Tootfinder

I've seen #POTUS47 use the phrase "tapping me along" a couple of times in the 2 weeks regarding Putin. I've never heard that phrase before, but from context, it sounds like he means "leading me on".
I did a quick web search "tapping me along", and 2 of the top ranked results are web forum posts where people are asking what Turnip means when he says it. Th…

Managing level of detail through head-tracked peripheral degradation: a model and resulting design principles
Benjamin Watson, Neff Walker, Larry F Hodges
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21456

Managing level of detail through head-tracked peripheral degradation: a model and resulting design principles
Previous work has demonstrated the utility of reductions in the level of detail (LOD) in the periphery of head-tracked, large field of view displays. This paper provides a psychophysically based model, centered around an eye/head movement tradeoff, that explains the effectiveness of peripheral degradation and suggests how peripherally degraded displays should be designed. An experiment evaluating the effect on search performance of the shape and area of the high detail central area (inset) in p…

High-precision Penning trap mass measurements of neutron-rich chlorine isotopes at the N=28 shell closure
H. Erington, G. Bollen, G. Dykstra, A. Hamaker, C. M. Ireland, C. R. Nicoloff, D. Puentes, R. Ringle, S. Schwarz, C. S. Sumithrarachchi, A. A. Valverde, I. T. Yandow
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18354

High-precision Penning trap mass measurements of neutron-rich chlorine isotopes at the N=28 shell closure
Although it is known that the $N=28$ spherical shell closure erodes, the strength of the closure with decreasing proton number $Z<20$ is an open question in nuclear structure. In this region of interest, direct high-precision mass measurements of neutron-rich $^{43-45}$Cl isotopes were performed at the Low Energy Beam and Ion Trap (LEBIT) when coupled to the National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab. The resulting mass excesses (MEs) are ME($^{43}$Cl) = -24114.4(1.7) keV, ME($^{44}$Cl) = -20450.8(…

GPU-accelerated Modeling of Biological Regulatory Networks
Joyce Reimer, Pranta Saha, Chris Chen, Neeraj Dhar, Brook Byrns, Steven Rayan, Gordon Broderick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19866

GPU-accelerated Modeling of Biological Regulatory Networks
The complex regulatory dynamics of a biological network can be succinctly captured using discrete logic models. Given even sparse time-course data from the system of interest, previous work has shown that global optimization schemes are suitable for proposing logic models that explain the data and make predictions about how the system will behave under varying conditions. Considering the large scale of the parameter search spaces associated with these regulatory systems, performance optimizatio…

If a sitting president can direct the IRS to investigate political enemies, revoke nonprofit status from dissenting institutions, or selectively enforce tax law to reward loyalty,
the agency no longer serves the public.
It serves power.
The slow hollowing of the IRS through funding cuts, staff attrition, and the erosion of norms yields the same result:
a weakened institution unable to enforce the law, uphold equity, or hold the powerful to account.
And when th…

The Fiscal State Under Siege: Why People Hate the IRS, and Why You Should Care
How Trump, DOGE, and Project 2025 Are Turning the IRS Into a Tool of Authoritarian Rule Editor’s Introduction: Hello readers, it's Nathan Tankus and I am very happy to bring to you the first in a long multi-part series on the IRS spearheaded by Anisha Steephen. Anisha worked for

I've made a summer quiz for EU energy policy nerds 🤓
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaapburger_acers-country-sheets-summer-quiz-acti…

Now that the school year is coming to an end in many European countries, many children are receiving their school reports. | Jaap Burger
Now that the school year is coming to an end in many European countries, many children are receiving their school reports. What are they doing well and where can they improve? Have they learned from the curriculum and have they acted on previous recommendations? How are they doing compared to their peers? EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) does something similar for countries, their retail energy markets and the level of consumer participation. It's time for their annual …

Very-high-energy observations of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 4151 with MAGIC -- Indication of another gamma-ray obscured candidate neutrino source
K. Abe, S. Abe, J. Abhir, A. Abhishek, V. A. Acciari, A. Aguasca-Cabot, I. Agudo, T. Aniello, S. Ansoldi, L. A. Antonelli, A. Arbet Engels, C. Arcaro, T. T. H. Arnesen, K. Asano, A. Babi\'c, C. Bakshi, U. Barres de Almeida, J. A. Barrio, L. Barrios-Jim\'enez, I. Batkovi\'c, J. Baxter, J. Becerra Gonz\'alez, W. Bednarek, E. Bernard…

Very-high-energy observations of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 4151 with MAGIC -- Indication of another gamma-ray obscured candidate neutrino source
Seyfert galaxies are emerging as a promising source class of high-energy neutrinos. The Seyfert galaxies NGC 4151 and NGC 1068 have come up respectively as the most promising counterparts of a 3$σ$ and of a 4.2$σ$ neutrino excesses detected by IceCube in the TeV energy range. Constraining the very-high-energy (VHE) emission associated with the neutrino signal is crucial to unveil the mechanism and site of neutrino production. In this work, we present the first results of the VHE observations …

Now out in #TMLR:
🍇 GRAPES: Learning to Sample Graphs for Scalable Graph Neural Networks 🍇
There's lots of work on sampling subgraphs for GNNs, but relatively little on making this sampling process _adaptive_. That is, learning to select the data from the graph that is relevant for your task.
We introduce an RL-based and a GFLowNet-based sampler and show that the approach perf…

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

PhantomHunter: Detecting Unseen Privately-Tuned LLM-Generated Text via Family-Aware Learning
Yuhui Shi, Yehan Yang, Qiang Sheng, Hao Mi, Beizhe Hu, Chaoxi Xu, Juan Cao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15683

PhantomHunter: Detecting Unseen Privately-Tuned LLM-Generated Text via Family-Aware Learning
With the popularity of large language models (LLMs), undesirable societal problems like misinformation production and academic misconduct have been more severe, making LLM-generated text detection now of unprecedented importance. Although existing methods have made remarkable progress, a new challenge posed by text from privately tuned LLMs remains underexplored. Users could easily possess private LLMs by fine-tuning an open-source one with private corpora, resulting in a significant performanc…