Tootfinder

Robert MacNeil, urbane anchor who founded ‘PBS NewsHour,’ dies at 93
Robert MacNeil, a Canadian-born broadcast journalist who built what is now “PBS NewsHour” and served for two decades as its urbane, evenhanded co-anchor, died April 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.

His daughter Alison MacNeil confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.

Mr. MacNeil, known as Robin, and Jim Lehrer, a former Texas newspaperman, formed one of television journalism’s most successful…

Robert MacNeil, urbane anchor who founded ‘PBS NewsHour,’ dies at 93
He forged a two-decade partnership with Jim Lehrer, his co-anchor on public television.

InfiCoder-Eval: Systematically Evaluating the Question-Answering Capabilities of Code Large Language Models
Linyi Li, Shijie Geng, Zhenwen Li, Yibo He, Hao Yu, Ziyue Hua, Guanghan Ning, Siwei Wang, Tao Xie, Hongxia Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07940

InfiCoder-Eval: Systematically Evaluating the Question-Answering Capabilities of Code Large Language Models
Large Language Models for understanding and generating code (code LLMs) have witnessed tremendous progress in recent years. With the rapid development of code LLMs, many popular evaluation benchmarks, such as HumanEval, DS-1000, and MBPP, have emerged to measure the performance of code LLMs with a particular focus on code generation tasks. However, they are insufficient to cover the full range of expected capabilities of code LLMs, which span beyond code generation to answering diverse coding-r…

Bavarian school curriculum from hell: Kid's learning about #Europe and got a list of 20 capitals.
List includes Moscow (they need to cut Eurasia apart somewhere and the city is to the west of it but WTF) and Ankara (also geography I guess?).
But then it's missing actual EU member capitals #Bratislava

Self-Induced Superradiant Masing
Wenzel Kersten, Nikolaus de Zordo, Elena S. Redchenko, Nikolaos Lagos, Andrew N. Kanagin, Andreas Angerer, William J. Munro, Kae Nemoto, Igor E. Mazets, J\"org Schmiedmayer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08537

Self-Induced Superradiant Masing
We study superradiant masing in a hybrid system composed of nitrogen-vacancy center spins in diamond coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity. After the first fast superradiant decay we observe transient pulsed and then quasi-continuous masing. This emission dynamics can be described by a phenomenological model incorporating the transfer of inverted spin excitations into the superradiant window of spins resonant with the cavity. After experimentally excluding cQED effects associated with t…

Come join us for @… Unwrapped Day 2 🙌
I'm especially excited about the last talk of the day!
https://datawrapper.de/unwrapped

Datawrapper: Create charts, maps, and tables
Create interactive, responsive & beautiful data visualizations with the online tool Datawrapper — no code required.

