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audience Paramount has

audience Paramount has targeted in recent years with movies like Fences, Allied, and The Big Short. Only this time, the studio doesn’t seem eager to be associated with the project. Annihilation is being released in American theaters on February 23, but with much less promotional fanfare than Arrival got. Outside of the U.S., Canada, and China, the movie isn’t getting a theatrical rollout at all— its international release will be handled by Netflix, to whom Paramount sold the rights in December. This arrangement is practically unheard of for a major studio, since it openly acknowledges that Paramount doesn’t think the film will make money. So what’s the rationale behind Paramount’s decision? § Paramount apparently sold the international rights to Annihilation after poor testscreening results last summer indicated the film might be “too intellectual” for general audiences. Garland’s last movie, Ex Machina, was a pint-sized hit, grossing $25 million and garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. For the indie studio A24, that was a solid result, and it was enough to get the director a deal at a major studio. But it seems Paramount wanted something more mainstream from Garland. Annihilation will still hit screens in the world’s two biggest markets—the U.S. and China—but the Netflix partnership is an unusually public show of nervousness over the film’s profitability. Paramount can use the money from the deal to help recoup the film’s reported $55 million budget, but if Annihilation is a hit, the studio will miss out on any international grosses. The deal also effectively signals Paramount’s lack of trust in the vision of the filmmaker it hired. § It’s a more extreme version of the clash between commerce and artistry that’s repeatedly played out in Hollywood in recent years, though it’s rare for such drama to break out after the film is completed. Annihilation isn’t a small-scale drama; it’s a visually inventive sci-fi epic, the likes of which major studios have produced for decades. Paramount bowing out of its international theatrical rollout is another example of the industry shifting away from films that aren’t proven box-office quantities. Ironically, the same kind of Netflix deal is reportedly being mulled for another Paramount movie, God Particle, part of the loosely connected Cloverfield franchise. The other two Cloverfield films were hits for Paramount, but apparently, the studio’s new CEO Jim Gianopulos has identified the $40 million–budgeted space thriller as a risk. Paramount’s decision is partly motivated by internal politics, too. Annihilation was ordered by the late Brad Grey, the studio’s prior CEO, who was ousted in February 2017 after a string of flops. His replacement, Gianopulos, has less attachment to the projects Grey shepherded and is seeking to shore things up after the studio’s disastrous 2017. But it’s rare for an upcoming film to lose theatrical distribution because of the failure of unrelated past projects; Annihilation, after all, had very little to do with Baywatch not connecting with audiences. § Annihilation and God Particle could be one-off casualties dumped onto Netflix as the studio tries to get its books in order. Or this could be the sign of a more worrying Hollywood trend, in which the very idea of a bigger-budgeted film that isn’t a guaranteed financial success is simply anathema to a big studio, with Netflix used as a last-resort, cost-saving measure. Another studio, New Line, has cut a deal with the service for an upcoming Shaft movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and Jessie Usher, in which the studios split the production costs and Netflix gets the international rights. It’s a model other studios could soon follow. But there’s a difference between making such a deal up front and doing it well after a movie has completed production. When Garland made Ex Machina in 2015 and released it to strong reviews, healthy box office (it made more than twice its budget worldwide), and Oscar success, he seemed primed as one of the most exciting new voices in Hollywood. He was a perfect candidate to helm a bigger-budgeted studio film. Paramount’s demonstration of its lack of faith in Annihilation is a particularly chilling reminder of how risk-averse many big studios have become, and perhaps a sign to artists to consider taking their work elsewhere. 7) Why I left Google to join Grab [Source: Medium.com] (https://goo.gl/iiTms1) § In this article, Steve Yegge, recounts his experience at Google. While he’s got several good stories to share, he talks about a few observations to help paint a backdrop for why, of all the great companies out there, he chose to join Grab. The main reason he left Google is because they can no longer innovate. According to him, they’ve pretty much lost that ability. He believes there are several contributing factors, of which he lists four here – they’re conservative, they are mired in politics, they’re arrogant and Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused. § According to him, Google’s nearly the entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, copy a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers. To be fair, there are exceptions. Google’s Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow, Waymo and a few others are generational innovations and will take some time for the industry to catch up with. In short, Steve feels Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. And so, like many Googlers, he had been thinking of moving on for a few years. But where would he go? It takes a lot to pry someone away from the best place to work on earth, since if nothing else, Google still has a pretty incredible work environment, especially for engineers. Also, he feels that almost all big name-brand tech companies are much the same now. It seems like you can only really get inspiration from startups these days. § About joining Grab, he feels it’s like going on a revolutionary war. He has never felt so excited about something since maybe the early days of Grok, when he was working 12+ hour days on his mini-startup within Google to revolutionize the way developers interacted with a billion-line code base. So what is Grab? Well, the simple and unsatisfying answer is:

