The three top 10 debut albums on this week's Billboard Top 200 album chart involve a trio of dudes who've earned their success three different ways. Social media star Shawn Mendes roared to No. 1 with "Illuminate," his second straight record to hit the top. The singer, who built the foundations of his fanbase through quickie posts on Vine, has jumped platforms to become the rare artist with back-to-back No. 1 albums. Mendes accomplished the feat through an impressive volume of streams. "Illuminate" accrued more than 24 million spins, which, combined with 120,000 downloads and physical sales, resulted in a total of 145,000 album equivalent units, according to Nielsen Music.

Hello there, I know there are a ton of ML tools for Python SciPy, Sklearn, Pandas, Numpy etc. A lot of which I am currently using for my Machine Learning Nano degree on Udacity. However I do like the c style syntax available in C# and I was wondering if there is rich set of tools available for this language as well.

Isn't pop music written by robots already? But really: Researchers at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in Paris have shared a pair of tracks created with the assistance of software called Flow Machines. The program analyzes a database of existing songs to "learn" musical styles and identify commonalities, then "[exploits] unique combinations of style transfer, optimization, and interaction techniques" to synthesize original music. Researchers can tailor the process to produce tunes that sound like the work of a particular artist--for example, "Daddy's Car," which is intended to emulate the style of the Beatles: Shadow," is fashioned in the style of Great American Songbook composers like Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington: Neither of these songs were entirely composed by artificial intelligence, nor did a computer write the words. As a post from the Flow Machines blog explains, French musician Benoît Carré "arranged and produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics."

Offering further evidence that the thirst for reviving vintage TV continues, ABC announced that it is bringing back "The Gong Show" with executive producer Will Arnett. Scheduled for a 10-episode run, the game show/talent competition will "celebrate un-traditionally talented, unique performers plucked from the Internet and put on a primetime stage," according to a statement from ABC. During the peak of its late-'70s run, "The Gong Show" was hosted with a sort of anarchic glee by Chuck Barris (whose bizarre autobiography "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" became a 2002 film directed by George Clooney). An outlet for the quasi-talented and otherwise fringe performers on NBC's daytime schedule and later nighttime syndication, the show was a competition to see who could last the longest onstage before one of the celebrity panelists struck a large gong, which ended the performance. "The comedy culture we are living in has finally caught up to'The Gong Show,' " said Holly Jacobs, executive vice president, reality and syndication programming for Sony Pictures Television.

A lifetime in comedy continues to pay off for Eddie Murphy, who will be honored with the Hollywood Career Achievement Award at the 2016 Hollywood Film Awards in November. Murphy, who was honored in 2015 with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, earns his latest accolades for a career that includes years on "Saturday Night Live," blockbuster hits "Shrek," "Coming to America" and "Beverly Hills Cop," as well as an Academy Award-nominated turn as James "Thunder" Early in the 2006 musical "Dreamgirls." "Eddie Murphy has had a spectacular career as a comedian, actor, writer, producer and director, spanning more than 35 years," said Allen Shapiro, CEO of Dick Clark Productions, in a statement released Monday. "We look forward to honoring his extraordinary body of work." Actor and comedian James Corden ("The Late Late Show With James Corden") will host the ceremony held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on Nov. 6.

When "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" is released next year, it will have been six years since Captain Jack Sparrow and company last graced the big screen and nearly 13 years since the franchise debuted in 2003. On Sunday, Disney released its first look at the fifth "Pirates" film and it's everything a fan could want from the franchise, save for one glaringly obvious absence. As the teaser unfolds, audiences are shown a British ship under siege by ghost pirates (probably not the same ghost pirates who have previously plagued the films, but to a certain extent all ghost pirates look the same to me) as the fog rolls in off the sea. Striding over the deck is a foreboding presence, soon revealed to be Javier Bardem as Captain Salazar, an old nemesis of Jack Sparrow. With the air surrounding them filled with fire particles from the burning ship, he tells a young man to find Sparrow and give him a message: "Death will go straight for him."

At what point does a robot become more than just a vessel for satisfying a human's needs? That's one of the many questions posed by the new HBO series Westworld, based on that other Michael Crichton story about a theme park in which the android attractions--who are designed to be fucked and killed--rise up against their creators. The series, which premiered Sunday evening, is science fiction, combined with throwback 1880s Americana period pastiche, and boasts a bordello filled with beautiful, enthusiastic robot whores who will toss back whiskey and slap your face during a threesome. In the original 1978 movie, there is a distinct divide between the robots' intelligence and ours, but the speculative technology that animates the story has made significant strides since Crichton's time. Today, we're closer than ever to being able to buy or rent the company of artificially intelligent machines, and ones we might believe could love us back. Sexual product technology has made some interesting progress in 2016.

In deep supervised learning, you can overfit a small dataset as a sanity check: making sure your model is implemented correctly and can actually learn before going on to train on your real, big dataset. Are there similar strategies in reinforcement learning, where one can get results in a few minutes before moving on to spend a day training on Space Invaders or even Pong?

During my commute the other day, I ended up on a dark subway car. The train still had power--the air conditioning was on, the announcements were coming through--but all the lights were dead. I live near an above-ground stop, so at first there was morning sunshine coming in through the windows. But when the train went underground, we were plunged into complete darkness. I found myself suddenly in a sea of floating, ghostly faces, illuminated by the glow of smartphones.