Tootfinder

Smite them!⚡️Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries: Washington’s Fears About Energy Markets Are Misplaced
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/why-ukraine-should-keep-striking-russian-oil-refineries

Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries
Washington’s fears about energy markets are misplaced.

A good chance Israel will bomb Hezbollah hard in Lebanon before striking in Iran and the inevitable reaction. To prevent a massive Hezbollah strike on northern Israel in the coming days.
#iran #israel #hezbollah

Interesting, if true. Via WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-strikes-live-coverage/card/many-iranian-missiles-failed-to-launch-or-crashe…

Today, my #lunchwalk was "a bit" rainy.
But I thought a bit of rain can't stop an outdoor jacket, rain pants and rubber boots.
After saving a Cockchafer[1] that I saw on lying on his back, it decided to stay on my jacket for the whole walk 😄
So I even had company!
After the walk I gently removed it from my jacket and placed it near our house. It seems they …

Melolontha - Wikipedia

Another awesome day in #Caledon, mix of sun & cloud and 7°C. We had a special guest on our hike today - this mare came galloping across the field to see us, with particular interest in Harley. Harley heard the hoof beats and ran into the woods. Not the bravest dog we've ever owned.
#DogsOfMastadon

Zelensky: Ukraine only uses its own weapons when striking Russian territory: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/10/zelensky-ukraine-only.html

Cowboys Leaving Door Open for Ezekiel Elliott Reunion https://heavy.com/sports/dallas-cowboys/ezekiel-elliott-reunion-aj-dillion-news/?adt_ei=[email]

Cowboys Leaving Door Open for Ezekiel Elliott Reunion
The Dallas Cowboys might consider bringing back Ezekiel Elliott to bolster their running back depth after striking out in free agency.

It's fuckin'-late o'clock, I'm wasting my sleep on some irrelevant thing and having our local equivalent of CNN on in the background.
I distinctly remember watching TV news as a kid and hearing about some military operation in late 1990s. I suppose it was NATO bombing Yugoslavia, not sure any more.
I understood jackshit, but I remembered that weird feeling watching bombers taking off on TV, nearly in real time.
Now I'm watching Iran striking Israel with …

Docs: RISC-V chip designer SiFive had $38.2M in revenue in 2023, a net operating loss of $113.1M, and expects to boost its licensing revenue to $60M this year (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Arm Rival SiFive Expects Licensing Revenue to Surge This Year
SiFive Inc., a money-losing chip designer that competes with Arm Holdings Plc, expects to boost its licensing revenue to $60 million this year while striking at least $180 million worth of lifetime royalty deals.

This is a really interesting video by Religion for Breakfast about similarities between AI apocalypticism and Christian and Jewish apocalypticism:
Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/religionforbreakfast-apocalyptic-ai-a-new-religion/
YT:…

ReligionForBreakfast — Apocalyptic A.I. - A New Religion?
What happens when the lines between ancient prophecies and modern technology blur? In this video, we explore the striking similarities between religious apocalyptic literature and the predictions surrounding artificial intelligence and the Singularity.

Israel approved Rafah military operation🔥 and started striking Hamas targets🔥
The decision by Israel’s War Cabinet came💥 hours after Hamas agreed to a cease-fire that Israel hadn’t previously accepted.💥
Israel launched a volley of strikes in the Gazan city of Rafah
and said it would continue military operations there,
even as the Biden administration has openly warned against the launch of any large-scale mission in the city without civilian protections.
In resp…

It's fuckin'-late o'clock, I'm wasting my sleep on some irrelevant thing and having our local equivalent of CNN on in the background.
I distinctly remember watching TV news as a kid and hearing about some military operation in late 1990s. I suppose it was NATO bombing Yugoslavia, not sure any more.
I understood jackshit, but I remembered that weird feeling watching bombers taking off on TV, nearly in real time.
Now I'm watching Iran striking Israel with …

Docs: RISC-V chip designer SiFive had $38.2M in revenue in 2023, a net operating loss of $113.1M, and expects to boost its licensing revenue to $60M this year (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Arm Rival SiFive Expects Licensing Revenue to Surge This Year
SiFive Inc., a money-losing chip designer that competes with Arm Holdings Plc, expects to boost its licensing revenue to $60 million this year while striking at least $180 million worth of lifetime royalty deals.

