Tootfinder

Chancellor Thomas Gibson is offering a challenge to #UWM faculty and staff: Raise a total of $1,000 by the end of this week, and he will match with a $1,000 gift. Visits to the UWM food pantry rose more than 41% from September to October, as the federal government shutdown cut paychecks and certain government benefits and demand is expected to spike in the coming days as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are interrupted.
It's a good cause.
#Milwaukee

Remote Estimation for Markov Jump Linear Systems: A Distributionally Robust Approach
Ioannis Tzortzis, Themistoklis Charalambous, Charalambos D. Charalambous
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04116

Remote Estimation for Markov Jump Linear Systems: A Distributionally Robust Approach
This paper considers the problem of remote state estimation for Markov jump linear systems in the presence of uncertainty in the posterior mode probabilities. Such uncertainty may arise when the estimator receives noisy or incomplete measurements over an unreliable communication network. To address this challenge, the estimation problem is formulated within a distributionally robust framework, where the true posterior is assumed to lie within a total variation distance ball centered at the nomi…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

"Wertheimer argues that the famous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act--which protects companies from liability for content posted by users to their websites--needs to be reinterpreted to exclude “platforms that actively promote content using reinforcement learning-based recommendation algorithms.”"
(Original title: Platform Temperance)

Platform Temperance
Notes on a new wave of the Techlash

Extra #GrindayFriday. New album coming out from NUCLEAR DUDES, which is mostly just one dude (Jon Weisnewski, the guy from Sandrider). He makes amazing videos like they used to make back in the old timey times of 120 Minutes and MTV and such.
'Truth Paste' is the title track from the album that comes out next Friday

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Delilah Holliday:
🎵 Long Time Coming
#NowPlaying #DelilahHolliday
#radioeins gespielten Titel als #Spotify Playliste: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3hdH98B6uyXilhcWxCA6nv

The Gender Gap in Science Communication on TikTok and YouTube: How Platform Dynamics Shape the Visibility of Female Science Communicators
Maider Eizmendi-Iraola, Sim\'on Pe\~na-Fern\'andez, Jordi Morales-i-Gras
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16865

The Gender Gap in Science Communication on TikTok and YouTube: How Platform Dynamics Shape the Visibility of Female Science Communicators
Social media platforms facilitate the dissemination of science and access to it. However, gender inequalities in the participation and visibility of communicators persist. This study examined the differences in reach and audience response between YouTube and TikTok from a gender perspective. To do so, the ten most influential science accounts on YouTube and TikTok were selected, with the sample divided equally between men and women, to conduct a comparative study. A total of 4293 videos on TikT…

Donald Trump has been forthright about his intention to bring about a death-penalty renaissance,
and now his efforts are coming to fruition.
This year has been a particularly lethal one for America’s death-row prisoners.
Together, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have executed a total of 40 people in the past 10 months
by injection, nitrogen hypoxia, and firing squad,
surpass…

The Next Golden Age of the Death Penalty Is Beginning
Trump and the Republican Party are bringing capital punishment back to the forefront of American criminal justice.

Impact Assessment Card: Communicating Risks and Benefits of AI Uses
Edyta Bogucka, Marios Constantinides, Sanja \v{S}\'cepanovi\'c, Daniele Quercia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18919

Impact Assessment Card: Communicating Risks and Benefits of AI Uses
Communicating the risks and benefits of AI is important for regulation and public understanding. Yet current methods such as technical reports often exclude people without technical expertise. Drawing on HCI research, we developed an Impact Assessment Card to present this information more clearly. We held three focus groups with a total of 12 participants who helped identify design requirements and create early versions of the card. We then tested a refined version in an online study with 235 p…

Danish Minister of Justice and chief architect of the current Chat Control proposal, Peter Hummelgaard:
"We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services."
Ok, I agree but on one condition: "everyone" means EVERYONE. Police, military, government, politicians, lobbyists, 100% 7x24 transparency. No closed door meetings, no off the record, no sly meets in a pub. Everyone.
Anything else is sinister.