Tootfinder

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

There are more billionaires than ever before.
The world has 2,781 people with fortunes exceeding $1bn, an increase of 141 on 2023, according to Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s richest people.
The billionaires are also collectively worth more than ever, with combined assets estimated at $14.2 Trillion
– a 2 Trillion dollar increase on 2023 and more than the GDP of every country except the US and China.
Their collective wealth has risen by 120% in the past decade…

Who among us doesn't love sharing [object Object] with friends?

It occurred to me: the crime rate among undocumented migrants in the US must be lower than that among members of the House, of the Senate, and even of the Supreme Court.
As for Presidents, there is no contest. The crime rate among that population is now estimated to be close to 200%.

Missing - the analysis of how much this stakeholder capitalism actually invested in communities vs tax at various rates vs the stakeholder community needs.
Something about being sold a bill of goods comes to mind.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/

Missing - the analysis of how much this stakeholder capitalism actually invested in communities vs tax at various rates vs the stakeholder community needs.
Something about being sold a bill of goods comes to mind.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/

The US weapons making their way to Ukraine right now: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/27/the-us-weapons.html

"Revealed: Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes"
#US #USA #America #Pollution

A short film on change: "Metamorphosis" - directed and edited by Max Pugh and co-produced by Diana Rose, recorded at The Garrison Institute & The Planet Local Summit in Bristol organised by Local Futures / Economics of Happiness.
"Among the voices are Daniel Christian Wahl, Youria Celidwen, Satish Kumar, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Nathalie Kelly, Puna Dawson, Rema Kumar, Nelson Mudzingwa, Bayo Akomolafe, Keibo Oiwa, Helena Norberg Hodges, Dolma Tesering, and Morag Gamble&q…

"As a medical doctor...specializing in addiction medicine, I have seen patients overcome substance use issues. Very few of them did so without stable housing. Homelessness increases the chaos in someone’s life, and the more chaos there is, the harder it is to overcome a substance use problem."
https://

Opinion | Drug testing welfare recipients is a dangerous idea
San Francisco Mayor London Breed wants mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients. It would likely create even more homelessness among the most vulnerable and strain our already overloaded health care system.

Mitch McConnell refuses to say whether he supports a US national ban
Senate minority leader says he is ‘not advocating anything at this level’ and that issue is too divisive among lawmakers for consensus
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/…

AI call quiz: see if you can spot the sham audio of Trump and Biden;
Toilets, yearbooks, snakes and toilets again! Spot the fakes among these gems from the 45th and 46th presidents
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/f

GARA: A novel approach to Improve Genetic Algorithms' Accuracy and Efficiency by Utilizing Relationships among Genes
Zhaoning Shi, Meng Xiang, Zhaoyang Hai, Xiabi Liu, Yan Pei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18955

GARA: A novel approach to Improve Genetic Algorithms' Accuracy and Efficiency by Utilizing Relationships among Genes
Genetic algorithms have played an important role in engineering optimization. Traditional GAs treat each gene separately. However, biophysical studies of gene regulatory networks revealed direct associations between different genes. It inspires us to propose an improvement to GA in this paper, Gene Regulatory Genetic Algorithm (GRGA), which, to our best knowledge, is the first time to utilize relationships among genes for improving GA's accuracy and efficiency. We design a directed multipartite…

Slaughterhouses in the United States are effectively without any restrictions for release of wastewater effluent into rivers. This is not only phosphorus and nitrogen, but a whole range of other toxic pollutants. As you would expect, this has a huge impact on the ecology of these systems.
#waterquality #pollution

A short film on change: "Metamorphosis" - directed and edited by Max Pugh and co-produced by Diana Rose, recorded at The Garrison Institute & The Planet Local Summit in Bristol organised by Local Futures / Economics of Happiness.
"Among the voices are Daniel Christian Wahl, Youria Celidwen, Satish Kumar, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Nathalie Kelly, Puna Dawson, Rema Kumar, Nelson Mudzingwa, Bayo Akomolafe, Keibo Oiwa, Helena Norberg Hodges, Dolma Tesering, and Morag Gamble&q…

Were we not all mortals, the greedy egomaniacs among us would get so powerful and so evil they would destroy us all anyway. They still could, if we don't get our collective shit together.
Vote for Democracy!

