Tootfinder

AI-Generated Interactive Fiction for Educational Use: A Pilot Study of Perceived Comprehensibility, Coherence, and Engagement
Finn Rogosch, Andreas Schrader
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10818 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10818 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10818
arXiv:2608.10818v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can produce educational content at scale, including interactive and narrative learning experiences, but technical generation alone is not sufficient: scenarios that are confusing, narratively inconsistent, or unengaging are unlikely to be useful in practice. This paper presents a pilot user-centred evaluation of AI-generated interactive fiction (IF) for educational use in higher education. Using a previously described domain-agnostic pipeline and a shared STEM content base, we generated a controlled pool of scenarios and asked participants (N = 22, STEM higher-education) to play one generated episode and rate it on narrative clarity, story-content coherence, engagement, and length acceptance. A free-text prompt captured open feedback. Narrative clarity and length acceptance were rated positively, engagement sat near the neutral mid-point of the scale, and story-content coherence was the weakest dimension by a clear margin. Qualitative feedback points to quiz integration as the bottleneck. Artificial in-fiction motivation for quiz prompts and abrupt setting changes were reported. Feedback also pointed to missing story-level consequences for wrong answers. From these observations, we derive concrete design implications that can inform larger follow-up studies, including later work on learning effectiveness.
toXiv_bot_toot

“That traditional question of political theory, 'Who should rule?', which begs for an authoritarian answer such as 'the best', or 'the wisest', or 'the people', or 'the majority', […] should be replaced by a completely different question such as 'How can we organize our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers (whom we should try not to get, but whom we so easily might get all the same) cannot do too much damage?'”
—Karl Popper

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin 541004, ChinaScott spaces of complete Boolean algebras need not be co-sober
Wei Ji, Xiaoquan Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08484 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.08484 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.08484
arXiv:2608.08484v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we first prove that for a complete Boolean algebra $L$, the complement graph of $L$ is a \emph{KC}-space (as a subspace) and each non-singleton compact irreducible subspace of that graph generates a non-principal $k$-irreducible compact saturated set in the Scott space of the square algebra $L\times L$. We then show that every compact sequential \emph{US}-space embeds into the complement graph of a suitable complete Boolean algebra. The embedding is built from a finite tail-constraint poset and its regular-open completion. Applying the construction to van Douwen's compact Fr\'echet anti-Hausdorff \emph{US}-space gives a complete Boolean algebra $B$ whose Scott space $\Sigma~\!\!B$ is not co-sober, thereby answering negatively a question on Scott spaces of complete Boolean algebras. The same Scott space $\Sigma~\!\!B$ is non-sober and, as a Scott space of a complete lattice, is well-filtered.
toXiv_bot_toot

:brdAngry2:

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@zwarich/116896925301582827
I am delighted to see this, and look forward to studying the paper a bit.
Back in my “Paul is tinkering around with programming on his own” days, radix sort was one of the first algorithms to fascinate me. When I started taking academic CS classes, I was baffled by fixation on •comparison• in sorting. What about radix sort?!?
Well, the obvious answer is “you can’t use radix for everything; comparison is more generic.” But…what if you made radix more generic too? This paper seems to take that little thought and run to grandiose places with it.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.
The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.
Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared t…

DefoEye: Python-Based Software for Facilitating Time-Series InSAR Analysis of Sentinel-1 Remote-Sensing Data
Alireza Taheri Dehkordi, Hossein Hashemi, Amir Naghibi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.04915 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.04915
arXiv:2608.04915v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Many existing time-series Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (TS-InSAR) software tools have limitations, including restricted geographic applicability, commercial licensing, and incomplete end-to-end processing support. Although GMTSAR avoids some of these constraints, it still requires substantial manual intervention and C-shell commands, lacks a user-friendly graphical interface, and omits important steps such as interferogram network pruning and anchoring of unwrapped interferograms. This paper introduces DefoEye (v1), an open-source Python-based software package that wraps GMTSAR and provides a unified, user-friendly TS-InSAR workflow for Sentinel-1 data. DefoEye supports parallel job execution, interferogram network pruning, and multiple anchoring options. Its performance was evaluated from 2020 to 2024 in four regions with different geological settings, deformation mechanisms, and atmospheric and climatic conditions. In Bologna, Italy; Gotland, Sweden; and Houston, USA, DefoEye results were compared with observations from 10 GNSS stations and showed strong agreement, with RMSE values of 4.3-11.9 mm and Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.63-0.95. In Karaj, Iran, where GNSS observations were unavailable, DefoEye was compared with other widely used processing tools and achieved similarly close agreement, with an RMSE of 4.8 mm/yr and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.98. These results demonstrate that DefoEye provides reliable TS-InSAR products for geological, hydrological, and environmental applications.
toXiv_bot_toot

"How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in"
Why DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX are Microsoft's most effective lock-in tool:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/07/17/microsofts-main-tool-for-lock-in/…

But seriously, if humans just keep doing human maths and then they get stuck at something like the Jacobian conjecture that anytime can be solved by the push of a button, it's just completely unrealistic to think that nobody would push the button.
The paper has zero answers and zero workable proposals how to continue. To be fair, nobody (except big tech) has any answers at the moment.
Everybody who says 'everything is fine for me' or 'we just keep going' is at an earlier stage of grief.