Canon has unveiled its most important camera in years -- the EOS R1 mirrorless. Launched alongside the 45-megapixel R5 II, it's the company's new flagship designed to replace the 1DX Mark III DSLR and help Canon maintain its leadership in the pro sports photography field. The R1 is all about speed, with the stacked sensor allowing 40 fps RAW bursts with continuous autofocus. Other features are designed to help nail crucial shots, including pre-capture, eye-tracking AF and sports-specific settings. At the same time, it should be great for video, thanks to its support for 6K RAW capture.

Hype can be a dangerous thing. Too much of it can tank your shares, kill your product launch effectively and turn the excitement on its head. The wave of excitement around generative AI that OpenAI is riding has effectively become an introduction to LLMs for most of the world. When Altman first confirmed that OpenAI was in fact building the successor to its benchmark model GPT3, the AI community was excited. GPT3 was a state-of-the-art language model with 175 billion parameters – holding the record for the largest-ever AI model then. And since its release in 2020, speculation has been rife around GPT4.

These conclusions are drawn from ETR's most recent October survey, the demographics of which are highlighted below. Bradley highlights the critical aspects of the October survey demographics. The fourth calendar quarter is often the most productive for vendors as buyers tend to spend later in the year both to lock in year-over-year budget comparisons and to get ready for the following January's project push. Having said that, it's not uncommon for ETR's October survey data to show softness relative to first-half expectations. Nonetheless, as the graphic below shows, aggregate Net Score projections for Q4 2020 are the lowest in the multi-year history of ETR's survey.

Have months of quarantine left you longing for social interaction? Social robots are on their way. Who needs human friends, anyways? "I don't need friends, they disappoint me." In all seriousness, social distancing can have detrimental effects on your mental and physical health, says an International Social Psychiatry Journal article published in April.

It is easy to be dazzled by the hype and the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the most transformational technology of our time. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, "AI is going to be the next big shift in technology." Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos describes recent AI developments as "a renaissance" and a "golden age." Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes it even further, suggesting that the impact of AI could be "more profound than fire or electricity." But most companies who have embarked on AI-led transformation have been disappointed.

Quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR) have been around for many years and have been employed in numerous fields from drug design to environmental toxicology. Countless papers have been written employing a wide variety of descriptors and computational methods in order to determine them. Nevertheless, while the jury is still out, it is safe to say that QSAR have not generally lived up to expectations, especially in cases where they are applied to data sets determined after the QSAR models were constructed. But this is true even in many "typical cases" where all of the data are known beforehand and are divided into training and test sets in order to construct and validate a model. Certainly the number of parameters available for use in QSAR models is sufficiently large and diverse to ensure reasonable predictions of bioactivity.

Beyond the lip service, I feel like we are in a trough of disillusionment on so many pivotal technologies. In particular, there are five emerging fields which have garnered tremendous excitement over the past couple of years, and yet this excitement is likely to die down in the next year as the reality sets in that the real impact of these technologies is still a good few years away. It is useful to understand these fading trends because while rising trends can be obvious, to take advantage of many of them in 2019, you needed to have acted a while ago. However, it is not too late to avoid wasting time and resources on these non-trends, at least for 2019, unless you are making significant long-term bets in which case, load up. It's useful to understand why we have hype and then disappointment before the real impact kicks in.

So is the Apple HomePod really worth the extra cost? MailOnline gave the smart speaker a test run to find out. Apple's HomePod stands at nearly 7 inches tall, which is slightly larger than the average smart speaker. It also feels heavier weighing in at 5.5lbs (2.5kg). But despite its size, it appears to blend into its surroundings.

Note: All TEDx Truro photos courtesy of Verity Westcott. Earlier in the year, our director Will Jackson was approached by TEDx Truro. For those who don't know, TED's philosophy is to present engaging and intelligent talks from leaders in their respective fields, for approx 15 minutes. When approached, we were (and still are) elbow-deep in our busiest year ever. Even taking a day to go and do a talk in Truro (10 miles drive) for Will was a very big ask.

Warner Bros.' "Blade Runner 2049" topped the box office charts this weekend, but despite strong reviews and positive audience reaction, ticket sales were estimated at only $31.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to the measurement firm ComScore, significantly below analysts' projections. A sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi cult classic, "Blade Runner," about a futuristic society where androids known as "replicants" are almost indistinguishable from humans, "Blade Runner 2049" had been estimated to pull in $45 million to $50 million in its opening weekend. The film -- directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Ryan Gosling and Jared Leto, with Harrison Ford reprising his role as Deckard -- cost an estimated $150 million to produce after rebates and before marketing costs. The film earned an 89% "fresh" rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and Times critic Kenneth Turan wrote, "this film puts you firmly, brilliantly, unassailably in another world." The film received an A-minus grade from audiences surveyed by CinemaScore.