Cuteness overload.
#Cat #Cats #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

Among premium SVODs, US subscriber growth fell from 21.6% YoY in 2022 to 10.1% YoY in 2023; 140.5M cancelled their subscriptions in 2023 vs. 104.3M in 2022 (Antenna)
https://www.antenna.live/post/antenna-q124-state-of-subscriptions-report-prem…

Antenna Q1’24 State of Subscriptions Report: Premium SVOD - Antenna Blog

I wholly agree with the authors opinion.
If you fought for ISIS or Hamas, you’d be arrested as soon as you touch foreign soil.
Given the ICC rulings, and UN positions, IDF soilders should be similarly arrested when they step on foreign soil.
If anything, this might make people, and Israel, start to think twice about their participation in this unspeakable genocide.
#palestine

I found the proof.
I found proof that we will make it to Mars as Elon promised.
Come on, we got geniuses among us.
Rocket shit is peanuts compared to this.
🤣😂🤣

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

Thirteen New M Dwarf T Dwarf Pairs Identified with WISE/NEOWISE
Federico Marocco (Caltech/IPAC, US), J. Davy Kirkpatrick (Caltech/IPAC, US, Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine), Adam C. Schneider (USNO, US, Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine), Aaron M. Meisner (NSF NOIRLab, US, Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine), Mark Popinchalk (AMNH, US, Graduate Center, CUNY, US, Hunter College, CUNY, US), Christopher R. Gelino (Caltech/IPAC, US), Jacqueline K. Faherty (AMNH, US, Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine), Adam…

Thirteen New M Dwarf + T Dwarf Pairs Identified with WISE/NEOWISE
We present the discovery of 13 new widely separated T dwarf companions to M dwarf primaries, identified using WISE/NEOWISE data by the CatWISE and Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 projects. This sample represents a $\sim$60% increase in the number of known M+T systems, and allows us to probe the most extreme products of binary/planetary system formation, a discovery space made available by the CatWISE2020 catalog and the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 effort. Highlights among the sample are WISEP J075108.7…

Let's say you set up a ticket vending machine for public transport, and you feel very ... not sure, maybe bureaucratic?
What should you call that machine? What about:
Passenger Operated Machine (POM).
The domain/object modelers among us just died a little.

How TfL’s simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales
Transport for London (TfL) has seen a drop in the sale of paper tickets after it made a small change to the ticket machines in London Underground stations.

GARA: A novel approach to Improve Genetic Algorithms' Accuracy and Efficiency by Utilizing Relationships among Genes
Zhaoning Shi, Meng Xiang, Zhaoyang Hai, Xiabi Liu, Yan Pei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18955

GARA: A novel approach to Improve Genetic Algorithms' Accuracy and Efficiency by Utilizing Relationships among Genes
Genetic algorithms have played an important role in engineering optimization. Traditional GAs treat each gene separately. However, biophysical studies of gene regulatory networks revealed direct associations between different genes. It inspires us to propose an improvement to GA in this paper, Gene Regulatory Genetic Algorithm (GRGA), which, to our best knowledge, is the first time to utilize relationships among genes for improving GA's accuracy and efficiency. We design a directed multipartite…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17575 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Can We Improve Channel Reciprocity via Loop-back Compensation for RIS-assisted Physical Layer Key Generation
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) facilitates the extraction of unpredictable channel features for physical layer key generation (PKG), securing communications among legitimate users with symmetric keys. Previous works have demonstrated that channel reciprocity plays a crucial role in generating symmetric keys in PKG systems, whereas, in reality, reciprocity is greatly affected by hardware interference and RIS-based jamming attacks. This motivates us to propose LoCKey, a novel approach t…

As Jack Matlock puts it, after the #coldwar the #US "had an opportunity to develop a security system based on #cooperation among the larger countries. Instead, the US too often chose

#NicoleEggert #KellySlater
Season 3 Episode 14 "Strangers Among Us"
#RandomBaywatch #lvdlpx

Slaughterhouses in the United States are effectively without any restrictions for release of wastewater effluent into rivers. This is not only phosphorus and nitrogen, but a whole range of other toxic pollutants. As you would expect, this has a huge impact on the ecology of these systems.
#waterquality #pollution

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, is among those who have excoriated the US supreme court for even appearing to entertain Donald Trump v United States, the former president’s appeal in his federal election subversion case, in which he claims presidents are immune from prosecution for acts committed in office.

