Hans Zimmer asks the question: "What if I could define a character in one note?" He spends his days running "experiments" and processing "Big Data" (the imaginary world painted in the film's script, his cultural and artistic background, etc.) using the distributed neuronal network architecture of his innate biological computer and extracts "models" comprised of emotionally-stirring themes full of rich patterns, context, and meaning "visualized" through the auditory medium (the Score) that either makes or breaks the ability of a producer/director to tell a story. Now, in order for his patterns to be effective in communicating the thematic message, they must strike a fundamentally common cultural chord within the audience that responds to the thematic information being conveyed, perhaps through some kind of shared library of archetypal cultural-emotional reference points (a shared prior), that facilitates some kind of visceral mutual appreciation. One might think of the universe of all possible scores for a film being embedded into some kind of high dimensional space that also contains the score of interest (like the sculpture already present in the marble), and Hans essentially exploring this musical space through'experiments' to find that subspace of specific themes that have a high degree of correlation with the various elements of the film. In a sense, he uses both a bayesian approach relying on his vast prior knowledge of themes, motifs, etc., a dimension-reduction approach by whittling away inessential elements, and adding raw innovations to identify those particular threads that have the best correspondence to the action in a particular scene.

More than a week after his death, Prince is everywhere. Artists the world over counted him as an influence and mentor, and Japan is no exception. When news of Prince's death broke, Japanese musicians, from pop idols to rappers, tweeted their goodbyes. But what a lot of people may not realize is that Prince also had profoundly affected one of the most bizarre comic and anime franchises Japan has ever produced – a series called, appropriately enough, "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure." The series isn't quite as popular as titles like "One Piece" or "Dragon Ball Z," but it has been running since 1985, spawned video game and novel spinoffs and produced a serious cult following.

Once your business is no longer the innovative upstart and you become the establishment entity, how do you maintain an entrepreneurial and disruptive spirit that gets results? That's the question Apple had to ask itself this week, following an iffy earnings report. This week, Apple posted the earnings results for the second quarter of 2016, and reported a year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the first time in 13 years. The company took in 50.6 billion in quarterly revenue and 10.5 billion in quarterly net income. On a call with investors, CEO Tim Cook characterized that 13 percent dip in revenue as a "pause in our growth," that had stemmed from "ongoing macroeconomic headwinds in much of the world." Despite the break in the company's decade plus streak of "record" growth, it's unlikely that the tech giant's standing as one of most valuable and authentic brands in the world will be dinged in any significant way.

Yesterday morning I woke up, put on a pot of coffee, and checked the news. I wanted to revisit the New Hampshire primary results that had rolled in the night before. I opened Quartz's new app and was greeted with a text message: "Yep, it's really happening: Trump and Sanders won big in New Hampshire." Below it appeared side-by-side portraits of Trump's scowl and Bernie's grin. To read more, I tapped a ready-made text reply containing a donkey, an elephant, and an American flag emoji.

In recent blogs, I wrote about using codified narrative as a form of data. I also discussed using attribution models to systematically evaluate codified narrative for ontological constructs: e.g. I provide a brief overview of these topics a bit later in the blog. The third important piece to make use of narrative data involves "attribution profiling" in a process that I call "catching scent." Following the odour of data involves establishing a scent and then searching for it. After attribution models create profiles from the codified narrative, I have the search engine hunt for similar profiles. I don't consider the process particularly original or creative.

There are no spoilers for Her Story in this article. When Sam Barlow was working at Climax Studios in Portsmouth, helping to design the survival horror sequel, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, he would get home at night and tinker with a couple of screenplay projects. They were just an exercise, a way to write about things that he couldn't in his day job. But then one night, he realised something: both scripts were about a man just ambling along, seemingly quite happy in life, until a cataclysmic event changes everything. "I was like, 'Oh right, this is me sending a message to myself'," he says. "I realised I needed the impetus to leave the company and go indie. I was writing this stuff to tell that to myself."

It's not often a unique product shows up in our email and news feeds, but we became curious over something a little different today: a USB compute module for neural networks and machine learning. Movidius' new Fathom Neural Compute Stick is an ultra-low power processor featuring a Myriad 2 VPU (vision processing unit), providing up to 150 GFLOPS of compute for about 1 Watt of power. Neural networks and machine learning have fascinated people for a long time; teaching machines and computers to think rather than simply'do'. The problem is that it's extremely difficult; not just from a hardware perspective (people aren't binary), but from an academic and psychological perspective too; the how we think. Instead of writing code that goes through images or live camera feeds, doing edge detection, writing more algorithms to define shapes and generally teach the computer what it needs to do (explicitly), neural networks are a way to teach a computer to teach itself – often creating systems that are faster and more accurate than the hand-coded method.

April 24 can't come soon enough for Game of Thrones fans eagerly awaiting the premiere of the hit show's sixth season. Naturally, most of us have been speculating wildly about the fate of our favorite characters for the past year, but now there's a clever app to help you withthat. The project, A Song of Ice and Data, was developed by a group of students of a JavaScript course at the Technical University of Munich. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! It looks at 24 features of each character, the list of which includes attributes like their age, the House they belong to, whether they're married and how popular they are based on how many wiki pages link to them.

Tempting as it is to lay as much blame as possible at the feet of Philip Green – a man whose 63rd birthday cake involved an edible version of himself, topless, in bed with his chihuahua, silk sheets recreated in sugar paste, gold candles fringing the mattress like a flaming cage – the decline of British Home Stores was not entirely his fault. Like Austin Reed, the high-street tailor that went into administration the day after BHS, this was a business that collapsed in large part because it failed to be flexible in a changing marketplace. Both came to rely on the patronage of people who, either through a lack of access or an abundance of ethics, opted to shop physically rather than digitally. But as discussions on Twitter over what you'll miss about BHS (mostly: somewhere to go to the loo) also indicate, unless your shop serves a need that cannot be met online, it will now struggle to survive. Even Argos, whose current raison d'être is to trump Amazon by letting you get your mitts on a cheap toaster the same day, has seen a 36% year-on-year drop in profits. This its chief executive credits to "a continuation of the challenges we saw towards the back of last year with high street footfall and the move online".

Scientific determinism as first published by Laplace in 1814 is an important and essential principle in the macro-world around us. We know that if we push something, it will move -- unless our impulse was not sufficient to overcome inertia… and so forth. Laplace postulated that if there were an omniscient daemon who knew the precise positions and impulses of each and every particle in a system, this daemon would be able to deterministically calculate each and every future state of this system. Our beloved spreadsheet calculations resemble this daemon (possibly in more than one connotation). Typing in some basic data to start calculations from, the wonderous spreadsheet software will automagically calulate everything depending on them, eventually deriving the results we wanted to obtain.