Janicza Bravo makes short films about loneliness. In one, Michael Cera plays an abrasive paraplegic who can't get lucky. In another, Gaby Hoffmann plays a phone stalker for whom the description "comes on too strong" is not strong enough. Bravo's shorts employ the visual grammar of art-house cinema: over-the-shoulder shots representing a character's point of view, handheld tracking shots depicting urgent movement, lingering closeups to heighten intimacy or unease, carefully composed establishing shots with an actor in the center of the frame. In March, 2015, Bravo went to Venice, on the western edge of Los Angeles, to meet with a production company called Wevr. The name is pronounced "weaver," but it can also be thought of as a sentence, with "We" as the subject and "V.R." as the verb. As anyone who has read a tech blog within the past five years, or a sci-fi novel within the past five decades, knows, "V.R." stands for virtual reality--a loosely defined phrase that is now being applied to several related forms of visual media. You put your smartphone into a portable device like a Google Cardboard or a Samsung Gear--or you use a more powerful computer-based setup, such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive--and the device engulfs your field of vision and tracks your head movement. The filmic world is no longer flat. Wherever you look, there's something to see. The producers at Wevr invited Bravo to write and direct a V.R. project. "I said no," she told me. "It sounded like a technical thing, and I'm not into technical. But then I talked to my husband, and he said, 'How often do people just hand you money in this business?' So I changed my mind." She thought about what kind of story might be told most effectively in the new medium. "The two words I kept hearing about V.R. were'empathy' and'immersion,' and I wasn't sure that being immersed in one of my dark comedies would be all that useful."

Oracle Corp. has acquired Israeli machine-learning Big Data startup Crosswise, Inc. The price of the acquisition was not officially disclosed but is believed to be 50 million according to local media. Founded in 2013, Crosswise provides an authoritative consumer device map to ad tech vendors, consumer brands, and premium publishers. The company's platform combines data science, Big Data and machine learning, to identify which PCs, phones, tablets, digital TVs and other connected devices are being used by individual consumers; by applying advanced data science and proprietary machine-learning techniques to this data, Crosswise constructs a new probabilistic Device Map matching multiple devices to individual users in an accurate, scalable and high-quality manner. According to Crosswise, the benefits in being able to provide this data is that it allows marketers and premium publishers to deliver advertising, personalization and analytics across different sorts of devices.

Adrianne Haslet heard all the talk about taking back Boylston Street in the years after the Boston Marathon bombings. After losing her left leg in the 2013 finish-line explosions, Haslet decided that she would return to the course -- this time as a runner. When the race leaves Hopkinton on Monday, Haslet will be one of 31 members of the One Fund community -- survivors of the attacks, their families and supporters-- who will be in the field. "A lot of people think about the finish line," she said. "I think about the start line."

In TensorFlow, during the training process of the models, the parameters are maintained in the memory as variables. When a variable is created, you can use a tensor defined as a parameter of the function as an initial value, which can be a constant or a random value.

This is the latest installment in a regular series of conversations with William McDonough (@billmcdonough), designer, architect, author and entrepreneur. Joel Makower: Tell me about the innovation future roundtable you recently convened. Bill McDonough: I have been working with companies that are looking at the future of mobility in India, and designing factories and other things for them. The chairman said he would like to connect to some of the advanced thinking across many sectors and integrate that with some conversations that he could participate in. The first person I thought of for that was Jack Hidary.

Authors from the Australian National University, Monash and La Trobe provide the most complete answer yet: the size of a flaccid penis can significantly affect how attractive a man's body is to women. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (a journal commonly known by its initials as PNAS), Brian Mautz, Bob Wong, Richard Peters and Michael Jennions use a clever experimental manipulation of computer-generated imagery - CGI - to test the effects of variation in penis size relative to height and torso shape (shoulder width relative to waist width) on the attractiveness of male bodies to women. How important is penis size? Authors from the Australian National University, Monash and La Trobe provide the most complete answer yet: the size of a flaccid penis can significantly affect how attractive a man's body is to women While researchers found that torso shape was by far the most important determinant of attractiveness, penis size has about as much influence on attractiveness as height. It has been suggests that women favor slightly larger than average penises.

Armed drones could take to the air for testing alongside US fighter pilots as early as 2018. The Air Force's'Loyal Wingman' program aims to pair fifth generation fighter jets with unmanned older craft, using computer algorithms to give pilots control of the drones. The initiative would allow a drone to take the lead in navigating dangerous environments, pinpointing targets without putting a human pilot at risk. The Air Force's'Loyal Wingman' program aims to pair fifth generation fighter jets with unmanned older craft, using computer algorithms to give pilots remote control of the drones. The'Loyal Wingman' program would see the Air Force convert an older craft, like the F-16 warplane, into a semi-autonomous and unmanned fighter that flies alongside a fifth generation craft, like the F-35 jet.

Singapore: Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a US-based information technology (IT) firm with most of its employees working out of India, expects its business growth in the Asia-Pacific region to outpace the company average this year, maintaining the trend seen in recent years, Jayajyoti Sengupta, president and Asia-Pacific head, said in an interview. Automation, which includes robots, machine learning and artificial intelligence, will be among the new frontiers for Cognizant, as rote and repetitive processes become "digital, instrumented, analyzed and intelligent", he said. Cognizant has said it expects its revenue growth to slow to between 10% and 14.3% for the calendar year 2016. How do you see the situation in the Asia-Pacific? It would be pertinent to note that Cognizant's growth of 21% in calendar 2015 included revenues from the acquisition of TriZetto.

A patient walks into the emergency department at Rush University Medical Center with a fever and bloodshot eyes. In days of yore, doctors would have to exhaust the obvious possibilities -- like a flu or allergic reaction -- before finally figuring a patient was suffering from Zika virus. But Rush says its predictive software, a system called Guardian, helps alert doctors to a possible diagnosis hours faster than physicians normally would. When dealing with more rare diagnoses, doctors typically think, "it's going to be everything else besides smallpox," said Dr. Dino Rumoro, who's been working on the technology for more than 20 years and is the chairman of Rush's Department of Emergency Medicine. "This gives the clinician a crutch."

Iran concluded a major, three-day military exercise Friday intended to review the readiness of its armed forces. The drills, called "Great Prophet," also field-tested new military technology, including the Iranian-made Karrar tank and the Hamasseh drone, Middle East Monitor reported. The Iranian air force, elite units and local forces were involved in the exercise. The drills covered four provinces in Iran's southeast region near the border with Pakistan. The exercises came amid growing tensions in the area over the protracted civil war in Syria and the threat posed by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.