Robots show they can foresee their own future The Political Side of Things

FiveThirtyEight pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood's gender imbalance The Bechdel-Wallace Test -- more commonly abbreviated to the Bechdel Test -- asks two simple questions of a movie: Does it have at least two named female characters? And do those characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man? A surprising number of films fail the test. Although the test is punchy and has become pervasive, it doesn't address the core inequalities in Hollywood films. Alison Bechdel -- an acclaimed cartoonist who was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2014 and whose memoir was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical -- in no way set out to solve Hollywood sexism when she wrote the test into a comic strip in the mid-1980s.