Tootfinder

Oh, Hacker News…FFS. Something got lost in the sad game of Popular Press Telephone between the actual study and this snotty post.
The actual study is here:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00577
It notes that:
1. Most research on air cleaning devices used air samples, not human health outcomes. (It’s far more difficult to conduct a study on the latter.)
2. Not many people are studying whether e.g. UV air purifiers create toxic byproducts.
3. The available studies sure do measure a whole bunch of different things, and wouldn’t it be nice if they had more consistent standards.
Their main recommendation is basically “scientists should do more studies where they measure infection in humans, not just germs in the air.” And that’s fair: It’s reasonable to •guess• that fewer germs in the air means less sickness, but it’s nice to actually •test• that!
However, AFAICT, nothing in the study warrants the “tinfoil hats” remark. Unlike a tinfoil hats, we have plenty good reason to think at least some of these devices actually work; the paper just wants the research to go deeper. It’s one giant “further study needed.” https://mastodon.social/@ngate/115091700894746240

Feedback Indicators: The Alignment between Llama and a Teacher in Language Learning
Sylvio R\"udian, Yassin Elsir, Marvin Kretschmer, Sabine Cayrou, Niels Pinkwart
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11364

Feedback Indicators: The Alignment between Llama and a Teacher in Language Learning
Automated feedback generation has the potential to enhance students' learning progress by providing timely and targeted feedback. Moreover, it can assist teachers in optimizing their time, allowing them to focus on more strategic and personalized aspects of teaching. To generate high-quality, information-rich formative feedback, it is essential first to extract relevant indicators, as these serve as the foundation upon which the feedback is constructed. Teachers often employ feedback criteria g…

Non-equilibrium state during proton-deuteron exchange at a liquid-liquid interface
Tillmann Buttersack, Niclas Sven Mueller, Giulia Carini, Henrik Haak, Hanna Bordyuh, Dipali Singh, Sandy Gewinner, Marco De Pas, Wieland Sch\"ollkopf, Martin Wolf, Hendrik Bluhm, Nils Huse, Bernd Winter, Gerard Meijer, Alexander Paarmann
https://arxiv.o…

Non-equilibrium state during proton-deuteron exchange at a liquid-liquid interface
The exchange of protons and deuterons is a very fast process, even on macroscopic length scales. Here we directly measure quantitatively the formation of HDO within the first 100 microseconds of the reaction at the liquid-liquid interface between D$_2$O and H$_2$O using a fast-flowing liquid flat jet and infrared spectroscopic imaging. During early stages of the reaction, the rate of HDO formation is limited by the availability of hydroxide and hydronium ions mediating the reaction, rather than…

Unpopular Opinion: Ich persönlich mag #TheLänd. Ich finde, Jung von Matt hat mit der Idee einen echten Coup gelandet. Werbeexperten sehen das ähnlich.
Andere denken bei The Länd eher - hä?
Nur den #NettHier-Sticker, den lieben ca. alle.

"The Länd" - wie erfolgreich die Werbung ist, weiß keiner, aber jeder kennt sie
Seit 2021 wirbt Baden-Württemberg mit der "The-Länd"-Kampagne um ausländische Fachkräfte. Weil unklar ist, ob das geklappt hat, gibt es neben positiven Stimmen aber auch Kritik.

"hoverflies, like some romantic go-between, allow plants hundreds of kilometres apart to mate."
🎁opens five times within seven days.
Hoverflies are long-distance travellers
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/10/08/hoverflies-are-long-distance-travellers?giftId=adcfa6b9-bae8-4ae2-a926-9c7b7f88a0a6&utm_campaign=gifted_article

Controlling the recovery time of the superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with a voltage-controlled cryogenic tunable resistor
Hui Wang, Nikita Dmitrievic Orlov, Thomas Descamps, J. W. Niels Los, Val Zwiller, Iman Esmaeil Zadeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11832

Controlling the recovery time of the superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with a voltage-controlled cryogenic tunable resistor
Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPD), owing to their unique performance, are currently the standard detector in most demanding single-photon experiments. One important metric for any single-photon detector is the deadtime (or recovery time), defined as the minimum temporal separation between consecutive detection events. In SNSPDs, the recovery time is more subtle, as the detection efficiency does not abruptly drop to zero when the temporal separation between detection event…

I'm putting together notes for novices to do simple data analysis with R and the fact that I'm telling them to "cut and paste this inscrutable block of code at the start of your file" reminds me of nothing so much as when I worked for the ESRI in Dublin in the mid 1980s and we used to run SPSS analyses remotely on UCD's Amdahl by sandwiching our SPSS code (on punch cards) between two decks of IBM Job Control Language cards of which we understood nothing whatsoever.

RIS-Assisted Near-Field ISAC for Multi-Target Indication in NLoS Scenarios
Hang Ruan (Weizmann Institute of Science), Homa Nikbakht (Weizmann Institute of Science, Princeton University), Ruizhi Zhang (Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Honglei Chen (MathWorks, Inc), Yonina C. Eldar (Weizmann Institute of Science)

RIS-Assisted Near-Field ISAC for Multi-Target Indication in NLoS Scenarios
Enabling multi-target sensing in near-field integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems is a key challenge, particularly when line-of-sight paths are blocked. This paper proposes a beamforming framework that leverages a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to achieve multi-target indication. Our contribution is the extension of classic beampattern gain and inter-target cross-correlation metrics to the near-field, leveraging both angle and distance information to discriminate between…

A Search Method for Hirota Bilinear Systems of Nonlinear Evolution Equations
I. Albazlamit, L. Al Sakkaf, U. Al Khawaja
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15590 https://

A Search Method for Hirota Bilinear Systems of Nonlinear Evolution Equations
We present a systematic search method for finding Hirota bilinear systems of nonlinear evolution equations, with emphasis on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE). Using a known exact solution, couplings between the different terms of the differential equation are identified, which are then used to derive the bilinear system. We show that a nonlinear evolution equation may have many solution-dependent Hirota bilinear systems. Nonetheless, all solution members of a certain solution class ar…

CRED-SQL: Enhancing Real-world Large Scale Database Text-to-SQL Parsing through Cluster Retrieval and Execution Description
Shaoming Duan, Zirui Wang, Chuanyi Liu, Zhibin Zhu, Yuhao Zhang, Peiyi Han, Liang Yan, Zewu Penge
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12769

CRED-SQL: Enhancing Real-world Large Scale Database Text-to-SQL Parsing through Cluster Retrieval and Execution Description
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the accuracy of Text-to-SQL systems. However, a critical challenge remains: the semantic mismatch between natural language questions (NLQs) and their corresponding SQL queries. This issue is exacerbated in large-scale databases, where semantically similar attributes hinder schema linking and semantic drift during SQL generation, ultimately reducing model accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce CRED-SQL, a fr…