Interviews with 20 current and former TSMC staff at its Arizona plant finds struggles over bridging Taiwanese and US norms, rigid hierarchies, and other issues (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

Inside TSMC’s struggle to build a chip factory in the U.S. suburbs
Missed deadlines and tension among Taiwanese and American coworkers are plaguing the chip giant’s Phoenix expansion.

Here is the Special Counsel calling out Donald Trump as a defiant threat to the judicial process everywhere: “There is a clear and demonstrable pattern in which numerous people ‘have had their lives turned upside down’ after being publicly identified as a participant in a proceeding involving defendant Trump.”
Witnesses, judges, jurors—all endangered by the harassment and threats of violence that Trump incites. An extraordinary accusation.

Laffy (@GottaLaff@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image 2/ Cheney, cont’d: Here, Smith says Cannon gave short shrift to concerns about witness safety despite threats to herself and others that other judges have raised alarms about. Among materials prosecutors want fully redacted: FBI interview reports of witnesses who worried about being publicly exposed, testimony that reveals nonpublic details about Mar-a-Lago layout, ID of a WH aide who testified about how presidents review classified info.

Remember, the enemies of Europe are everywhere, even among us #eupol #nlpol #vatniks

"Dutch politicians in pay of pro-Russian news site", say Czechs - DutchNews.nl
The PVV and GroenLinks-PvdA are calling on the cabinet to clarify claims by the Czech intelligence service that a pro-Russian news site based in Prague has been paying European politicians from countries, including the Netherlands, to oppose support for Ukraine and the EU, the AD reports. At a press conference on Wednesday, Czech intelligence service BIS claimed the site is financed by Russia to destabilise the European Union and increase Russian influence. Several politicians have been paid la…

"for Republican lawmakers, criticizing university presidents for failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism is a useful political issue with the potential to deepen divisions among Democrats — one that, unsurprisingly, they have pursued vociferously."
thing is, Democratic *voters* are not divided. 75% disapprove of Israel's actions in Gaza!

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

A Taxation Perspective for Fair Re-ranking
Chen Xu, Xiaopeng Ye, Wenjie Wang, Liang Pang, Jun Xu, Tat-Seng Chua
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17826 https://…

A Taxation Perspective for Fair Re-ranking
Fair re-ranking aims to redistribute ranking slots among items more equitably to ensure responsibility and ethics. The exploration of redistribution problems has a long history in economics, offering valuable insights for conceptualizing fair re-ranking as a taxation process. Such a formulation provides us with a fresh perspective to re-examine fair re-ranking and inspire the development of new methods. From a taxation perspective, we theoretically demonstrate that most previous fair re-ranking…

"Republican #GOP parties in half the battleground states are awash in dysfunction, debt, and disarray. There is no one explanation." Uhh, yes there is : #DonaldTrump.

Inside the G.O.P.’s State Party Problem
Financial woes and other issues in state parties in crucial swing states such as Arizona and Michigan have caused deepening concern among top Republican officials.

Jonathan Howard:
I can’t stop thinking about the essay
"No, Young Adults Should Not Live in Fear from Coronavirus" by Drs. John Mandrola and Andrew Foy,
two so-called “medical conservatives”.
It was written on December 29th, 2020 in response to a research letter titled "All-Cause Excess Mortality and COVID-19–Related Mortality Among US Adults Aged 25-44 Years, March-July 2020",
which found that 4,535 COVID deaths were recorded among young ad…

Once a Doctor Has Minimized Literal Death for Young People, Should We Value Their Opinion on Any Topic Less Consequential Than Literal Death?
Is potential death worse than real death?

Are you Amoung
or Amoung Pequeño
#amogus

Het is al net als met de ‘technologische oplossingen’ van de stikstofcrisis: ze werken niet, niet goed, niet echt of echt niet. En en worden miljarden gespendeerd om aan gesubsidieerde symptoombestrijding te doen, want het probleem bij de wortels aanpakken zou slecht zijn voor de economie. 🤮 ‘Wake-up call’: pipeline leak exposes carbon capture safety gaps, advocates say

Among premium SVODs, US subscriber growth fell from 21.6% YoY in 2022 to 10.1% YoY in 2023; 140.5M cancelled their subscriptions in 2023 vs. 104.3M in 2022 (Antenna)
https://www.antenna.live/post/antenna-q124-state-of-subscriptions-report-prem…

Antenna Q1’24 State of Subscriptions Report: Premium SVOD - Antenna Blog

Great Moments in Parenting
On vacation. Have spent a half hour in a damp courtyard among several cottages, trying to get damp wood to stay alight in the shared fire pit for s'mores.
The child, already, uh, less than helpful, emerges from our cottage and shouts across the courtyard
"Dad! Mom says you're incapable!"
And of course, the fire goes completely out immediately.
"You know, that sentence makes none of us look good, kid."

