Data centers powering the AI boom have been spewing out a staggering amount of pollution by relying on fossil fuel-powered generators.
And given the industry’s unrelenting appetite for more infrastructure supporting ever-more-resource-intensive AI models,
the trend is only going to get worse from here.
It’s reached the point that AI is giving the fossil fuel industry a substantial leg up,
as a new paper published in the journal NPJ Climate Action details.
The au…
If you want to know just how disgusting a country the #UK is, read this story:
"the Home Office acknowledged that Maryam had cancer, but still refused the request to join her brother-in-law in Glasgow.
Officials concluded the family's situation did not meet the threshold for 'compelling circumstances.'"
DefoEye: Python-Based Software for Facilitating Time-Series InSAR Analysis of Sentinel-1 Remote-Sensing Data
Alireza Taheri Dehkordi, Hossein Hashemi, Amir Naghibi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.04915 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.04915
arXiv:2608.04915v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Many existing time-series Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (TS-InSAR) software tools have limitations, including restricted geographic applicability, commercial licensing, and incomplete end-to-end processing support. Although GMTSAR avoids some of these constraints, it still requires substantial manual intervention and C-shell commands, lacks a user-friendly graphical interface, and omits important steps such as interferogram network pruning and anchoring of unwrapped interferograms. This paper introduces DefoEye (v1), an open-source Python-based software package that wraps GMTSAR and provides a unified, user-friendly TS-InSAR workflow for Sentinel-1 data. DefoEye supports parallel job execution, interferogram network pruning, and multiple anchoring options. Its performance was evaluated from 2020 to 2024 in four regions with different geological settings, deformation mechanisms, and atmospheric and climatic conditions. In Bologna, Italy; Gotland, Sweden; and Houston, USA, DefoEye results were compared with observations from 10 GNSS stations and showed strong agreement, with RMSE values of 4.3-11.9 mm and Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.63-0.95. In Karaj, Iran, where GNSS observations were unavailable, DefoEye was compared with other widely used processing tools and achieved similarly close agreement, with an RMSE of 4.8 mm/yr and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.98. These results demonstrate that DefoEye provides reliable TS-InSAR products for geological, hydrological, and environmental applications.
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Hierarchical Bayesian Calibration with Bayesian Committee Machine
Sebastian Heinekamp, David M. Higdon, Andreas Adelmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12603 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12603 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12603
arXiv:2608.12603v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Calibrating computational models to experimental data is a core task in applied statistics, especially in scientific domains, where physical experiments are costly and simulations play a central role in design and inference. Motivated by uncertainty quantification challenges in particle accelerator experiments, we develop and evaluate a Hierarchical Bayesian Calibration framework. In contrast to standard Bayesian calibration, certain inputs - such as beam injection amplitude - must be estimated separately for each experiment. We adopt the Kennedy-O'Hagan formulation and extend it with a hierarchical prior structure to model the distribution of experiment-specific calibration parameters, thus borrowing strength and improving generalisation across repeated experiments. A key methodological challenge arises from the need to evaluate a large number of forward simulations, which renders conventional Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches computationally prohibitive. To address this, we leverage the Bayesian Committee Machine as a scalable modelling strategy for Gaussian Process emulators. The BCM provides a principled divide-and-conquer approach, enabling parallel inference and reducing computational cost without requiring problem-specific tuning of the emulator approximation. Posterior sampling is performed using the No-U-Turn Sampler, supported by automatic differentiation in Julia, which removes the need for analytic gradient derivation and facilitates flexible model specification. We assess the proposed framework using established benchmark problems and simulated data from the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator. The results demonstrate substantial computational savings and robust calibration performance, highlighting the applicability of the method to large-scale scientific modelling problems.
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AuthProbe: Specification-Driven, Multi-Identity Detection of Broken Object-Level Authorization in Recruitment API
Jay Barach
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20574 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20574 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.20574
arXiv:2607.20574v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Broken Object-Level Authorization (BOLA), also known as Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR), has topped the OWASP API Security ranking since 2019 and is the root cause of some of the largest exposures of applicant data in recruitment technology. The defining feature of this flaw class is that a malicious request is byte-for-byte indistinguishable from a legitimate one, which is precisely why web application firewalls and single identity scanners fail to catch it. We present AuthProbe, an open-source, black-box scanner that detects BOLA and IDOR in HTTP APIs by driving its tests from an OpenAPI specification and by acting under two or more identities that the operator controls. AuthProbe discovers, for each identity, the objects that identity legitimately owns, then attempts to read one identity's objects while authenticated as another and confirms a leak by comparing the response against a ground-truth fetch by the true owner. It also walks predictable identifiers to expose enumeration and reports missing authentication and existence oracles. The tool returns a severity-thresholded exit code and machine-readable reports so that it can gate a continuous integration build. On a synthetic recruitment API in which the McHire failure class is reproduced, AuthProbe detects every planted cross-identity read with no false positives on a hardened counterpart, and its running time grows linearly with the number of objects under test. AuthProbe is released under the Apache 2.0 license with an authorized-use guardrail.
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