Warning: if you're not a fan of spoilers or fictional conglomerates hellbent on taking over the free world, you should probably stop reading here. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. That's essentially what the finale of Mr. Robot came down to on Wednesday night. Season 2 of Elliot's long, enigmatic journey to topple superconglomerate E Corp and, quite frankly, society, faded to black with him nursing a gunshot wound to the gut, falling to the ground and spewing blood all over the floor of an abandoned warehouse.

"X-Men" star James Marsden jumped at the chance to be a part of HBO's new sci-fi series "Westworld" because it gave him a chance to live a childhood dream. Marsden told Stuff that being on the set enabled him to live "out that eight-year-old fantasy of being a cowboy gunslinger again – putting on chaps, a cowboy hat, a gun and riding horses." But what the actor really came to appreciate about the show is not just the elaborate Wild West costumes and setting. Marsden said the show will make viewers question humanity -- or the concept of humanity -- as they try to figure out who are really humans and robotic "hosts." "It's kind of personal," the actor said.

We're still not sure if Scarlett Johansson is the best choice to play Major Motoko Kusanagi, but our first look at the upcoming Ghost in the Shell live-action flick is here. Separated into five brief teaser trailers that aired during tonight's Mr. Robot season finale, they're just enough to get a taste of what the movie looks like without giving any plot points away. They're so brief that it's tough to judge if the movie properly captures the environment of the manga and anime series, but we're sure there will be plenty of additional previews before the flick hits theaters on March 31, 2017.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence tell story about "Eleven-year-old David is the first android with human feelings. He is adopted by the Swinton family to test his ability to function. Before they are done testing him though David goes off on his own following his wish to be a human. He is on an odyssey to understand the secret to his existence. A science fiction film from Steven Spielberg taken over from Stanley Kubrick."

Machine learning and artificial intelligence already are and will continue to be beneficial in health care. However, serious pitfalls dot the health care landscape -- while failed experiments like Twitter chatbots may be amusing, mistakes in a medical context can have serious consequences. This talk will demystify the basic concepts of machine learning and several of the freely available tools that are making this technology more and more accessible, as well as explore the pros and cons of machine learning's expansion across the health care industry.

Someone sent me this article by psychology professor Susan Fiske, scheduled to appear in the APS Observer, a magazine of the Association for Psychological Science. The article made me a little bit sad, and I was inclined to just keep my response short and sweet, but then it seemed worth the trouble to give some context. I'll first share the article with you, then give my take on what I see as the larger issues. The title and headings of this post allude to the fact that the replication crisis has redrawn the topography of science, especially in social psychology, and I can see that to people such as Fiske who'd adapted to the earlier lay of the land, these changes can feel catastrophic. I will not be giving any sort of point-by-point refutation of Fiske's piece, because it's pretty much all about internal goings-on within the field of psychology (careers, tenure, smear tactics, people trying to protect their labs, public-speaking sponsors, career-stage vulnerability), and I don't know anything about this, as I'm an outsider to psychology and I've seen very little of this sort of thing in statistics or political science. As I don't know enough about the academic politics of psychology to comment on most of what Fiske writes about, so what I'll mostly be talking about is how her attitudes, distasteful as I find them both in substance and in expression, can be understood in light of the recent history of psychology and its replication crisis. In short, Fiske doesn't like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She's implicitly following what I've sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth.

Why makes a good operating system? The last component should be the easiest one, especially for well-established OSes, but it's where many have stumbled. Microsoft, for instance, learned a hard lesson with the innovative and overreaching Windows 8. It hid key components of the operating system and tried to drag Windows users into the touch age. We know how that turned out.

Five years ago, music personalization at Spotify was a tiny team. The team read papers, developed models, wrote data pipelines and built services. Today personalization involves multiple teams in New York, Boston & Stockholm producing datasets, feature engineering and serving up products to users. Features like Discover Weekly and Release Radar are but the tip of a huge personalization iceberg. One thing we have noticed is the overhead of running services.

Industry robots build our cars and our smartphones. Rehabilitation robots help people walk again. Machine teaching assistants can answer student questions. Software programs can write legal documents. Software systems can write stories for newspapers.

Recommendation systems allow executives and manager to recommend products their customers will like, and in the process take the guesswork out of marketing efforts - but they're still underused, and often under perform. We explain their use cases, how they work, why they might fail, and how to solve these issues. In a world dominated by mail, social media, youtube ads, chat applications and other communication technologies, marketing executives and managers have never had more ways of reaching out to customers. Yet this explosion in communication channels is a mixed blessing: while customers can be reached more easily, marketing teams also need to tailor their message much more than a decade ago: gone are the days of "one message to every customer". Non-tailored messages are often considered like junk or spam, and have become largely ineffective at driving sales.