Tootfinder

Zahlen, bitte! Medizinische Hilfe in 2 Stunden an jeden Ort im Outback: Der RFDS
Wie schafft man schnelle ärztliche Versorgung im riesigen Outback? Das sichert der Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia per ausgeklügeltem Flug-Netzwerk

#Minnesota Pubic Radio (MPR) parent company cuts 30 jobs following federal funding cuts | MPR News (h/t akuzee@bsky.social)
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/08/15/m

MPR parent company cuts 30 jobs following federal funding cuts
Minnesota Public Radio's parent company laid off 30 staff members Friday after Congress clawed back funding that it had previously approved for public broadcasting. Cuts in state funding from the Minnesota Legislature exacerbated the budget gap.

3 out of 7 recommended news stories are about Trump failing.
I would be happier about it if it did not imply Putin was winning. This is bad for everyone, but especially Ukraine.
Trump’s ego, fealty, and idiocy is going to destroy the world if Europe, the Global South, and other democratic nations don’t take the reins from the USA.
#russiaukrainewar #russia #ukraine

Improved sampling algorithms and Poincar\'e inequalities for non-log-concave distributions
Yuchen He, Zhehan Lei, Jianan Shao, Chihao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11236

Improved sampling algorithms and Poincaré inequalities for non-log-concave distributions
We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $μ$ with density $\propto e^{-V}$ for some potential function $V:\mathbb R^d\to \mathbb R$ with query access to $V$ and $\nabla V$. We start with the following standard assumptions: (1) The potential function $V$ is $L$-smooth. (2) The second moment $\mathbf{E}_{X\sim μ}[\|X\|^2]\leq M$. Recently, He and Zhang (COLT'25) showed that the query complexity of sampling from such distributions is at least $\left(\frac{LM}{dε}\rig…

Raiders QB Geno Smith Destroyed by NFL World Following Nightmare Game https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/geno-smith-chargers-stats-reactions/?adt_ei=[email]

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

From Flat to Feeling: A Feasibility and Impact Study on Dynamic Facial Emotions in AI-Generated Avatars
Pegah Salehi, Sajad Amouei Sheshkal, Vajira Thambawita, P{\aa}l Halvorsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13477

From Flat to Feeling: A Feasibility and Impact Study on Dynamic Facial Emotions in AI-Generated Avatars
Dynamic facial emotion is essential for believable AI-generated avatars; however, most systems remain visually inert, limiting their utility in high-stakes simulations such as virtual training for investigative interviews with abused children. We introduce and evaluate a real-time architecture fusing Unreal Engine 5 MetaHuman rendering with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face to translate vocal prosody into high-fidelity facial expressions on photorealistic child avatars. We implemented a distributed t…

Approximate polymorphisms of predicates
Yaroslav Alekseev, Yuval Filmus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12155 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.1…

Approximate polymorphisms of predicates
A generalized polymorphism of a predicate $P \subseteq \{0,1\}^m$ is a tuple of functions $f_1,\dots,f_m\colon \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ satisfying the following property: If $x^{(1)},\dots,x^{(m)} \in \{0,1\}^n$ are such that $(x^{(1)}_i,\dots,x^{(m)}_i) \in P$ for all $i$, then also $(f_1(x^{(1)}),\dots,f_m(x^{(m)})) \in P$. We show that if $f_1,\dots,f_m$ satisfy this property for most $x^{(1)},\dots,x^{(m)}$ (as measured with respect to an arbitrary full support distribution $μ$ on $P$), th…

Two wildfires are burning at or near the North Rim, known
as the White Sage Fire
and the Dragon Bravo Fire.
The latter is the one that destroyed the lodge and other structures.
The park initially was managing it as a controlled burn
but then shifted to suppression as it rapidly grew to 7.8 square miles (20 square kilometers) because of hot temperatures,
low humidity and wind, fire officials said.
No injuries have been reported.
Millions of peo…

A historic Grand Canyon lodge has been destroyed by wildfire, park official says
The Grand Canyon Lodge, the only lodging inside the park at the North Rim, was consumed by the flames, park Superintendent Ed Keable told park residents, staff and others in a meeting Sunday morning. He said the visitor center, the gas station, a waste water treatment plant, an administrative building and some employee housing were among the 50 to 80 structures lost.

Dream Destroyer – the found is feeling again #feeling #music https://muz4now.com/2025/dream-destroy

Dream Destroyer - the found is feeling again
Stan Stewart - @muz4now