Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1886 fictional "consulting detective," Sherlock Holmes, was a great mind renowned for his highly advanced powers of observation and reasoning. He was often assisted by Dr Watson, who was unfailingly loyal, if noticeably less bright. At the end of each thrilling tale starring the duo, the anxious reader would always be delighted to hear Sherlock announce that he had solved the latest mind-bending riddle, inevitably characterizing the solution to his trusty helper as, "Elementary, my dear Watson!" Sherlock, no doubt, would love today's hottest trend – Artificial Intelligence -- as he would be thrilled by its ability to execute or to make plain that which appears impossible or difficult to achieve. For the past few years, for example, we've grown to love streaming music providers like Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, etc, which get smarter about our musical preferences the more we use/teach them. More recently, fun and friendly assistants from Amazon and Google have become the coolest gadgets to have, as they quickly search the web and serve up answers in response to simple voice commands.

Finding the music of the moment can often be a challenging problem, even for humans with well-versed musical tastes. These challenges further explode into a myriad of complexities when attempting to construct algorithmic approaches for automatic playlist generation. A variety of factors play a role in influencing a listener's perception of what music is appropriate on a given seed (e.g. Erik Schmidt, Senior Scientist at Pandora will be presenting at the Machine Intelligence Summit in San Francisco, 23-24 March. Erik will present an overview of recommendations at Pandora, followed by a deep dive into the challenges of recommending content.

In recent years, commenting services have come and go, but one has maintained a consistent presence on some of the world's biggest websites: Disqus. It's spent the past ten years helping brands and news media develop their own communities, while simultaneously amassing hundreds of millions of users of its own. The service is big enough that its commenting tools have been deployed on websites that host unsavory content, which it has, in turn, become associated with. Disqus has said it has no tolerance for hate speech but continues to host discussions on websites that promote toxicity. Now, it says, it wants to do more about it.

CBS News profiled a New Jersey vertical farm providing baby kale, arugula, spinach and romaine to nearby Newark and NYC groceries. They boast 130% more productivity, 95% less water and no pesticides versus field farms. And they harvest 24 times a year, rain, snow or shine. The pros for vertical farming are obvious: 95% less water, no pesticides, year-around production, local delivery, almost no spoilage, true organic veggies. But there are an equal number of cons: high energy costs, lack of automation and robotics to reduce costs, high initial facility cost, steep up-front facility and fixtures cost with consequent premium selling prices limiting the number of buyers willing to pay that premium.

Whether you've just gotten rid of cable or want to supplement your TV package with online video, now's an excellent time to buy a media streaming device. Compared to the typical smart TV, standalone streamers such as the Roku Streaming Stick and Amazon Fire TV tend to have bigger app selections, faster performance, and more features. And with so much competition between device makers, the hardware is becoming faster, more capable, and more affordable. We constantly test all the latest devices, including Roku players, Fire TV devices, Android TV devices, Apple TV, and Chromecast. We review each new generation of hardware and constantly revisit the software and app selection so we can help you determine which platform is right for you.

It has been years since video games surpassed blockbuster movies as the biggest releases in media, but that's never stopped games makers wanting to get a slice of the action on the big screen. Now Call of Duty's makers Activision Blizzard are planning an assault to rival Disney's Marvel Universe. It plans to use the multi-layered, interconnected approach that has made Marvel's superheroes a dominant force in cinema to turn the first-person shooter into an all-conquering film franchise of its own. Two people are tasked with pulling that off, Stacey Sher and Nick van Dyk, the co-presidents of Activision Blizzard Studios, an in-house production division that hopes to succeed where almost everyone else has failed by turning games into commercially and critically successful film and TV. According to the pair, work on the Call of Duty films has already generated multiple scripts, and involved extensive research with military experts and retired soldiers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, has given a series of interviews in which he has criticised how the internet has developed, condemned how advertising has evolved and warned of the risks that global connectivity poses to users' privacy. In an interview with The Guardian, Sir Tim said that the Trump administration's decision to allow internet service providers to sign away their customers' privacy and sell users' browsing habits is "disgusting" and "appalling". The problem with the internet, he said, is that it can be "ridiculously revealing". "You have the right to go to a doctor in privacy where it's just between you and the doctor. And similarly, you have to be able to go to the web."

A recent "fake news" scandal involving IT giant DeNA Co. shows how quickly bogus health information can make the rounds online. According to a 300-page report released last month by a third-party panel looking into the scandal, Welq -- one of the firm's 10 content curation sites and one that focused on health -- totally lacked the awareness that medical information should be handled carefully because inaccuracies can do serious harm to people's health. Instead, Welq worked hard to find an algorithm it could use to mass-produce articles that would dominate Google's search rankings. The site managers also naively believed that, in an era when the most rigorously researched and reported works of journalism struggle to sell, they could strike it rich as long as they kept readers attracted to the site, regardless of accuracy. As a result, some of the stories ended up looking like a bad joke, like the one that said ghosts might cause stiff shoulders.

As a tech writer, I sometimes feel about new technology the way I suspect military historians must feel about war: You just can't say you love every aspect of your subject. My default model for "tomorrow" is built on the bright and exciting images of yesterday's tomorrow, from "Star Trek" and Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Tom Swift. As naïve as it may sound, I inherited from the books, films and TV shows of my childhood a basically progressive view: Despite bumps and missteps occasionally setting us back along the way, technology ultimately would lead to a better future. And I believe it has. Despite the anxiety we seem to thrive on these days, this is a safer world than the one I was born into nearly 70 years ago.

By most accounts, the movie adaptation of Ghost in the Shell didn't live up to the visionary manga and anime it's based on, but it did create some stunning visuals. The film's holo-saturated neon cityscape was designed in major part by digital creative Ash Thorp, who recently put together a highlight reel of concepts and animations created for the film. Part mood board and part tech demo, the short video blitzes through some of the most vibrant concepts that characterized the film's world. True design nerds will want to dive into Thorp's post on his personal blog, where he explains his philosophies behind the movie's murky, neon-drenched cities and geometric-styled props: "Pulling muse from the amazing original source material, I aimed to craft a look and style that would match [director Rupert Sander's] vision, while still maintaining the essence of the original manga and anime. By merging physical buildings with the Solograms, old neon lights, and holograms, I aimed to paint a multi-layered facade over the city to bring it to life. I wanted it to feel as if the viewer was taking a psychedelic journey wavering between the realms of alternate reality and virtual reality."