Tootfinder

“Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, said he did not believe Mr. Kimmel’s removal was an example of ‘cancel culture.’ He said that ‘when a person says something that a ton of people find offensive, rude, dumb in real time and then that person is punished for it that’s not cancel culture. That is consequences for your actions.’”
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Reactions to ABC’s Pulling of ‘Kimmel’ Reflect America’s Partisan Divide
Fans and liberals expressed anger while conservatives hailed ABC’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show off the air after comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk.

ENCODE: Breaking the Trade-Off Between Performance and Efficiency in Long-Term User Behavior Modeling
Wenji Zhou, Yuhang Zheng, Yinfu Feng, Yunan Ye, Rong Xiao, Long Chen, Xiaosong Yang, Jun Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13567

ENCODE: Breaking the Trade-Off Between Performance and Efficiency in Long-Term User Behavior Modeling
Long-term user behavior sequences are a goldmine for businesses to explore users' interests to improve Click-Through Rate. However, it is very challenging to accurately capture users' long-term interests from their long-term behavior sequences and give quick responses from the online serving systems. To meet such requirements, existing methods "inadvertently" destroy two basic requirements in long-term sequence modeling: R1) make full use of the entire sequence to keep the information as much a…

X-ray spectropolarimetric characterization of the Z-source GX 340 0 in the normal branch
Fabio La Monaca, Alessandro Di Marco, Francesco Coti Zelati, Anna Bobrikova, Renee M. Ludlam, Juri Poutanen, Alessio Marino, Songwei Li, Fei Xie, Hua Feng, Chichuan Jin, Nanda Rea, Lian Tao, Weimin Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13278

X-ray spectropolarimetric characterization of the Z-source GX 340+0 in the normal branch
This study presents an X-ray spectropolarimetric characterisation of the Z-source GX 340+0 during the normal branch (NB) and compares it with that obtained for the horizontal branch (HB), using IXPE, NICER and NuSTAR observations. The analysis reveals significant polarisation, with polarisation degrees (PD) of ${\sim}1.4$\% in the NB and ${\sim}3.7$\% in the HB, indicating a notable decrease in polarisation when transitioning from the HB to the NB. The polarisation angles show a consistent tren…

The Milky Way is a less massive galaxy--new estimates of the Milky Way's local and global stellar masses
Jianhui Lian (Yunnan Uni.), Tao Wang (Yunnan Uni.), Qikang Feng (Peking Uni.), Yang Huang (U of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Helong Guo (Yunnan Uni.)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13665

The Milky Way is a less massive galaxy--new estimates of the Milky Way's local and global stellar masses
Stellar mass is the most fundamental property of a galaxy. While it has been robustly measured for millions of external galaxies, it remains poorly constrained for the Milky Way because of the strong selection effect from our inside perspective. In this work, we reconstruct the intrinsic vertical mass density profile in the solar neighborhood and the radial mass density profile across the entire Galaxy using data from the Gaia and APOGEE surveys, following careful correction for the selection f…

MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook
Peng Xu, Shengwu Xiong, Jiajun Zhang, Yaxiong Chen, Bowen Zhou, Chen Change Loy, David A. Clifton, Kyoung Mu Lee, Luc Van Gool, Ruiming He, Ruilin Yao, Xinwei Long, Jirui Huang, Kai Tian, Sa Yang, Yihua Shao, Jin Feng, Yue Zhong, Jiakai Zhou, Cheng Tang, Tianyu Zou, Yifang Zhang, Junming Liang, Guoyou Li, Zhaoxiang Wang, Qiang Zhou, Yichen Zhao, Shili Xiong, Hyeongjin Nam, Jaerin Lee, Jaey…

MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook
This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applicati…

The first step on the road to #TNC26 starts today… with the opening of the Call for Proposals!
Next year, our community will gather in Helsinki 🇫🇮 under the theme Digital Sisu—inspired by the Finnish word “sisu,” which embodies inner strength, tenacity, and determination in the face of adversity.
💡 If you have a story to share, or a vision that can shape the conversation—we want to hear f…

Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication
Gang Cheng, Xin Gao, Li Hu, Siqi Hu, Mingyang Huang, Chaonan Ji, Ju Li, Dechao Meng, Jinwei Qi, Penchong Qiao, Zhen Shen, Yafei Song, Ke Sun, Linrui Tian, Feng Wang, Guangyuan Wang, Qi Wang, Zhongjian Wang, Jiayu Xiao, Sheng Xu, Bang Zhang, Peng Zhang, Xindi Zhang, Zhe Zhang, Jingren Zhou, Lian Zhuo

Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication
We introduce Wan-Animate, a unified framework for character animation and replacement. Given a character image and a reference video, Wan-Animate can animate the character by precisely replicating the expressions and movements of the character in the video to generate high-fidelity character videos. Alternatively, it can integrate the animated character into the reference video to replace the original character, replicating the scene's lighting and color tone to achieve seamless environmental i…

Lego table is coming along. The center piece is done. And ready to be finished. I need to make the legs for both sides (4x) and the two leaves.
We have a good idea on the finish. The "walnut" color on the top right is so far the preference.
#woodworking
#inprogress

Magnetic Reconnection as a Potential Driver of X-ray Variability in Active Galactic Nuclei
Chen-Ran Hu, Yong-Feng Huang, Lang Cui, Hanle Zhang, Jiang-Tao Li, Li Ji, Jin-Jun Geng, Orkash Amat, Fan Xu, Chen Du, Wen-Long Zhang, Ze-Cheng Zou, Xiao-Fei Dong, Chen Deng, Pengfei Jiang, Jie Liao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12978

Magnetic Reconnection as a Potential Driver of X-ray Variability in Active Galactic Nuclei
We present a systematic analysis on the X-ray variability in 13 bright quasars at z > 4.5, combining recent Swift observations from 2021 to 2023 and archival multi-epoch observations. Upper limits of the luminosity measurements were included in the analysis by using the Kaplan-Meier estimator method. It is found that the high-z quasars exhibit X-ray variability on both short-term (hours-to-days) and intermediate-term (weeks-to-months) timescales, with short-term variability dominating the overa…

The Lego (building) table is finished. My son already has plans to move his in progress build to finish it.
#woodworking
#finished