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🍆 A Hermetic, Transparent Soft Growing Vine Robot System for Pipe Inspection
#robots #machine

A Hermetic, Transparent Soft Growing Vine Robot System for Pipe Inspection
Rehabilitation of aging pipes requires accurate condition assessment and mapping far into the pipe interiors. Soft growing vine robot systems are particularly promising for navigating confined, sinuous paths such as in pipes, but are currently limited by complex subsystems and a lack of validation in real-world industrial settings. In this paper, we introduce the concept and implementation of a hermetic and transparent vine robot system for visual condition assessment and mapping within non-bra…

A federal agent pointed a gun at a combat veteran’s face and said “
"bang, bang” and
“you’re dead, liberal”
during an immigration raid last week in Chicago,
the veteran is alleging in a new court filing.
https://…

Federal Agent Told Combat Veteran ‘You’re Dead, Liberal’ At Little Village Encounter, Attorneys Say
The allegation comes as ICE and Border Patrol are increasingly facing pushback for using tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and other measures against peaceful protesters and bystanders.

WaPo Publisher Will Lewis appeared at NFL Honors in San Francisco Thursday, after failing to show for a Zoom call in which WaPo announced historic layoffs (Drew Lerner/Awful Announcing)
https://awfulannouncing.com/newspapers/will-lewis-nfl…

WaPo editor Will Lewis spotted on NFL red carpet day after killing paper's sports desk
Washington Post publisher Will Lewis appeared on the NFL Honors red carpet one day after laying off one-third of his paper.

This week in small town paper headlines:
Vegan Circus serves up cruelty-free carnival delights
Joey Chang to bring unique cello-beatbox performance to Nevada City
911 caller reports truck with flames coming from undercarriage
Hospital announces their first baby of 2026 (Jan 5)

God bless the creative people of Norfolk, with their “public safety” posters around Sandringham estate 👏👏

Oklahoma instructor removed from teaching for failing a screed of an essay
https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-bible-essay-instructor-fulneckydei-f37ba4b8afdc9d9aba3b73b124f13b9b

The University of Oklahoma fires instructor who gave failing grade to Bible-based gender essay
The University of Oklahoma has fired an instructor who was accused by a student of religious discrimination. The complaint from 20-year-old junior Samantha Fulnecky was over a failing grade on a psychology paper in which she cited the Bible and called promoting a belief in multiple genders “demonic.” The university said Monday that its investigation found that the graduate teaching assistant had been arbitrary in giving Fulnecky zero points on the assignment. The attorney for instructor Mel…

A graduate student at the University of Oklahoma
is the latest in a growing list of college instructors to face disciplinary action
after being targeted by Turning Point USA,
the right-wing campus pressure group founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Mel Curth, a trans psychology instructor who recently won the Department of Psychology’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award,
gave a zero to junior Samantha Fulnecky’s reaction paper for an assignment on “gender typicali…

State Universities Are Scrambling to Appease the Bigoted MAGA Regime
From Oklahoma to Indiana to Alabama, state schools are bending over backward—suspending student magazines and even disciplining instructors—to preemptively satisfy the Trump administration.

Follow up reporting on that breaking and entering by CBP in #Utah that led to warrantless kidnapping of the owner as well as the employee they were following.
Thank you, @… for the detailed reporting. Our local paper has removed the paywall on all reporting for 2026, so don…

Someone really doesn't like their Bändchen checked...
ACAB = all creatures are bändchened!
#39c3

Robust forecast aggregation via additional queries
Rafael Frongillo, Mary Monroe, Eric Neyman, Bo Waggoner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05271
arXiv:2512.05271v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of robust forecast aggregation: combining expert forecasts with provable accuracy guarantees compared to the best possible aggregation of the underlying information. Prior work shows strong impossibility results, e.g. that even under natural assumptions, no aggregation of the experts' individual forecasts can outperform simply following a random expert (Neyman and Roughgarden, 2022).
In this paper, we introduce a more general framework that allows the principal to elicit richer information from experts through structured queries. Our framework ensures that experts will truthfully report their underlying beliefs, and also enables us to define notions of complexity over the difficulty of asking these queries. Under a general model of independent but overlapping expert signals, we show that optimal aggregation is achievable in the worst case with each complexity measure bounded above by the number of agents $n$. We further establish tight tradeoffs between accuracy and query complexity: aggregation error decreases linearly with the number of queries, and vanishes when the "order of reasoning" and number of agents relevant to a query is $\omega(\sqrt{n})$. These results demonstrate that modest extensions to the space of expert queries dramatically strengthen the power of robust forecast aggregation. We therefore expect that our new query framework will open up a fruitful line of research in this area.
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