Enthusiasm wanes among Black voters who powered Biden's 2020 Georgia win (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/enthusiasm-wanes-among-black-voters-who-powered-bidens-2020-georgia-win-2024-03-11/
http://www.memeorandum.com/240311/p79#a240311p79

What Ukraine lost while waiting for the US aid bill to pass: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/23/what-ukraine-lost.html

“I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs person who worked at the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Corporation.
https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-…

STATEMENT from Google workers with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign on Google’s mass, retaliatory firings of workers:
This evening, Google indiscriminately fired over two dozen workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests. This flagrant…

roblox is no longer gonna work on linux. i will not be able to play cart ride into skibidi toilet among us fidget spinner pop it tycoon so i will hit my ssd with a hammer

Fuck Google
https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

STATEMENT from Google workers with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign on Google’s mass, retaliatory firings of workers:
This evening, Google indiscriminately fired over two dozen workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests. This flagrant…

MIM-Reasoner: Learning with Theoretical Guarantees for Multiplex Influence Maximization
Nguyen Do, Tanmoy Chowdhury, Chen Ling, Liang Zhao, My T. Thai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16898

MIM-Reasoner: Learning with Theoretical Guarantees for Multiplex Influence Maximization
Multiplex influence maximization (MIM) asks us to identify a set of seed users such as to maximize the expected number of influenced users in a multiplex network. MIM has been one of central research topics, especially in nowadays social networking landscape where users participate in multiple online social networks (OSNs) and their influences can propagate among several OSNs simultaneously. Although there exist a couple combinatorial algorithms to MIM, learning-based solutions have been desire…

In another life I’m among the dead in Gaza. Any one of us could be among the 30,000 Palestinians that the IOF has murdered. A ceasefire is an astonishingly insufficient remedy for the cruel nightmare Israel, the United States, Canada, the U.K., etc. have inflicted upon humanity. #Gaza #Palestine

American cows now have bird flu.
But it’s time for planning – not panic
Since being identified in late March this year (meaning it was spreading for months among cattle unnoticed),
the virus has been confirmed in 33 herds in eight states.
Given how infectious H5N1 is
(the R number can be as high as 100 among birds
– meaning each infected bird could infect 100 others
– and is still unknown for cows),
and the fact cows are asymptomatic or hav…

LLMs Among Us: Generative AI Participating in Digital Discourse
Kristina Radivojevic, Nicholas Clark, Paul Brenner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07940 https:/…

LLMs Among Us: Generative AI Participating in Digital Discourse
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has great potential to reshape the landscape of many social media platforms. While this can bring promising opportunities, it also raises many threats, such as biases and privacy concerns, and may contribute to the spread of propaganda by malicious actors. We developed the "LLMs Among Us" experimental framework on top of the Mastodon social media platform for bot and human participants to communicate without knowing the ratio or nature of bot and hu…

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

Optimizing Portfolio Management and Risk Assessment in Digital Assets Using Deep Learning for Predictive Analysis
Qishuo Cheng, Le Yang, Jiajian Zheng, Miao Tian, Duan Xin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15994 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.15994
arXiv:2402.15994v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Portfolio management issues have been extensively studied in the field of artificial intelligence in recent years, but existing deep learning-based quantitative trading methods have some areas where they could be improved. First of all, the prediction mode of stocks is singular; often, only one trading expert is trained by a model, and the trading decision is solely based on the prediction results of the model. Secondly, the data source used by the model is relatively simple, and only considers the data of the stock itself, ignoring the impact of the whole market risk on the stock. In this paper, the DQN algorithm is introduced into asset management portfolios in a novel and straightforward way, and the performance greatly exceeds the benchmark, which fully proves the effectiveness of the DRL algorithm in portfolio management. This also inspires us to consider the complexity of financial problems, and the use of algorithms should be fully combined with the problems to adapt. Finally, in this paper, the strategy is implemented by selecting the assets and actions with the largest Q value. Since different assets are trained separately as environments, there may be a phenomenon of Q value drift among different assets (different assets have different Q value distribution areas), which may easily lead to incorrect asset selection. Consider adding constraints so that the Q values of different assets share a Q value distribution to improve results.

