as long as capitalism endures, Das Kapital demands to be read and understood.
©2006 Francis Wheen (P)2007 Tantor
misleading book title
it's not the actual book of Das Kapital, was a total waste of money, hope no one else will fall for it again
Could've been better....
Marx is a genius and it's a shame his brilliant ideas never got into the hands of the right people or culture for that matter. However, this particular audio book is a tad on the boring side and the narration certainly didn't help any.
Informing read but difficult to understand
it was a very eye opening book but it's language is sometimes too difficult to understand and it's doesn't do a great work of explaining Das Kapital but more about explaining it's writer


text:
Ontario East is named in the TOP TEN of 2018 Canada's Best Locations for Site Selectors
Site Selection Names Top Territories for Infrastructure; Canada's Best Locations and 2018's Top U.S. Utilities in Economic Development
Atlanta, September 4, 2018: Canada, the U.S. and Australia lead the way globally, and Texas, Louisiana and Nebraska lead the U.S. states when it comes to the powerful blend of infrastructure project investment and corporate facility investment over the past several years. These are among the locations ranked in the inaugural Global Groundwork Index, published in the September 2018 issue of Site Selection magazine. (See full lists below.) The index is a blend of proprietary data from Conway Analytics' Conway Projects Database and an equally robust database from global infrastructure advisory and events firm CG/LA.
The Global Groundwork Index identifies where billions of dollars in corporate facility activity intersect with billions of dollars in roads, bridges, airports, tunnels, pipelines, utilities, railroads and other major infrastructure projects to "lay the literal groundwork for prosperity," says Adam Bruns, managing editor of Site Selection. The Index also features commentary from CG/LA President Norman Anderson. "Keeping a pulse on who is building the right infrastructure in the right places is critical for long-term success, and we see clear winners and losers at this stage," he says. "Canada — a country that has made three significant moves toward the creation of a new infrastructure paradigm — is one of the clear winners."
Canada's Best Locations
In this same issue, Site Selection's Canadian Competitiveness Award recognizes Ontario as the most competitive province in a competitive nation, followed by Québec and Alberta. And metro areas from Montréal to Mississauga to Calgary and Vancouver head Site Selection's annual list of top Canadian economic development groups (see full lists below).
Those are the conclusions reached as Site Selection publishes its annual Canada's Best Locations awards and rankings, based on April 2017-March 2018 corporate end-user facility investment and job creation data derived from the Conway Projects Database and the magazine's own research. The Canadian Competitiveness Award, this year awarded to the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, goes to the leading province based on data derived from qualifying new corporate facilities and expansions. The Top Canadian Groups are local or regional economic development groups ranked based on project data, regional partnership, proactive and innovative programming, and quality data and Web tools and resources.
The Canada's Best Locations 2018 report includes a Canadian economic development directory and is posted at www.siteselection.com.
"The annual Canada's Best Locations feature sheds additional light on Canada's many location options for corporate site selectors," says Mark Arend, editor in chief of Site Selection. "We salute the provinces and communities that made this year's rankings."
Top Utilities in Economic Development
Also featured in the September issue are Site Selection's annual rankings of Top U.S. Utilities in Economic Development (see list below), based on analysis of corporate end-user project activity in 2017 in that company's territory (from Conway Projects Database and submitted materials from utilities). In addition to examining facility investment project totals and calculating those projects' jobs and capital investment numbers on a cumulative and per-capita basis, we also looked at website tools and data; innovative programs and incentives for business, including energy efficiency and renewable energy programs; and the utility's own job-creating infrastructure and facility investment trends.
"Every year, the Top Utilities excel at wearing many hats, from reliable power provision to helping out with storm recovery, modernizing their grids and connecting people as well as they connect power lines," says Managing Editor Adam Bruns of the rankings Site Selection has published since 1999.
