Murder makes unlikely allies. On the eve of the planet Ileri's historic vote to join the Commonwealth, the assassination of a government minister threatens to shatter everything. Private investigator Noo Okereke and spy Meiko Ogawa join forces with police chief Toiwa to investigate - and discover clues that point disturbingly toward a threat humanity thought they had escaped. A threat that could destroy Ileri and spark an interplanetary war... unless the disparate team can work together to…
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ACTORS! ACTING! Here's a quick summary of the film: "I AM ACTING!" "YEAH! WELL I AM ACTING LOUDER THAN YOU!" "OH? REALLY? JUST LOOK HOW GOOD I'M ACTING!" It's a relentless argument between two gormless gargoyles. Yes, the director is very clever in using lots of long and unedited shots. And, gosh, isn't the aspect ratio quirky?! Hey, isn't that... you know... the actor from the thing...? And literally all that happens is that horrible people scream at each other. It's not a movie, it's a…
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What if Red Dwarf were given a big budget and re-made "Backwards"? I'm only teasing a little bit! It is impossible to do a good Time Travel story. The closest I've experienced is "This Is How You Lose the Time War" which, similar to TENET, has sort-of-spies chasing each other through time. Most sci-fi movies are an excuse to advertise the prowess of the special effects team - and TENET is no exception. Even on a TV screen, it is blisteringly clever the way they seamlessly interweave the…
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As part of my MSc, I'm getting a few lessons in technologies I'm not familiar with. I've found some of these lessons extremely confusing - even when I'm proficient in the language. Here's an example of a coding fragment from one of the tutorials in the R language. Let me explain everything that I think is wrong with it. barplot(H, names.arg =M, col=“blue” xlab ='Country', ylab="Population") something <- lm( mydata$Col1~mydata$Col2) What are H and M? They are defined earlier in the doc…
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I received a rather distraught DM from a Twitter friend last week. They were upset that I was following an account which did nothing but spew out racist bile all day long. Did this mean that I endorsed their hateful views. I was confused. I didn't recognise the specific account, and didn't recall seeing any of their tweets - but I was following them. How? Why? Was it a hack? I did a little digging, and finally it twigged... The account belonged to someone I met at an industry event several…
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A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk Considering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions s…
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