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How to use ChatGPT to boost your writing
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Become a more efficient and better writer with the help of AI. ChatGPT can help with many things--creating images, looking up information, role-playing, solving math problems, programming and much more. But at the heart of everything it does are so-called "large language models"--AI algorithms trained on unimaginable amounts of text. So it's not surprising that what it does best is working with text.
Betting in Sport. More money, more problems?
Game Theory: Is the betting industry ruining sport? Betting is now embedded in modern sport. In Tรผrkiye, referees are under investigation for placing thousands of bets. NBA players and coaches are facing major sanctions over gambling violations. But on the flip side, those same players, teams and leagues wear and promote gambling brands.
The death of the swear word: Gen Z are more offended by slurs than expletives - with p***k, d**k, and c**k now ranked among the LEAST offensive terms of all
Harry and Meghan's photo-gate leaves Kardashian clan'upset': Sussexes demanded not to be pictured inside Kris Jenner's 70th birthday party before mystery deletion Epstein's ultimate betrayal of Trump as emails reveal billionaire's twisted plot against president: 'I am the one able to take him down' Father of cheerleader who mysteriously died on Carnival cruise speaks out on investigation... and reveals the horrific theories he's heard I tried the'magic' pill that claims to cure migraines, back pain, anxiety and insomnia. The relief was instant... and it costs just $25 a month Kim Kardashian's daughter North West, 12, shocks fans with'high-risk piercing' not suitable for kids Alex Murdaugh's housekeeper says she KNEW the lawyer killed his wife and son in bombshell new book Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson hospitalized in Chicago Donald Trump leaves Ozzy Osbourne's widow Sharon in tears after paying tribute to the late rocker Kelly Clarkson's staff'feel like s***': TV insiders reveal star's huge backstage transformation after death of ex-husband He killed his daughter, 2, in a hot car then committed suicide on day he was due to be jailed. Then she tried to have her rich husband assassinated. Epstein's mysterious falling out with Clinton is revealed in emails to Obama lawyer inviting her to his infamous NYC townhouse John Travolta's son Benjamin, 14, has grown into his spitting image as Grease star proudly shares new clip Sober Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel'indebted' to Commanders' Dan Quinn for helping him beat drinking problem Diddy has prison release date pushed BACK amid allegations of'drinking moonshine' Kill a comrade or be killed: Three winters into Putin's war, his army is devouring itself. Trump makes sordid joke about Muslim president's WIFE at the White House The Navy commander who stared down Al Qaeda on the USS Cole has a new enemy... and a chilling warning for America Swear words that were once potent are losing their sting, a new study has revealed.
Drugs disguised as tea keep washing up on this S Korean holiday island
Since September, residents on South Korea's Jeju island have been spotting small packs of what appear to be bags of Chinese tea washed ashore. Upon closer inspection, however, they were found to contain ketamine. Some 28kg (62 lbs) of the drug, wrapped in foil and labelled with the Chinese character for tea, have been found on at least eight occasions, police say. Ketamine is used as an anaesthetic in medical procedures, but its recreational use is illegal in South Korea. It can cause severe physical and mental damage, including to the heart and lungs, when misused.
Where Should I Study? Biased Language Models Decide! Evaluating Fairness in LMs for Academic Recommendations
Shailya, Krithi, Mishra, Akhilesh Kumar, Krishnan, Gokul S, Ravindran, Balaraman
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as daily recommendation systems for tasks like education planning, yet their recommendations risk perpetuating societal biases. This paper empirically examines geographic, demographic, and economic biases in university and program suggestions from three open-source LLMs: LLaMA-3.1-8B, Gemma-7B, and Mistral-7B. Using 360 simulated user profiles varying by gender, nationality, and economic status, we analyze over 25,000 recommendations. Results show strong biases: institutions in the Global North are disproportionately favored, recommendations often reinforce gender stereotypes, and institutional repetition is prevalent. While LLaMA-3.1 achieves the highest diversity, recommending 481 unique universities across 58 countries, systemic disparities persist. To quantify these issues, we propose a novel, multi-dimensional evaluation framework that goes beyond accuracy by measuring demographic and geographic representation. Our findings highlight the urgent need for bias consideration in educational LMs to ensure equitable global access to higher education.
