Influential British comedian Mel Smith dies

British comedian Mel Smith, who became a household name for a series of television sketch shows in the 1970s and 80s which colleagues said had inspired a generation of comics, has died of a heart attack, his agent said overnight (NZ time). Smith, who died yesterday (NZ time) aged 60, found fame starring in hugely popular shows Not The Nine O’clock News and Alas Smith and Jones and went on to direct the films Bean and The Tall Guy.

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Study: TV’s female characters are sexual targets

Teenage female characters are sexual fodder for broadcast network TV series, especially comedies, according to a conservative US advocacy group’s new study. An examination of 238 sitcoms and dramas airing in the United States during four weeks in 2011 and 2012 found a third of the episodes included content that “rose to the level of sexual exploitation” of females, according to the Parents Television Council report

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Pet Shop Boys switch labels

Pet Shop Boys have left the record label Parlophone after 28 years and will release their new studio album Electric through independent music publisher Kobalt in June, the British duo said. The chart-toppers, whose 1980s hits include West End Girls and It’s A Sin, said further details of their 12th studio album would be released soon

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Interview with IBM’s Watson Handler David Ferrucci

Why aren’t you letting Watson speak for himself today?Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It’s not an interactive dialogue system, so it can’t conduct its own interviews. You can imagine giving it information so it could answer [impromptu] questions, but it would still be responding only from content it’s been given and analyzed

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WOMEN OF THE YEAR: Great Changes, New Chances, Tough Choices

They have arrived like a new immigrant wave in male America. They may be cops, judges, military officers, telephone linemen, cab drivers, pipefitters, editors, business executives—or mothers and housewives, but not quite the same subordinate creatures they were before

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