Russia strikes Sumy Oblast, injuring 5 children, 1 adult: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/13/russia-strikes-sumy.html

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03185 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arX…

$\frac{5}{2}$ fractional quantum Hall state in GaAs with Landau level mixing
The Landau level mixing is the key in understanding the mysterious 5/2 fractional quantum Hall effect in GaAs quantum well. Theoretical calculations with and without Landau level mixing show striking differences. However, the way to deal with the considerable strong Landau level mixing in GaAs is still unsatisfactory. We develop a method combining the screening and the perturbation theories to study the nature of the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall effect in GaAs efficiently. The screening which ha…

Scrolling through these replies is delightful.
https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112066609049680983

mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social)
Attached: 4 images Today is my birthday! If you'd like to do something for me for my birthday, would you please reply to this with—or by other means send me— something with colors you liked? Like an image or a video or a link. Music would also be acceptable if it gives you a strong synesthesiac association with color. If this request confuses you, here are some examples of images with colors I found striking [Artists: Laurie Barmore, Vian Borchert, Erica Aurahack]. But your reply can be …

Did my new #afterwork #cycling loop together with my wife today in comfy speed. What a great start into the #weekend !

Unionized workers at two Gannett outlets, the Austin American-Statesman and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, strike over stalled contract negotiations (Angela Fu/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2024

Gannett journalists in the solar eclipse’s path go on strike - Poynter
Unionized workers at the Austin American-Statesman and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle are striking over stalled contract negotiations

The British Asians who stood with striking miners https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0jxdjxdzpeo

The British Asians who stood with striking miners
How young Asian people took on racism 40 years ago while showing solidarity with striking workers.

Shrinkage MMSE estimators of covariances beyond the zero-mean and stationary variance assumptions
Olivier Flasseur, Eric Thi\'ebaut, Lo\"ic Denis, Maud Langlois
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07104

Shrinkage MMSE estimators of covariances beyond the zero-mean and stationary variance assumptions
We tackle covariance estimation in low-sample scenarios, employing a structured covariance matrix with shrinkage methods. These involve convexly combining a low-bias/high-variance empirical estimate with a biased regularization estimator, striking a bias-variance trade-off. Literature provides optimal settings of the regularization amount through risk minimization between the true covariance and its shrunk counterpart. Such estimators were derived for zero-mean statistics with i.i.d. diagonal r…

"One of the most striking changes in the proposed fee structure... is the introduction of new fees for continuation applications.... These fees are clearly designed to discourage applicants from filing continuation applications long after the original priority date...." - @…

3/6
Yet, the narrative of Cholecalciferol's benefits extends its chapters into the immune system's fortification. This vitamin is not a mere player but rather a strategic guardian in our body's defense against infections and chronic diseases. A striking revelation from a study in "The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" (2007) draws a line connecting optimal Vitamin D levels with a notable decrease in flu incidents, accentuating its role as an immune booster par excellence.

Man who swung bat at cops on #Jan6 considers plea deal
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/i

Man seen in video swinging metal baseball bat at officers on Jan. 6 considers plea deal
A man seen in video striking officers with a metal baseball bat during the U.S. Capitol riots and telling reporters he was "not there for Trump" is considering a plea deal in his case.

Documentary sequel "Food, Inc 2" covers a lot of ground,
from the conditions of workers to local farming initiatives,
and some have real impact, such as the campaign to ensure that mostly migrant labourers are paid a decent wage for picking fruit.
Kenner said he was “shocked” at one of the film’s most striking revelations:
Less than 15 cents in the dollar of food production goes to farmers.
The bulk of the profit is in turning healthy food into

Speaking of AI: while I think a worldwide class-action lawsuit against OpenAI is the best course of action, can somebody give me a reason why we're not *all* on strike?
I mean, farmers are striking across the EU because they feel the policies will impact them (also because fascists but that's beside the point); why aren't we - all of us impacted by LLMs - striking to *force* the EU to tackle the problem now, before it's too late?
(Yes I'm on a roll. It's a…

Israel approved Rafah military operation and started striking Hamas targets (Alexander Ward/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/06/israel-rafah-hamas-00156372
http://www.memeorandum.com/240506/p65#a240506p65

Another police chase with an innocent bystander injured: https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/07/girl-injured-police-pursuit-suspect-san-francisco/
What bewilders me is that, in a city with a rectilinear street grid, there are not better …

San Francisco pursuit suspect injures 14-year-old girl in hit-and-run
The suspect was being pursued by police after striking another pedestrian in the Tenderloin, officials said. He was ultimately arrested by the Embarcadero.

