Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Africa


UN warns of potential 'ethnically driven' atrocities in Sudan's el-Fasher

Al Jazeera

UN warns of potential'ethnically driven' atrocities in Sudan's el-Fasher At least 91 people have been killed in Sudan's besieged city of el-Fasher in attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over 10 days last month, the United Nations says. The attacks took place during intensified fighting between the RSF and Sudan's army around the city, the largest urban centre in the Darfur region that remains under the control of the military and its allies, known as the Joint Forces. UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday that the city's Daraja Oula neighbourhood was repeatedly attacked and subjected to RSF artillery shelling, drone strikes and ground incursions from September 19 to 29. He called for urgent action to prevent "large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities in el-Fasher." He said "atrocities are not inevitable", adding that "they can be averted if all actors take concrete action to uphold international law, demand respect for civilian life and property, and prevent the continued commission of atrocity crimes".


Cross-Domain Matching for Bag-of-Words Data via Kernel Embeddings of Latent Distributions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a kernel-based method for finding matching between instances across different domains, such as multilingual documents and images with annotations. Each instance is assumed to be represented as a multiset of features, e.g., a bag-of-words representation for documents. The major difficulty in finding cross-domain relationships is that the similarity between instances in different domains cannot be directly measured. To overcome this difficulty, the proposed method embeds all the features of different domains in a shared latent space, and regards each instance as a distribution of its own features in the shared latent space. To represent the distributions efficiently and nonparametrically, we employ the framework of the kernel embeddings of distributions. The embedding is estimated so as to minimize the difference between distributions of paired instances while keeping unpaired instances apart. In our experiments, we show that the proposed method can achieve high performance on finding correspondence between multi-lingual Wikipedia articles, between documents and tags, and between images and tags.


REVEALED: The sneaky food additives jacking up your grocery bill

Daily Mail - Science & tech

US military poised to seize ports and airfields in Venezuela as Trump strikes a fourth'narco-terrorist' boat Robert Griffin III involved in'scary' car crash with wife and kids as shocking photos emerge I'm no longer sleeping with my husband - and never will again, says MOLLY RYDDELL. I love him, but counted down the moments until he climaxed. Then I couldn't bear it any more and the truth spilled out... so many women feel the same Body count from Houston's bayous rises as serial killer whispers grip city and residents are told: 'Be vigilant' I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied His daughter was warped into an ultra-woke monster and set fire to his life. Now, GOP state senator Jay Block fights back... and reveals the dark secrets she was desperate to hide The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split Realtor with expensive ex-wife arrested over shocking $11.6m claims about how he was funding Palm Beach lifestyle Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by the most iconic political photo of the century Fired CNN host Don Lemon's delivers expletive-filled rant at Megyn Kelly for comments about his husband Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection Mystery deepens over Hulk Hogan's death as his widow faces fresh anguish Warning as pasta salad is recalled due to risk of'fatal infections' Food manufacturers are quietly turning to lab-engineered additives amid supply chain disruptions and ingredient shortages - and are passing on the higher costs to consumers.


Tesla sales jump as buyers scramble before EV tax credit expires

Al Jazeera

Tesla sales have surged in the third quarter as buyers in the United States rushed to take advantage of electric vehicle (EV) tax credits that were eliminated under President Donald Trump's sweeping tax bill passed this year. On Thursday, the automaker reported a 7.4 percent increase in sales compared with the same period last year as demand was driven by customers looking to buy before the credits officially expired at the end of September. Tesla also delivered 481,166 units of its Model 3 compact sedan and Model Y crossover in the quarter, well above Wall Street expectations. The Elon Musk-led carmaker frequently talked up the expiry of the tax credits, using it alongside discounts and financing deals to spur sales and leases of its EVs. Investors are worried because sales are now expected to slump as the $7,500 federal tax credit disappears.


Thousands of Americans can't get new jobs as government shutdown directly hits citizens

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Overall, federal records revealed that over 2.7 million background checks are conducted every month for various reasons, including job applications. This also means air travel will likely suffer this month because the FAA Pilot Record Database is delayed and new pilots cannot start flights. FBI criminal checks, as well as civil court record searches, are needed for nurses, aides, and therapists, to slow hospital onboarding. 'Shutdowns cause delays in court record updates and verification gaps, slowing credentialing and risking non-compliance with HIPAA or state mandates,' the cyber expert explained. Trucking and shipping companies will also feel the impact of the shutdown because commercial drivers must undergo mandated checks by the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse and Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP), which depend on federal IT updates and audits.


It's not the dog, it's the owner: Vets confirm the heartbreaking reason why some pets are so aggressive

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Robert Griffin III involved in'scary' car crash with wife and kids as shocking photos emerge Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection Body count from Houston's bayous rises as serial killer whispers grip city and residents are told: 'Be vigilant' I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied I'm no longer sleeping with my husband - and never will again, says MOLLY RYDDELL. I love him, but counted down the moments until he climaxed. Then I couldn't bear it any more and the truth spilled out... so many women feel the same The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with I'm a woman with autism... here are the signs you might be masking, even from yourself Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split Realtor with expensive ex-wife arrested over shocking $11.6m claims about how he was funding Palm Beach lifestyle Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by the most iconic political photo of the century Taylor Swift-superfan KENNEDY decodes the star's raunchiest album ever... and finds Easter eggs in the strangest places Mystery deepens over Hulk Hogan's death as his widow faces fresh anguish Warning as pasta salad is recalled due to risk of'fatal infections' It's not the dog, it's the owner: Vets confirm the heartbreaking reason why some pets are so aggressive READ MORE: Is YOUR dog a genius? Despite being referred to as'man's best friend', many dogs have an aggressive side.


China Rolls Out Its First Talent Visa as the US Retreats on H-1Bs

WIRED

The Chinese government unveiled a program to woo foreign talent just as the US cracked down on H-1Bs with a $100,000 fee. The move immediately provoked xenophobic backlash. While President Donald Trump makes it harder to hire skilled foreign workers in the US, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is trying to lure them in. On Wednesday, China officially launched a new visa program designed to make it easier for young professionals and people with degrees in science and technology from top universities to study and do business in the country. While many of the details of the K visa program have yet to be announced, Chinese authorities have said that applicants won't be required to obtain an invitation letter from a specific company, meaning the visa isn't tied to individual employers.



On the Limitation of Spectral Methods: From the Gaussian Hidden Clique Problem to Rank-One Perturbations of Gaussian Tensors

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the following detection problem: given a realization of a symmetric matrix X of dimension n, distinguish between the hypothesis that all upper triangular variables are i.i.d. Gaussians variables with mean 0 and variance 1 and the hypothesis that there is a planted principal submatrix B of dimension L for which all upper triangular variables are i.i.d. Gaussians with mean 1 and variance 1, whereas all other upper triangular elements of X not in B are i.i.d.


From Predictions to Decisions: Using L kahead Regularization

Neural Information Processing Systems

But when deployed transparently, learned models also affect how users act in order to improve outcomes. The standard approach to learning predictive models is agnostic to induced user actions and provides no guarantees as to the effect of actions.