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| | | Zone 414 review – Guy Pearce grimaces through soulless Blade Runner clone | | by Cath Clarke Sep 30, 2021 | | Pearce, chasing after a sinister tech billionaire’s lost daughter, gives undeserved credibility to a feeble sci-fi bereft of real ideas Blimey, for a second at the start of Zone 414, I mistook Guy Pearce for Mark Wahlberg, as he stands there scowling in a tough-guy black leather jacket and pointing a gun with purpose. This film is a hollow Blade Runner copycat, set in a grungy, neon-lit futuristic world where artificial intelligence convincingly passes for human, yet people drink coffee out of polystyrene cups and use landline telephones. The script feels completely devoid of ideas about what the future of AI might look like. But what it does prove is that Pearce adds a basic layer of credibility to any film simply by showing up. He plays former cop David Carmichael, a private investigator. You’ll know the type: ex-drinker; seen action in the army; a man of few words; harbours a dark secret. He’s been summoned by tech billionaire with a monstrous ego Marlon Veidt (played by Vikings actor Travis Fimmel underneath ridiculous ageing makeup and a scraggly white wig). Like all the villains in the movie, Fimmel goes full ham with a show of deviancy and creepy tics, more silly than scary. As Veidt, he is the creator of lifelike robots which the government permits to be trialled in Zone 414, the only district where humans and AI can interact. Continue reading... | | | | | Covid by Numbers review – how to make sense of the statistics | | by Oliver Johnson Sep 30, 2021 | | David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters delve into the detail behind the data and explore the true human cost of the pandemic Along with successive waves of infection, the coronavirus pandemic has provided us with a tsunami of data and graphs. Thanks to the Public Health England dashboard and websites such as Our World in Data, every internet user can access accurate and timely information on Covid cases, deaths, hospitalisations and vaccines, broken down by age, gender and location. However, while this wealth of information can be immensely valuable, it can also cause problems. Taken out of context and spun in a misleading way, raw coronavirus numbers can be a source of disinformation, which through social media can spread as efficiently as the virus itself. A simple fact, such as the median age of coronavirus victims (83) actually exceeding UK life expectancy at birth (81) can lead to governments and the public not taking Covid as seriously as they should. (Having lived to 83, one would ordinarily expect to live longer still – what matters is life expectancy conditional on having reached this age.) Continue reading... | | | | | |
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