Tootfinder

Online Edge Coloring is (Nearly) as Easy as Offline
Joakim Blikstad, Ola Svensson, Radu Vintan, David Wajc
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18339 https://…

Online Edge Coloring is (Nearly) as Easy as Offline
The classic theorem of Vizing (Diskret. Analiz.'64) asserts that any graph of maximum degree $Δ$ can be edge colored (offline) using no more than $Δ+1$ colors (with $Δ$ being a trivial lower bound). In the online setting, Bar-Noy, Motwani and Naor (IPL'92) conjectured that a $(1+o(1))Δ$-edge-coloring can be computed online in $n$-vertex graphs of maximum degree $Δ=ω(\log n)$. Numerous algorithms made progress on this question, using a higher number of colors or assuming restricted arrival…

$125K stolen in 10 minutes
From Kim Komando's newsletter —
"Feb. 16 was a typical Friday night. Barry and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.
We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were shining lights all over our property. A recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”
As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed Phoenix SWAT team members with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”
The police told me to go inside
When I asked again, a SWAT member said, “Ma’am, it’s a South American gang targeting homes to steal from. The jammer says you might have been next. Do we have permission to enter your property?” I said, “Yes!” and then he asked something like, “If we find anyone, will you pursue charges so we can arrest them?” I replied, “Of course!”
I opened the driveway gates to our property and the guest house while Barry tossed the police keys to open the security gates. People asked me if I was scared. How could I be? There was a team of really professional police officers protecting me from who knows what.
Turns out, when the gang saw we were home, they likely diverted their attention to the house next door. A house four doors down from us wasn’t so lucky.
The homeowner left at 5 p.m. to have dinner and got a notification his security cameras were offline at 5:05 p.m. He thought the internet went down. Nope, the gang broke in and took $25,000 in cash and valuables worth $100,000. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
How are they getting away with this?
The gang places cellular and Wi‑Fi jammers around the homes they’re targeting. This way, security cameras and phones are useless. A Phoenix police officer told me the gang probably noticed nothing was down in our house.
We have our cameras and internet hardwired. Even when they tried to jam our signals, the red lights on the security cameras still showed they were recording everything.
But how frightening is that? Your phone doesn’t work. Your cameras aren’t recording anything. On the upside, the gang doesn’t carry guns. This way, if they get caught, they’ll spend about six months in jail before being extradited to Chile.
Nothing is random
The gang scopes out homes beforehand. They drive the neighborhood and look up houses on real estate sites to get an idea of where the primary bedroom is located. They look for dogs, too.
It’s not just in Phoenix, by the way. This is happening all over the country. A friend was robbed by this gang, and he lives in a guarded, gated community in California. Kudos to the Phoenix Police Department — they arrested three members of the gang who were in my neighborhood that night.
So, what can you do?
☑️​ Wireless cameras go kaput with no signal. Try a wired camera for a backup.
☑️​ A cam with SD card storage will still record if there’s no Wi‑Fi.
☑️​ Put up motion-activated lights; they make it harder for anyone to sneak around.
☑️​ A femtocell (think of it as a mini cell tower) could be enough to keep your connection if thieves use jammers — T‑Mobile or Verizon.
☑️​ Have an Amazon Echo? Away mode lets you control your lights so it looks like someone’s home.
☑️​ Make it look like someone’s watching TV at your house when you’re not there with a Television Simulator.
☑️​ A University of North Carolina survey of over 400 incarcerated burglars found security system signs deter thieves.
☑️​ Check Zillow, Realtor⁠.⁠com and Redfin for photos of your house. The more crooks know about the layout, the better for them. Ask to have them removed.
☑️​ Blur your house from Google Maps and Apple Maps while you’re at it.

Normal people: using one #map app.
Me: using up to five apps:
1. MapFactor Navigator — with offline maps based on #OpenStreetMap.
#Android

Social Media and Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Cities and Societies: A Water Quality Analysis Use-case
Muhammad Asif Auyb, Muhammad Tayyab Zamir, Imran Khan, Hannia Naseem, Nasir Ahmad, Kashif Ahmad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14977

Social Media and Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Cities and Societies: A Water Quality Analysis Use-case
This paper focuses on a very important societal challenge of water quality analysis. Being one of the key factors in the economic and social development of society, the provision of water and ensuring its quality has always remained one of the top priorities of public authorities. To ensure the quality of water, different methods for monitoring and assessing the water networks, such as offline and online surveys, are used. However, these surveys have several limitations, such as the limited num…

Hackers have breached the CISA leading to some systems being taken offline. https://reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1bbzs4c/

PSA: I've seen a few posts about 3DS and WiiU servers going offline and lamenting not being to play games like Splatoon etc. Did you know there's a way to regain that functionality? Yes, it involves "hacking" your device to run custom firmware but .. they just removed the last pillar of support so like, eff Nintendo, hack the planet? Here's Modern Vintage Gamer with a guide/links in the description to even more guides on how to do this.

Policy-Guided Diffusion
Matthew Thomas Jackson, Michael Tryfan Matthews, Cong Lu, Benjamin Ellis, Shimon Whiteson, Jakob Foerster
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06356

Policy-Guided Diffusion
In many real-world settings, agents must learn from an offline dataset gathered by some prior behavior policy. Such a setting naturally leads to distribution shift between the behavior policy and the target policy being trained - requiring policy conservatism to avoid instability and overestimation bias. Autoregressive world models offer a different solution to this by generating synthetic, on-policy experience. However, in practice, model rollouts must be severely truncated to avoid compoundin…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11192 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@ar…

A beam-driven proton irradiation setup for precision radiation damage tests of silicon detectors
A proton irradiation site for silicon detectors has been developed and commissioned at the Bonn Isochronous Cyclotron. The accelerator provides 14 MeV proton beams of up to 1 $μ$A at beam widths of a few mm to the setup. Devices Under Test (DUTs) are irradiated inside a cooled, thermally-insulated box at $\le$-20°C, while being moved through the beam in a row-based scan pattern to achieve uniform fluence distributions. Custom-made diagnostics allow for beam-based, on- and offline dosimetry, e…

A beam-driven proton irradiation setup for precision radiation damage tests of silicon detectors
Pascal Wolf, Dennis Sauerland, Reinhard Beck, Jochen Dingfelder
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11192

A beam-driven proton irradiation setup for precision radiation damage tests of silicon detectors
A proton irradiation site for silicon detectors has been developed and commissioned at the Bonn Isochronous Cyclotron. The accelerator provides 14 MeV proton beams of up to 1 $μ$A at beam widths of a few mm to the setup. Devices Under Test (DUTs) are irradiated inside a cooled, thermally-insulated box at $\le$-20°C, while being moved through the beam in a row-based scan pattern to achieve uniform fluence distributions. Custom-made diagnostics allow for beam-based, on- and offline dosimetry, e…