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Enlarge / A new mentorship program seeks to honor the memory of Brook Owens. (credit: Brooke Owens Fellowship Program)

Lori Garver had just boarded a plane last June when she heard that her young friend, D. Brooke Owens, had passed away. Owens, 35, had had terminal cancer for a long time, but the moment still stung Garver, the former deputy NASA administrator. She'd mentored Owens toward her dream of running an airport, and the two had become close.

During those few minutes before the plane took off, Garver said she just couldn't let it go. So she dashed off an e-mail to friends and colleagues in the aerospace business—chief executives, managers, and bright, young chiefs of staff she'd worked with at NASA and in the White House. Would they be interested in mentoring young women interested in getting into the aerospace industry?

"My goal, sitting on that airplane, was to get five or maybe at most 10 internships," Garver told Ars in an interview. But by the time her flight had landed, Garver's inbox was full with interested companies. Two other close friends of Owens—Cassie Lee, the Director of Aerospace Applications at Vulcan, Inc., and William Pomerantz, the Vice President of Special Projects at Virgin Galactic—said they wanted to help organize the program. On Wednesday, less than a year her passing, the Brooke Owens Fellowship Program launched with 36 paid internships.

Enlarge (credit: Kaggle)

Google's latest acquisition appears to involve data scientists and machine learning contests. According to TechCrunch sources, the company is reportedly buying Kaggle, a group that hosts both data science and machine-learning competitions, as well as a job board with listings for analysts, programmers, and more. The report doesn't provide details of the acquisition, but an official announcement could come in the next few days as Google hosts its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.

Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom "declined to deny" rumors of the acquisition, and Google would not comment on rumors. Google and Kaggle recently hosted a $100,000 machine-learning competition that challenged participates to develop classification algorithms for YouTube videos. That contest gave participates early access to Google's Cloud Machine Learning beta platform as well.

Kaggle was launched in 2010 and currently has about half a million data scientists on its platform. It specializes in running data-science-related competitions, and it created a tool called "kernels" for sharing source codes needed to analyze data sets.

SAN FRANCISCO—Before I gush about how slick and action-packed Middle Earth: Shadow of War is looking before it comes out for PC and consoles, I'd like to offer a huge warning: I didn't get to play it. Warner Bros. Interactive hosted the Tolkien-universe game's first major demo at a state-of-the-art movie theater down the block from last week's Game Developers Conference. The developers at Monolith carefully hid their controllers behind a theater seat, and the game doesn't come out for almost six months.

For some incomplete games' previews, those are tolerable limitations, especially if their basic gameplay systems (combat, strategy, interface) are neatly spelled out. And in a few ways, what I saw looks like a "bigger and better" Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. That isn't a terrible conclusion to draw. (While uneven in some respects, the 2014 action-adventure game enjoyed a solid reception by making the most of its Tolkien license, as opposed to being chained to a single book or film's exact plot.)

But, in too many other ways, Shadow of War is aiming its swords, axes, arrows, and spectral super-powers a lot higher this time—and doing so in an action-adventure market that is looking quite different than it did in 2014. Thus, my challenge is to piece together how many parts of the demo were withheld for mystery's sake as opposed to being incomplete or bad.

Enlarge / Galen Dara's illustration for Stephen Blackmoore's short story, "La Bestia," published in 2015 by Fireside. (credit: Illustration by Galen Dara)

You may not have heard of Fireside Fiction Company, but it's time you did. Packed with excellent free science fiction stories, the Patreon-supported publication has been going strong for five years. There are many reasons you need to start reading Fireside, not the least of which is its recent upgrade to GitHub Pages.

You could spend days immersed in Fireside's back content. Editors Brian White and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry curate quality work from well-known writers and rising stars, including Chuck Wendig, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Daniel Abraham (one half of the Expanse writing team known as James S.E. Corey), Cassandra Khaw (whom you may know from Ars), Ken Liu, Daniel José Older, and more. But it's not just White and Sjunneson-Henry's good taste that has earned Fireside a sterling reputation among writers. Unlike many small publications, Fireside pays good rates for fiction. It spends almost all the money it gets from Patreon on its authors and artists.

Fireside Fiction Company also publishes a limited number of books and hosts special projects. One these projects was #BlackSpecFic, a special report on black voices in science fiction. #BlackSpecFic fits into Fireside's overall commitment to inclusivity, publishing stories by people from a diversity of backgrounds and places.