In addition to an array of state and regional spotlights, industry reports and Investment Profiles, the new issue of Site Selection includes the magazine's annual Infrastructure Report (featuring the new Global Groundwork Index in collaboration with CG/LA); insights into transit, logistics and the eds & meds sector; the Albuquerque Intelligence Report; and a UK spotlight.
Site Selection magazine, published by Conway Inc., delivers expansion planning information to 45,000 executives of fast-growing firms. The senior publication in the development field, Site Selection and its affiliated e-newsletters are also available via Site Selection Online. Headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., Conway since 1954 has been a trusted advisor to corporations, government economic development and investment promotion agencies around the world. Conway owns and manages Conway Events; Berlin-based FDI consultancy Conway Advisory; and New York-based Conway PR & Marketing. Conway also manages the Industrial Asset Management Council. Conway also operates a Custom Publishing Division and employs over 80 people in 10 offices in seven countries.
Top 10 Countries, Global Groundwork Index
1. Canada
2. United States
4. United Arab Emirates
5. Bahrain
9. United Kingdom
10. Singapore
2018 Canadian Competitiveness Rankings
1. Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade
2. Invest Québec
3. Alberta Ministry of Economic Development and Trade
2018 Canada's Best Locations (alphabetical order)
Calgary Economic Development
Hamilton Economic Development
London Economic Development Corporation (Ontario)
City of Mississauga Economic Development Office
Ontario East
Québec International
Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership (Ontario)
Vancouver Economic Commission
Economic Development Winnipeg
2018 Canada's Best Locations Honorable Mention
Invest Barrie (Ontario)
Durham Region Economic Development
Edmonton Economic Development Corporation (Alberta)
Ignite Fredericton (New Brunswick)
Invest in Guelph (Ontario)
City of Moncton (New Brunswick)
Niagara Economic Development
Sherbrooke Innopole (Quebec)
Toronto Global
Waterloo Economic Development Corporation
Windsor-Essex Economic Development
Click HERE for complete article
Adam Bruns, Managing Editor,Site Selector Magazine
Shelley Hirstwood, President, Ontario East Economic Development
Hon. Todd Smith, MPP Bay of Quinte, Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade,
Government House Leader
Last Newsletter:
December 12, 2019 E-Newsletter: OEMC 2020 Call for Speakers Now Open!


text:
The Last Of The Pelican Daughters
Thursday 5 March 2020, 2:30 pm
to tackle the idea of what it means for young people to grapple with inheritance, loss and justice in this comedy about four sisters trying to come to terms with…
…the charismatic leader of a right-wing organisation: he could be Diana's saviour – or pull the fragile household to pieces. Stranded together, this explosive mix of people must survive the…
Saturday 30 May 2020, 2:15 pm
Medicine's Monstrous Daughters
Thursday 19 March 2020, 7:00 pm
…people deemed 'different' or 'damaged' and asks how much of our humanity do we lose in search of the cure? Julie McNamara's Monstrous Daughters is a funny and haunting story,…
Monday 2 April 2001, 7:45 pm
You've Got Dragons
Audio described in-house. "Dragons come when you least expect it. You turn round… and they're there." Lots of people get them. Sometimes they make you feel alone. So, what can…
Rebel Music
Thursday 26 September 2019, 8:00 pm
…theatre specialists Middle Child (All We Ever Wanted Was Everything) for this raucous story of people power, set to a soundtrack of Punk, Reggae and 2Tone. Join the rebellion. Please…
Sunday 20 October 2019, 11:00 am
The Cunning Little Vixen
Sunday 25 July 2021, 2:00 pm
…cub. He takes her captive, but she soon breaks free and sets about finding a home and the fox of her dreams. As animals, insects and people take their chances…
A Kind of People
…than fighting for any cause. Mark is just… always there. And Victoria, Victoria wants to dance with somebody… Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's new play, set amidst a contemporary British community, asks…
Horrible Histories – Terrible Tudors
Audio described in-house. We all want to meet people from history. The trouble is everyone is dead! So it's time to prepare yourselves for Horrible Histories live on stage!: Terrible…
…an estimated 26 million people, and counting, Joseph continues to enthrall audiences around the world. To find out more, visit the Belgrade Theatre website. Please note that the audio description…
Saturday 21 December 2019, 2:30 pm
Audio described in-house. I've spent so much of my life wondering…passing people on the street…and now, yeah…this. When Tom meets Samad it's like he's coming face to face with himself….