Deadly #CAFO #BirdFlu has left #poultry #factoryfarms and is now jumping species in US,

Bird flu detected in dairy worker who had contact with infected cattle in Texas
This is the second case of a human sickened by this highly virulent strain of bird flu in the United States, raising questions about whether this pathogen is now more easily transmitted among mammals.

What Ukraine lost while waiting for the US aid bill to pass: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/23/what-ukraine-lost.html

There's a #fungus among us!

Google firing people / No Tech for Apartheid
"This evening, Google indiscriminately fired over two dozen workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests. This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers."
#Google #ProjectNimbus #Palestine

Pomelo, a "send now, pay later" startup that lets users in the US send money in the form of credit to people in the Philippines, raised a $35M Series A (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/22/pome

'Send now, pay later' startup Pomelo lands $35M Series A from secretive Vy Capital, Founders Fund | TechCrunch
VY Capital led the raise, which was among Keith Rabois’s last deals before his departure from Founders Fund.

The defense innovation agencies of all three AUKUS nations
– #Australia, the #UK and #US
– have launched a 🔸competition among global suppliers 🔸to source #electronic

AUKUS nations set up global competition for EW technologies
The AUKUS nations have launched a global competition for industry to develop EW technologies that will provide an edge under pillar 2.

This is my nominee for least-covered, least-understood story of the decade. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is the righteous and plausible path to ending the Electoral College. No constitutional amendment required.
That seems too good to be true. Also, to wrap your head around it requires a bit of effort. It’s almost like (content warning!) math.
But take a minute or two, and the light will dawn. This could happen. And it should.

Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote
One-page explanation (PDF) The National Popular Vote law will guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It will apply the one-person-one-vote principle to presidential elections, and make every vote equal. Why a National Popular Vote for President Is Needed The shortcomings of the current system stem from “winner-take-all” laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most …

Has anyone actually played Among Us after it became like three different memes?

"Australia among hotspots for toxic ‘forever chemicals’, study of PFAS levels finds"
#Australia #PFAS #ForeverChemicals

Earth Defence Force 2017: they're spitting acid at us!
My brother came to visit last night, and for some reason among playing Samba de Amigo, FIFA 08, Beijing 2008, Ghost Squad and Virtua Tennis, I suggested we put on EDF2017. I bought it almost a year ago, and had never played it. I wish I had. It is superb. Well, no, it's crap, in a funky skillo sort of way.

Who among us can honestly say that they haven’t at one time or another experimented with editing?

Invented Narratives and the Outrage Industry
by Teri Kanefield
#Democracy

Invented Narratives and the Outrage Industry
Even if you are not caught up in the Outrage Industry, it affects you because it affects us all. Among other things, the Outrage Industry influences how we talk about politics with our friends and family—and why some people avoid talking about politics.

Macabre imagery targeting Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies frequently circulates online among right-wing provocateurs and pro-Trump groups, --- and in some cases has been featured at conservative conferences.
Photos of trucks featuring similar images of Mr. Biden tied up have been shared across social media, and online vendors sell vehicle stickers with the image.
Trump’s promotion of the video featuring the image reflects the increasingly caustic and personal attacks that he has d…

Trump Shares Video Featuring Image of a Hog-Tied Biden
The social media post reflects the increasingly violent and personal attacks that Donald J. Trump has employed during the presidential campaign.

Leaders of 18 countries urge Hamas to release hostages
UK and US leaders among those calling for release, as families renew pressure on Netanyahu to restart negotiations
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr

US election contributor for the Kyiv Independent: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/08/us-election-contributor.html

"Six people were working the night shift on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed after being rammed by a cargo ship. The missing construction workers include men from El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala.
"Immigrants from Latin America are among the workers most likely to die in the workplace, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"'They come here for better opportunities.'... filling jobs US-born workers won't."…

Bridge collapse victims were immigrants working risky jobs - Marketplace
Mexican and Central American workers have been the lifeblood of the Baltimore economy, but they're also part of the "lowerarchy.'"

This is my nominee for least-covered, least-understood story of the decade. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is the righteous and plausible path to ending the Electoral College. No constitutional amendment required.
That seems too good to be true. Also, to wrap your head around it requires a bit of effort. It’s almost like (content warning!) math.
But take a minute or two, and the light will dawn. This could happen. And it should.

Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote
One-page explanation (PDF) The National Popular Vote law will guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It will apply the one-person-one-vote principle to presidential elections, and make every vote equal. Why a National Popular Vote for President Is Needed The shortcomings of the current system stem from “winner-take-all” laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most …

I'd like to think that everyone would want to be antifascist.
But fascists walk among us.

SF is a strong-mayor city. In fact we're exceptional among US cities for how much power we concentrate in the mayor's office. That power corrupts. Mayor Breed uses it to block social housing and Slow Streets; a car-brained mayor Farrell could use it to rip out bike lanes. The mayor should have less power not more. #SFPol

"Australia among hotspots for toxic ‘forever chemicals’, study of PFAS levels finds"
#Australia #PFAS #ForeverChemicals

Leaders of 18 countries urge Hamas to release hostages
UK and US leaders among those calling for release, as families renew pressure on Netanyahu to restart negotiations
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), a 1955 French film revisiting the Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust ends with a call for both vigilance and comparison:
"Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of new executioners?
Are their faces really so different from ours?
…

Thermodynamical Topology of Quantum BTZ Black Hole
Shan-Ping Wu, Shao-Wen Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14167 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Thermodynamical Topology of Quantum BTZ Black Hole
Among the study of black hole thermodynamics, topology offers a novel approach and perspective for classifying black hole systems. In this work, we explore the thermodynamical topology of the quantum BTZ black hole by employing the concept of the generalized free energy. To fully characterize the thermodynamics, we introduce two distinct topological numbers. The first one is determined by an expression, denoted by $z$, derived from the free energy. Although it can provide us with some local phy…

Cepheids with giant companions: A new, abundant source of Cepheid astrophysics
Bogumi{\l} Pilecki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18312 https://

Cepheids with giant companions: A new, abundant source of Cepheid astrophysics
We present a progress report of our project aiming to increase the number of known Cepheids in double-lined binary (SB2) systems from six to 100 or more. This will allow us, among other goals, to accurately measure masses for a large sample of Cepheids. Currently, only six accurate Cepheid masses are available, which hinders our understanding of their physical properties and renders the Cepheid mass--luminosity relation poorly constrained. At the same time, Cepheids are widely used for essentia…

Well that’s *one* way to shit on RBG’s grave. https://fedified.com/@DataDrivenMD/112091905814089054

Motivic Hilbert zeta functions for curve singularities and related invariants
Masahiro Watari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12545 https://

Motivic Hilbert zeta functions for curve singularities and related invariants
In the present paper, we show that the motivic Hilbert zeta function for a curve singularity yields the generating functions for Euler numbers of punctual Hilbert schemes when any punctual Hilbert scheme admits an affine cell decomposition. This fact allows us to derive the relations among the motivic Hilbert zeta function and other invariants such as the generating function for semi-modules of the semi-group of the singularity, the HOMFLY polynomial and the degrees of Severi strata of the mini…

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13624 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

A rigidity framework for Roe-like algebras
We give a complete solution to the problem of C*-rigidity for (extended) locally compact metric spaces. Namely, we show that (stable) isomorphisms among Roe algebras always give rise to coarse equivalences. To do so, we develop a framework to study rigidity problems for Roe-like C*-algebras of countably generated coarse spaces. This allows us to provide a unified proof of C*-rigidity for Roe algebras, algebras of operators of controlled propagation, and algebras of quasi-local operators. As fur…

SELF-[IN]CORRECT: LLMs Struggle with Refining Self-Generated Responses
Dongwei Jiang, Jingyu Zhang, Orion Weller, Nathaniel Weir, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04298

SELF-[IN]CORRECT: LLMs Struggle with Refining Self-Generated Responses
Can LLMs continually improve their previous outputs for better results? An affirmative answer would require LLMs to be better at discriminating among previously-generated alternatives, than generating initial responses. We explore the validity of this hypothesis in practice. We first introduce a unified framework that allows us to compare the generative and discriminative capability of any model on any task. Then, in our resulting experimental analysis of several LLMs, we do not observe the per…

i ask from within my heart
where did our failures start
if we must imagine ourselves
as someone, somewhere else
and what does the future hold
if we’re running low on health and hope
our denial it speaks in tongues
there’s monsters among us
dusk lives within us
darkness won’t give up
(by Converge [Band])

