Though Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema's '"The Conjuring 2" ghosted all of its competition at the weekend box office, all eyes are on the performance of Universal Pictures and Legendary Pictures' "Warcraft." Though the video game adaptation grossed only a modest sum in the U.S and Canada, given its hefty production budget, the picture's international numbers wildly make up for it. "Warcraft" grossed an estimated 24.4 million in ticket sales in the U.S., coming in just shy of analyst projections of 25 million and taking the second place spot. The film has a 160 million price tag attached to it, proving that film adaptations of massively popular video games (the multiplayer strategy game "World of Warcraft" is produced by Irvine-headquartered publisher Blizzard Entertainment) are still a tough sell in the U.S. Reviews have been decidedly negative for the picture. As of Sunday, only 27% of Rotten Tomatoes critics favored it, though up from the paltry 16% positive rating the film had just days before its release.

The big-budget video-game adaptation "Warcraft" came in second with 24.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. That was a more middling debut, but the film, taken from the "World of Warcraft" video game franchise, has been a lucrative hit in overseas markets, particularly China.

Following on soon from the remarkably Smart Devices we are enjoying(!) Your next, or perhaps your last, smartphone will be cleverer than you are. Its IQ will be way above anyone less than a genius. Artificial (General) Intelligent robots will be cleverer than us, able to do anything we can do, better, and faster, for twenty four hours a day, with no time off demanded either, except perhaps for an occasional self-service. Most of the jobs only humans could do before will be gone, and this situation will soon seriously begin to happen, well before the end of the next decade.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A new Sowing Application for farmers combined with a Personalized Village Advisory Dashboard for the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, is hoping to see feedback and radical improvements for agriculture and small-holder farmers in the state. The sowing app is to help farmers achieve optimal harvests by advising on the best time to sow crops depending on weather conditions, soil and other indicators. This has been made possible through a partnership between the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Microsoft and the Andhra Pradesh government. The pioneering digital tools are released by ICRISAT with development undertaken by Microsoft. The Personalized Village Advisory Dashboard has been especially developed to enable officials of Andhra Pradesh Primary Sector Mission (APPSM) – Rythu Kosam, to better manage programs of scale.

China's equivalent of Google is under fire. Search engine Baidu has been criticised following the death of 21-year-old student Wei Zai, who used the search engine to research esoteric treatments for his cancer. After Wei Zai's death, the state-run People's Daily attacked Baidu, claiming it was ranking search results in exchange for money. "There have been hospitals making profits at the cost of killing patients who were directed by false advertisements paid at a higher rank in search results," the article claimed, adding, "profit considerations shall not be placed over social responsibility". The Chinese party newspaper may have its own reasons for wanting to control Baidu; a powerful search engine is a gateway to the outside world and a challenge to any repressive state.

There is no need to worry about whether robots might start taking our jobs. Three of the world's 10 largest employers are already replacing tens of thousands of their workers with robots: Foxconn, a key manufacturing partner for Apple, Google, and Amazon, is the world's 10th largest employer and it has already replaced 60,000 workers with robots, according to a recent note written in part by analyst John Seagrimat CLSA. Walmart, the third-largest global employer with 2.1 million workers, wants to replace its warehouse stock-checkers with flying drones that can scan miles of shelves in a fraction of the time. And the US Department of Defense, the No.1 global employer, is already; flying the world's largest fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles - drones, basically - in its various Middle East conflicts. The US DoD has at least 7,362 RQ-11 Ravens in operation for instance.

Artificial intelligence has long fascinated the technology industry and it's easy to see why. Creating a piece of software that can think, and act, like a human mind would be one of the biggest advancements in computer science ever, and that might even be an understatement. The interest in A.I. has meant that big companies, like Google or Facebook, are hiring teams of engineers and researchers to build the technology into their products. While humans have not created anything close to the human mind, machines and software are becoming much better at predicting what we want based on a much smaller set of information. Google, for example, spent much of its annual I/O conference talking about advances in A.I. and how the company plans to implement the technology.

In this paper, we will investigate the efficacy of IMAT (Iterative Method of Adaptive Thresholding) in recovering the sparse signal (parameters) for linear models with missing data. Sparse recovery rises in compressed sensing and machine learning problems and has various applications necessitating viable reconstruction methods specifically when we work with big data. This paper will focus on comparing the power of IMAT in reconstruction of the desired sparse signal with LASSO. Additionally, we will assume the model has random missing information. Missing data has been recently of interest in big data and machine learning problems since they appear in many cases including but not limited to medical imaging datasets, hospital datasets, and massive MIMO. The dominance of IMAT over the well-known LASSO will be taken into account in different scenarios. Simulations and numerical results are also provided to verify the arguments.

Daniel Faggella is founder of TechEmergence, a news and advice website for entrepreneurs and investors interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. Speech recognition technology has been around for more than half a decade, though the early uses of speech recognition -- like voice dialing or desktop dictation -- certainly don't seem as sexy as today's burgeoning virtual agents or smart home devices. If you've been following the speech recognition technology market for any length of time, you know that a slew of significant players emerged on the scene about six years ago, including Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft (in a brief search, I counted 26 U.S.-based companies developing speech recognition technology). Since that time, the biggest tech trend setters in the world have been picking up speed and setting new benchmarks in a growing field, with Google recently providing open access to its new enterprise-level speech recognition API. While Google certainly seems to have the current edge in the market after substantial investments in machine learning systems over the past couple of years, the tech giant may yet have a potential Achilles' heel in owning an important segment of the global market -- lack of access to China.