Another police chase with an innocent bystander injured: https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/07/girl-injured-police-pursuit-suspect-san-francisco/
What bewilders me is that, in a city with a rectilinear street grid, there are not better …

San Francisco pursuit suspect injures 14-year-old girl in hit-and-run
The suspect was being pursued by police after striking another pedestrian in the Tenderloin, officials said. He was ultimately arrested by the Embarcadero.

Russia attacks 11 communities in Sumy Oblast: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/12/russia-attacks-communities.html

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14256 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Lang--Trotter Conjecture for CM Elliptic Curves
Given an elliptic curve $E$ over $\mathbb{Q}$ and non-zero integer $r$, the Lang--Trotter conjecture predicts a striking asymptotic formula for the number of good primes $p\leqslant x$, denoted by $π_{E,r}(x)$, such that the Frobenius trace of $E$ at $p$ is equal to the given integer $r$. We focus on the CM case in this memoir, and show how to realize the following two goals: (1) to give an unconditional estimate for $π_{E,r}(x)$, which confirms the upper bound part of the conjecture up to …

What AIs are not Learning (and Why)
Mark Stefik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04267 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.04267

What AIs are not Learning (and Why)
What applications is AI ready for? Advances in deep learning and generative approaches have produced AI that learn from massive online data and outperform manually built AIs. Some AIs outperform people. It is easy (but misleading) to conclude that today's AI technologies can learn to do everything. Conversely, it is striking that big data, deep learning, and generative AI have had so little impact on robotics. For example, today's autonomous robots do not learn to provide home care or to be nur…

After nurturing this plant for the last 13 years, (acquired no higher than 30cm, it's now well over 2 metres tall) for the first time ever, it has flowered, producing 7 flowering spikes. This one opened this morning.
Many years ago I saw bird of paradise flowers blooming in the magnificent Kirstenbosch botanical gardens in Cape Town. I have coveted them ever since. It is bringing much joy and a touch of South African sun to the cold northern February

A twist-grain boundary (TGB) phase in aqueous solutions of the DNA tetramer GTAC
Gregory P. Smith, Chenhui Zhu, Mikhail Zernenkov, Guillaume Freychet, Noel A. Clark
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07844

A twist-grain boundary (TGB) phase in aqueous solutions of the DNA tetramer GTAC
We report the observation of a Twist Grain Boundary (TGB) phase of DNA, a striking motif of three dimensional (3D) equilibrium self-assembly of the DNA tetramer 5'-GTAC-3', a base sequence that is self-complimentary, pairing to form 4-base long, blunt-end Watson/Crick (WC) duplexes. Hydrophobic blunt ends and liquid crystal ordering enable these short duplexes to aggregate into long-DNA-like columns, even though the double helix has a break every 4 bases. A further step assembles these columns …

A Tractability Gap Beyond Nim-Sums: It's Hard to Tell Whether a Bunch of Superstars Are Losers
Kyle Burke, Matthew Ferland, Svenja Huntemann, Shang-Hua Teng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04955

A Tractability Gap Beyond Nim-Sums: It's Hard to Tell Whether a Bunch of Superstars Are Losers
In this paper, we address a natural question at the intersection of combinatorial game theory and computational complexity: "Can a sum of simple tepid games in canonical form be intractable?" To resolve this fundamental question, we consider superstars, positions first introduced in Winning Ways where all options are nimbers. Extending Morris' classic result with hot games to tepid games, we prove that disjunctive sums of superstars are intractable to solve. This is striking as sums of nimbers …

Ukraine confirms striking 2 large Russian landing ships in occupied Crimea: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/24/ukraine-confirms-striking.html

Microsoft bekommt vom Bund alleine 1,28 Milliarden Euro für Lizenzen bis 2025. Bei der Zendis, der Stelle, die die Microsoft Office-Alternative OpenDesk entwickeln soll, wurden die Mittel von 2024 von 45 Millionen Euro auf 19 Millionen Euro gestrichen. Wie ernst nimmt die Ampelkoalition, wie ernst nehmen viele Länder und Behörden das Thema Digitale Souveränität wirklich? Wohl eher GAR NICHT!
#Microsoft

1,28 Milliarden Euro für Microsoft-Lizenzen, 18 Millionen für Zendis
Digitale Souveränität ist eigentlich ein definiertes Ziel der Ampelregierung. Doch wird genau an dem Thema gespart und stattdessen werden Hunderte von Millionen in Microsoft.Produkte investiert. Tr…

Unionized workers at two Gannett outlets, the Austin American-Statesman and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, strike over stalled contract negotiations (Angela Fu/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2024

