Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Jeff Bezos attends The 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 7, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California. SAN FRANCISCO -- Nobody ever said original programming was cheap, but an internal Amazon document shows just how expensive it can be -- to the tune of $500 million for a new prequel series of "The Lord of the Rings." Amazon said in November it plans to create a multi-season prequel based on the beloved book series and blockbuster movies that came out of it. Insiders put the cost just for rights at $250 million. Now comes word from a leaked document obtained by Reuters that Amazon could spend another $250 million on production and marketing for the series, bringing the total cost to $500 million.

There's a performance tradeoff inherent in batch size selection--a larger batch size is often more efficient computationally (up to a point) but while that might increase the number of samples/s you process, it also can mean that the number of SGD iterations you take /s decreases. It currently seems that with deep networks it's preferable to take many small steps than to take fewer larger ones (again, this is a design tradeoff that requires experimentation to nail down optimally for any given dataset/net). There's an intense amount of research going on examining this phenomenon in theoretical and empirical detail, and evidence currently seems to be pointing towards the higher variance gradients of minibatch gradient descent actually being tied to generalization.

The late Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is one of history's least likely best-sellers. Yet the book was a pop-cultural phenomenon, selling more than 10 million copies and popularizing everything from advanced cosmological theories to the phrase "turtles all the way down." It was also adapted into a documentary of the same name by Errol Morris. A Brief History of Time (which is currently streamable on FilmStruck) was Morris' first major documentary after The Thin Blue Line and the first of his portrait films. Combining interviews with Hawking, his family, his friends, and his colleagues with clips from Disney's bizarre live-action sci-fi film The Black Hole, archival images, and, of course, a Philip Glass score, A Brief History of Time is the kind of film that only Morris could make. After Hawking's death on Wednesday, I called up Morris to talk about making the film, why Hawking was his generation's celebrity scientist, and their friendship, which continued for decades. Isaac Butler: What drew you to the book--or to Hawking--as a subject?

Smart speakers have become one of the hottest markets in consumer tech. Amazon Echos and Google Homes were among the most popular gifts this past holiday season, and that sales bump solidified Amazon as the leader in the space. Apple has since struggled to catch up, with its recently launched HomePod, but other hardware makers have rushed to get in on the hype, integrating Alexa and Google Assistant into their own headphones, wearables, and speakers. Each of the three big smart-speaker platforms includes its own integrated music player--Amazon Prime Music, Google Play Music, and Apple Music. But for 159 million music lovers, another app is their player of choice: Spotify.

Kuju studio chief Brynley Gibson only said that his team is "looking forward to creating a game that matches the fantastic storyline and gritty action of the Netflix series." Tim Stephen, Head of Legal and Business Affairs at Gaumont, also said that it trusts the developers to create a game that will thrill the series' fans and allow "them to engage with the storylines and characters they have come to know over the past three seasons." Season three's focus shifted to Escobar's rivals, the Cali Cartel, so you at least have an idea of which characters will be in the game. We'll definitely know more about it before it drops: Curve and Kuju plan to release the game in 2019 for the PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PC. If that release date's too vague and far away, don't worry: Narcos season 4, which will focus on Mexico's Guadalajara cartel, might arrive on Netflix by the end of the year.

Actor Matthew Morrison arrives at the 42nd American Music Awards in Los Angeles, on Nov. 23, 2014. Matthew Morrison's new film, "Crazy Alien," has been accused of animal abuse on set. During the filming of the Chinese science fiction film, a set member sent PETA a video of a German shepherd allegedly being mistreated while shooting a stunt. The video and an account of the alleged incident by the crew member was made public by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on Thursday. "On November 28th, 2017, I witnessed firsthand one of the worst animal cruelty acts I have ever seen," the staffer-turned-whistleblower told PETA, per a log the group released.

Ever since her debut in the original 1996 videogame Tomb Raider, Lara Croft has been the subject of feminist debate, mainly due to her disproportionate chest size and skimpy shorts. But in 2013, Square Enix's videogame reboot sought to take a less objectifying approach to the character, dressing her in a more practical tank top and pants. Her face is covered with scratches, her hair messily tossed into a ponytail. The new Tomb Raider film, which reboots the movie franchise after the two Angelina Jolie-starring installments in the early 2000s, takes most of those empowering changes to heart. As Slate's Inkoo Kang notes in her review, the focus is on what her body can do, rather than how it looks.

In 1959, Arthur Samuel, a pioneer in machine learning, defined it as the'field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed'. Machine learning can translate to using algorithms to parse through data, recognise patterns, and then make predictions and assessments based on what the algorithms have learnt. Machine learning can be used for fact checking and it can make archiving less of a tedious task for journalists. It can let voice assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant know you're pissed off based on the tone of your voice on a Monday morning and then play a song to cheer you up. It can also be used to explore scenes in Wes Anderson films and help uncover hidden spy planes. In short, machine learning systems could very well become essential journalism tools in the coming years.

A Washington state man, who survived a samurai sword attack last week by his now ex-girlfriend while he was asleep, revealed his rigorous video game training regime left him with a lack of sex drive, and this resulted in his former partner thinking he was cheating on her. "It killed my sex drive. I was training too hard, it exhausted me. I felt bad because she needed the affection. I just couldn't keep up," 29-year-old Alex Lovell told Buzzfeed News of his video game training regimen, which led to the attack by his ex-girlfriend March 3. "She thought I was having sex with other people," Lovell added.

Technology is changing the way we work and the jobs we do. Will artificial intelligence and robots relieve us of humdrum tasks, making our working lives easier, or will they take our jobs away altogether? As part of a new series called the Future of Work, we look at the growing popularity of "daigou" - Chinese expats who buy consumer goods for people back home in China. Sandra Lee describes herself as part of a "global phenomenon". A 37-year-old Chinese expat who lives in Central Coast, Australia, she makes money by selling Australian goods to people back in China.