They’re the Uber of Southeast Asia. But that’s a terrible marketing message, because Uber is trying their best to become the most hated company in the U.S. It’s like touting them as the Comcast of Southeast Asia. And it’s also inaccurate because the Grab and Uber company philosophies are so radically different. § Further, he feels after the ride-hailing transport, food-delivery would be a gamechanger. And he adds that transport and food are only scratching the surface. You need to download the Grab app in order to hail a ride or order food. Everyone in Southeast Asia has smartphones, so everyone there is getting the Grab app. Which means the next step is mobile Payments. Grab is signing up local merchants—and there are millions of them who can participate—at an incredible rate, so that people can pay for stuff with their Grab app. Southeast Asians use smartphones possibly more than anyone else in the world. There’s another player in SEA, strongly resembling Grab. And they’re fierce. That competitor is Go- Jek. Go-Jek and Grab are mortal enemies, locked in a life-and-death land war that’s going to enable the biggest social and economic transformation in modern history. 8) New brain mapping technique highlights relationship between connectivity and IQ [Source: rdmag.com] (https://goo.gl/CGNLhE) § A new and relatively simple technique for mapping the wiring of the brain has shown a correlation between how well connected an individual's brain regions are and their intelligence, say researchers at the University of Cambridge. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort among scientists to map the connections in the brain - the so-called 'connectome' - and to understand how this relates to human behaviours, such as intelligence and mental health disorders. Now, in research published in the journal Neuron, an international team led by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, has shown that it is possible to build up a map of the connectome by analysing conventional brain scans taken using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. § The team compared the brains of 296 typically-developing adolescent volunteers. Their results were then validated in a cohort of a further 124 volunteers. The team used a conventional 3T MRI scanner, where 3T represents the strength of the magnetic field; however, Cambridge has recently installed a much more powerful Siemens 7T Terra MRI scanner, which should allow this technique to give an even more precise mapping of the human brain. A typical MRI scan will provide a single image of the brain, from which it is possible to calculate multiple structural features of the brain. This means that every region of the brain can be described using as many as ten different characteristics. The researchers showed that if two regions have similar profiles, then they are described as having 'morphometric similarity' and it can be assumed that they are a connected network.They verified this assumption using publically-available MRI data on a cohort of 31 juvenile rhesus macaque monkeys to compare to 'gold-standard' connectivity estimates in that species. § Using these morphometric similarity networks (MSNs), the researchers were able to build up a map showing how well connected the 'hubs' - the major connection points between different regions of the brain network - were. They found a link between the connectivity in the MSNs in brain regions linked to higher order functions - such as problem solving and language - and intelligence. "We saw a clear link between the 'hubbiness' of higher-order brain regions - in other words, how densely connected they were to the rest of the network - and an individual's IQ," explains PhD candidate Jakob Seidlitz at the University of Cambridge and NIH. "This makes sense if you think of the hubs as enabling the flow of information around the brain - the stronger the connections, the better the brain is at processing information." § While IQ varied across the participants, the MSNs accounted for around 40% of this variation - it is possible that higher-resolution multi-modal data provided by a 7T scanner may be able to account for an even greater proportion of the individual variation, says the researchers. "What this doesn't tell us, though, is where exactly this variation comes from," adds Seidlitz. "What makes some brains more connected than others - is it down to their genetics or their educational upbringing, for example? And how do these connections strengthen or weaken across development?" "This could take us closer to being able to get an idea of intelligence from brain scans, rather than having to rely on IQ tests," says Professor Ed Bullmore, Head of Psychiatry at Cambridge. "Our new mapping technique could also help us understand how the symptoms of mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression or even schizophrenia arise from differences in connectivity within the brain." 9) The female price of male pleasure [The Week] (https://goo.gl/wDe71N) § The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with "takes" arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. "Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave. The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. § This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role