Gannett journalists in the solar eclipse’s path go on strike - Poynter
Unionized workers at the Austin American-Statesman and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle are striking over stalled contract negotiations

Speaking of AI: while I think a worldwide class-action lawsuit against OpenAI is the best course of action, can somebody give me a reason why we're not *all* on strike?
I mean, farmers are striking across the EU because they feel the policies will impact them (also because fascists but that's beside the point); why aren't we - all of us impacted by LLMs - striking to *force* the EU to tackle the problem now, before it's too late?
(Yes I'm on a roll. It's a…

Maximally Forward-Looking Core Inflation
Philippe Goulet Coulombe, Karin Klieber, Christophe Barrette, Maximilian Goebel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05209 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05209
arXiv:2404.05209v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Timely monetary policy decision-making requires timely core inflation measures. We create a new core inflation series that is explicitly designed to succeed at that goal. Precisely, we introduce the Assemblage Regression, a generalized nonnegative ridge regression problem that optimizes the price index's subcomponent weights such that the aggregate is maximally predictive of future headline inflation. Ordering subcomponents according to their rank in each period switches the algorithm to be learning supervised trimmed inflation - or, put differently, the maximally forward-looking summary statistic of the realized price changes distribution. In an extensive out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the US and the euro area, we find substantial improvements for signaling medium-term inflation developments in both the pre- and post-Covid years. Those coming from the supervised trimmed version are particularly striking, and are attributable to a highly asymmetric trimming which contrasts with conventional indicators. We also find that this metric was indicating first upward pressures on inflation as early as mid-2020 and quickly captured the turning point in 2022. We also consider extensions, like assembling inflation from geographical regions, trimmed temporal aggregation, and building core measures specialized for either upside or downside inflation risks.

Another police chase with an innocent bystander injured: https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/07/girl-injured-police-pursuit-suspect-san-francisco/
What bewilders me is that, in a city with a rectilinear street grid, there are not better …

San Francisco pursuit suspect injures 14-year-old girl in hit-and-run
The suspect was being pursued by police after striking another pedestrian in the Tenderloin, officials said. He was ultimately arrested by the Embarcadero.

Ewald Engelen is an opinionmaker who is willingly or unwillingly helping Putin. Quite ignorant in the field of international relations but still people listen to him too much. At least he has summarised his thoughts in an essay that can be discussed.
There are many flaws in his reasoning, one striking is the ommission of any free will of Ukraine where people actually want to live in freedom.

Ewald Engelen - Sleepwalkers redux - Brave New Europe
An analysis of the failed policy of corrupt and incompetent European NATO governments in Ukraine. Ewald Engelen is Professor of Financial Geography at the University of Amsterdam The war in Ukraine has entered its twenty-sixth [...]

Lady of the Sea.
2 FREE wallpapers for you to use.
Also uploaded to my Ko-fi completely uncompressed (Mastodon compresses images) for free here: #MidJourneyArt

Click to view on Ko-fi
Follow Be Aware on Ko-fi

Not a wildflower at all but very striking. A japanese camellia. I thought it was a rose bush. Jenny's Garden. Last weekend. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/203776176

Japanese camellia (Camellia japonica)
Japanese camellia from Hamilton Heights, New York, NY, USA on March 24, 2024 at 02:44 PM by Ira Gershenhorn. Near Jenny's Garden

I'm polishing the front end of a petproject and Im researching front-end design ideology. Right now it just spits out html with class attributes that tie in with a very rudimentary stylesheet.
The goal is allow user css customization of every element but also ensure its not *too* flexible as to break accessibility. So for example, striking a balance between html tables or just dumping everyting as divs and spans and let the grids/flexboxes sort it out.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.06931 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

On the consistency of supervised learning with missing values
In many application settings, the data have missing entries which make analysis challenging. An abundant literature addresses missing values in an inferential framework: estimating parameters and their variance from incomplete tables. Here, we consider supervised-learning settings: predicting a target when missing values appear in both training and testing data. We show the consistency of two approaches in prediction. A striking result is that the widely-used method of imputing with a constant,…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01558 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Confinement in the Transverse Field Ising model on the Heavy Hex lattice
We study the emergence of confinement in the transverse field Ising model on a decorated hexagonal lattice. Using an infinite tensor network state optimised with belief propagation we show how a quench from a broken symmetry state leads to striking nonthermal behaviour underpinned by persistent oscillations and saturation of the entanglement entropy. We explain this phenomenon by constructing a minimal model based on the confinement of elementary excitations, which take the form of various flav…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08849 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

