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The island paradise that claims to house the Ark of the Covenant

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Hollywood icon who starred in Psycho after Hitchcock dubbed her'my new Grace Kelly' looks incredible at 95 Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Tucker Carlson erupts at Trump adviser as she hurls'SLANDER' claim linking him to synagogue shooting Ben Affleck'scores $600m deal' with Netflix to sell his AI film start-up Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' For centuries, the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred gold-plated chest said to contain the Ten Commandments, has been one of the greatest mysteries in religious history. The object, which once symbolized God's presence among the Israelites, vanished from the historical record more than 2,500 years ago, sparking endless debate about where it may have been taken. Some believers claim it was hidden in Ethiopia .


How uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade

MIT Technology Review

Fast, stealthy, and cheap--autonomous, semisubmersible drone boats carrying tons of cocaine could be international law enforcement's nightmare scenario. A big one just came ashore. Colombian military officials intercepted this 40-foot-long uncrewed fiberglass "narco sub" in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a "narco sub," a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The plane's crew radioed it in, and eventually nearby coast guard boats got the order, routine but urgent: Intercept. In Cartagena, about 150 miles from the action, Captain Jaime González Zamudio, commander of the regional coast guard group, sat down at his desk to watch what happened next.



Unlocking the Potential of Global Human Expertise

Neural Information Processing Systems

For example, in the Pandemic Response Challenge experiment, the context consisted of data about the geographic region for which the predictions were made, e.g., historical data of COVID-19 cases and intervention policies; actions were future schedules of intervention policies for the region; and outcomes were predicted future cases of COVID-19 along with the stringency


BabyHuBERT: Multilingual Self-Supervised Learning for Segmenting Speakers in Child-Centered Long-Form Recordings

Charlot, Théo, Kunze, Tarek, Poli, Maxime, Cristia, Alejandrina, Dupoux, Emmanuel, Lavechin, Marvin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Child-centered long-form recordings are essential for studying early language development, but existing speech models trained on clean adult data perform poorly due to acoustic and linguistic differences. We introduce BabyHuBERT, the first self-supervised speech representation model trained on 13,000 hours of multilingual child-centered long-form recordings spanning over 40 languages. We evaluate BabyHuBERT on speaker segmentation, identifying when target children speak versus female adults, male adults, or other children -- a fundamental preprocessing step for analyzing naturalistic language experiences. BabyHuBERT achieves F1-scores from 52.1% to 74.4% across six diverse datasets, consistently outperforming W2V2-LL4300 (trained on English long-forms) and standard HuBERT (trained on clean adult speech). Notable improvements include 13.2 absolute F1 points over HuBERT on Vanuatu and 15.9 points on Solomon Islands corpora, demonstrating effectiveness on underrepresented languages. By sharing code and models, BabyHuBERT serves as a foundation model for child speech research, enabling fine-tuning on diverse downstream tasks.


13 World War II shipwrecks captured in stunning detail

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Judging by newly released photos and video, the crew aboard Ocean Exploration Trust's Nautilus research vessel had an extremely productive summer trip to the South Pacific. Over 22 days, the team completed detailed archaeological surveys of more than a dozen shipwrecks sunk amid the Solomon Islands campaign during World War II. In addition to imaging four of them for the first time, experts guided remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) towards the rediscovery of two long-lost vessels:the separated bow from the USS New Orleans as well as the Imperial Japanese Naval destroyer Teruzuki. Although researchers originally spotted some of these shipwrecks more than 34 years ago, Ocean Exploration Trust president Robert Ballard explained that the most recent trip to Iron Bottom Sound provided opportunities to document their finds using a new generation of technology including high-definition survey cameras, underwater vehicles, and imaging tools aboard the EV Nautilus.


Lost in Cultural Translation: Do LLMs Struggle with Math Across Cultural Contexts?

Karim, Aabid, Karim, Abdul, Lohana, Bhoomika, Keon, Matt, Singh, Jaswinder, Sattar, Abdul

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various fields, particularly coding, mathematical reasoning, and logical problem solving. However, a critical question remains: Do these mathematical reasoning abilities persist when LLMs are presented with culturally adapted math problems? Specifically, how do LLMs perform when faced with math problems embedded in cultural contexts that have no significant representation in main stream web-scale AI training data? To explore this, we generated six synthetic cultural datasets from GSM8K, a widely used benchmark for assessing LLMs' mathematical reasoning skills. While preserving the mathematical logic and numerical values of the original GSM8K test set, we modify cultural elements such as personal names, food items, place names, etc. These culturally adapted datasets provide a more reliable framework for evaluating LLMs' mathematical reasoning under shifting cultural contexts. Our findings reveal that LLMs struggle with math problems when cultural references change, even though the underlying mathematical structure remains constant. Smaller models exhibit greater performance drops compared to larger models. Interestingly, our results also suggest that cultural familiarity can enhance mathematical reasoning. Even models with no explicit mathematical training but exposure to relevant cultural contexts sometimes outperform larger, mathematically proficient models on culturally embedded math problems. This study highlights the impact of cultural context on the mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs, underscoring the need for more diverse and representative training data to improve robustness in real-world applications. The benchmark data sets and script for reproducing the results are available at https://github.com/akarim23131/Lost_in_Cultural_Translation


