Tootfinder

“Siloviki” is perhaps the most borrowed word in Russian studies
— probably because it explains so much about Putin’s Russia.
Its members are the police, the border control, the army, the security services, the spies.
For their service to the regime, they are rewarded with early pensions,
plenty of cash and almost total immunity from investigation for corruption or brutality.
In truth, the American security state, with its qualified immunity, surveillance appar…

Opinion | Here’s What’s Happening in America, in Six (Mostly) Russian Terms
To help Americans name their new reality, we wrote a phrase book of authoritarianism.

"As the West debates red lines and escalation risks, Ukraine’s spies are doing what no NATO agency dared: hunting Russian war criminals across three continents, from Moscow’s suburbs to Mali’s deserts — the very territories where Russia projected power unopposed for years.
Russia’s failed blitzkrieg birthed something far more dangerous than Ukrainian resistance — Ukrainian revenge."
CIA forged Ukraine's spy service into Mossad for Putin— now it can't make them stop
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/06/08/cia-forged-ukraines-broken-spy-service-into-mossad-for-putin-now-it-cant-make-them-stop/

> Polish "patriot"
Look inside.
> fascinated by the USA
> dependent on corporations from the USA
> dependent on wares from China
> dependent on immigrant workers
> speaks a mix of Polish with English loan words
> can't handle Polish spelling
> weak with Polish history
> Putin's puppet

Okay, spent a little time with Python's Matplotlib to get this graph of miles biked so far this year...
At some point I should be able to pull the data from Run Gap's SQLite database to automate this more, and get more granular.
I still need to figure out how to space the bars and some other formatting stuff but it's a good start!
#python

Russia's Spy Hunters Are Suspicious as Putin Moves Closer to China (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/world/europe/china-russia-spies-documents-putin-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NE8.PimT.gsouQqQHBzvf&smid=url-share
http://www.memeorandum.com/250607/p68#a250607p68

ESWC 2025 has just started with the presentation of the submission numbers to the individual tracks:
research track: 98 papers
resource track: 36 papers
in-use track: 22 papers
Looking forward to great presentations and discussions!
#eswc2025 #semweb

PARROT: Synergizing Mamba and Attention-based SSL Pre-Trained Models via Parallel Branch Hadamard Optimal Transport for Speech Emotion Recognition
Orchid Chetia Phukan, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar, Girish, Swarup Ranjan Behera, Jaya Sai Kiran Patibandla, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01138

PARROT: Synergizing Mamba and Attention-based SSL Pre-Trained Models via Parallel Branch Hadamard Optimal Transport for Speech Emotion Recognition
The emergence of Mamba as an alternative to attention-based architectures has led to the development of Mamba-based self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-trained models (PTMs) for speech and audio processing. Recent studies suggest that these models achieve comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) attention-based PTMs for speech emotion recognition (SER). Motivated by prior work demonstrating the benefits of PTM fusion across different speech processing tasks, we hypothesize t…

On the rejection of Argentina and Poland (among others) proposals for a moon treaty by the USA and the USSR.
#SpacePolicy

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00278 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

BatAnalysis -- A Comprehensive Python Pipeline for Swift BAT Time-Tagged Event Data Analysis
The Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is a coded aperture gamma-ray instrument with a large field of view that was designed to detect and localize transient events. When a transient is detected, either on-board or externally, the BAT saves time-tagged event (TTE) data which provides the highest quality information of the locations of the photons on the detector plane and their energies. This data can be used to produce spectra, lightcurves, and sky images of a transient event. While these data …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19533 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Testing quantum theory on curved space-time with quantum networks
Quantum technologies present new opportunities for fundamental tests of nature. One potential application is to probe the interplay between quantum physics and general relativity - a field of physics with no empirical evidence yet. Here we show that quantum networks open a new window to test this interface. We demonstrate how photon mediated entanglement between atomic or atom-like systems can be used to probe time-dilation induced entanglement and interference modulation. Key are non-local mea…