Learning a Stable Dynamic System with a Lyapunov Energy Function for Demonstratives Using Neural Networks
Autonomous Dynamic System (DS)-based algorithms hold a pivotal and foundational role in the field of Learning from Demonstration (LfD). Nevertheless, they confront the formidable challenge of striking a delicate balance between achieving precision in learning and ensuring the overall stability of the system. In response to this substantial challenge, this paper introduces a novel DS algorithm rooted in neural network technology. This algorithm not only possesses the capability to extract critic…

Great, thx to the strike in the UK I have to pay eurostar 70 euro's extra and for the ic train inside of the uk an extra 30gbp extra...
(Switched from Lner to Lumo and because Lumo doesn't ride that late, I had to pay extra to get an earlier Eurostar)
To be clear I'm not blaming the people striking. I'm blaming the companies that cause the people to need to strike

With push from Trump, Republicans plan blitz of election-related lawsuits
When Donald Trump installed a new chairman of the Republican Party this month,
he explained privately and publicly what he wanted from the GOP:
🔸a bigger focus on election-related lawsuits,
🔸a more aggressive operation to monitor voting
🔸 and a vow to make “election integrity” the party’s No. 1 priority.

The party is now striking a more aggressive tone as it recruits poll observers …

With push from Trump, Republicans plan blitz of election-related lawsuits
Donald Trump’s allies who took over the Republican National Committee promise to fight more election battles in court as the 2024 campaign heats up.

I created an account on post.news a long time ago but never used it. Now, with the pending shutdown, I took another look.
It's striking that it basically looks like Mastodon. Plus a few extra features like payments.
Why did they not implement this as an add-on to, or fork of, Mastodon?

Ichneumon stramentor - a spectacular parasitic #wasp in my garden in #Wageningen today.

Russia attacks 11 communities in Sumy Oblast: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/10/russia-attacks-communities.html

This exquisite collaboration between artist Auriea Harvey and curator Regina Harsanyi is a gift to anyone who wants to learn more about digital art. Unwrapping it reveals virtuoso lessons in Internet art, emulation, 3-D scanning, indie video games, and augmented reality
https://www.

Acorn woodpecker in Griffith Park
#naturalist #wildlife

#NorthCarolina's state bird is the northern red cardinal. What these striking red birds lack in brains they make up for in their talent for mimickry....which is cool until they start mimicking car alarms.
This is not a post about #birds after all.

Followed a DeLorean the other day (“What in the world is that?") and the most striking thing was it is very, very smol. Cars used to be small. We’ve grown accustomed to these obscenely swollen things clogging the roads, but it wasn’t always like this.

The $L^p$ estimate for the gain term of the Boltzmann collision operator and its application
Ling-Bing He, Jin-Cheng Jiang, Hung-Wen Kuo, Meng-Hao Liang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05517

The $L^p$ estimate for the gain term of the Boltzmann collision operator and its application
We prove the Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev type $L^p$ estimates for the gain term of the Boltzmann collision operator including Maxwellian molecule, hard potential and hard sphere models. Combining with the results of Alonso et al. [2] for the soft potential and Maxwellian molecule models, we provide an unified form of $L^p$ estimates for all cutoff models which are sharp in the sense of scaling. The most striking feature of our new estimates for the hard potential and hard sphere models is that the…

Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
ORAC: A tap on the head. Yes, I see. In this instance the word tap has a double meaning, as in to strike something and as a device for controlling the release of fluid from a tank or pipe. The fluid referred to is water, therefore, tap on the head has two ambivalent meanings, one pertaining to the striking of the cranium...
[Vila grabs his head in frustration.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/s/310/242 📺 B7BC

Please read to the end of this piece from Jonathan Freedland 🙏
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/16/jews-uk-attack-palestine-antisemitism-labour-britain

Microsoft bekommt vom Bund alleine 1,28 Milliarden Euro für Lizenzen bis 2025. Bei der Zendis, der Stelle, die die Microsoft Office-Alternative OpenDesk entwickeln soll, wurden die Mittel von 2024 von 45 Millionen Euro auf 19 Millionen Euro gestrichen. Wie ernst nimmt die Ampelkoalition, wie ernst nehmen viele Länder und Behörden das Thema Digitale Souveränität wirklich? Wohl eher GAR NICHT!
#Microsoft

1,28 Milliarden Euro für Microsoft-Lizenzen, 18 Millionen für Zendis
Digitale Souveränität ist eigentlich ein definiertes Ziel der Ampelregierung. Doch wird genau an dem Thema gespart und stattdessen werden Hunderte von Millionen in Microsoft.Produkte investiert. Tr…

Ach
https://mastodon.scot/@paka/111987099820034718

With push from Trump, Republicans plan blitz of election-related lawsuits
When Donald Trump installed a new chairman of the Republican Party this month,
he explained privately and publicly what he wanted from the GOP:
🔸a bigger focus on election-related lawsuits,
🔸a more aggressive operation to monitor voting
🔸 and a vow to make “election integrity” the party’s No. 1 priority.

