Managing risk in motion picture project development

Movies are produced as unique prototypic media content to serve a highly uncertain demand. Film producers have to address the consumption risk while their projects are still in their development phase. This paper provides a literature review of key risk dimensions of movie projects and how to control them. The interviews conducted with movie producers have made it possible to compare the industry’s risk control strategies. Content attributes, personnel, and funding emerge as key project resources and risk reducing elements both in theory and practice. Three distinct risk control strategies are identified and assigned to different resource configurations and market constraints of individual producers

Arithmetic complexity via effective names for random sequences

We investigate enumerability properties for classes of sets which permit recursive, lexicographically increasing approximations, or left-r.e. sets. In addition to pinpointing the complexity of left-r.e. Martin-L\"{o}f, computably, Schnorr, and Kurtz random sets, weakly 1-generics and their complementary classes, we find that there exist characterizations of the third and fourth levels of the arithmetic hierarchy purely in terms of these notions. More generally, there exists an equivalence between arithmetic complexity and existence of numberings for classes of left-r.e. sets with shift-persistent elements. While some classes (such as Martin-L\"{o}f randoms and Kurtz non-randoms) have left-r.e. numberings, there is no canonical, or acceptable, left-r.e. numbering for any class of left-r.e. randoms. Finally, we note some fundamental differences between left-r.e. numberings for sets and reals

Carbon-13 in groundwater from English and Norwegian crystalline rock aquifers: a tool for deducing the origin of alkalinity?

The 13C signature is evaluated for various environmental compartments (vegetation, soils, soil gas, rock and groundwater) for three crystalline rock terrains in England and Norway. The data are used to evaluate the extent to which stable carbon isotopic data can be applied to deduce whether the alkalinity in crystalline bedrock groundwaters has its origin in hydrolysis of carbonate or silicate minerals by CO2. The resolution of this issue has profound implications for the role of weathering of crystalline rocks as a global sink for CO2. In the investigated English terrain (Isles of Scilly), groundwaters are hydrochemically immature and DIC is predominantly in the form of carbonic acid with a soil gas signature. In the Norwegian terrains, the evidence is not conclusive but is consistent with a significant fraction of the groundwater DIC being derived from silicate hydrolysis by CO2. A combined consideration of pH, alkalinity and carbon isotope data, plotted alongside theoretical evolutionary pathways on bivariate diagrams, strongly suggests real evolutionary pathways are likely to be hybrid, potentially involving both open and closed CO2 conditions

Scattering of Fermions off Dilaton Black Holes

We discuss how various properties of dilaton black holes depend on the dilaton coupling constant $a$. In particular we investigate the $a$-dependence of certain mass parameters both outside and in the extremal limit and discuss their relation to thermodynamical quantities. To further illuminate the role of the coupling constant $a$ we look at a massless point particle in a dilaton black hole geometry as well as the scattering of (neutral) fermions. In this latter case we find that the scattering potential vanishes for the zero angular momentum mode which seems to indicate a catastrophic deradiation when $a>1$.Comment: 12, Oslo-TP-4-94, USITP-94-

Securing quality in public service television entertainment

The objective of this paper is twofold: First we discuss what can be regarded as quality in TV entertainment and how it’s promoted or regulated by different media systems. We argue that the public value of entertainment depends on its quality. Thus, there should be a difference between entertainment programming in public service and commercial broadcasts. A brief review of discussion on media quality is provided in order to distinguish the perspective of recipients, producers and regulators. We find three different types of quality criteria: Minimum standards apply to all broadcasters, while Public Service Broadcasters (PSB) must address rather fuzzy additional criteria derived from their respective mandates. Small states impose additional criteria to protect their market and culture. To fulfill our second objective, we present findings from a comparative study in five European countries with different media systems about the role perception of TV commissioners in the production process of entertainment programming and their commitment to quality content. We find that commissioners at PSBs have generally internalized their programming mandates. They allocate higher importance to quality dimensions that address a public value, however, when it comes to tangible commissioning decisions they generally use the same decision criteria in the same ranking as their counterparts in commercial broadcasting