Putin bromance has US intelligence officials fearing second Trump term
Donald #Trump’s continuing lavish praise and support for Vladimir #Putin are fueling alarm among former intelligence officials and other experts who fear♦️ another Trump presidency would benefit Moscow and harm American democracy and interests over…

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

Thermodynamical Topology of Quantum BTZ Black Hole
Shan-Ping Wu, Shao-Wen Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14167 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Thermodynamical Topology of Quantum BTZ Black Hole
Among the study of black hole thermodynamics, topology offers a novel approach and perspective for classifying black hole systems. In this work, we explore the thermodynamical topology of the quantum BTZ black hole by employing the concept of the generalized free energy. To fully characterize the thermodynamics, we introduce two distinct topological numbers. The first one is determined by an expression, denoted by $z$, derived from the free energy. Although it can provide us with some local phy…

AT&T plans to invest an additional $3B by 2030 to help close the US digital divide, after initially committing $2B by 2024, which helped nearly 5M Americans (Hope King/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/04/att-john-stankey-affordable-connect…

Exclusive: AT&T CEO on massive new investment to shrink digital divide
U.S. consumers pay some of the highest prices for internet among developed countries.

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

‘Dead on arrival’? US Senate poised for vote on $118bn border and Ukraine bill
The Senate appears ready to move forward on Wednesday with a planned procedural vote on the bipartisan border and national security bill, even as the legislation looked increasingly likely to fail due to entrenched opposition among Republicans.
The $118bn bill would grant the president a new power to shut down the border when daily crossings pass a certain limit while also expediting the asylum review …

On gun violence, the United States is an outlier
Key takeaways:
• Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany.
•  Gun violence accounts for over 8% of deaths in the US among those under age 20.
• Age-adjusted rates of firearm homicide are highest in Washington, DC and lowest in New Hampshire.

On gun violence, the United States is an outlier | Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
When we look exclusively at high-income countries and territories with populations of 10 million or more, the US ranks first for its high levels of gun violence.

Major US corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle’
Upset by the surge in union drives, several of the best-known corporations in the US are seeking to cripple the country’s top labor watchdog, the National Labor Relations Board ( #NLRB ), by having it declared #unconstitutional.
Som…

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

Trump's RNC Chair Includes Ukraine in List of US Adversaries
Michael Whatley, Donald Trump's hand-picked Republican National Committee (RNC) chair,
lumped in #Ukraine with China and Iran when listing the United States' "aggressive" #adversaries on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures…

Trump's RNC Chair Includes Ukraine in List of US Adversaries
Trump's hand-picked RNC Chair, Michael Whatley, listed Ukraine with China and Iran among aggressive countries on the world front.

Trump's RNC Chair Includes Ukraine in List of US Adversaries
Michael Whatley, Donald Trump's hand-picked Republican National Committee (RNC) chair,
lumped in #Ukraine with China and Iran when listing the United States' "aggressive" #adversaries on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures…

Trump's RNC Chair Includes Ukraine in List of US Adversaries
Trump's hand-picked RNC Chair, Michael Whatley, listed Ukraine with China and Iran among aggressive countries on the world front.

Many Americans who recently bought guns open to political violence, survey finds
Large numbers of Americans who have bought guns over the past four years or who regularly carry their loaded weapons in public are willing to engage in political violence, even to the extent of shooting a perceived opponent, a new mega-survey has found.
The study of almost 13,000 Americans, drawn from across the US and weighted for demographics, provides alarming evidence of the openness of certain ty…

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP) found X had granted blue check marks to accounts tied to Hezbollah members, among others.
For $8 (£6.40) a month, a tick allows longer posts and better promotion.
X removed some ticks after the report, saying its security was "robust".
Mr Musk's decision to charge for check marks was one of the most controversial changes he made after he bought Twitter in 2022, with critics saying the move would make issues of disinformation wo…

X took payment from terrorists, campaigners say
Campaigners at the Tech Transparency Project in the US found paid-for features for organisations.

Trump gets the nasty laughs he seeks at someone else’s expense, especially when he sneers at a person’s physical limitations.
People who behaved that way were once scorned. Now they become the Republican nominee for president.
There are few among us who don’t know how it feels to be the butt of a joke.
That includes Trump’s supporters.
But with their always aggrieved state of mind, they have anointed Trump as a strongman who allows them to belittle those they see as …

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Trump didn't choose his supporters, his supporters chose him
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet. Renée Graham �of�The Boston Globe looks ...