The party is now striking a more aggressive tone as it recruits poll observers …

With push from Trump, Republicans plan blitz of election-related lawsuits
Donald Trump’s allies who took over the Republican National Committee promise to fight more election battles in court as the 2024 campaign heats up.

Ukraine war latest: Ukraine confirms striking 2 large Russian landing ships; Russia launches major attack on energy system: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/24/ukraine-war-latest.html

Maximally Forward-Looking Core Inflation
Philippe Goulet Coulombe, Karin Klieber, Christophe Barrette, Maximilian Goebel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05209 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05209
arXiv:2404.05209v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Timely monetary policy decision-making requires timely core inflation measures. We create a new core inflation series that is explicitly designed to succeed at that goal. Precisely, we introduce the Assemblage Regression, a generalized nonnegative ridge regression problem that optimizes the price index's subcomponent weights such that the aggregate is maximally predictive of future headline inflation. Ordering subcomponents according to their rank in each period switches the algorithm to be learning supervised trimmed inflation - or, put differently, the maximally forward-looking summary statistic of the realized price changes distribution. In an extensive out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the US and the euro area, we find substantial improvements for signaling medium-term inflation developments in both the pre- and post-Covid years. Those coming from the supervised trimmed version are particularly striking, and are attributable to a highly asymmetric trimming which contrasts with conventional indicators. We also find that this metric was indicating first upward pressures on inflation as early as mid-2020 and quickly captured the turning point in 2022. We also consider extensions, like assembling inflation from geographical regions, trimmed temporal aggregation, and building core measures specialized for either upside or downside inflation risks.

Hi! This #selfie was from an early spring #hiking trip last year. I had to change my plans during the ascent as I didn't dare to cross a region where I didn't check avalanche conditions before.
The clouds were so thick that I also didn't feel comfortable about estimating the conditi…

Geomagnetic storm from a solar flare could disrupt radio communications and create a striking aurora (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/sun-solar-flare-geomagnetic-storm-magnetic-corona-73fc7ecffaff88fbfaea51aa82025217
http://www.memeorandum.com/240324/p29#a240324p29

Digitale Souveränität ist eigentlich ein definiertes Ziel der Ampelregierung. Doch wird genau an dem Thema gespart und stattdessen werden Hunderte von Millionen in Microsoft-Produkte investiert. Trotz massiver Bedenken der US-Behörden bezüglich der Sicherheit der Microsoft-Lösungen.
#Microsoft #Deutschland

1,28 Milliarden Euro für Microsoft-Lizenzen, 18 Millionen für Zendis
Digitale Souveränität ist eigentlich ein definiertes Ziel der Ampelregierung. Doch wird genau an dem Thema gespart und stattdessen werden Hunderte von Millionen in Microsoft.Produkte investiert. Tr…

I created an account on post.news a long time ago but never used it. Now, with the pending shutdown, I took another look.
It's striking that it basically looks like Mastodon. Plus a few extra features like payments.
Why did they not implement this as an add-on to, or fork of, Mastodon?

Enhancing (quasi-)long-range order in a two-dimensional driven crystal
R. Maire, A. Plati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05621 https://ar…

Enhancing (quasi-)long-range order in a two-dimensional driven crystal
It has been recently shown that 2D systems can exhibit crystalline phases with long-range translational order showcasing a striking violation of the Hohenberg-Mermin-Wagner (HMW) theorem which is valid at equilibrium. This is made possible by athermal driving mechanisms that inject energy into the system without exciting long wavelength modes of the density field. However, as thermal fluctuations are superimposed on the non-equilibrium driving, long-range translational order is inevitably lost.…

Claims of Mass Rape by #Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation | Portside #Gaza
https://portside.…

Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation
This investigative report uncovers questionable sourcing and a striking lack of physical or eyewitness evidence in two early reports that have been widely cited to bolster claims that Hamas committed mass sexual violence in its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
ORAC: A tap on the head. Yes, I see. In this instance the word tap has a double meaning, as in to strike something and as a device for controlling the release of fluid from a tank or pipe. The fluid referred to is water, therefore, tap on the head has two ambivalent meanings, one pertaining to the striking of the cranium...
[Vila grabs his head in frustration.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/s/310/242 📺 B7BC

Russian drones hit Sumy: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/06/russian-drones-hit.html

A german leader who doesn't allow a free democracy to defend itself against russian agression.
Ukraine has every right to use weapons (short or long range) to defend itself, apparently howitzers are fine but cruise missiles are not. Ukraine must fight with hands tied.
Russia has no limitations in weapons delivered to it, striking from large distances , destroying civilian targets. He weakens NATO actively doing this..