Opium may have been a daily habit for Ancient Egyptians
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Ancient Egyptians may have used opium a . Based on recent examinations, archaeologists now say the drug may even have been a near-daily recreational habit. Opium might have even been widely used across socio-economic classes as long as 3,000 years ago. The evidence is detailed in a study recently published in the, and offers a glimpse into the daily lives of regular Egyptians and royalty alike.
From Anger to Joy: How Nationality Personas Shape Emotion Attribution in Large Language Models
Kamruzzaman, Mahammed, Monsur, Abdullah Al, Kim, Gene Louis, Chhabra, Anshuman
Emotions are a fundamental facet of human experience, varying across individuals, cultural contexts, and nationalities. Given the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) as role-playing agents, we examine whether LLMs exhibit emotional stereotypes when assigned nationality-specific personas. Specifically, we investigate how different countries are represented in pre-trained LLMs through emotion attributions and whether these attributions align with cultural norms. To provide a deeper interpretive lens, we incorporate four key cultural dimensions, namely Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-Term Orientation, and Individualism, derived from Hofstedes cross-cultural framework. Our analysis reveals significant nationality-based differences, with emotions such as shame, fear, and joy being disproportionately assigned across regions. Furthermore, we observe notable misalignment between LLM-generated and human emotional responses, particularly for negative emotions, highlighting the presence of reductive and potentially biased stereotypes in LLM outputs.
Stochastic Forward-Forward Learning through Representational Dimensionality Compression
Zhu, Zhichao, Qi, Yang, Ma, Hengyuan, Lu, Wenlian, Feng, Jianfeng
The Forward-Forward (FF) learning algorithm provides a bottom-up alternative to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks, relying on a layer-wise "goodness" function with well-designed negative samples for contrastive learning. Existing goodness functions are typically defined as the sum of squared postsynaptic activations, neglecting correlated variability between neurons. In this work, we propose a novel goodness function termed dimensionality compression that uses the effective dimensionality (ED) of fluctuating neural responses to incorporate second-order statistical structure. Our objective minimizes ED for noisy copies of individual inputs while maximizing it across the sample distribution, promoting structured representations without the need to prepare negative samples.We demonstrate that this formulation achieves competitive performance compared to other non-BP methods. Moreover, we show that noise plays a constructive role that can enhance generalization and improve inference when predictions are derived from the mean of squared output, which is equivalent to making predictions based on an energy term. Our findings contribute to the development of more biologically plausible learning algorithms and suggest a natural fit for neuromorphic computing, where stochasticity is a computational resource rather than a nuisance. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhichaoZhu/StochasticForwardForward
Non-Negative Stiefel Approximating Flow: Orthogonalish Matrix Optimization for Interpretable Embeddings
Avants, Brian B., Tustison, Nicholas J., Stone, James R
Interpretable representation learning is a central challenge in modern machine learning, particularly in high-dimensional settings such as neuroimaging, genomics, and text analysis. Current methods often struggle to balance the competing demands of interpretability and model flexibility, limiting their effectiveness in extracting meaningful insights from complex data. We introduce Non-negative Stiefel Approximating Flow (NSA-Flow), a general-purpose matrix estimation framework that unifies ideas from sparse matrix factorization, orthogonalization, and constrained manifold learning. NSA-Flow enforces structured sparsity through a continuous balance between reconstruction fidelity and column-wise decorrelation, parameterized by a single tunable weight. The method operates as a smooth flow near the Stiefel manifold with proximal updates for non-negativity and adaptive gradient control, yielding representations that are simultaneously sparse, stable, and interpretable. Unlike classical regularization schemes, NSA-Flow provides an intuitive geometric mechanism for manipulating sparsity at the level of global structure while simplifying latent features. We demonstrate that the NSA-Flow objective can be optimized smoothly and integrates seamlessly with existing pipelines for dimensionality reduction while improving interpretability and generalization in both simulated and real biomedical data. Empirical validation on the Golub leukemia dataset and in Alzheimer's disease demonstrate that the NSA-Flow constraints can maintain or improve performance over related methods with little additional methodological effort. NSA-Flow offers a scalable, general-purpose tool for interpretable ML, applicable across data science domains.