An Inspector Calls
…thriller has enthralled more than 4 million people worldwide. When Inspector Goole arrives unexpectedly at the prosperous Birling family home, their peaceful dinner party is shattered by his investigations into…
One Under
Tuesday 19 November 2019, 8:00 pm – Saturday 23 November 2019, 8:00 pm
…as the past begins to catch up with people whose lives are changed forever. Graeae are world-renowned for placing D/deaf and disabled artists centre-stage. All performances of One Under will…
Groan Ups
Audio described by VocalEyes. From the parents of The Play That Goes Wrong comes a brand-new comedy all about growing up. Are we the same people at 30 as we…
Thursday 31 October 2019, 11:00 am


Scheduling notes are included under each brief course description. For more detailed information about each course or program, click on the Course Name. For a list of regularly scheduled free seminars that can be brought to your church, email the Director.
"How Would You Counsel This?" Guided role-play through counseling scenarios.
Scheduling: Due to the nature and depth of the information covered, it is best that class sessions be scheduled once each week for the duration of the program.
Little understood yet more prevalent than many want to believe, most leaders in most churches have been under-prepared to know how to recognize the signs of domestic oppression and abuse, or how to address them once they are made known.
This 12-week training weaves together solid theological and Biblical perspectives with down-to-earth, practical, and proven information and methods for being effective shepherds and disciplers for those impacted by these devastating evils. Our team has decades in this area of counseling and brokenness.
Due to the nature and depth of the information covered, it is best that class sessions be scheduled once each week for the duration of the program.
Also, assistance is available for helping you develop church policies and procedures for everything from screening staff and volunteers to walking alongside the wounded. Thousands have been helped by this information and we would be delighted to help close the gap for your church fellowship.
two weekends with 8 hours of class time per weekend, plus a couple of hours each for discussion.
This is the same 8-week course that comprises Module 4 of the Certified Biblical Counseling Program.
Scheduling: Due to the nature and depth of information, it is best that class sessions will be held once each week for eight weeks. We can, however, consider a weekend-intensive. Contact the Registrar to discuss.


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Ben's Week In Review: April 7
Ben's Week In Review: April 7
April 6, 2013 Ben-Dutka — 25 Comments
Wow…it's so weird to look at the site and see articles I didn't put there. But it's also a very nice feeling, I think. 😉
"Cross-generation" games are a complex subject
It happened quite a bit going into the current generation. There were many titles that developers created for both the PS2 and PS3, which of course makes perfect sense. You want to support the new hardware but at the same time, there's almost no user base and hence, very little in the way of sales potential.
That's only part of the thorny issue, though. When CD Projekt Red said they're only focusing on the next generation , that immediately generates several questions concerning those "cross-generation" titles like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag , Watch Dogs and Destiny . Firstly, were those games designed around the new hardware and then simply scaled back? Secondly, did the developers all know they'd be making a version for each machine when they started the development phase? Thirdly, how much of a difference is there between the two versions? Will gamers really be disappointed with the lesser iteration?
Thing is, it's not easy for consumers. They're caught thinking that if they want the best version of something, they'll have to spring for the new consoles. The hardcore have no desire to play something that is significantly inferior, but when it's a matter of money, it can be a forced reality. Not everyone wants to jump instantaneously into the new generation and indeed, not everyone can . So they see all these multiplatform cross-generation titles and they're going, "Well damn, I almost have to find a way to pay for the new console." It isn't an easy situation, certainly.