Prime Video will air NHL games on Monday nights in Canada for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons, after striking a deal with rights holder Rogers Communications (Etan Vlessing/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Prime Video Adds Live NHL Hockey Games in Canada
The two-year deal will see National Hockey League games appear exclusively on the Amazon streaming site on Monday nights.

Digitale Souveränität ist eigentlich ein definiertes Ziel der Ampelregierung. Doch wird genau an dem Thema gespart und stattdessen werden Hunderte von Millionen in Microsoft-Produkte investiert. Trotz massiver Bedenken der US-Behörden bezüglich der Sicherheit der Microsoft-Lösungen.
#Microsoft #Deutschland

1,28 Milliarden Euro für Microsoft-Lizenzen, 18 Millionen für Zendis
Digitale Souveränität ist eigentlich ein definiertes Ziel der Ampelregierung. Doch wird genau an dem Thema gespart und stattdessen werden Hunderte von Millionen in Microsoft.Produkte investiert. Tr…

Russia attacks 11 communities in Sumy Oblast, injuring 1: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/05/russia-attacks-communities.html

Prime Video will air NHL games on Monday nights in Canada for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons, after striking a deal with rights holder Rogers Communications (Etan Vlessing/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Prime Video Adds Live NHL Hockey Games in Canada
The two-year deal will see National Hockey League games appear exclusively on the Amazon streaming site on Monday nights.

Prigogine-Defay ratio of glassy freezing scales with liquid fragility
Alois Loidl, Peter Lunkenheimer, Konrad Samwer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05612 https…

Prigogine-Defay ratio of glassy freezing scales with liquid fragility
A detailed study of published experimental data for a variety of materials on the incremental variation of heat capacity, thermal expansion, and compressibility at glassy freezing reveals a striking dependence of the Prigogine-Defay ratio R on the fragility index m. At high m, R approaches values of ~1, the Ehrenfest expectation for 2nd order continuous phase transitions, while R reaches values > 20 for low fragilities. We explain this correlation by the degree of separation of the glassy freez…

Israel considered striking Iran on Monday but decided to wait, officials say (Barak Ravid/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/17/israel-iran-attack-retaliate-strike-postponed
http://www.memeorandum.com/240417/p58#a240417p58

#goodmorning friends!
Not a single cloud on today's morning walk. Just fresh & chill air.
I'm looking forward to having a long weekend. We haven't planned anything yet except "being outside".
#getoutside

FT: US reportedly tells Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/22/ft-us-reportedly.html

'Brilliant': #Trump sneakers trolled by Parkland High School shooting survivor - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-sneakers-trolled/

'Brilliant': Trump sneakers trolled by Parkland High School shooting survivor
Former President Donald Trump's new sneakers venture is being trolled by a survivor of the Parkland shooting. David Hogg took to X this weekend to share he'd purchased a URL with a striking similarity to the gold sneakers Trump has begun to sell. “I just bought shoptrumpsneakers.com” wrote the acti...

Russia attacks 8 communities in Sumy Oblast: https://benborges.xyz/2024/03/04/russia-attacks-communities.html

Skiers across Europe are arriving at resorts to find historically low levels of snow following an exceptionally mild winter.
Stark images from resorts in the likes of France, Austria and Bosnia show huge swathes of mountains almost entirely bare. 
It’s a striking contrast to how they usually look in mid-to-late February - typically the peak season for winter sports.

Muddy runs and melting snow: European ski resorts are in crisis
Even snow cannons have stopped working due to the high temperatures.

