Rami Malek haunts "Buster's Mal Heart" like an alien being just getting to know human form. In this finely calibrated indie from writer/director Sarah Adina Smith, the Emmy-winning "Mr. Robot" star is used to disconcertingly good effect, his large, lidded eyes like reservoirs of hope and pain. If Malek's role -- a mountain man nicknamed Buster who rants about an upcoming apocalyptic Inversion, but who was once a dedicated family man and hotel concierge named Jonah -- reminds you of his split-personality TV role, it's less a glomming-on than a burnishing of the actor's gift with conveying paralyzing rootlessness. In the Jonah scenes, Malek is a clean-cut, teetering Lynchian figure, dreaming of a better life for wife Marty (Kate Lyn Shiel) and their toddler daughter, but drawn to a mysterious conspiracy theorist figure (DJ Qualls) who feeds his nagging belief that his fate is mechanistic and predetermined.

Here's a data problem I encounter all the time. Let's say I'm running a website where users can submit movie ratings on a continuous 1-10 scale. For the sake of argument, let's say that the users who rate each movie are an unbiased random sample from the population of users. I'd like to compute the average rating for each movie so that I can create a ranked list of the best movies. I've got two big problems here. First, nobody is using my website.

When it comes to handbags, these days there are almost as many ways to jazz up your existing bag as there are new designs. In Selfridges' vast accessories hall in London, you can buy a clip-on set of metal flowers from Louis Vuitton, multi-coloured jangling robots from Prada, and leather tassels at Ted Baker. What customers want, it seems, is a way to stamp a bit of individuality on their purchases. And one new counter at Selfridges will let you go a stage further. At Mon Purse, an Australian brand, you are handed an iPad and samples of leathers, and given the chance to design your own handbag.

In recent years, popular culture has done a pretty good job of scaring us with the threat of machines turning on man. Just think of the red-eyed Terminator, from the movie franchise, shorn of its artificial flesh, the foot soldier of the Skynet artificial intelligence that lost patience with its human overlords and decided to wipe us out. Fortunately, that is science fiction, not science fact. The reality is that machines are among us every day and are becoming increasingly integrated into our lives in positive ways. Hence the report into machine learning, just published by the Royal Society.

Amazon is continuing its fierce expansion in the UK, unveiling plans to hire 400 people for a new development centre due to open in Cambridge in autumn. The retail giant said on Thursday that it was recruiting "extensively" for machine learning scientists, knowledge engineers, data scientists, mathematical modellers, speech scientists and software engineers to staff the new facilities and work on products like the Kindle, Fire tablet, Fire TV Stick, Echo, Echo Dot and the new Echo Look. Once the new centre is open, an existing facility in Cambridge will largely be used for research and development related to Amazon's Prime Air – a delivery system which aims to get parcels to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones. Last week Amazon announced that it was creating 1,200 new jobs at a site in Warrington under plans announced in February to expand its UK workforce by 5,000, despite uncertainty stemming from Brexit. The UK has for some years been a major market for Amazon and in March the sprawling Seattle-headquartered group launched Amazon Business for the UK, aimed at doing for businesses what it already does for individual customers, by offering a marketplace where companies can buy everything from industrial machinery to paper clips and janitorial equipment, even in bulk.

Talking about their hasty retreat from the planet Tattoine are Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd, and Jedi Apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), as droid R2-D2 listens in Star Wars:Episode I The Phantom Menace. Why are most Star Wars fans so vehemently opposed to the idea of midichlorians? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. The more time the narrative spends on those holes, they don't close, they actually widen. If X-Men spent air-time explaining why Storm could magically move the air molecules around to form storms, the more you'd think about how utterly impossible it is or how she must really be the most powerful mutant on Earth because the ability to move air molecules means that she can move any molecule, which means she could probably rearrange matter. But we don't do that.

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Artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but is now front-and-center in the digital strategies of many organizations. Information Management spoke with Don Schuerman, chief technology officer and vice president of product marketing at Pegasystems, at the Gartner ITxpo conference in Orlando on what for data management and analytics, and how vendor companies are responding. Information Management: What are the most common themes you heard from conference participants? But moreover, they are looking for guidance as to how they can apply AI to their businesses. With emerging experience channels like chatbots and virtual assistants, enterprises want to satisfy their customers'digital expectations' by connecting them back to their existing CRM and legacy environment.

Parrots are always getting people in trouble with their ability to copy what someone says. But, imagine if they could copy your speech and your tone of voice, thus sounding just like you. Creepy, right?! Well, replace the parrot with an AI algorithm, and you have the latest advancement in machine learning. The Montreal-based startup, Lyrebird, is making huge progress in speech synthesis technology. In other words, their algorithms are getting good at imitating people.

As Apple Inc.'s stash of cash grows, so does the possibility that the world's most valuable company will use some of the money for a huge acquisition that would expand its empire beyond iPhones and other gadgets. The company holds more than a quarter of a trillion dollars it could use to go shopping. So far, the guessing game has primarily focused on possible targets such as Netflix and Tesla. Either deal could make sense, given Apple's long-running interest in providing a TV service to consumers and its more recent work on self-driving cars. But in recent months the takeover talk has swirled around whether Apple might do something even more dramatic by making a bid for Walt Disney Co.