Some developers realize that single-player is still critical
In an age where some game makers are treating multiplayer as the be-all end-all, as something that absolutely positively has to be in a game, it's nice to see a developer stand up and say- "No, not every game needs it and especially not ours." Eidos Montreal said that in regards to the Thief reboot , and I wanted to stand up and applaud. They want to deliver the very best campaign experience they can, and they fully understand that Thief does not need a multiplayer component. They're considering something small but it'll hardly be a critical part of the production. Awesome. If you look at the best games of this year, it's obvious that single-player is far from dead, which I'm quite happy to see.
Tomb Raider and God of War: Ascension had multiplayer but neither needed it and in the end, they weren't necessarily praised for those elements. Bioshock Infinite and DmC: Devil May Cry didn't have multipllayer at all, and they're two of the highest-rated games of 2013 so far. Thief has always been about the solo experience. If you want to stay true to the franchise's roots, it has to stay that way. And I'm just very glad the designers are willing to embrace that "old-fashioned" concept wholeheartedly.
Personal gaming update
Bioshock Infinite is just so fantastic; love that game. I've also started playing a bit of Defiance but I have to admit, it really isn't my thing. I just hate MMOs in most any capacity and I'd say that definitely qualifies, but I'll try to issue an accurate and unbiased review, as I always do. Then there's the upcoming Dead Island Riptide , which could be very good. I didn't really get into the first one, though, so we'll have to see if the upgrades and tweaks make the sequel more appealing overall. Beyond that, it's nice to have a bit of gap between now and June; I can finally play some catch-up.
And as I said above, I'm happy to see new work on PSXE. The contributors are going to be a great help, I'm sure, and you're already seeing increased content and different types of news articles and points of view. You may also notice my brother participating as well; he just did an in-depth hands-on DUST 514 beta , which you might want to check out. And more things will be on the way that I could never get to before. 🙂
I never buy cross gen games, I know I will have the new console some day so it's a great opportunity to just wait and see and then wind up with the better version at a lower price.
With Thief on the way I feel like I'm getting plenty of good retrofuture stuff (which I love like other people love CoD) with Dishonored, Infinite and the season pass. I just wish Singularity became a series.
Ben if you want to get the most out of Riptide you should co-op with your brother or somebody. Mob mentality is fun in a zombie environment.
I think I'm at the end of Infinite now so I might just beat it tonight. For once I'm looking forward to DLC!
Something interesting to point out about AC4.
I have pre-ordered the PS4 version of the Black Chest edition from the Ubi store ($190AUD lol). The release date for the PS4 version is the same date as the rest of AC4, which is 31 Oct.
I emailed Ubisoft and they confirmed that is the release date for the PS4 version.
Which means a) They know when the PS4 will arrive, and it will be before Nov 2013. b) They don't know, and it is an estimated date.
A is more likely, seeing as though they are actively developing for the PS4 version.
I will let you guys know how the PS4 version stacks up to the PS3 version when I get it!
Killa Tequilla
C: You can buy Ps4 games before the system is even out.
yeah they must know the target date.
Yah, I suspect the first year or two of the next-gen will be fraught with many of those games that feel neither here nor there in terms of the 'next level' of gaming. For 360 it took a year to deliver Gears of War. PS3 didn't seem to get it's big hit until MGS4. These games pretty much proudly claimed, "this is the next-gen. this ain't anything like last gen's games."
PGU: NG3: RE has been center stage, rudely interrupting the final portions of DMC3. NG3 RE has been a pleasure to play thus far. Many of the complaints leveled against NG3 were addressed. Thankfully. The combat system received a good number of tweaks. Back are the charged UT's. Back are the many weapons… which become oh so powerful when leveled up. The Lunar staff is just sick. Ayane is off the hook awesome now. She was pretty cool before but is doubly so in this game. Too bad there's only 2 levels of her's, both of which are great. The game is so very fast. It doesn't look consistently pretty but it certainly moves faster and smoother than most of it's type this gen.
