Tootfinder

The excellent @… (https://erinkissane.com) has written a lot about the idea of “governance” in tech: the human networks and processes that surround the things that we build. Erin has proposed — and I agree, though I long failed to see it! — that governance is the gaping hole in the way we build OSS, shared infra, and the whole technology commons.
3/

Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D)
is telling political allies that she is
likely to run for the Senate,
with some expecting an official announcement in the coming weeks.
Party leaders have been pressing the term-limited Mills to challenge Sen. Susan Collins,
the only GOP senator representing a state carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris

Scoop: Mills "likely" to run for Senate to try to defeat Susan Collins
Party leaders have been pressing the term-limited Mills to challenge GOP Sen. Susan Collins.

ChartGaze: Enhancing Chart Understanding in LVLMs with Eye-Tracking Guided Attention Refinement
Ali Salamatian, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Wan-Cyuan Fan, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Leonid Sigal, Giuseppe Carenini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13282

ChartGaze: Enhancing Chart Understanding in LVLMs with Eye-Tracking Guided Attention Refinement
Charts are a crucial visual medium for communicating and representing information. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made progress on chart question answering (CQA), the task remains challenging, particularly when models attend to irrelevant regions of the chart. In this work, we present ChartGaze, a new eye-tracking dataset that captures human gaze patterns during chart reasoning tasks. Through a systematic comparison of human and model attention, we find that LVLMs often diverge…

When Avatars Have Personality: Effects on Engagement and Communication in Immersive Medical Training
Julia S. Dollis, Iago A. Brito, Fernanda B. F\"arber, Pedro S. F. B. Ribeiro, Rafael T. Sousa, Arlindo R. Galv\~ao Filho
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14132

When Avatars Have Personality: Effects on Engagement and Communication in Immersive Medical Training
While virtual reality (VR) excels at simulating physical environments, its effectiveness for training complex interpersonal skills is limited by a lack of psychologically plausible virtual humans. This is a critical gap in high-stakes domains like medical education, where communication is a core competency. This paper introduces a framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) into immersive VR to create medically coherent virtual patients with distinct, consistent personalities, built …

The blast zone from The Walt Disney Company’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show off the air is now threatening to engulf the Brentwood home of Bob Iger
-- who just happens to be married to Willow Bay, dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Iger, along with Disney Entertainment chairman Dana Walden, was the Disney exec who pulled the chord on Kimmel’s suspension over on-air comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder
— and that decision…

Bob Iger’s Wife, Willow Bay, May Have to Move Her Free Speech Fundraiser  
A fundraiser for Willow Bay's International Women's Media Foundation, planned to take place at the power couple's Brentwood home next month, may have to relocate after her husband yanks Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Ask-to-Clarify: Resolving Instruction Ambiguity through Multi-turn Dialogue
Xingyao Lin, Xinghao Zhu, Tianyi Lu, Sicheng Xie, Hui Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15061

Ask-to-Clarify: Resolving Instruction Ambiguity through Multi-turn Dialogue
The ultimate goal of embodied agents is to create collaborators that can interact with humans, not mere executors that passively follow instructions. This requires agents to communicate, coordinate, and adapt their actions based on human feedback. Recently, advances in VLAs have offered a path toward this goal. However, most current VLA-based embodied agents operate in a one-way mode: they receive an instruction and execute it without feedback. This approach fails in real-world scenarios where …

Protect your privacy – Start now with Signal
 
Autocracies always implement broad surveillance methods in order to identify and punish resistance. Surveillance can take many forms including the capture of your social media posts and email, monitoring your connections to web sites, and preventing the use of private communications through encryption back-doors and other means.
 
Take action now to create ways to communicate privately with your family, friends and colleague…

Differential Communication in Channels with Mobility and Delay Spread using Zak-OTFS
Sandesh Rao Mattu, Nishant Mehrotra, Robert Calderbank
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12593

Differential Communication in Channels with Mobility and Delay Spread using Zak-OTFS
Zak-transform based orthogonal time frequency space (Zak-OTFS) is a delay-Doppler (DD) domain modulation scheme in which the signal processing is carried out in the DD domain. The channel when viewed in the DD domain is predictable. However, even with Zak-OTFS, pilots need to be sent periodically, albeit at a lower rate. In this paper, we propose a differential communication scheme for Zak-OTFS systems that alleviates the need for periodic pilot transmission. Towards this, we analytically show …

Activism thrives on connection, yet our passion can create barriers; nonviolent communication, focusing on understanding and compassion rather than blame or argument, bridges these divides. full article @ https://www.brichapman.com/p/nonviolent-communication-for-activism

Nonviolent Communication for Activists
Speaking to be Heard, Listening to Understand

Sketchar: Supporting Character Design and Illustration Prototyping Using Generative AI
Long Ling, Xinyi Chen, Ruoyu Wen, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Ray LC
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12333

Sketchar: Supporting Character Design and Illustration Prototyping Using Generative AI
Character design in games involves interdisciplinary collaborations, typically between designers who create the narrative content, and illustrators who realize the design vision. However, traditional workflows face challenges in communication due to the differing backgrounds of illustrators and designers, the latter with limited artistic abilities. To overcome these challenges, we created Sketchar, a Generative AI (GenAI) tool that allows designers to prototype game characters and generate imag…