Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water. The time spent finding and carrying water, if local wells are not reliable, steals precious time from farming, making a living or going to school. It can even force people to revert to unsanitary water sources shared with animals. Water issues are tied to a cycle of poverty.

Two images released last week from upcoming films highlight one glaring Hollywood problem. The first was the visage of Tilda Swinton in the debut trailer for Marvel's "Doctor Strange," in which the actress -- shorn and wearing the white robes of a Tibetan monk -- plays the Ancient One. In the "Doctor Strange" comics, the Ancient One is like Dumbledore meets Yoda: When the shattered former surgeon Stephen Strange makes his way deep into the Himalayas looking for enlightenment and redemption, he becomes a student of the mystically adept, absolutely Asian Ancient One. Marvel's cinematic universe just got a whole lot spookier, and a bit more magical. The world premiere of his new Marvel movie "Doctor Strange" (directed by longtime horror director Scott Derrickson) is loaded with lots of mystical charm with a serious twist.

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-- in the field. "A lot of people think about the finish line," she said. "I think about the start line."

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.