In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

It's no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without relying on rules-based programming. It came into its own as a scientific discipline in the late 1990s as steady advances in digitization and cheap computing power enabled data scientists to stop building finished models and instead train computers to do so. The unmanageable volume and complexity of the big data that the world is now swimming in have increased the potential of machine learning--and the need for it. In 2007 Fei-Fei Li, the head of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, gave up trying to program computers to recognize objects and began labeling the millions of raw images that a child might encounter by age three and feeding them to computers. By being shown thousands and thousands of labeled data sets with instances of, say, a cat, the machine could shape its own rules for deciding whether a particular set of digital pixels was, in fact, a cat.1 1.Fei-Fei Li, "How we're teaching computers to understand pictures," TED, March 2015, ted.com.

The online dating app has announced that its latest update allows users to type a word that describes their gender identity. The West Hollywood, California-based company says in a blog post Tuesday that users also can choose to be shown in searches that best reflect that identity.

Propped over her breakfast at a West Hollywood cafe one morning in late October, Amy Adams was contemplating her dream role. The actress had just dropped her 6-year-old daughter off at school after returning from traveling to promote her two new films, the science-fiction drama "Arrival" and psychological thriller "Nocturnal Animals." Her mother and husband at a nearby table, Adams was preparing for extended family to arrive in town momentarily. "I need to play somebody who just goes around and gets spa treatments," Adams said, wistfully. "I would have to do a lot of spa treatments, just for research. Adams has certainly earned some downtime after turning in her two new complex lead performances. In Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival," which opens Nov. 11, she plays a linguist haunted by an unexplained melancholy who must learn to communicate with aliens in order to prevent a global war. In Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals," which opens a week later, she plays an aloof art gallerist obsessed with her ex-husband's novel. At 42, the five-time Oscar nominee's career has been characterized by a mix of supporting roles, from a naive nun in "Doubt" to the wife of a cult leader in "The Master" to journalist/love interest Lois Lane in the latest round of Superman movies. As "Arrival's" Louise Banks, she reluctantly leads a team of investigators including a scientist played by Jeremy Renner. Much of the film's 10-week shoot took place on a bare soundstage in Montreal, with puppeteers behind a lighted screen serving as the aliens. For the entire production, Adams said, she had a stomachache, a side effect of internalizing Louise's anxiety. "She's not heroic in the traditional sense," Adams said of the character. "I love that she gets to rely on her intellect and instinct as opposed to brawn and bravery." Adams said she prepared for the role by studying linguistics and working with her acting coach on the film's psychological underpinnings, but she is ill-equipped to answer the deep questions the movie raises about science and the nature of time. "It's funny when people start challenging me about it," Adams said, of the movie's internal logic. "If I were able to explain how the science of this film works, I would not be an actress." In "Nocturnal Animals," Adams plays a woman who is equally unmoored, although the milieu -- the Los Angeles fine-art scene -- is far more familiar. Adams' husband is artist Darren Le Gallo, and though his work resides more in the underground art scene than the rarified one depicted in the film, she found some uncomfortable parts of the character to latch onto. "I have definitely been invited into that world at times, the wealth and privilege of a very specific part of the Los Angeles art scene," Adams said. "I found myself really judgmental of this character.

There's a good chance information about you is available for sale to advertisers and other businesses on Vertical Mass. The nearly 3-year-old West Hollywood start-up provides user data storage and analysis software for companies in music, sports, video games and Hollywood. Those companies also can list some of their user information for sale, with Vertical Mass collecting a portion of the proceeds. Fees from the software service and the data marketplace have brought Vertical Mass seven figures in revenue for two consecutive years, Chief Executive Mark Shedletsky said, declining to provide specific figures. But investors think the company is only getting started as a key information broker in the entertainment universe.

Zume Pizza, a company in Mountain View, Calif., is using robots to make pizza. And it's delivering that pizza in a special truck outfitted with 56 ovens, in which the pizzas bake before they're delivered. This should eliminate the problem of your soggy, lukewarm pizza being delivered after bouncing around in the back of a dirty car. The company was started by restaurateur Julia Collins and Alex Garden, former general manager of XBox Live. The two decided it was time to crack into the 39-billion pizza industry -- with robots.

At first, Shura figured, the spilled drink didn't seem like cause for alarm. "I saw a bit of residue on the keyboard, but I thought it'd be fine," the English pop singer said of a moment not long into her show Monday night at West Hollywood's Roxy when Prosecco came splashing down on her instrument. "Then I started playing and was like, 'Oh, those are not the right chords.' So I tried again -- still wrong." Turns out the synth -- crucial to a sleek, '80s-inspired sound many have compared to early Madonna -- had sustained serious damage, enough that Shura had to make use of a replacement while the other was sent out for repairs.

If Ford, Volvo, GM and Uber are to be believed, self-driving cars will soon dominate our roads and car ownership will be a thing of the past. If regular consumers are to be believed, automakers need to hold their horses, because people aren't ready for a self-driving future. Those are the findings from a new survey commissioned by Kelley Blue Book, which polled 2,264 U.S. residents weighted to census figures by age, gender, ethnicity and location. The results, published Wednesday, found that 80% of survey participants said people should "always have the option to drive themselves." Sixty-four percent of respondents said they need to be in control of their own vehicle and 62% said they enjoy driving.

The new team at UC Irvine is suiting up for battle in a recently furnished arena on campus, where members will gear up with headphones, a keyboard and mouse. UC Irvine this month opened its e-sports arena, which is equipped with 80 computers and will be frequented by the school's new team competing in the "League of Legends" game. E-sports, or electronic sports, are multiplayer video game experiences and competitions in which players play against one another through a digital platform. "When people like to watch professional basketball or football, people also want to watch the best gamers in the world play against the other best gamers in the world," said Jesse Wang, president of UC Irvine's Assn. of Gamers, a student group. In a collective effort from the association, the school's admissions department, Student Affairs and UC Irvine's e-sports acting Director Mark Deppe, the university was able to recruit five of the team's players, who are receiving about 15,000 worth of scholarships.

The top civilian drone maker's latest model is small enough to slip into purses and controllable with just a smartphone. The Mavic Pro represents a significant leap for Chinese start-up DJI, whose Phantom and Inspire offerings dominate the camera drone market. The unveiling of the Mavic Pro on Tuesday, a week after action camera maker GoPro released its Karma drone and a month after Chinese rival Yuneec's launch of its Breeze, sets up a holiday shopping showdown. The drones still carry price tags likely to intimidate to most consumers -- from 500 to 1,200. But with simplified flying controls and slimmer bodies compared with earlier models, the quadcopters are edging away from their enthusiasts-only roots toward a future as mass consumer devices.