After I have my fill of NG3:RE and DMC3 I eagerly await Darksiders 2. Really been wanting to hit that one. I'd also like to give Injustice a shot. At this point it doesn't look like something I'd take serious, but it certainly looks like a lot of fun. And Ben, if you're reading, any chance that game will be added to the prize stack for the review contest? That'd be amazingly awesome 😉
Last edited by Temjin001 on 4/6/2013 11:29:11 PM
No fair, you get dismemberment and I don't.
I'd like to get back to Darksiders 2 at some point, it's weird to be using my brain in a game this generation. I like it.
yah, world, it be one gory game. Too bad though they didn't change the Spider-Man the movie ending. What with Ryu hopping around building tops into the sunset and all. Apparently, Spiderman was big in Japan also. Must have been.
And Darksiders 2 looks to be one sweet sweet ride. Can't wait.
Darksiders 2 was breath taking (ending not so much). I'll give my 2 cents in a review. Playing MG Rising. And, again, I am very, pleasantly surprised. Plays like NG + Shinobi + Bayonetta + MG. I love it.
Sensei Temjin, did you notice a drop in visual fidelity (looks like dynamic resolution is the culprit, to accommodate the unnecessary dismemberment)?
World, i think NG3 still has some pluses…namely visual fidelity, i think, and Move support, if you're in to that kind of thing (though i don't think you are).
You know Master Shams, I swear NG3 RE both looks and performs better with no dynamic resolution scaling. There seems to be less screen tearing than I remember to, and less slowdown. I think they've drawn the camera back to match NGS2 as well.
It could be in my head but I really think this is the case. I may do some direct comparisons when I get the time.
Anyhow there's a ton of game play mods. UT's can be instantly triggered from off of a Izuna drop rebound, and now manually charged. It appears a Steel on Bone connects every time a strong attack connects clean on an enemy charging, charging with that red mist stuff. This includes bosses like the doppleganger. A variety of ninpo's are back which can be released at will. You can restore health with unused ninpo magic. There's just all kinds of tweaks. I've enjoyed it quite a bit.
When I played the demo, I thought that, too (comparing Ryu's desert stage), but when i fired up the full title on release, it was the first stage that kind of soured my stomach. The enemies were more vicious, but the background textures were even muddier, and the character models seem less detailed and blurry, but, only during the hectic combat. Again, i didn't notice this at all in the demo, so maybe this just particular to the first level, if the observation is true at all. It does sound like you have played more of it so for, so that's assuring.
Ooh, so that's who Mr. Charles is!!
bigrailer19
Considering my plan is to get the PS4 on release, I'll fully support it. Ill still support the PS3 with games like Beyond and so forth, but any coss-generation releases will be played on the PS4.
I believe a lot of developers believe sp is very important. ND understands it, despite adding a solid mp component to Uncharted. Sony Santa Monica though proved that some developers believe, even games that strive on the sp component, need mp, or atleast should have it included. To be fair ND should probably be included as well based purely on the inclusion of mp to Uncharted. But some developers even Sony Santa Monica and ND focus on the sp and still strive to create that experience you just dont get in a mp setting.
PGU: I really want to try Defiance, problem is Borderlands 2 dlc came out and I still need to get Bioshock. Most games like Defiance need to be played from the start, especially on consoles because its kind of a niche genre for console gamers.
But for now its Borderlands 2 again.
I got a kegerator for my birthday, so now I can enjoy some great local Micro/craft brews from home fresh from the barrel . Im not a big drinker but I do appreciate an occassional beer and this is far cheaper than sitting at a bar! So thats my exciting news for today!
Hand_of_Sorrow
i may or may not get a ps4 on launch date. so depending
how desperate i am to play a cross gen game, i might
get the ps3 version.
pgu:
i'm trying to plantium army of two: the devil's cartel,
i'm thinking of picking up, bioshock infinite,
Snaaaake
For titles like Watch Dogs and Destiny, is the PS4 version better in anyway?
