Tootfinder

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 180 nodes and 45047 edges.
Tags: Soc…

Fear of flying therapy is about reframing the flight experience;
if my mind’s eye squints,
I can almost interpret my sweating palms and pounding heartbeat as a kind of buzz.
But this requires repeated, strenuous effort,
and the result is a mental exhaustion that makes the worst-case scenario appealing:
succumbing to my fears and never flying again.
I imagine this as analogous to what many Americans, aerophobic or not, are feeling.
It’s simply easier…

Winging It | Noelle Mateer
For those trying to overcome their fears of flying, it’s been . . . a challenging time to say the least.

The completeness of the Deligne-Ribet monoids
Takeo Uramoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05693 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05693

The completeness of the Deligne-Ribet monoids
Following Cornelissen, Li, Marcolli, and Smit, this short paper proves that the isomorphism of the Deligne-Ribet monoids $DR_K, DR_L$ for two number fields $K, L$ implies the field isomorphism of $K$ and $L$. Thus the Deligne-Ribet monoid $DR_K$ gives a complete invariant of the number field $K$ as in the case of the absolute Galois group $G_K$.

A former Justice Department official is warning of a
🔥wave of retribution inside the agency.
Patty Hartman, who served as a top public affairs specialist at the FBI and federal prosecutors' offices, told CBS News,
"The rules don't exist anymore."
Hartman, who was fired Monday via a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi,
is the fourth person connected to the agency's work on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots to be terminated in the past month.

Fired Justice Department official warns "we are falling into an abyss"
Patty Hartman, who worked with the public affairs team on Jan. 6 prosecutions, was fired Monday by Pam Bondi.

"""
In melancholy, the spirits are carried away by an agitation, but a weak agitation that lacks power or violence, a sort of impotent upset that follows neither a particular path nor the aperta opercula [open ways], but traverses the cerebral matter constantly creating new pores. Yet the spirits do not wander far on the new paths they create, and their agitation dies down rapidly, as their strength is quickly spent and motion comes to a halt: ‘non longe perveniunt’ [they do not reach far]. A trouble of this nature, common to all delirium, does not have the power to produce on the surface of the body the violent movements or the cries to be observed in mania and frenzy. Melancholy never attains frenzy; it is a madness always at the limits of its own impotence. That paradox is explained by the secret alterations in the spirits. Ordinarily, they travel with the speed and instantaneous transparency of rays of light, but in melancholy they become weighed down with night, becoming ‘obscure, thick and dark’, and the images of things that they bring before consciousness are ‘in a shadow, or covered with darkness’. As a result they move more slowly, and are more like a dark, chemical vapour than pure light. This chemical vapour is acid in nature, rather than sulphurous or alcoholic, for in acid vapours the particles are mobile and incapable of repose, but their activity is weak and without consequence. When they are distilled, all that remains in the still is a kind of insipid phlegm. Acid vapours, therefore, are taken to have the same properties as melancholy, whereas alcoholic vapours, which are always ready to burst into flames, are more related to frenzy, and sulphurous vapours bring on mania, as they are agitated by continuous, violent movement. If the ‘formal reason and causes’ of melancholy were to be sought, it made sense to look for them in the vapours that rose up from the blood to the head, and which had degenerated into ‘an acetous or sharp distillation’. A cursory glance seems to indicate that a melancholy of spirits and a whole chemistry of humours lies behind Willis’ analyses, but in fact his guiding principle mostly reflects the immediate qualities of the melancholic illness: an impotent disorder, and the shadow that comes over the spirit with an acrid acidity that slowly corrodes the heart and the mind. The chemistry of acids is not an explanation of the symptoms, but a qualitative option: a whole phenomenology of melancholic experience.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Shifting from Ranking to Set Selection for Retrieval Augmented Generation
Dahyun Lee, Yongrae Jo, Haeju Park, Moontae Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06838 …

Shifting from Ranking to Set Selection for Retrieval Augmented Generation
Retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG) must ensure that retrieved passages are not only individually relevant but also collectively form a comprehensive set. Existing approaches primarily rerank top-k passages based on their individual relevance, often failing to meet the information needs of complex queries in multi-hop question answering. In this work, we propose a set-wise passage selection approach and introduce SETR, which explicitly identifies the information requirements of a q…

Modifying the Optical Emission of Vanadyl Phthalocyanine via Molecular Self-Assembly on van der Waals Materials
S. Carin Gavin, William Koll, Moumita Kar, Yiying Liu, Anushka Dasgupta, Ethan Garvey, Thomas W. Song, Chunxi Zhou, Brendan P. Kerwin, Jash Jain, Tobin J. Marks, Mark C. Hersam, George C. Schatz, Jay A. Gupta, Nathaniel P. Stern
https://

Modifying the Optical Emission of Vanadyl Phthalocyanine via Molecular Self-Assembly on van der Waals Materials
Vanadyl phthalocyanine (VOPc) is a promising organic molecule for applications in quantum information because of its thermal stability, efficient processing, and potential as a spin qubit. The deposition of VOPc in different molecular orientations allows the properties to be customized for integration into various devices. However, such customization has yet to be fully leveraged to alter its intrinsic properties, particularly optical emission. Normally, VOPc films on dielectric substrates emit…

California Central Coast elected officials, nonprofit organizers, and immigrant rights advocates are preparing for an incoming increase in immigration enforcement
following recent developments at the federal level, including the U.S. Supreme Court decision to lift restrictions in the region,
and billions of dollars that will soon be available to fund more detention centers, officers, and ICE enforcement operations.
On Monday, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administrati…

Central Coast Leaders Prepare for Surge in Federal Immigration Response
Elected officials and organizers are speaking out against the incoming increase in enforcement and ICE funding.

Here’s a mind-blowing experiment that you can try at home:
Gather some children’s blocks and place them on a table.
Take one block and slowly push it over the table’s edge, inch by inch, until it’s on the brink of falling.
If you possess patience and a steady hand, you should be able to balance it so that exactly half of it hangs off the edge.
Nudge it any farther, and gravity wins.
Now take two blocks and start over.
Stacking one on top of the other, how…

This Block-Stacking Math Problem Has a Preposterous Solution You Need to See to Believe — Scientific American
In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity Amanda Montañez Math Here’s a mind-blowing experiment that you can try at home: Gather some children’s blocks and place them on a table. Take one block and slowly push it over the table’s edge, inch by inch, until it’s on the brink of falling. If you possess patience and a steady hand, you should be able to balance it so that exactly half of it…

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President, and It’s Time to Say So
Economy loses jobs for August
Donald Trump understands better than anyone else alive that his hold on his supporters
—and on plenty of swing voters, too
—depends on the mere perception that he’s strong, wins everywhere, always acts boldly, and wields absolute mastery over his eternally feckless, disoriented enemies.
Last month, after an anemic July jobs report, Trump fired the steward of jobs data,

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President, and It’s Time to Say So
It’s possible for Trump to be an inept buffoon—but still extremely dangerous. And it shouldn’t be so hard to make that case.