Kwan, meanwhile, remains the largest and most obvious missed opportunity of the series. Her narrative arc took six episodes to even begin, and it ends abruptly and anticlimactically in a seventh episode dedicated solely to her. In the end, she is determined by destiny (by the story's lore and the script writers) to be a thread between her father and ancestor's legacy to the Halo ring world, but that connection comes off as flimsy at best. She discovers this by visiting a band of magical desert ninjas to learn more about her past who seem to have no identity outside of providing Kwan's next part of the script. While Yerin Ha does her best to portray Kwan's growth, she can only do so much with a script that fails her character in every way.

Bathurst: Take that scene in Episode 1 where [Master Chief] is sitting in the ship with Kwan, and Kwan's having a meal and talking about the fact that, actually, Master Chief shot her mother. Initially, when I read that, you know, I thought, okay he's going to have his helmet on and that stuff, but I mean, that's what I mean by that impressive piece of [costume] design. I could look at that helmet and that mirrored visor for hours and kind of be intrigued as to what was going on inside. I mean, I actually sometimes found it more engaging when you're looking in the mirror [of Master Chief's visor] going, "What's going on in there?" I didn't find it disconnecting at all.

Lawyers need not fear an immediate rise of the machines, it emerged today, after a discussion on making arbitration fit for the future concluded that artificial intelligence (AI) will not be able to issue rulings in the near-future. Although panellists said AI would undoubtedly cause changes to the legal profession and have an impact in arbitration disputes, it was accepted a final decision could not be handed over to a machine. International firm Hogan Lovells, which hosted a discussion at its Hong Kong office, asked whether given that AI can assess likely outcomes of cases and perform document reviews, it is realistic to ask if this could be extended to actually making a final ruling. The discussion comes against a continuous debate about the impact of'lawtech'. James Kwan, partner at Hogan Lovells, said there are'few laws' that explicitly ban robots from being decision makers.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures--short films, music videos, commercials--that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people's bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, "Swiss Army Man"--starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway--premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it "weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented." Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call. The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel's music scene--a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of "The Wall"--only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, "I Can't Be Sad Anymore," which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed--altering, in real time, the song's vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch's words "I want to drink less / but be more drunk." Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics "I want to work less / but for a greater cause."

The sight of flying umbrellas, changing altitude with a fluttering rhythm, looks more like an animated Disney scene than graduate work by a student engineer. "I wanted to push the envelope of coordinating drones in the sky," says the project's creator Alan Kwan, a student in MIT's "ACT" (Art, Culture and Technology) program. He wanted his drones to act almost alive, "not like things to be controlled by an algorithm," he says, "but flying creatures that take on a synchronous life." A Hong Kong native, Kwan, 25, has explored scientific art before. He won an award for his Beating Clock project, a reanimated pig heart that keeps time.