Tootfinder

National and Political correspondent Jacob Soboroff shares his latest reporting on the fight behind the scenes to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season. 
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/inside-the-scramble-to-…

Inside the scramble to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season
NBC News National and Political correspondent Jacob Soboroff shares his latest reporting on the fight behind the scenes to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season. 

Two related news stories that hint of the destruction of US assets and infrastructure that are critical to the safety of all of us:
"Severe weather hits the US hard as key forecast offices reel from Trump cuts"
"Trump delays plan to cut satellite data access crucial to hurricane forecasting"

In a stunning reversal,
the Pentagon said it will uphold a longstanding program that supplies critical hurricane data to federal weather forecasters
—just days before it was set to end.
The move follows outcry from meteorologists and public officials blindsided by the planned cancellation at the start of hurricane season. 

In Rare Spasm of Sanity, Pentagon Backtracks on Plan to Scuttle Storm Tracking
The Department of Defense has walked back its decision to stop sharing satellite storm data with federal forecasters.

Self-Induced Flapping Dynamics of a Horizontal Flexible sheet in a Uniform Flow
Kalyani Panigrahi, Pardha S Gurugubelli, Sabareesh G R
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22406 https://

Self-Induced Flapping Dynamics of a Horizontal Flexible sheet in a Uniform Flow
The case of a conventional flexible sheet in a uniform flow has been of interest in understanding the underlying physics of passive coupled dynamics between a flexible structure and a flow field. Gravity is known to influence the flapping instability and post-critical dynamics. Interestingly, the flapping instability and dynamics of a thin flexible structure have been investigated either by neglecting the effects of gravity or by considering gravity along the length/span of the sheet. This stud…

SeqAffordSplat: Scene-level Sequential Affordance Reasoning on 3D Gaussian Splatting
Di Li, Jie Feng, Jiahao Chen, Weisheng Dong, Guanbin Li, Yuhui Zheng, Mingtao Feng, Guangming Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23772

SeqAffordSplat: Scene-level Sequential Affordance Reasoning on 3D Gaussian Splatting
3D affordance reasoning, the task of associating human instructions with the functional regions of 3D objects, is a critical capability for embodied agents. Current methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) are fundamentally limited to single-object, single-step interactions, a paradigm that falls short of addressing the long-horizon, multi-object tasks required for complex real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the novel task of Sequential 3D Gaussian Affordance Reasonin…

The Effect of Pattern Quality on Measurements of Stress Heterogeneity and Geometrically Necessary Dislocation Density by High-Angular Resolution Electron Backscatter Diffraction
Harison S. Wiesman, David Wallis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22745

The Effect of Pattern Quality on Measurements of Stress Heterogeneity and Geometrically Necessary Dislocation Density by High-Angular Resolution Electron Backscatter Diffraction
We examine the effect of pattern quality on the output of high-angular resolution electron backscatter diffraction (HR-EBSD) analyses. Band contrast, as a proxy for pattern quality, was varied by adjusting the number of frames averaged per electron backscatter pattern during data collection. The same region in a deformed sample of the mineral olivine was mapped six times varying the number of frames averaged between 1 and 30 between each map. Each data set was analyzed with HR-EBSD, producing m…

Convergence of Higher-Curvature Expansions Near the Horizon: Hawking Radiation from Regular Black Holes
Roman. A. Konoplya, Alexander Zhidenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22660 h…

Convergence of Higher-Curvature Expansions Near the Horizon: Hawking Radiation from Regular Black Holes
A recently proposed model incorporating a series of higher-curvature corrections allows for analytic black-hole solutions at each order of the expansion, with a fully regular black hole emerging in the limit of infinite number of terms. An important question that arises within this framework is how rapidly the series converges. For those classical observables, which are primarily determined by the geometry near the peak of the effective potential, it has been previously shown that the series co…

Mean-Variance Optimization and Algorithm for Finite-Horizon Markov Decision Processes
Li Xia, Zhihui Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22327 https://arxiv.org/…

Mean-Variance Optimization and Algorithm for Finite-Horizon Markov Decision Processes
Multi-period mean-variance optimization is a long-standing problem, caused by the failure of dynamic programming principle. This paper studies the mean-variance optimization in a setting of finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the objective is to maximize the combined metrics of mean and variance of the accumulated rewards at terminal stage. By introducing the concepts of pseudo mean and pseudo variance, we convert the original mean-variance MDP to a bilevel MDP,…

Search for seasonal variations of the horizontal muon rate with the HAWC observatory
Cindy Castell\'on (for the HAWC Collaboration), Hermes Le\'on Vargas (for the HAWC Collaboration)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22196

Search for seasonal variations of the horizontal muon rate with the HAWC observatory
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory was designed to study gamma-ray sources in the energy range between a few hundred GeV up to few hundred TeV. It is composed of 300 Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCDs) that cover a surface of approximately 22000 m${}^2$, at 4100 m a.s.l. In this study, we use the HAWC WCDs as a very large horizontal particle tracker, searching for horizontal muon rate variations by season using 1.5 years of HAWC data. We look for a possible correlation between th…

Requirements for Active Assistance of Natural Questions in Software Architecture
Diogo Lemos, Ademar Aguiar, Neil B. Harrison
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23898

Requirements for Active Assistance of Natural Questions in Software Architecture
Natural questions are crucial to shaping key architectural decisions and preserving architectural knowledge. They arise organically during the architectural design process, often resulting from the existing architectural experience of the designer and the distinctive characteristics of the system being designed. However, natural questions are often mismanaged or ignored, which can lead to architectural drift, knowledge loss, inefficient resource use, or poor understandability of the system's ar…