Tootfinder

MIT study shows how vision can be rebooted in adults with amblyopia https://picower.mit.edu/news/mit-study-shows-how-vision-can-be-rebooted-adults-amblyopia "Temporarily anesthetizing the retina briefly reverts the activity of the visual sys…

Recommendations include —
•Avoid repeating misinfo w/o correction
•Leverage trusted sources to counter misinformation & provide accurate health info
•Debunk misinformation often &repeatedly w/ evidence-based methods
**•Fund basic & translational
research on the psychology of health misinformation , including effective ways to counter it **

Sander van der Linden (@profsanderlinden.bsky.social)
Public health is under attack by a deluge of misinformation. We offer a consensus report from the American Psychological Association summarizing what we know & what interventions are effective in countering it. We provide 8 concrete recommendations. Open-access - https://awspntest.apa.org/fulltext/2026-77135-001.pdf

A look at data labeling startups like Objectways, whose workers record and annotate repetitive tasks like folding towels to train AI robots for physical tasks (Nilesh Christopher/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/202…

Inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world
Humanoid robot training is booming around the world. Tech companies are rushing to build the robots for a market projected to reach $38 billion within the next decade.

StarveSpam: Mitigating Spam with Local Reputation in Permissionless Blockchains
Rowdy Chotkan, Bulat Nasrulin, J\'er\'emie Decouchant, Johan Pouwelse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23427

StarveSpam: Mitigating Spam with Local Reputation in Permissionless Blockchains
Spam poses a growing threat to blockchain networks. Adversaries can easily create multiple accounts to flood transaction pools, inflating fees and degrading service quality. Existing defenses against spam, such as fee markets and staking requirements, primarily rely on economic deterrence, which fails to distinguish between malicious and legitimate users and often exclude low-value but honest activity. To address these shortcomings, we present StarveSpam, a decentralized reputation-based protoc…

Source: Laura Loomer has been credentialed to cover the Pentagon, joining a new cohort of right-wing media that have agreed to the Pentagon's new press policy (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/03/laura-loomer-pentagon-…

Laura Loomer is now credentialed to cover the Pentagon
The far-right activist has repeatedly criticized defense officials on her website and social media accounts while boasting of her close ties to President Donald Trump.

#fafo #backlash

A Backlash Is Brewing Against Companies Helping ICE
Activists are targeting the reputations of Home Depot, AT&T, and other businesses.

Spin-Orbit Misalignments of Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in AGN Disks
Gaia Fabj, Christopher Tiede, Connar Rowan, Martin Pessah, Johan Samsing
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07952 h…

Spin-Orbit Misalignments of Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in AGN Disks
The disks of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) provide a natural environment where stellar-mass black holes (BHs) can dynamically pair, undergo repeated interactions, and eventually merge. It is commonly assumed that gas accretion will both efficiently spin up disk-embedded black holes and align the orbits of embedded binaries with the disk plane, leading to mergers with preferentially positive effective spin parameters ($χ_{\mathrm{eff}}$). Such predictions have motivated the use of $χ_{\mathrm{…

Investigation: the US government allowed and even helped US companies sell tech used for China's surveillance across five GOP and Democratic administrations (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/chinese-sur

US government helps Silicon Valley firms sell surveillance technology to China
Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found. And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-p…

Iterative Hypothesis Pruning and Distribution-based Early Labeling for Sequential Hypothesis Testing
George Vershinin, Asaf Cohen, Omer Gurewitz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25908

Iterative Hypothesis Pruning and Distribution-based Early Labeling for Sequential Hypothesis Testing
We consider the problem where an active Decision-Maker (DM) is tasked to identify the true hypothesis using as few samples as possible while maintaining accuracy. The DM collects samples according to its determined actions and knows the distributions under each hypothesis. We propose the $Φ$-$Δ$ algorithm, a deterministic and adaptive multi-stage hypothesis-elimination algorithm where the DM selects an action, applies it repeatedly, and discards hypotheses in light of its obtained samples. Th…