Chasing the Timber Trail: Machine Learning to Reveal Harvest Location Misrepresentation

Sarkar, Shailik, Yousuf, Raquib Bin, Wang, Linhan, Mayer, Brian, Mortier, Thomas, Deklerck, Victor, Truszkowski, Jakub, Simeone, John C., Norman, Marigold, Saunders, Jade, Lu, Chang-Tien, Ramakrishnan, Naren

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Illegal logging poses a significant threat to global biodiversity, climate stability, and depresses international prices for legal wood harvesting and responsible forest products trade, affecting livelihoods and communities across the globe. Stable isotope ratio analysis (SIRA) is rapidly becoming an important tool for determining the harvest location of traded, organic, products. The spatial pattern in stable isotope ratio values depends on factors such as atmospheric and environmental conditions and can thus be used for geographic origin identification. We present here the results of a deployed machine learning pipeline where we leverage both isotope values and atmospheric variables to determine timber harvest location. Additionally, the pipeline incorporates uncertainty estimation to facilitate the interpretation of harvest location determination for analysts. We present our experiments on a collection of oak (Quercus spp.) tree samples from its global range. Our pipeline outperforms comparable state-of-the-art models determining geographic harvest origin of commercially traded wood products, and has been used by European enforcement agencies to identify harvest location misrepresentation. We also identify opportunities for further advancement of our framework and how it can be generalized to help identify the origin of falsely labeled organic products throughout the supply chain.


Optimizing Product Provenance Verification using Data Valuation Methods

Yousuf, Raquib Bin, Just, Hoang Anh, Xu, Shengzhe, Mayer, Brian, Deklerck, Victor, Truszkowski, Jakub, Simeone, John C., Saunders, Jade, Lu, Chang-Tien, Jia, Ruoxi, Ramakrishnan, Naren

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Determining and Determining and verifying product provenance remains a critical verifying product provenance is a challenge in global supply chains, challenge in global supply chains, particularly as geopolitical conflicts as geopolitics and the lure of "don't ask, don't tell" with respect to and shifting borders create new incentives for misrepresentation the ecological and social cost creates incentives for misrepresentation of commodities, such as hiding the origin of illegally harvested of commodities, such as hiding the origin of illegally harvested timber or agriculture grown on illegally cleared land. Stable Isotope timber or agriculture grown on illegally cleared land. Ratio Analysis (SIRA), combined with Gaussian process regressionbased Product identification and provenance verification of traded natural isoscapes, has emerged as a powerful tool for geographic resources have emerged as promising research areas, with origin verification. However, the effectiveness of these models is often various combinations of methods used based on the specific natural constrained by data scarcity and suboptimal dataset selection. In resource sector and the level of granularity of species identification this work, we introduce a novel data valuation framework designed and origin-provenance determination. For example, for wood and to enhance the selection and utilization of training data for machine forest products, determining species identification and geographic learning models applied in SIRA. By prioritizing high-informative harvest provenance requires utilizing multiple testing methods and samples, our approach improves model robustness and predictive tools [5, 8, 20].


A Rapid Test for Accuracy and Bias of Face Recognition Technology

Knott, Manuel, Serna, Ignacio, Mann, Ethan, Perona, Pietro

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Measuring the accuracy of face recognition (FR) systems is essential for improving performance and ensuring responsible use. Accuracy is typically estimated using large annotated datasets, which are costly and difficult to obtain. We propose a novel method for 1:1 face verification that benchmarks FR systems quickly and without manual annotation, starting from approximate labels (e.g., from web search results). Unlike previous methods for training set label cleaning, ours leverages the embedding representation of the models being evaluated, achieving high accuracy in smaller-sized test datasets. Our approach reliably estimates FR accuracy and ranking, significantly reducing the time and cost of manual labeling. We also introduce the first public benchmark of five FR cloud services, revealing demographic biases, particularly lower accuracy for Asian women. Our rapid test method can democratize FR testing, promoting scrutiny and responsible use of the technology.