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'Moonlight,' 'Manchester by the Sea' and more critics' picks, Feb. 17-23

Los Angeles Times

Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Founder Michael Keaton gives a performance of ratty, reptilian brilliance as Ray Kroc, the American salesman who turned a California burger stand into the global fast-food behemoth that is McDonald's, in John Lee Hancock's shrewd and satisfyingly fat-free biopic. I Am Not Your Negro As directed by the gifted Raoul Peck, this documentary on James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of movie effects, not only spoken language but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals, to create a cinematic essay that is powerful and painfully relevant. La La Land Starring a well-paired Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, writer-director Damien Chazelle's tuneful tribute to classic movie musicals is often stronger in concept than execution, but it's lovely and transporting all the same.


Chinese passenger drones are coming to Dubai

Popular Science

Made by the dronemaker Beijing Yi-Hang Creation Science and Technology Corporation, the Ehang 184 is a "passenger drone" that can carry a single person (and luggage) of up to 220 pounds. With a four-rotor layout in the form of a giant quadcopter, it has enough battery power to fly a range of just over 30 miles, at speeds up to 100 miles per hour. The Ehang 184 is also highly autonomous; while its flight computer is linked to a command center (with some human oversight), the flight computer is capable of making emergency landings, self diagnosing issues, and avoiding obstacles.


What's next for the drone war?

Popular Science

On Jan. 20, the drone war entered its third Administration. Over the inaugural weekend, American drones fired missiles at suspected Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, killing five people. The drone war, that is, the popular, unmanned-vehicle term for America's strategy of targeted killing, is an outgrowth of President George W. Bush's war on terror, a vestigial organ that became the centerpiece for the Obama administration's eight years of low-intensity warfare. With much of American national security strategy poised to change under the new Trump administration, it's worth taking a step back to examine what, exactly, the United States hoped to do with its drones. The United States is, it's worth noting, at war.


Yahoo to its users: Hackers could access your emails without a password

The Independent - Tech

Yahoo is warning customers that hackers may have been able to break into their accounts without even stealing their passwords. The attack, which has been attributed to the same "state-sponsored" hackers that were blamed for breaking into over a billion Yahoo accounts last year – the biggest hack in history – was effective between 2015 and 2016. It was first disclosed by the company last year, but users have been receiving notifications about it this week. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.


Atheism, the Computer Model - Issue 45: Power

Nautilus

In the United States, the nones have it. The nones being people with no organized religion and increasingly no belief in God or a universal spiritual power. They have the momentum, attention, and an expectation that in the future they will become a majority of the population, just as they currently are in western Europe, Japan, and China. Or so says the Pew Research Religious Landscape Study, which in 2015 found that almost a quarter of Americans profess no religious affiliation. Within that group, a third do not believe in God or a higher power of any sort ("nothing in particular," as the study termed it). Both numbers are up from a similar study in 2007, when 16 percent of the country professed no religious affiliation, and 22 percent of these did not believe in God.


AI Predicts Le Pen To Be France's Next President - Vessel News

#artificialintelligence

Marine Le Pen is on course to be the next president of France, according to one fund manager's big-data analysis. Arun Kant, chief executive and chief investment officer at Singapore-based investing firm Leonie Hill Capital, told CNBC he expected the right-wing populist to prevail thanks to his firm's proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) system's analysis of troves of data. His analysis -- which he said incorporates inputs such as social and traditional media discussions, polling, economics and demographics -- predicts that Le Pen will "walk over" her opponents in the first electoral test and then prove most forecasters wrong and steal the lead in the second ballot, Kant said. The French vote is split into two phases, with the top two candidates from the April 23 round due to face each other in a second run-off on May 7. In the running alongside 48-year old Le Pen are former economy minister and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron, conservative ex-prime minister Francois Fillon and socialist Benoit Hamon. Kant's AI program predicts that Le Pen would take 28 percent of the vote in the first round, he said, which would best 16.4 percent for Fillon, and 19 to 20 percent for Macron.


'Doraemon VR' Brings The World Of The Lovable Robotic Cat To Life

Forbes - Tech

With yet another big Doraemon movie set for release this March, Bandai Namco has unveiled a new Doraemon themed virtual reality, or VR, experience to tie in with the film. If you are somehow unfamiliar with the phenomenon of Doraemon it started as a manga at the end of the 60's penned by Fujiko Fujio. The premise had a robotic cat called Doraemon from the 22nd century sent back in time to improve the fortunes of the Nobi family due to the prior failings of Nobita Nobi. Doraemon's mission then was to aid Nobita in the past but in typical fashion, the variety of Doraemon's future gadgetry often ended up making things worse but at the very least everybody had a great deal of fun while doing so. What's amazing about Doraemon as a series is that it has lost none of its vitality over the years.


Flipboard on Flipboard

#artificialintelligence

Fan Hui is speaking to a chatty audience at the 2016 European Go Congress in St. Petersburg, Russia, gushing over a game of Go played by one of his mentors. Hui's enthusiasm is infectious--the room's chatter subsides as he pulls up slides of the complex Chinese game, whose players battle to dominate a 19 19 board with black and white tiles called stones. Hui's mentor, AlphaGo, has studied strategies built over the game's 4,000-year history, and has played thousands of practice matches. But a training regiment that took Hui years to perfect, AlphaGo did in about four weeks. The game Hui showed to the Saint Petersburg audience is one that the machine played against itself, and to Hui, is an example of the beauty of AlphaGo's strategic mind Even the smartest humans miss patterns that computers see instantly. Problems like file-compression, translation, and custom drug fabrication have millions of variables and data points whose limits exceed human understanding dozens of times over.


Machine Learning Is Unlocking Food's Super Powers

Forbes - Tech

Bono and The Edge are excited by Nuritas' potential for impact and profitability. Try to imagine walking into your local grocery store ten years from now. You head towards the back, as you've done countless times before, to snatch a handful of your favorite cereal bars. Only this time, the packaging looks a bit different. You notice that there are two new versions, each with a label below the brand name.


'Scorpion' robot mission inside Fukushima reactor aborted

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A'scorpion' robot sent into a Japanese nuclear reactor to learn about the damage suffered in a tsunami-induced meltdown had its mission aborted after the probe ran into trouble, Tokyo Electric Power company said Thursday. TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, sent the remote-controlled device into the No. 2 reactor where radiation levels have recently hit record highs. The'scorpion' robot, so-called because it can lift up its camera-mounted tail to achieve better viewing angles, is also designed to crawl over rubble inside the damaged facility. The'scorpion' robot is designed to withstand up to 1,000 sieverts of radiation - but had its mission aborted after the probe ran into trouble, Tokyo Electric Power company said After a manually operated camera probed the deepest point yet within the reactor earlier this month, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) estimate that radiation levels inside the plant's No. 2 reactor have hit 530 sieverts per hour. Radiation exposure at 530 sieverts per hour would effectively shut down TEPCO's planned robot camera probe in under two hours.