Faced with prospect of watching Hate Story 2 or Kick on weekend, engineering students found actually studying

Dedicated to another mindless Salman Khan flick.

Mumbai. Post the release of Salman Khan’s latest movie ‘Kick’, engineering students faced with the prospect of watching the movie were found studying in hostels across the country.

“First it is written by Chetan,” said Tadapit Kumar from his hostel in IIT Bombay, “so there is almost a 100% guarantee it is a bad story. Second, Taran Adarsh has given the movie a billion stars, which generally means that the movie is intolerable. So I am in my hostel room, studying the ‘Rotational Dynamics’ chapter from H. C. Verma, which I have begun to find extremely entertaining.”

“I saw the trailer of Kick and knew it was going to be a terrible movie that would go on to make 1000 crores,” Chaddha, Tadapit’s roommate said. “But thanks to Kick, everyone in our campus is studying without there being an exam the next day. I think this has to be some kind of record… Guinness nahin to Limca hee sahi.”

In IIT Delhi, the scene was no different. “I was shocked,” Shuklaji, the librarian at IIT Delhi Campus. “Generally we get an average of five students every day – four of which are couples looking to spend quality time in free airconditioning. But today it seems the entire campus has come to the library.”

“Itne log to exam time pe bhi nahin aate,” he added.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/07/26/faced-with-prospect-of-watching-hate-story-2-or-kick-on-weekend-engineering-students-found-actually-studying/

Candy Crush addict found crushing real candies in office

Dedicated to all the Candy Crush requests I have ever received.

Gurgaon: In the first diagnosed case of “Candy Crush Mania”, a software engineer was found crushing real candies in office when his smartphone crashed. The engineer – called Tadapit Kumar – had reportedly been playing the game for 36 hours straight and had to resort to real life candy crushing when his phone got infected by malware the game had downloaded onto it.

Attempting to clear the air over Tadapit’s situation, his manager Chadha said, “No no no, there has been no pressure on him at work really. It is only this Facebook – Shacebook jee. Everybody is going mad these days.”

“I had been getting Candy Crush invites for a few years and had been ignoring them,” Tadapit said in an exclusive interview with this Faking News reporter, continuing to crush Pan Parag toffees between his fingers. “But yesterday I decided to accept an invite from a girl whose profile pic was really quite cute. I thought she would start noticing me in office if I accepted the invite. But what happened next was that I ended up getting really addicted to this candy-crushing business, with no time left for other things.”

“And worst thing was that even after my phone got infected with whatever virus that game has,” Tadapit said, “I still cannot stop crushing candies. In fact, I find crushing them terribly liberating. I don’t have a girlfriend, my career is going nowhere and my dad thinks I am a loser, but at least I am good at crushing candies!”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2014/07/21/candy-crush-addict-found-crushing-real-candies-in-office/

Times of India Movie Reviews: The Freakonomical Scam Underneath (Part Two)

So ever since I wrote on this topic (read Part One here), I have been getting congratulatory emails, requests for the data I used to run the analysis and a few emails/ comments on my post contesting the validity of the analysis. I think some people didn’t really get it. What I had analyzed, hypothesized and then proven using data was that the gap in movie review ratings between TOI and IMDB (and not the actual rating on TOI itself) moves up whenever there is a bankable star in a movie.

However, I just wanted to take this data analysis further. (So expect there to be a part three or four as well later.) Just to silence the handful of critics my previous article attracted, I ran something that could conclusively prove TOI’s complicity in scamming the public (apropos movie reviews). 

As I had explained in Part One, I have been, for some time, particularly pained by the disparity in TOI’s movie reviews versus reviews by independent reviewers like Masand/ Anupama Chopra. So what I did was take down movie reviews for 100 movies and compute the gap in movie ratings between TOI and IMDB (arguably the most unbiased movie reviewer possible).

Aside from my discoveries in part one, what is more damning is that the average movie review gap between TOI and IMDB goes up by a whopping 360% if the budget of a movie is higher than INR 32.76 Crore. (32.76 Crore was the average budget of the movie data set I analyzed.) In simpler terms, on average the gap in movie reviews between TOI and IMDB moved up by 4.6 times, if the budget of the movie being reviewed was higher than the average of the data set, which was Rs. 32.76 Crore.

At the median, the disparity is starker. The median gap in movie reviews between TOI and IMDB moved up by a mindboggling 6.5 times, if the budget of the movie being reviewed was higher than the average of the data set, which was Rs. 32.76 Crore.

 

So there you have it… We have a hypothesis that stands the test of the monetary challenge thrown at it. Higher the budget, higher the gap in movie review ratings between TOI and IMDB, which should only mean one thing – a part of the higher budget is being allocated to reviewers like TOI.