Being overweight carries with it a social stigma, as does being a man who embraces the feminine, but for those in the gay community who live at the intersection of such identities, life can be like the worst case of double jeopardy. To Jamal Lewis, however, who is also black and who identifies as "gender deviant," being fat and effeminate is a source of power and a subject worthy of exploration in a documentary titled "No Fats, No Femmes." "For me, I'm just interested in the spaces that people are afraid to occupy," said Lewis, who uses "he-she" as a gender pronoun. "I think there is something to be learned from what we are most afraid of, and so, if that's what I was taught to be afraid of, well [forget] that. I am the Fat Femme."

A fearless Frenchman, Franky Zapata, thinks one day people will be able to ride his hoverboard to pick up bread in the morning (it's a French thing). The jet ski champion on Saturday set a new Guinness World Record for the farthest hoverboard flight – yes, just like in the movies – off the coast of Sausset-les-Pins in the south of France. Mr. Zapata rode the 1,000 horsepower drone, standing on top of it, for 7,388 feet, or more than a mile. He hovered 165 feet above the surface of the water, "trailed by a fleet of boats and jet skis," as Guinness reports. His feat shattered the previous hoverboard travel record of 905 feet and 2 inches, set last year by Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru.

When teenage carpet salesman Lee Biggins decided to set up a jobseekers website, he wasn't going to let the fact he didn't have any computer skills hold him back. This was back in 1999, and the then 19-year-old had big ambitions for his business idea. So he went out and spent 899 on a computer, and an internet how-to book. Mr Biggins, who had left school at 15 "with some terrible grades - Es, Fs, and Gs", also enrolled on a computer literacy course in his hometown of Fleet, in Hampshire, 45 miles south west of London. But realising he could still do with some technical assistance, he says he went down his local pub one evening, and asked everyone: "Does anyone know someone who can build a website?"

Antwood is the alias of Tristan Douglas, a producer, microbiologist, and all-around deep thinker hailing from Nanaimo, British Columbia. Some might remember his EP Work Focus from last year, an under-the-radar gem put out by net label B.YRSLF Division. It's a slice of footwork that's been pummeled and fractured into something that's neither here nor there, which is probably why it grabbed the attention of Planet Mu boss Mike Paradinas. Around that time, Douglas was still recording under the name Margaret Antwood, an admittedly lazy spoonerism on internationally-celebrated poet and novelist Margaret Atwood. "I thought it'd be funny to take some figure that's barely known in the public consciousness and do like a really crappy pun of her name," he says.

What will we do with all the data we accumulate from photos? On a daily basis, Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook or Microsoft use highly sophisticated deep learning engines to better understand the content of billions of images uploaded, liked and shared. For now, it is to better serve advertising, but what else can be done? For one, we could generate custom-made photos. Automated photo generating A.I. using all the knowledge acquired about photography -- including which image types helps sell more products, which dominant colors appeal to viewers, and which composition is the most effective -- would build a perfect photo according to your needs.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience. Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money. His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries--that the present isn't all that different from the past.

Do they miss you when you're away on business? Can they put on a VR headset without their parents' help? That last one is pretty important. The year is zipping by, but before we launch full-force into next month, there's just about enough time for a quick roundup of the best updates and launches in April. It was recently revealed that Google was testing a new app for travelers, and now we have a better idea of what it might do.

Raibert has been designing walking robots since 1980, when he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon University; he later moved the research group to MIT. When I visited the company in 2003, he showed me a video of mountain goats clambering easily up steep terrain and pointed out that "a large part of the earth's surface is inaccessible to vehicles that have wheels or [tank treads]. Yet people and animals can go to all of those places." Boston Dynamics's primary customer was the Pentagon's advanced research arm, known as DARPA. BigDog was pitched as a kind of robotic "pack mule" that would help soldiers carry heavy gear on terrain that was hostile to Humvees.

A workaholic moderate, who set aside dreams of a storybook inauguration to pursue a diplomatic career, meets a hopelessly single-issue candidate chasing his last shot at relevance. Throw in a wacky, albeit divided, party and an amorous ex-President who dredges up all kinds of unpleasant memories, and you have the sleeper hit of the season! Thematically, this film is underscored by decades of entrenched sexism and anti-socialism, though the talking points are the same as the 2008 original. "The Best (No, Seriously) the Greatest-Ever Exotic Marigold Hotel--I Mean It, It's Classy" A group of disenfranchised retirees book a stay at a destination resort built by a famed real-estate developer. But they soon discover that he didn't actually build it himself but licensed his name to the project.

I recently gave a talk about recommender systems at the Data Science Sydney meetup (the slides are available here). This post roughly follows the outline of the talk, expanding on some of the key points in non-slide form (i.e., complete sentences and paragraphs!). The first few sections give a broad overview of the field and the common recommendation paradigms, while the final part is dedicated to debunking five common myths about recommender systems. The key reason why many people seem to care about recommender systems is money. For companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, recommender systems drive significant engagement and revenue. But this is the more cynical view of things.