Thomas C. Theiner not active in the fediverse posted some nice pictures on X about how elaborate the air and missiledefense was in europe during the coldwar. An enormous system is required to defend a large territory. We don't have enough equipment to fully protect Ukraine this way so the only option it seems is striking deep inside Russia at missile factories, airbases etc.
#ukraine

Marta Barandiy: It is striking how both, Russia and China use the same narratives in their “congitive war” against the West: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/17/marta-barandiy-it.html

The Long Beach Post lays off staffers following a switch to nonprofit ownership and amid employees' efforts to unionize; source: staff was cut from 17 to eight (Christi Carras/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts

Long Beach Post layoffs hit striking staffers
The Long Beach Media Guild announced Friday that nine Long Beach Post staffers received layoff notices after moving to unionize and going on strike.

While I'm commuting home from the office, I'm just browsing a bit in the photos from my last hikes.
This one made me smile as it reminds me of the first snow hike in the season. I was surprised by the amount of snow and wind, but that also made it a really great experience.
But it also meant returning earlier than planned initially. Safety in winter is always number 1 priority.
#nature

After two weeks of thwarted attempts, the Arizona House of Representatives voted Wednesday to ⭐️repeal a near-total abortion ban from 1864, ⭐️with three Republican lawmakers breaking from their party to join Democrats in striking it down. 
The bill passed with a vote of 32-28 and has been sent to the state Senate for approval.
Because the legislature is meeting just one day a week while budget negotiations ramp up, the earliest the upper chamber can take action on the bill is Ma…

AZ House has voted to repeal the 1864 abortion ban upheld by the Supreme Court
After three weeks of trying, the Arizona House of Representatives has voted to repeal a near-total abortion ban that was written in 1864 after the state Supreme Court earlier this month ruled that it could be enforced, setting the stage for the end of abortion services in the Grand Canyon State.

While I'm commuting home from the office, I'm just browsing a bit in the photos from my last hikes.
This one made me smile as it reminds me of the first snow hike in the season. I was surprised by the amount of snow and wind, but that also made it a really great experience.
But it also meant returning earlier than planned initially. Safety in winter is always number 1 priority.
#nature

Latvian Foreign Minister: Ukraine has already received weapons from Western partners with permission to strike Russia: https://benborges.xyz/2024/05/01/latvian-foreign-minister.html

Space weather forecasters have issued a #geomagnetic #storm watch through Monday
An ouburst of #plasma from a solar flare could interfere with radio transmissions on Earth -- And could make for great

Geomagnetic storm from a solar flare could disrupt radio communications and create a striking aurora
Space weather forecasters have issued a geomagnetic storm watch through Monday. They say a plasma burst from a solar flare could interfere with radio transmissions on Earth. It may also make for great aurora viewing. According to the alert issued Saturday by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, there's no reason for concern. Jonathan Lash, a forecaster at the Boulder, Colorado-based center, says the storm could interrupt high-frequency radio transmissions, such as by aircraft trying to com…

A deep look at the reasons behind the ongoing strike at The Long Beach Post, including layoffs after staffers voted to form a union (Ben Burgis/Jacobin)
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/long-beach-post-union-busting

The Long Beach Post Is Union Busting in Broad Daylight
Striking Long Beach Post journalists say they are fighting against layoffs, corporate media consolidation, and union-busting labor law violations.

Recently someone stumbled across one of my #pristineWinter photos and gave some really lovely feedback.
So I just Browser through those photos again and - yes, I really love them! I should pick up printing them again!
If you want a copy, it's currently available on FineArtAmerica as well.

Stand Strong by Franz Graf
Stand Strong Photograph by Franz Graf

Drone footage and interviews with witnesses and colleagues raise questions about Israeli justification for striking two members of an Al Jazeera crew (Washington Post)
https://wapo.st/4a1WUDE

Drone footage raises questions about Israeli justification for deadly strike on Gaza journalists
Footage recovered from the drone of an Al Jazeera team killed by the IDF in a targeted Jan. 7 missile strike raises critical questions about the Israeli justification for the attack.

Both #Islamic #State in general, and #ISIS-K in particular, have long proclaimed their intention of striking Russia.
They have cited Russia’s earlier military occupation of

At work we recently came to the topic of #winter jackets and one colleague said "ooh yeah the JackWolfskins" (expressing that everyone wears an outdoor jacket here even if they just go to the subway).
I had to laugh because I came to the office in my red one. And I own mostly #outdoor…

At work we recently came to the topic of #winter jackets and one colleague said "ooh yeah the JackWolfskins" (expressing that everyone wears an outdoor jacket here even if they just go to the subway).
I had to laugh because I came to the office in my red one. And I own mostly #outdoor…

#goodmorning friends. Here's one more from my january #photography walk.
On the way back, I had finished the photo-shoot mentally already when I came to that bridge.
I decided to climb down to the stream and just try a couple of