Nick Cave said something interesting last week. On this occasion, he was reacting to a question from a fan. Cave does this a lot on the Red Hand Files, his online repository where he answers any number and range of enquiries from devotees. This one was about artificial intelligence. There is an open access AI bot, ChatGPT, that some people have been playing with to see if it can create as well as a human. Mark, from Christchurch in New Zealand, fired in a load of Cave's lyrics, got a resulting set of lyrics and sent them to Cave asking for his reaction.

Drone footage of endangered dolphins swimming with paddleboarders in Southland could help artificial intelligence, which is being used for conservation. Rodd Trafford filmed the playful pod in Te Waewae Bay, about an hours drive west of Invercargill, on January 9. "I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'll never get a chance to film that again," Trafford said. The footage appears to show at least 16 dolphins. READ MORE: * Dolphin advocates say Government's proposed protections are fundamentally flawed * 'It's right in the middle of their hood': Dolphin researcher fearful old dumpsite could spell disaster for Hector's * DOC proposal could cut red tape to building cycle trails on conservation land Trafford said he technically broke drone-use rules when he got the footage, but the Department Of Conservation had since given him the OK because the department would use the footage to enhance its artificial technology work.

A major challenge in embedding or visualizing clinical patient data is the heterogeneity of variable types including continuous lab values, categorical diagnostic codes, as well as missing or incomplete data. In particular, in EHR data, some variables are {\em missing not at random (MNAR)} but deliberately not collected and thus are a source of information. For example, lab tests may be deemed necessary for some patients on the basis of suspected diagnosis, but not for others. Here we present the MURAL forest -- an unsupervised random forest for representing data with disparate variable types (e.g., categorical, continuous, MNAR). MURAL forests consist of a set of decision trees where node-splitting variables are chosen at random, such that the marginal entropy of all other variables is minimized by the split. This allows us to also split on MNAR variables and discrete variables in a way that is consistent with the continuous variables. The end goal is to learn the MURAL embedding of patients using average tree distances between those patients. These distances can be fed to nonlinear dimensionality reduction method like PHATE to derive visualizable embeddings. While such methods are ubiquitous in continuous-valued datasets (like single cell RNA-sequencing) they have not been used extensively in mixed variable data. We showcase the use of our method on one artificial and two clinical datasets. We show that using our approach, we can visualize and classify data more accurately than competing approaches. Finally, we show that MURAL can also be used to compare cohorts of patients via the recently proposed tree-sliced Wasserstein distances.

Our homes and offices are only as solid as the ground beneath them. When that solid ground turns to liquid--as sometimes happens during earthquakes--it can topple buildings and bridges. This phenomenon is known as liquefaction, and it was a major feature of the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a magnitude 6.3 quake that killed 185 people and destroyed thousands of homes. An upside of the Christchurch quake was that it was one of the most well-documented in history. Because New Zealand is seismically active, the city was instrumented with numerous sensors for monitoring earthquakes.

Andy Cockburn (andy.cockburn@canterbury.ac.nz) is a professor at the University of Cantebury, Christchurch, New Zealand, where he is head of the HCI and Multimedia Lab. Pierre Dragicevic is a research scientist at Inria, Orsay, France.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 31 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com New Zealand has banned an "abhorrent" video game that the country's chief censor said glorifies the mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch that killed 51 worshipers last March, according to a report. Chief Censor David Shanks said in a statement that the creators of the game set out to "produce and sell a game designed to place the player in the role of a white supremacist terrorist killer." He classified the game as objectionable, adding that in the game "anyone who isn't a white heterosexual male is a target for simply existing," Reuters reported.

At a conference at the Vatican last week, Pope Francis warned a group of Silicon Valley execs that in the wrong hands, artificial intelligence could have devastating consequences for humanity. "If mankind's so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest," he said, according to Reuters. The development of advanced AI can "raise increasingly significant implications in all areas of human activity," the Pope said. He also called for "open and concrete discussions" to develop "both theoretical and practical moral principles." The conference also grappled with the March 2019 attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, and how social media platforms helped spread footage taken during the shootings, according to TIME.

But it also provides "live video broadcasting of brutal killings", he continued, citing the recent attack in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, where dozens of Muslim worshippers were killed by a self-avowed white supremacist. "This is done in order to spread fear and split society", maintained the UNOCT chief, warning of more serious developments, such as attempts by terrorists to create home-made biological weapons. He pointed out that terrorists have the capacity to use drones to deliver chemical, biological or radiological materials, which Mr. Voronkov said, "are even hard to imagine." But the international community is "not sitting idly by", he stressed, noting that developments in this area allow the processing and identification of key information, which can counter terrorist operations with lightning speed. "The Internet content of terrorists is detected and deleted faster than ever", elaborated the UNOCT chief.

The rise in online hate speech and the way it is reflected in the offline world is a hot topic in politics right now. The internet has given everyone a voice, which clearly has positive implications for the way citizens can publicly challenge authority and debate issues. It's fairly commonly assumed that this form of hate speech, particularly when encountered alongside other factors such as social deprivation or mental illness, has the potential to radicalize individuals in dangerous ways, and inspire them to commit illegal and violent acts. Just as terrorist organizations like ISIS can be seen using hate speech in videos and propaganda material intended to incite violence, racist and anti-Islamic material is thought to have inspired killers like Anders Breivik, who killed 69 youths in a 2011 shooting spree, and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting in which 51 died. So far these links between online and real-world actions, though common sense tells us they are likely to exist, have been difficult to prove scientifically.

Following the attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, social media companies have once again come under growing pressure to "do …