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A closer look at Peru’s Amazon reveals new mining trends, deforestation https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/a-closer-look-at-perus-amazon-reveals-new-mining-trends-deforestation/

A closer look at Peru’s Amazon reveals new mining trends, deforestation
For years, gold mining has been one of Peru’s most pressing environmental challenges, with illegal operations clearing the Amazon Rainforest and polluting rivers with chemicals. The industry continues to grow, as miners spread into new parts of the country and adopt different ways of working. One recent project that maps mining operations and their expansion […]

Omg, this detail from CNN about the ICE hiring snafu is wild.
This seems like an HR 101 level thing to get right.
They turned a hiring bonus into something much closer to an application bonus
https://bsky.app/profile/johnpfaff.bsky.social/post/3m3vqmpk7cs2u

John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social)
Omg, this detail from CNN about the ICE hiring snafu is wild. This seems like an HR 101 level thing to get right. They turned a hiring bonus into something much closer to an application bonus. Seems like a great way to burn a ton of cash. Also? Here’s some waste for sure!

moreno_sociograms: Moreno's sociograms (1934)
Relationships between pupils in a classroom. A directed edge exists if the source wants to sit next to the target. Each child can only choose two others.
This network has 29 nodes and 59 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted
https://networks.ske…

It's been a week since I watched this episode, and I still giggle at this scene about once per day.
[I read a lot of Mad Magazine in my youth.]

ClassMind: Scaling Classroom Observation and Instructional Feedback with Multimodal AI
Ao Qu, Yuxi Wen, Jiayi Zhang, Yunge Wen, Yibo Zhao, Alok Prakash, Andr\'es F. Salazar-G\'omez, Paul Pu Liang, Jinhua Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18020

ClassMind: Scaling Classroom Observation and Instructional Feedback with Multimodal AI
Classroom observation -- one of the most effective methods for teacher development -- remains limited due to high costs and a shortage of expert coaches. We present ClassMind, an AI-driven classroom observation system that integrates generative AI and multimodal learning to analyze classroom artifacts (e.g., class recordings) and deliver timely, personalized feedback aligned with pedagogical practices. At its core is AVA-Align, an agent framework that analyzes long classroom video recordings to…

Closer to Reality: Practical Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Foundation Model Adaptation
Guangyu Sun, Jingtao Li, Weiming Zhuang, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Lingjuan Lyu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16568

Closer to Reality: Practical Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Foundation Model Adaptation
Foundation models (FMs) exhibit remarkable generalization but require adaptation to downstream tasks, particularly in privacy-sensitive applications. Due to data privacy regulations, cloud-based FMs cannot directly access private edge data, limiting their adaptation. Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-aware alternative, but existing FL approaches overlook the constraints imposed by edge devices -- namely, limited computational resources and the scarcity of labeled data. To address these…

Rectified Decoupled Dataset Distillation: A Closer Look for Fair and Comprehensive Evaluation
Xinhao Zhong, Shuoyang Sun, Xulin Gu, Chenyang Zhu, Bin Chen, Yaowei Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19743 …

Rectified Decoupled Dataset Distillation: A Closer Look for Fair and Comprehensive Evaluation
Dataset distillation aims to generate compact synthetic datasets that enable models trained on them to achieve performance comparable to those trained on full real datasets, while substantially reducing storage and computational costs. Early bi-level optimization methods (e.g., MTT) have shown promising results on small-scale datasets, but their scalability is limited by high computational overhead. To address this limitation, recent decoupled dataset distillation methods (e.g., SRe$^2$L) separ…

An Analytical and AI-discovered Stable, Accurate, and Generalizable Subgrid-scale Closure for Geophysical Turbulence
Karan Jakhar, Yifei Guan, Pedram Hassanzadeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20365

An Analytical and AI-discovered Stable, Accurate, and Generalizable Subgrid-scale Closure for Geophysical Turbulence
By combining AI and fluid physics, we discover a closed-form closure for 2D turbulence from small direct numerical simulation (DNS) data. Large-eddy simulation (LES) with this closure is accurate and stable, reproducing DNS statistics including those of extremes. We also show that the new closure could be derived from a 4th-order truncated Taylor expansion. Prior analytical and AI-based work only found the 2nd-order expansion, which led to unstable LES. The additional terms emerge only when int…

An interview with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on the NFL's growing relationship with YouTube, embracing creators, altcasts, a streaming Super Bowl, and more (Jourdan Rodrigue/The Athletic)
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6641297/2

The NFL and YouTube are getting closer, and their relationship could change everything
As the NFL increasingly embraces streamers and creators, YouTube could be a bigger and bigger part of its future.

The closure of rural hospitals is a looming problem across all of California.
Two Inland Empire lawmakers are urging state officials to take action to save a hospital in Blythe.
Last spring, Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe was on the brink of closure,
after a series of financial mishaps left it bleeding cash.
In May, the hospital announced that it would not accept new patients, “for the foreseeable future,”
although its emergency room and clinic remained open, th…

This rural hospital almost closed. Emergency state funding is keeping it open, but for how long?
The closure of rural hospitals is a looming problem across California. Two lawmakers are urging the state try and save a hospital in Blythe.