Tootfinder

Half of the world's coral reefs suffered major bleaching during the 2014–2017 global heat wave, estimates suggest https://phys.org/news/2026-02-world-coral-reefs-major-global.html

Half of the world's coral reefs suffered major bleaching during the 2014–2017 global heat wave, estimates suggest
Benefits to society from coral reefs, including fisheries, tourism, coastal protection, pharmaceutical discovery and more, are estimated at about $9.8 trillion per year. For the first time, an international team led by Smithsonian researchers estimated the extent of coral bleaching worldwide during a global marine heat wave, finding that half of the world's reefs experienced significant damage. Another heat wave began in 2023 and is ongoing.

2026 Shipboard Immersion - Waterfronts Past & Present: Learning How Engineers Design with Nature
"Opportunity to learn about the #GreatLakes and coastal engineering in Milwaukee."
For "formal or nonformal educators who teach at the middle or high-school level that are experienced or new to the Great Lakes Literacy Principles"
STIPENDS Will be provided to o…

2026 Shipboard Immersion - Waterfronts Past & Present: Learning How Engineers Design with Nature
Thank you for taking time to complete the application for our FREE 2026 Shipboard Science Professional Learning opportunity, brought to you by the Center for Great Lakes Literacy, Wisconsin Sea Grant, and UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. WHAT The workshop will explore how coastal engineering can shape and strengthen our coasts and shorelines, using Milwaukee and its Lake Michigan shoreline as our case study. It will include time aboard R/V Neeskay giving a unique perspective to the…

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#Radio3InConcert
- Bluebeard's Castle
The BBC Philharmonic Orchestra's Principal Guest Conductor, Anja Bihlmaier, is joined by Jennifer Johnston and Christopher Purves to unlock the secrets of Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002qqs4

Towards Efficient Data Structures for Approximate Search with Range Queries
Ladan Kian, Dariusz R. Kowalski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06860 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06860 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.06860
arXiv:2602.06860v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Range queries are simple and popular types of queries used in data retrieval. However, extracting exact and complete information using range queries is costly. As a remedy, some previous work proposed a faster principle, {\em approximate} search with range queries, also called single range cover (SRC) search. It can, however, produce some false positives. In this work we introduce a new SRC search structure, a $c$-DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), which provably decreases the average number of false positives by logarithmic factor while keeping asymptotically same time and memory complexities as a classic tree structure. A $c$-DAG is a tunable augmentation of the 1D-Tree with denser overlapping branches ($c \geq 3$ children per node). We perform a competitive analysis of a $c$-DAG with respect to 1D-Tree and derive an additive constant time overhead and a multiplicative logarithmic improvement of the false positives ratio, on average. We also provide a generic framework to extend our results to empirical distributions of queries, and demonstrate its effectiveness for Gowalla dataset. Finally, we quantify and discuss security and privacy aspects of SRC search on $c$-DAG vs 1D-Tree, mainly mitigation of structural leakage, which makes $c$-DAG a good data structure candidate for deployment in privacy-preserving systems (e.g., searchable encryption) and multimedia retrieval.
toXiv_bot_toot

Something for my #TTRPG bubble - but not only the TTRPG bubble.
I'm the kind of person who really likes to have transcripts or summaries of TTRPG sessions, but also struggles with participating and taking notes at the same time.
LLM apps for creating automatic meeting transcripts looked really promising, but:
1. Are usually costly …
2. … create privacy concerns …

Last night, I was reading a book that contained this passage about Mussolini, and it took me an hour to fully grasp what this meant:
"[his 2-year stay in Switzerland] had initiated Mussolini to a form of revolutionary socialism based not on materialism or orthodox Marxism, but on a cocktail of voluntarists and anti-rational principles derived from Pareto, Le Bon, Nietzsche, and Sorel"