I don't see how not.
dmiitrie
Cross-gen seems really simple to me. You just have to pick two from the following list:
1) have the best version of the game
2) pay less for the new console
3) have the game on Day 1
I'm sorry, but you just can't have all three. For myself, I'll definitely be getting the cross gens for the PS4, just haven't decided if I want to get it for launch yet.
PGU: tried Demon Souls briefly and am just not feeling it so far. Haven't really played enough to feel like I've given it a fair shake, so I'll stick with it for a while longer, but initial impression is lacking. Of course, part if that might be because in completely absorbed with Deadwood right now. Probably won't get much play time of anything in until that's finished. Haha
double edged sword really.
there great because there the perfect demonstration of why you need a new console.
its hard to convince people with only next gen titles because then they start saying well maybe they could of done some witchcraft and gotten older systems to similar lengths.
kinda what cd project red did with the witcher 2 on 360, i mean its not as good as the PC version, but for a 7 year old console holy f*cking sh*t!
its good to be able to have comparisons, and say this is what the extra money has bought me.
on the other hand though its a bad thing because what if theres not really much of a gap between the two?
then you have the problem of it simply being available on current systems so people will save the cash and get it on that.
not to mention the ever lingering niggle of what the game could of been like if it was next gen only.
exactly why i really dont like cross generation games.
yea its great to be able to see what the ps4 is going to bring us in AC4 appose to what the ps3 will.
but at the same time, just existing is hurting itself.
next gen consoles always struggle off the line, having big name games available for their siblings is not exactly helping solve this problem.
cons outweigh the pros really.
as i said the other day i wish developers would start looking to different avenues to extend the replayability and life of a game.
some games suit the traditional MP experience, some certainly dont!
shoehorning it in for the sake of sales and replayability is just stupid!
developers really need to stop taking the easy way out, pull their f*cking finger out, and start thinking ok how else can we bring in a multiplayer mode, but something that will suit our game, and people will enjoy.
some games like LBP suit creating your own levels, so why not use that?
some games would suit a horde tower defense type game so why not use that?
some games would suit a score chasing mode, or some sort of challange mode like what hitman absolution offers so why not use that?
some games would really benefit from expansion packs, FC3 a prime candidate for this, so why not?
im so f*cking sick of developers saying hey we need to add MP to our game otherwise it wont sell.
ok lets just copy and paste what every other game is doing, problem solved!
no, problem not solved, some games just do not suit that style of gameplay!
the MP in tomb raider is as well suited and welcome as a whale and dolphin at the Hiroshima memorial!
its really sad how the industry has become so stale and boring lately!
so many games just feel a bit, eh.
been there, done that, just takes away from the enjoyment of them.
so many games have added, changed, improved so much, but the core of them is so similar to everything else you just cant torture yourself to finish it!
GOW ascension, GOW judgement, 2 perfect examples of games that really have changed things for the better, but at the same time you just cant help but say meh been there done that.
bioshock infinite another perfect example, a beautifully crafted game, such a ambitious project, but its just so similar to the original bioshock released 6 freaking years ago!
you really cant stop yourself from yawning and repeating eh been there done that.
we REALLY need next gen consoles to come out, NOW!
and hopefully they reinvigorate this meh been there done that industry.
suddenly had a craving to go back to NFS most wanted for some reason, so i picked that up today.
good excuse to turn my wiiu on, christ havent touched the thing since last year!
ninty, you seriously need to hurry the f*ck up and get some 1st party titles out, otherwise your really going to drown especially when the ps4 and next xbox release!
funny how every time i get a chance to go back to darksiders 2, for some reason i dont want to.
wonder why.
i really enjoy the game, but maybe its got something to do with it just not being the game it should of been.
