Month: March 2020

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  Kat Dennings has been cast as one of the Endless.

Update, May 13: Neil Gaiman has confirmed more tantalizing details about the first-ever adaptation of Sandman outside of comic pages, including the all-important release date: July 15, exclusively on Audible. Fans can pre-order the collection as a standalone $35 purchase or receive the whole thing as part of a paid, ongoing Audible subscription.

While no audio samples have yet been released, Gaiman took the opportunity to confirm the cast's principal players, with Gaiman making an unsurprising turn as the story's narrator. The massive cast reveal begins with celebrities such as Riz Ahmed (Venom, Rogue One), Kat Dennings (2 Broke Girls), Taron Egerton (Rocketman, Kingsman series), Andy Serkis, and Michael Sheen, with James McAvoy in the middle of it all as Morpheus. The full announced cast is embedded in the above gallery, and you can learn more about the comic's unique audiobook adaptation below.

Original story:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Partisan misinformation online is at least in part a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. There’s the supply on one side, coming in part from politically motivated websites indistinguishable from propaganda but also from some who are just trying to make a buck bringing in clicks with fake headlines. But there’s also the demand to consider—those people voraciously surfing to sate their hunger for bias-confirming outrage. To understand the extent of the problem, it helps to look at both sides of this relationship. What misinformation is floating around, and who is consuming it?

In a new study, Andy Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler took advantage of survey data tracking the Web histories of around 2,500 people in the month before the 2016 US election. Combined with some demographic survey data on things like their preferred candidate for president, the researchers were able to break down who was reading which articles.

Who publishes what

The researchers relied on a previous study’s list of “untrustworthy” sites. This included several hundred that could be fairly described as fake but also over a hundred that run afoul of fact-checkers and were determined to lack editorial standards. Among that list are conspiracy-spreading sites like InfoWars and Natural News, hyperpartisan sites like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, and even some tabloids like The Express.

Enlarge / The Facebook app displayed on the screen of an iPhone. (credit: Fabian Sommer | picture alliance | Getty Images)

A lot of neural networks are black boxes. We know they can successfully categorize things—images with cats, X-rays with cancer, and so on—but for many of them, we can't understand what they use to reach that conclusion. But that doesn't mean that people can't infer the rules they use to fit things into different categories. And that creates a problem for companies like Facebook, which hopes to use AI to get rid of accounts that abuse its terms of service.

Most spammers and scammers create accounts in bulk, and they can easily look for differences between the ones that get banned and the ones that slip under the radar. Those differences can allow them to evade automated algorithms by structuring new accounts to avoid the features that trigger bans. The end result is an arms race between algorithms and spammers and scammers who try to guess their rules.

Facebook thinks it's found a way to avoid getting involved in this arms race while still using automated tools to police its users, and this week, it decided to tell the press about it. The result was an interesting window into how to keep AI-based moderation useful in the face of adversarial behavior, an approach that could be applicable well beyond Facebook.

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  The Doctor channels James Bond in the opening episode. [credit: BBC ]

After taking pains to set Jodie Whittaker's 13th Doctor apart in his first stint as Doctor Who showrunner, Chris Chibnall took a different tack with series 12, upping the stakes and giving us more of the classic tropes that have made this long-running series so enduringly appealing. The season included the revival of a well-known nemesis and a classic monster, plus an entertaining cameo by a former ally. And the finale dove deep into Whovian lore to give us a pretty big final twist.

(Mild spoilers below until the second gallery; some major spoilers after. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

Last season, the Doctor landed in Sheffield, sans TARDIS, right after regenerating. She teamed up with some locals as her new companions (aka her "fam"): Graham O'Brien (Bradley Walsh, Coronation Street); his grown stepson Ryan Sinclair (Tosin Cole, Hollyoaks); and Ryan's old school chum, Yasmin "Yaz" Khan (Mandip Gill, also from Hollyoaks), a rookie police officer eager to prove herself.

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  This is one of the potential layouts for GM's new Ultium battery platform and BEV3 vehicle architecture. You can tell from the tires it's a truck frame, and if you click on the image to enlarge it, you might be able to see that the cells are aligned vertically, which GM says allows for better energy density at the cost of a taller pack. [credit: Steve Fecht for General Motors ]

On Wednesday afternoon in Warren, Michigan, General Motors announced it has developed a new, third-generation battery electric vehicle platform (called BEV3) and a new flexible battery architecture—called Ultium—that will underpin a wide range of new BEVs across the Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC brands. It's the latest in a series of recent announcements by GM regarding its electrified future; in December 2019, the carmaker revealed a $2.3 billion joint venture with LG Chem to build a battery factory in Lordstown, Ohio, then followed that in January with plans to spend $2.2 billion refitting its Detroit-Hamtramck factory to exclusively build BEVs.

Breaking the $100/kWh barrier

GM has gone for a pouch cell design for the Ultium batteries, which can be configured in different ways depending on the vehicle and its needs. For a big pickup or SUV, that means pouches arranged vertically in the modules (i.e., with their second-longest edge vertically), which GM says is best for energy density, but at the tradeoff of a taller pack. For cars that need something a little lower profile, the pouches can be stacked on top of each other in a module. GM says that a car would use between six and 12 modules in a pack, with up to 24 in a 200kWh, 800V double-layer battery pack for something like the 1,000hp electric GMC Hummer that was trailed at this year's Super Bowl. (The smallest six-module packs would be 50kWh units.)

The battery modules also include their own battery-management electronics. That has cut the amount of wiring in a pack by 88 percent over the current Chevrolet Bolt EV battery pack. GM says that if you have to replace an individual module within a battery pack, the electronics can talk to each other and recalibrate the pack easily. That's because each module knows what kind of chemistry its cells use.