Soaring development costs; protracted production cycles; cautious C-suites looking to deliver reliable returns for shareholders: for many reasons, there is a dearth of original programming in big-budget video games. Already this year we have seen the arrival of the seventh mainline Civilization game, the 14th entry in the Assassin's Creed franchise, and, most brain-melting of all, the 27th Monster Hunter title. But look: here's a magical-realist tale set in a moody, hurricane-ravaged imagining of the American deep south, whose title, crucially, bears no numerical suffix. South of Midnight makes a brilliantly atmospheric first impression. Winds bludgeon flimsy abodes; rain lashes down on tin roofs; the world is rendered with the macabre and crooked details of a Tim Burton film.

By studying how machine learning powers artificial intelligence, students can further develop their own thought processes and tackle societal impacts. When thinking of classes on artificial intelligence, you probably imagine students on a computer writing code. But that's not where Joseph South, chief learning officer for the International Society for Technology in Education, says educators should start. Instead, teachers should help students learn how to approach decisions the way digital programming might -- by working through information, finding patterns and making a choice. "At ISTE, we feel strongly students need to learn how the digital world works," South said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries have taken the approach of tiered restrictions which has remained a point of debate due to a lack of transparency. Using the dominance-based rough set approach, we identify patterns in the COVID-19 data pertaining to the UK government's tiered restrictions allocation system. These insights from the analysis are translated into "if-then" type rules, which can easily be interpreted by policy makers. The differences in the rules extracted from different geographical areas suggest inconsistencies in the allocations of tiers in these areas. We found that the differences delineated an overall north south divide in England, however, this divide was driven mostly by London. Based on our analysis, we demonstrate the usefulness of the dominance-based rough sets approach for investigating the fairness and explainabilty of decision making regarding COVID-19 restrictions. The proposed approach and analysis could provide a more transparent approach to localised public health restrictions, which can help ensure greater conformity to the public safety rules.

Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? I'm currently attending college, and to help pay for various expenses I got a summer job at a daycare. A few weeks ago, a parent accused me of making an inappropriate hand gesture at them during pick up. I didn't do it; I've never had so much as a conversation with this woman.

We will use the Google AIY Vision Kit to show a real world example of how to setup AI and discuss competing frameworks (CNTK, Tensorflow, Pytorch, etc.) The objective of this session will be to help attendees understand the field of AI, tools of the trade and how to get started as a developer. Please feel free to bring your own Google AIY Vision kit but this is not a requirement since most of the material will be showcasing the technology and not a hands-on lab.

China's top security officer has revealed plans to use artificial intelligence to predict crime, terrorism and social unrest before it happens. Meng Jianzhu, the head of the Chinese Community Party's central commission for political and legal affairs, said the government would start to use AI software which uses machine learning, data mining and computer modelling to predict where crime and disorder is likely to occur. "Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a precision and speed unmatchable by humans, and will drastically improve the predictability, accuracy and efficiency of social management," Mr Meng told colleagues at a meeting in Beijing on Friday. He said security forces should look for patterns in data about terror attacks and build an analysis model to help authorities predict where the attack may strike, Chinese news website thepaper.cn Mr Meng also called for all elements of the Chinese state and the party to share data with each other and for renewed efforts to integrate surveillance footage systems across the country.