i really do hope crytek US buys the rights, that way the series lives on.
but if they do buy it, please for the love of god, go back to the old slow heavy style that the original darksiders had!
and for f*cks sake get rid of the cell shaded graphics!
absolutely HATE it when violent dark creepy games have cell shaded graphics its so f*cking stupid!
i know, lets set up a torture chamber and will run it in leprechaun land with a bright sunshine, lush green grass, pots of glimmering gold, waterfalls, birds chirping, and rainbows everywhere!
just does not work!
graphic gory games set in freaking dungeons should be dark and gloomy, not have the graphics of a freaking cartoon aimed at freaking 5 year olds!
Solid Fantasy
Really like the extra article influence on PSX!
It's been a good week of gaming. Was about to finish up with the last mission on Xcom, until my friend bought me the PC Skyrim. I can't believe this games fits on one DVD rom!? I'm on pace to breed a gold chocobo! the online community levels of Sound Shapes are tough as hell. MG Rising showed up in the mail. The 2nd fix on the PS3 should be in tomorrow. With that machine back I can be looking at Rising, Twisted Metal, and Deus Ex back in the already over bloated mix.
oh and I shouldn't forget to mention I picked up the Sony 3D TV bundle. I just couldn't resist. It's cheap enough to afford and small enough to travel with. Once that comes I'll have KZ3, U3, and… well, too many games to play. Good times are often busy times. April is a low month for me and I don't have a girl friend and yet still lack time for everything I want to do.
Also, I still can't stop watching the MSGV trailer. The theme song was on top for itunes for a little while b/c of that trailer!
Dude, 3D was a milestone, a before/after moment for me. No less. Many say 3D gaming it's just a hype, but I really believe it is here to stay.
To me it makes a huge difference, I has become boring to play with a 2D picture again once I got used to do my gaming in 3D.
Cool! Yeah I'm stoked for it to. The latest Nvdia driver update seemed to be on board to!
Ah you're going to use the Sony screen on your PC? Coolio, it's on the PC I do my 3D gaming too, with the Nivida 3D Vision that came with my monitor.
Regarding cross-gen releases I am ambivalent. On one hand I don't want a game held back because of a former generation, on the other hand I really don't want to buy more games for the PS3 now – so better with a cross-gen than no-game, to put it like that.
For example, I am going to gamble on the next GTA also being released for the PS4. I won't buy it for the PS3.
Most of the other contributors for PSXE has had their first story published this week, and I am getting a bit stressed by that. This week I *have* to contribute too.
Last week I found Just Because 2 on sale on Steam for like… nothing (three euro!), so although I've already played it on PS3 I bought it again.
And man how much better that game looks on PC. It really was another division, visually. And that's quite cool cause that makes me want to replay that game even more. And it looks *excellent* in 3D too.
I am also playing Crysis 3, and while it looks very good and still is totally cool with that suit, I can easily understand what the reviewers were talking about. It is awesome, but at the same time, something is missing compared to the earlier games in the franchise.
And finally, last friday was the "OKDay" event at work, a monthly event where every developer puts aside all regular customer/business tasks and do whatever they want, using whatever technology they are curious to test. And interestingly a few of the guys went together to design a new game, using… The Unity engine!
It'll be fun to hear their experiences.
As for me I started on an Android app that I've been wanting to make for a long time. It's the first app I've ever made. I love the OKDays. 🙂
Last edited by Beamboom on 4/7/2013 11:35:42 AM
Just beat Bioshock Infinite, does anyone know if there's 2 endings again this time or more?
SirLoin of Beef
As far as I know, there's only one.
Douchebaguette
Believe it or not, the circle button is actually orange. WHAAAAAAAAAATT.