Here's their press release from this morning:
Alt text here instead of in images due to length:
NEWS RELEASE Embargoed until April 24, 7:00am PST
Divest From Death USA
Media Contact: Media Liaisons, USC Divest From Death Coalition USCSolidarityOccupation@protonmail.com
USC Divest From Death Coalition to Begin Gaza Solidarity Occupation in University of
Southern California Campus
LOS ANGELES. (April 24, 2023) — USC Divest From Death Coalition today announced theit occupation of USC's Alumni Park, where the increasingly controversial 2024 Commencement is currently set to take place. The students taking part in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation are planning to occupy USC until their demands are met. The coalition joins other students groups across the country in the National Students for Justice in Palestine's "Popular University for Gaza," a coordinated mass movement of students, faculty and staff that disrupts universities, creating climates that push universities to answer community and international calls for full divestment from the Zionist entity, and all of the industries that sustain it.
1. End War Profiteering and Investment in Genocide. USC must fully disclose and divest its finances and endowment from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine, including the US Military and weapons manufacturing. USC must comumit to accountability through full transparency of their financial investments.
2. Complete Academic Boycott of Israel. USC must end its study abroad programs at Hebrew University's Rothenberg International School and Reichman University and sever all academic ties and research cooperation with Israeli universities.
3. Protect free speech on campus and provide full amnesty to all students, staff, and faculty disciplined, penalized, or fired for their pro-Palestine ackivism. USC must abide by their self- proclaimed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion values and implement material policies protecting the safety of its marginalized students.
4. Stop the Displacement, from South Central to Palestine. No land grabs, whether in South Central, Tongva territory, or Palestine. Cease expansion, provide reparations, and support housing for low-income South Central residents. No development by USC without genuine community control.
5. No Policing on Campus. End the targeted repression and harassment of Black, Brown, and Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus, including through university disciplinary processes. Defund the Department of Public Safety and disclose and sever all ties with the LAPD.
6. End the Silence on the Genocide in Palestine. Release a public statement calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza, denouncing the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, and call on government officials o do so too.
"I'm participating in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation at USC to highlight and amplify the anti- zionist Jewish voice at USC and be in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for liberation," says a student organizer from USC's chapter of Jewish Voices for Palestine (JVP). "JVP USC feels our voice is especially important right now as many people at USC and across the country are equating zionism and Judaism, but we are here to say they are not the same! We stand by our belief of free speech, resistance to oppressive systems and solidarity with our valedictorian Asna and all other college campuses where pro-Palestine voices have been silenced."
The USC Divest From Death Coalition establishes the occupation mo st fundamentally in solidarity with the people of Palestine as they resist genocide and continue in their struggle for liberation. The occupation is also in resistance to attempts by USC and other universities to suppress the student movement for Palestine on its campuses, in resistance to the silencing of students that criticize the state of Israel, in resistance to the university administrators and boards of trustees who profit off the genocide of Palestinians; The students taking part are firm in their commitment to speaking out against the university's complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
"USC's funding of the ongoing genocide perpetuated by the zionist entity is reflective of maintaining imperialist interests abroad, as well as solidifying the shared ideology of amerikan and zionist institutions in preserving racialized oppression," says a student organizer of the Gaza Solidarity Occupation. "To not stand in opposition to the expressly racist violence here and abroad is to ignore the calls for solidarity demanded by the majority of the world. USC acts in accordance with these oppressions, and to call against this is to recognize both the inhumanity of these systems and our own humanity in opposing them."
We have chosen to use the word "occupation” instead of "encampment" to draw attention to USC as an occupying force on unceded Gabrieleno/Tongva land, an occupying force in South Central through its expansion into, gentrification of, and destruction of the existing community, and as a complicit power in Israeli occupation of Palestine.
About USC Divest From Death
In joining the national "Cut Ties with Genocide: Divest from Death" campaign, USC Divest From Death pushes our institutions to divest from companies complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, in all its iterations, alongside thousands of campuses. The coalition's push for the advancement of the key demand points on campus is the first steps towards the liberation of all people by ending the complicity of the University of Southern California in the violence enacted on our communities. Through the intentional act of coalition building, the students of USC realize that we are part of an interconnected fight for freedom taking place on campus, in our communities and homelands. We envision campuses free from militarism, occupation, and war through the implementation of divestment at USC
About Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
The student movement for the liberation of Palestine first began in the 1950s through the formation of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). From the U.S. to Palestine, GUPS chapters galvanized thousands of students towards a liberated Palestine. The 90s” wave of corrupt politicians and faulty deals changed the liberation movement as we knew it and many institutions, including the student movement, collapsed. In the absence of a Palestinian student movement, organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine emerged across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada) as a way to educate, advocate, and mobilize in support for Palestinian liberation. Nearly two decades after the formation of the first Students for Justice in Palestine, the movement for Palestine has taken colleges and universities across North America by storm. With over 200 campus Palestine solidarity organizations across the continent, students have been leaders in uplifting demands for freedom, Justice, and equality for the Palestinian people.

Multidimensional Blockchain Fees are (Essentially) Optimal
Guillermo Angeris, Theo Diamandis, Ciamac Moallemi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08661 https://

Multidimensional Blockchain Fees are (Essentially) Optimal
In this paper we show that, using only mild assumptions, previously proposed multidimensional blockchain fee markets are essentially optimal, even against worst-case adversaries. In particular, we show that the average welfare gap between the following two scenarios is at most $O(1/\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the length of the time horizon considered. In the first scenario, the designer knows all future actions by users and is allowed to fix the optimal prices of resources ahead of time, based on …

Allow me to re-stack two of the AP’s graphs. #Uvalde
“… an investigator hired by Uvalde officials found that the city’s officers did not deserve punishment, and in some cases, praised their actions …”
“… prompting shouts of “cowards” from the audience and causing several family members of the victims to angrily walk out of the meeting.”

Uvalde parents lash out after new report clears city police of missteps during Texas school attack
An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting has put no blame on local police officers and defended their actions, but still acknowledged a series of failures during the response. The 2022 classroom attack left 19 children and two teachers dead. The probe by Austin-based investigator and former detective Jesse Prado for the Uvalde City Council is just one of several into the massacre. State lawmakers found in 2022 that nearly 400 local, state and federal…

Snurre the Cat needs hugz!
(Read image description for gory details)
#CatsOfMastodon

This summer’s Democratic National Convention could be hit by protests and scenes of chaos that undermine Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
Already, 65-plus organizations in Chicago and elsewhere have formed a coalition to “March on the DNC” when it opens there on Aug. 19.
Activists have sued in federal court, alleging First Amendment violations because the city has only offered permits for demonstrations miles from the United Center, where Biden is scheduled to accept the Dem…

Noting campus protests, Democrats are preparing for intense action at their summer convention
As pro-Palestinian demonstrations escalate on college campuses around the country, critics of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war suggest this summer’s Democratic National Convention could be hit by protests and scenes of chaos that undermine his reelection. Already, more than 65 organizations in Chicago and elsewhere have formed a coalition to “March on the DNC” when it opens there on Aug. 19. Protesters preparing for the convention hope to channel the anger on many …