Following a similar business tactic that drug dealers have employed for ages, developer Blizzard is giving folks who check out the upcoming Warcraft movie a free, full, copy of World of Warcraft. That's assuming you see the movie at certain Regal Cinemas (which is running a promo to send folks to BlizzCon, as well), United Artists Theaters or Edwards Theaters here in the United States. The promo is supported abroad too, with Australia, Brazil, Europe, Southeast Asia and New Zealand all getting in on the action.

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn't been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt's memory. It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She'd been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She'd said to me, impulsively, "I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go." To this I'd replied, for reasons I'm at a loss to reconstruct, "Antarctica?" Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Hoping to make Antarctica more palatable to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt's money on the most deluxe of bookings--a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she'd consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she'd be happy she'd made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother's situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home. By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I'd proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of "seeing it before it melts" was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent's status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the snowy sheathbill and the world's southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I'd already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we'd learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days.

The militant extremist group has suffered recent military setbacks and lost territory in both Iraq and Syria, says Brett McGurk, presidential adviser for the anti-ISIS coalition. Unlike most leaders in his party, the presumptive Republican nominee opposes any changes to Social Security and says he is open to the idea of a higher minimum wage. Michel Temer, who leads the South American country in the wake of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, must deal with an ongoing economic recession, the Zika virus, a distrustful populace and the upcoming Rio Summer Olympics. Self-driving cars, which could be motoring on more American streets within a decade, may prove so convenient that their use might soar and cause more traffic jams. An "incredibly lifelike" but fake bomb forced police to evacuate Old Trafford stadium on the final day of the English Premier League soccer season.

In a world of smart machines that can drive cars, beat humans at chess, advise on medical diagnoses and perform a host of other tasks, imagine the next likely step as a smart machine as a people manager. As business investment in smart machines grows, "robobosses" will increasingly make workplace decisions that previously could only have been made by human managers. By 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by robobosses, according to Frances Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. These smart machine managers will look at data derived from worker performance in new ways because of their ability to dispassionately discover previously undetected relationships and correlations, test their hypotheses, and then elevate them to production status. "Supervisor duties are increasingly shifting toward monitoring worker accomplishments through measurements of performance that are directly tied to output and customer evaluation," explained Ms. Karamouzis.

Use code WTBDBP16 to get 15% off the price of registration for 2 Day and Combo passes. Imaging, Vision and Learning based on Optimization and PDEs, August 29 – September 1, Bergen, Norway.

As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don't throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Traditional neural networks can't do this, and it seems like a major shortcoming. For example, imagine you want to classify what kind of event is happening at every point in a movie. It's unclear how a traditional neural network could use its reasoning about previous events in the film to inform later ones. Recurrent neural networks address this issue.

Today on In Case You Missed It: A University of Washington robot hand has an algorithm in it that knows what works and what doesn't when handling things, and can improve itself over time. Samsung Brasil made a smart surfboard for a professional surfer that shows water conditions and incoming texts, and researchers hacked movies to include the visual style of art masters. Mass transit fiends will want to know how the hyperloop test in Nevada went. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

The amount of data produced every day grows tremendously in most real-life domains, including medical imaging, genomics, text categorisation, computational biology, and many others. Although it appears beneficial at the first glance (more data could mean more possibilities of extracting and revealing useful underlying knowledge), handling massively large datasets became a challenging issue and attracts research attention, especially in the era of big data. This big data revolution affected many research fields, including statistics, machine learning, parallel computing, and computer systems in general [1]. Storing and analysing the acquired historical information should allow predicting the label of an incoming (unseen) feature vector, containing some quantified features of a given data example. If the labels are categorical, then we are to tackle the classification task (it's regression otherwise).

When you get right down to it, developing vaccines is about data and luck. Scientists start with a set of variables--what drugs a virus responds to, how effectively, and for whom--and then it's a whole lot of trial and error until they stumble upon a cure. One of the most exciting possibilities in medical research right now is how technology like machine learning could help researchers rapidly process those enormous sets of data, more quickly leading to cures. This is already starting to happen: In a study published Wednesday in the journal Macromolecules, researchers from IBM and Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology reveal a breakthrough that could help prevent deadly virus infections. With the help of IBM super computer Watson, they hope their finding will soon make its way into vaccines.

MasterCard Inc. says new machine-learning technology has helped it quickly control three separate cyberattacks that targeted automated bank tellers, limiting the damage to about 100,000 each. The transaction-monitoring system, which also employs data visualization tools, caught the three attacks during the first two months of 2016, according to MasterCard. The company declined to identify the banks. The Safety Net system, rolled out globally late last year, analyzes more than 1.3 billion transactions per day involving MasterCard debit and credit accounts at banks, merchants and ATMs, using algorithms that assess customer behavior in real-time. In the three attacks this year, directed against two U.S. banks and one bank in South America, Safety Net identified anomalies such as large cash withdrawals or transactions outside the usual geographic area for a given account.