Tootfinder

The Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest from LBGs: First 3D Correlation Measurement with DESI and Prospects for Cosmology
Hiram K. Herrera-Alcantar, Eric Armengaud, Christophe Y\`eche, Calum Gordon, Laura Casas, Andreu Font-Ribera, Christophe Magneville, Corentin Ravoux, J. Aguilar, S. Ahlen, A. Anand, D. Brooks, E. Chaussidon, T. Claybaugh, A. Cuceu, K. S. Dawson, A. de la Macorra, P. Doel, S. Ferraro, J. E. Forero-Romero, E. Gazta\~naga, S. Gontcho A Gontcho, A. X. Gonzalez-Morales, G. Gutierrez, …

The Lyman-$α$ Forest from LBGs: First 3D Correlation Measurement with DESI and Prospects for Cosmology
The Lyman-$α$ (Ly$α$) forest is a key tracer of large-scale structure at redshifts z > 2, traditionally studied using spectra of quasars. Here, we explore the viability Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs) as alternative background sources for Ly$α$ forest studies. We analyze 4,151 Ly$α$ forest skewers extracted from LBG spectra obtained in the DESI pilot surveys in the COSMOS and XMM-LSS fields. We present the first measurement of the Ly$α$ forest auto-correlation function derived exclusively from…

Masimo sues US CBP, saying CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that enabled Apple to reactivate a Watch blood oxygen tracking feature (Christopher Yasiejko/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-la

Masimo Sues US Customs Over Apple Restoring Watch’s Oxygen Tool
US Customs and Border Protection unlawfully let Apple Inc. reactivate a blood-oxygen tracking feature on Apple Watches that infringes patents for the technology, Masimo Corp. said in a federal lawsuit.

The Mallee Daily
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: #GreatAusPods

Wiecie, czego naprawdę nie znoszę w długie weekendy?
Nawet nie zmian rozkładu, ale tego, że dla mniejszych przewoźników, po prostu nie idzie znaleźć informacji, czy w piątek autobusy kursują według rozkładu dla dni roboczych czy weekendowego. I oczywiście jeden z drugim z reguły różnią się tak bardzo, że nawet nie można wybrać jednego kursu, który na pewno pojedzie.
Tak, pomyślałem, żeby jutro rano pojechać do Kórnika. Pewnie nikt tu przypadkiem nie orientuje się, jak jutro jeżdż…

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Riesz-means bounds for functional-difference operators for mirror curves
Duv\'an Cardona
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07433 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07…

Riesz-means bounds for functional-difference operators for mirror curves
Let \( P \) and \( Q \) be the quantum-mechanical momentum and position operators on \( L^2(\R) \). Let $ζ>0.$ We provide estimates for the {\it Riesz means} $\varkappa(λ)$ associated with the system of eigenvalues of the operator \begin{align} H(ζ) = \e^{-bP} + \e^{bP} + \e^{2πb Q} + ζ\e^{-2πb Q} = U + U^{-1} + V + ζV^{-1}, \end{align} when $λ\rightarrow\infty.$ This operator arises in the quantisation of the local {\it del Pezzo Calabi-Yau threefold}, defined as the total space of t…

AROMA: Mixed-Initiative AI Assistance for Non-Visual Cooking by Grounding Multi-modal Information Between Reality and Videos
Zheng Ning, Leyang Li, Daniel Killough, JooYoung Seo, Patrick Carrington, Yapeng Tian, Yuhang Zhao, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Toby Jia-Jun Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10963

AROMA: Mixed-Initiative AI Assistance for Non-Visual Cooking by Grounding Multi-modal Information Between Reality and Videos
Videos offer rich audiovisual information that can support people in performing activities of daily living (ADLs), but they remain largely inaccessible to blind or low-vision (BLV) individuals. In cooking, BLV people often rely on non-visual cues, such as touch, taste, and smell, to navigate their environment, making it difficult to follow the predominantly audiovisual instructions found in video recipes. To address this problem, we introduce AROMA, an AI system that provides timely responses t…

SUSEP-Net: Simulation-Supervised and Contrastive Learning-based Deep Neural Networks for Susceptibility Source Separation
Min Li, Chen Chen, Zhenghao Li, Yin Liu, Shanshan Shan, Peng Wu, Pengfei Rong, Feng Liu, G. Bruce Pike, Alan H. Wilman, Hongfu Sun, Yang Gao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13293

SUSEP-Net: Simulation-Supervised and Contrastive Learning-based Deep Neural Networks for Susceptibility Source Separation
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) provides a valuable tool for quantifying susceptibility distributions in human brains; however, two types of opposing susceptibility sources (i.e., paramagnetic and diamagnetic), may coexist in a single voxel, and cancel each other out in net QSM images. Susceptibility source separation techniques enable the extraction of sub-voxel information from QSM maps. This study proposes a novel SUSEP-Net for susceptibility source separation by training a dual-br…

RationalVLA: A Rational Vision-Language-Action Model with Dual System
Wenxuan Song, Jiayi Chen, Wenxue Li, Xu He, Han Zhao, Pengxiang Ding Shiyan Su, Feilong Tang, Xuelian Cheng, Donglin Wang, Zongyuan Ge, Xinhu Zheng, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang, Yunhui Liu, Haoang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10826

RationalVLA: A Rational Vision-Language-Action Model with Dual System
A fundamental requirement for real-world robotic deployment is the ability to understand and respond to natural language instructions. Existing language-conditioned manipulation tasks typically assume that instructions are perfectly aligned with the environment. This assumption limits robustness and generalization in realistic scenarios where instructions may be ambiguous, irrelevant, or infeasible. To address this problem, we introduce RAtional MAnipulation (RAMA), a new benchmark that challen…

Controlling quantum entanglement with classical non-separable light
R. F. Barros, A. L. S. Santos Junior, A. Z. Khoury, R. Fickler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06462

Controlling quantum entanglement with classical non-separable light
Here we investigate the quantum frequency conversion of entangled photons driven by a classically non-separable laser beam. We show that the frequency conversion dynamics is described by a quantum channel that stems from the classical drive field through the channel-state duality - the quantum channel is dual to the classical coherence matrix of the drive field. This implies that the evolution of entanglement in the conversion process is bound by the classical non-separability of the drive fiel…