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New Federal Theatre Presents Octoberfest
Five Plays to Insp0ire
By: Rachel de Aragon - Oct 25, 2020
Octoberfet. New Federal Theatre
Woody King Jr.'s Federal Theater presents Octoberfest: Five plays that reawaken, inspire, and remind us of the struggle for freedom and dignity of African-Americans. Each piece, with its own history of previous production success, has been re-imagined. Billed as readings, seasoned actors and directors take us to a new form of theatrical communication in the "zoom style" medium.
From the Mississippi Delta
Written by Endesha Ida Mae Holland
Directed by Ed Smith
Assistant Director John Scutchins
From the Mississippi Delta is an autobiographical drama of the triumph of the civil rights movement in Mississippi through the story of a woman whose life was transformed. It is a tale of a woman's personal journey from the isolated, brutally segregated and oppressed world of a small town in Mississippi to the academically and socially cosmopolitan world of the international civil rights movement.
We are presented with the microcosm of the changes wrought by a generation. The drama was presented as a montage of monologues describing incidents in Holland's life. Gracefully utilizing the "zoom style" medium which our "darkened stage era" requires, Smith and Scutchins build a vivid picture through the voices of three actors,{Brenda Denmark, Elain Graham, Verneice Turner} and a narrator, Beethovan Oden. The three women speaking directly to the audience, do far more than a reading. They sing, they cry, they demand that we believe the stories which unfold. We are carried into the the neglected corner of the delta where the relationship of white and black has changed little since the days of slavery and the hopes of escape are almost as treacherous and uncertain. We swell with a sense of pride and growth as the character's personal hopes for a better way of life blend and become part of the national voice for change.
Medal of Honor Rag
Written byTom Cole
Directed by A. Dean Irby
The piece confronts the trauma of survival as Medal of Honor winning African-American Vietnam vet, Dale Jackson, (Beethovan Oden) suffers a collapse of his mental health and is treated by a Jewish psychiatrist at a Veterans' Administration hospital. The doctor (Micah Stock) is himself a survivor, the child who was sent out of harms way as the Nazis entered Poland. No one in his family survived. Jackson saw every man in his platoon burned when an ambush struck their tank. He had been transferred to a different tank.
Why did I survive, while others became cinders? Both men live within the essence of this pain. The veteran blames himself not only for his survival but for having become a killer himself. The brutal irony of his life is that he feels that he has been rewarded by our country for being exactly what he was brought up to know is wrong.
Cole's script, a dialog within the confines of the doctors office, poses the pain of a generation. The children of the post WWII 'boom' whose values were built upon our victory over fascism, found themselves confronted by becoming the enemy. Jackson embodies the African-American struggle to achieve what is rewarded by the country and at the same time ignore the loss of so many lives in the process. Irby's skillful timing of the minimal action drama is purposeful and effective. We feel the tension between the two men, and although they are not in fact facing each other on stage, they do face off in this poignant piece. Oden and Stock work well 'together', and their ability to respond to each other's energy creates a strong realistic feel.
The Festival has also reached back having re-imagined James De Jonah's Do Lord Remind Me. The play is based upon the compilation of recorded memoirs of formerly enslaved contributors made by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930's. Hearing the stories "in their own words", is a powerful way to experience the presence of the past.
Clare' Coss's Dr. DuBois and Miss Ovington recalls the relationship between the great scholar and the NAACP leader. It is a reflection of the relationship between African-Americans and white civil rights activists, as well as the changing visions of radical and more measured methods of effecting change.
Yet to be released is Stories of the Old Days by Bill Harris. In this piece, two people in their 60's, whose life stories are very different, reflect upon their lives. This production is available for viewing beginning Friday October 30 at 7pm. It will run through Sunday November 1 at midnight. I would recommend it. This series has powerfully re-envisioned visionary classics.
"It's so great to hear about creative and effective use of the zoom medium for theatre in these challenging times! The performances sound powerful and engaging. Glad to know that "Stories of Old Days" is on next. Thank you for this informative review, Rachel de Aragon!"
Posted By: Elizabeth Upton on 10-26-2020, 07:05 pm