Tootfinder

Nach einem Brandanschlag auf ein Umspannwerk(?) in Südfrankreich ist dort das Netz teilweise zusammengebrochen. Zeitweise waren mehr als 160k Haushalte betroffen, u.A. auch in Cannes, wo grade das gleichnamige Filmfestival stattfindet.
Spekulation: Dürfte im Bereich Poste électrique du Biançon gewesen sein. Wichtiger Knotenpunkt mit 400/225kV und nem 20MW Wasserkraftwerk (Barrage de Saint-Cassien) dran.

Safety Assurance for Quadrotor Kinodynamic Motion Planning
Theodoros Tavoulareas, Marzia Cescon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17679 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507…

Safety Assurance for Quadrotor Kinodynamic Motion Planning
Autonomous drones have gained considerable attention for applications in real-world scenarios, such as search and rescue, inspection, and delivery. As their use becomes ever more pervasive in civilian applications, failure to ensure safe operation can lead to physical damage to the system, environmental pollution, and even loss of human life. Recent work has demonstrated that motion planning techniques effectively generate a collision-free trajectory during navigation. However, these methods, w…

“ave US Tariff rate has risen from 2% to 16% over the past year”
"Countries must now buy access to the world's largest market (USA)”
"The USA reaffirmed CUSMA will not be subject to tariffs.”
"Actual US tariff rate on Canadian goods is actually 5.6%”.
"More than 85% of Canada/US trade is tariff free”
"Canada has the best deal of any country in the world.”
"We must do everything we can to preserve this unique advantage for Canadians”
"The Canadian government will now match the USA, by removing all tariffs on goods covered by CUSMA”
... he goes into French repeating most of this.
#Live #CBC #Canada #CanPoli #CdnPoli #Trump #TradeWar

An nth-cousin mating model and the n-anacci numbers
Elisa Heinrich Mora, Noah A. Rosenberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16577 https://a…

An nth-cousin mating model and the n-anacci numbers
In seeking to understand the size of inbred pedigrees, J. Lachance (J. Theor. Biol. 261, 238-247, 2009) studied a population model in which, for a fixed value of $n$, each mating occurs between $n$th cousins. We explain a connection between the second-cousin case of the model ($n=2$) and the Fibonacci sequence, and more generally, between the $n$th-cousin case and the $n$-anacci sequence $(n \geq 2)$. For a model with $n$th-cousin mating $(n \geq 1)$, we obtain the generating function describin…

Any nonincreasing convergence curves are simultaneously possible for GMRES and weighted GMRES, as well as for left and right preconditioned GMRES
Pierre Matalon, Nicole Spillane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17193

Any nonincreasing convergence curves are simultaneously possible for GMRES and weighted GMRES, as well as for left and right preconditioned GMRES
The convergence of the GMRES linear solver is notoriously hard to predict. A particularly enlightening result by [Greenbaum, Pták, Strakoš, 1996] is that, given any convergence curve, one can build a linear system for which GMRES realizes that convergence curve. What is even more extraordinary is that the eigenvalues of the problem matrix can be chosen arbitrarily. We build upon this idea to derive novel results about weighted GMRES. We prove that for any linear system and any prescribed conv…

Explainxkcd's text[1] about yesterday's #xkcd[2] was way more interesting and funny that I had expected[3]: the authors apparently interpreted the title text as a challenge. 😂
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/…

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

Controllable Latent Space Augmentation for Digital Pathology
Sofi\`ene Boutaj, Marin Scalbert, Pierre Marza, Florent Couzinie-Devy, Maria Vakalopoulou, Stergios Christodoulidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14588

Controllable Latent Space Augmentation for Digital Pathology
Whole slide image (WSI) analysis in digital pathology presents unique challenges due to the gigapixel resolution of WSIs and the scarcity of dense supervision signals. While Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a natural fit for slide-level tasks, training robust models requires large and diverse datasets. Even though image augmentation techniques could be utilized to increase data variability and reduce overfitting, implementing them effectively is not a trivial task. Traditional patch-level au…

ALIA in partnership with the Office of Community Cohesion is looking to work with public libraries across the country on an exciting new community engagement initiative. Participating libraries will receive a payment of $9,900 incl GST in order to host a range of programs that strengthen, grow, and protect community cohesion in diverse ways.
Information session on Wednesday 25 June, 12:30pm AEST. This is your opportunity to find out more and ask questions before putting in your expres…

SCOPE for Hexapod Gait Generation
Jim O'Connor, Jay B. Nash, Derin Gezgin, Gary B. Parker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13539 https://

SCOPE for Hexapod Gait Generation
Evolutionary methods have previously been shown to be an effective learning method for walking gaits on hexapod robots. However, the ability of these algorithms to evolve an effective policy rapidly degrades as the input space becomes more complex. This degradation is due to the exponential growth of the solution space, resulting from an increasing parameter count to handle a more complex input. In order to address this challenge, we introduce Sparse Cosine Optimized Policy Evolution (SCOPE). S…