Month: August 2022

Disney+ has released an action-packed trailer for Andor, the forthcoming 12-episode prequel series set five years before the events of Rogue One, starring Diego Luna as Cassian Andor.

As we've reported previously, our first look at the series came from a behind-the-scenes teaser in December 2020 during Disney's Investors Day. We got a short teaser earlier this year at Star Wars Celebration. Andor has been described as a "tense, nail-biting spy thriller," with Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote Rogue One, serving as showrunner.

The story begins with the Empire's destruction of Cassian Andor's homeworld and will depict his transformation from a "revolution-averse" cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. According to Deadline Hollywood, Luna described Andor as “the journey of a migrant. That feeling of having to move is behind this story—that shapes you as a person. It defines you in many ways, and what you are willing to do.”

Enlarge / Released in May, this was the NOAA forecast for Atlantic hurricane activity in 2022. (credit: NOAA)

Take a deep breath, everyone—the Atlantic hurricane season is one-third over. And there's some good news to report.

To date, the Atlantic has produced three named storms, Alex, Bonnie, and Colin. Historically, three named storms before the beginning of August would represent a busier-than-usual start to a season that officially lasts six months, from June 1 to November 30. But a simple storm count is a superficial measure of activity.

None of these storms has exceeded tropical storm strength, and they lasted only about a day. By other more revealing measures, the Atlantic is having a relatively slow start. At the beginning of August, an average year produces nearly nine days on which a tropical storm or hurricane has been active. This year, the number of "named storm days" is just 3.25. And by the measure of "accumulated cyclone energy," which accounts for both storm duration and intensity, the Atlantic basin is only producing about 30 percent of its normal activity.

Enlarge / Is our machine learning yet?

Over the past year, machine learning and artificial intelligence technology have made significant strides. Specialized algorithms, including OpenAI's DALL-E, have demonstrated the ability to generate images based on text prompts with increasing canniness. Natural language processing (NLP) systems have grown closer to approximating human writing and text. And some people even think that an AI has attained sentience. (Spoiler alert: It has not.)

And as Ars' Matt Ford recently pointed out here, artificial intelligence may be artificial, but it's not "intelligence"—and it certainly isn't magic. What we call "AI" is dependent upon the construction of models from data using statistical approaches developed by flesh-and-blood humans, and it can fail just as spectacularly as it succeeds. Build a model from bad data and you get bad predictions and bad output—just ask the developers of Microsoft's Tay Twitterbot about that.

For a much less spectacular failure, just look to our back pages. Readers who have been with us for a while, or at least since the summer of 2021, will remember that time we tried to use machine learning to do some analysis—and didn't exactly succeed. ("It turns out 'data-driven' is not just a joke or a buzzword," said Amazon Web Services Senior Product Manager Danny Smith when we checked in with him for some advice. "'Data-driven' is a reality for machine learning or data science projects!") But we learned a lot, and the biggest lesson was that machine learning succeeds only when you ask the right questions of the right data with the right tool.