Tootfinder

🤦 As Indonesia reclaims forests from palm oil, smallholders bear brunt of enforcement
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/07/as-indonesia-reclaims-forests-from-palm-oil-smallholders-bear-brunt-of-enforcement/

As Indonesia reclaims forests from palm oil, smallholders bear brunt of enforcement
JAKARTA — Indonesia has launched a sweeping and militarized crackdown on illegal forest use, reclaiming millions of hectares of land — but civil society groups warn the campaign is displacing Indigenous peoples while sparing corporate offenders and entrenching land inequality. Under a regulation issued in January, President Prabowo Subianto established a task force to crack down on […]

World Rainforest Day and the state of Earth’s most vital rainforests https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/06/world-rainforest-day-and-the-state-of-earths-most-vital-rainforests/

World Rainforest Day and the state of Earth’s most vital rainforests
June 22 marks World Rainforest Day, launched in 2017 by Rainforest Partnership to highlight the critical role of tropical forests. These ecosystems stabilize the climate, regulate rainfall, store vast amounts of carbon, and support most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. Yet despite their importance, 2024 proved to be a devastating year. Fires ravaged millions of […]

Jordanian spin chains for twisted strings in $AdS_5\times S^5$
Sibylle Driezen, Adrien Molines
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13911 https://

Jordanian spin chains for twisted strings in $AdS_5\times S^5$
We study the integrable spin chain formulation of Jordanian deformations of the $AdS_5\times S^5$ superstring, realised via Drinfel'd twists. Among these models, we first identify a unique supergravity deformation confined to an $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ sector and with constant dilaton. We then develop a general framework for closed Drinfel'd twisted spin chains and construct an explicit map to undeformed models with twisted-boundary conditions. Applied to the non compact $\mathrm{XXX}_{-1/2}$ spin c…

An Investigation Into Secondary School Students' Debugging Behaviour in Python
Laurie Gale, Sue Sentance
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14833 https://arxiv…

An Investigation Into Secondary School Students' Debugging Behaviour in Python
Background and context: Debugging is a common and often frustrating challenge for beginner programmers. Understanding students' debugging processes can help us identify the difficulties and misunderstandings they possess. However, we currently have limited knowledge of how secondary students debug in a text-based language, a medium through which millions of students will learn to program in the future. Objectives: In this paper, we investigate the debugging behaviour of K-12 students learning a…

Probing EFX via PMMS: (Non-)Existence Results in Discrete Fair Division
Jaros{\l}aw Byrka, Franciszek Malinka, Tomasz Ponitka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14957

Probing EFX via PMMS: (Non-)Existence Results in Discrete Fair Division
We study the fair division of indivisible items and provide new insights into the EFX problem, which is widely regarded as the central open question in fair division, and the PMMS problem, a strictly stronger variant of EFX. Our first result constructs a three-agent instance with two monotone valuations and one additive valuation in which no PMMS allocation exists. Since EFX allocations are known to exist under these assumptions, this establishes a formal separation between EFX and PMMS. We p…

Chemical enrichment of metal-poor stars orbiting massive black hole companions
Alejandra Rosselli-Calderon, Julia Stewart, Sijing Shen Sukanya Chakrabarti, Melinda Soares-Furtado, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14163

Chemical enrichment of metal-poor stars orbiting massive black hole companions
There are millions of undetected black holes wandering through our galaxy. Observatories like {\it Chandra}, LIGO, and more recently, {\it Gaia}, have provided valuable insights into the configurations of these elusive objects when residing in binary systems. Motivated by these advances, we study, for the first time, the enhanced accretion of metals from the interstellar medium (ISM) onto low-mass companions in binary systems with highly unequal mass ratios, utilizing a series of hydrodynamical…

Development and testing of integrated readout electronics for next generation SiSeRO (Single electron Sensitive Read Out) devices
Tanmoy Chattopadhyay, Haley R. Stueber, Abigail Y. Pan, Sven Herrmann, Peter Orel, Kevan Donlon, Steven W. Allen, Marshall W. Bautz, Michael Cooper, Catherine E. Grant, Beverly LaMarr, Christopher Leitz, Andrew Malonis, Eric D. Miller, R. Glenn Morris, Gregory Prigozhin, Ilya Prigozhin, Artem Poliszczuk, Keith Warner, Daniel R. Wilkins

Development and testing of integrated readout electronics for next generation SiSeRO (Single electron Sensitive Read Out) devices
The first generation of Single electron Sensitive Read Out (SiSeRO) amplifiers, employed as on-chip charge detectors for charge-coupled devices (CCDs) have demonstrated excellent noise and spectral performance: a responsivity of around 800 pA per electron, an equivalent noise charge (ENC) of 3.2 electrons root mean square (RMS), and a full width half maximum (FWHM) energy resolution of 130 eV at 5.9 keV for a readout speed of 625 Kpixel/s. Repetitive Non Destructive Readout (RNDR) has also been…

🐦‍⬛ 'Resident Evil' makers marvel at 'miracle' longevity
#games

'Resident Evil' makers marvel at 'miracle' longevity
When zombie-blasting survival game "Resident Evil" launched on the very first PlayStation console in 1996, Japanese publishers Capcom never thought the series would reach tens of millions of people or endure for three decades.

EGOILLUSION: Benchmarking Hallucinations in Egocentric Video Understanding
Ashish Seth, Utkarsh Tyagi, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Nishit Anand, Sonal Kumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Ramani Duraiswami, Chirag Agarwal, Dinesh Manocha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12687

EGOILLUSION: Benchmarking Hallucinations in Egocentric Video Understanding
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex multimodal tasks. While MLLMs excel at visual perception and reasoning in third-person and egocentric videos, they are prone to hallucinations, generating coherent yet inaccurate responses. We present EgoIllusion, a first benchmark to evaluate MLLM hallucinations in egocentric videos. EgoIllusion comprises 1,400 videos paired with 8,000 human-annotated open and closed-ended questions designed to trigger…

Controlling Multimodal LLMs via Reward-guided Decoding
Oscar Ma\~nas, Pierluca D'Oro, Koustuv Sinha, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Michal Drozdzal, Aishwarya Agrawal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11616

Controlling Multimodal LLMs via Reward-guided Decoding
As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) gain widespread applicability, it is becoming increasingly desirable to adapt them for diverse user needs. In this paper, we study the adaptation of MLLMs through controlled decoding. To achieve this, we introduce the first method for reward-guided decoding of MLLMs and demonstrate its application in improving their visual grounding. Our method involves building reward models for visual grounding and using them to guide the MLLM's decoding process. Co…