South America
Ukraine's soldiers react to US peace plan with defiance, anger and resignation
'No one will support it': Ukraine's soldiers react to US peace plan Ukraine's frontline soldiers have reacted to draft US peace proposals with a mixture of defiance, anger and resignation. The BBC spoke to half a dozen who sent us their views via social media and email in response to the original US plan - details of which were leaked last week. Since then, American and Ukrainian negotiators have been working on changes to the proposals - and are set to continue talks about the peace framework. Of the original US plan, Yaroslav, in eastern Ukraine, says it sucks no one will support it while an army medic with the call sign Shtutser dismissed it as an absolutely disgraceful draft of a peace plan, unworthy of our attention. But one soldier with the call sign Snake told us it's time to agree at least on something.
Machu Picchu hit by a row over tourist buses
Machu Picchu, the remains of a 15th Century Inca city, is Peru's most popular tourist destination, and a Unesco world heritage site. Yet a continuing dispute over the buses that take visitors up to the mountain-top site recently saw some 1,400 stranded tourists needing to be evacuated. Cristian Alberto Caballero Chacón is head of operations for bus company Consettur, which for the past 30 years has transported some 4,500 people every day to Machu Picchu from the local town of Aguas Calientes. It is a 20-minute journey, and the only alternative is an arduous, steep, two-hour walk. He admits that in the past few months there have been some conflicts between people from different communities here.
The use of vocal biomarkers in the detection of Parkinson's disease: a robust statistical performance comparison of classic machine learning models
Sacramento, Katia Pires Nascimento do, Garcia, Elliot Q. C., Vilela, Nicéias Silva, Sacramento, Vinicius P., Ferreira, Tiago A. E.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that, in addition to directly impairing functional mobility, is frequently associated with vocal impairments such as hypophonia and dysarthria, which typically manifest in the early stages. The use of vocal biomarkers to support the early diagnosis of PD presents a non-invasive, low-cost, and accessible alternative in clinical settings. Thus, the objective of this cross-sectional study was to consistently evaluate the effectiveness of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) in distinguishing individuals with Parkinson's disease from healthy controls, in comparison with traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods, using vocal biomarkers. Two publicly available voice datasets were used. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) were extracted from the samples, and model robustness was assessed using a validation strategy with 1000 independent random executions. Performance was evaluated using classification statistics. Since normality assumptions were not satisfied, non-parametric tests (Kruskal-Wallis and Bonferroni post-hoc tests) were applied to verify whether the tested classification models were similar or different in the classification of PD. With an average accuracy of $98.65\%$ and $92.11\%$ on the Italian Voice dataset and Parkinson's Telemonitoring dataset, respectively, the DNN demonstrated superior performance and efficiency compared to traditional ML models, while also achieving competitive results when benchmarked against relevant studies. Overall, this study confirms the efficiency of DNNs and emphasizes their potential to provide greater accuracy and reliability for the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases using voice-based biomarkers.
Rubio hails 'tremendous progress' at Ukraine peace talks
Rubio hails'tremendous progress' at Ukraine peace talks A tremendous amount of progress has been achieved in talks to finalise a US-proposed peace plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said. But there's still some work to be done, Rubio said after meeting Ukrainian and European negotiators in Geneva, Switzerland. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said there were signals that President [Donald] Trump's team is hearing us. Ukraine and its European allies had expressed concern over the leaked proposals, seen as favouring Russia and welcomed by Vladimir Putin as the basis for settlement. Zelensky had said Ukraine might face a very difficult choice: either losing dignity, or risk losing a key partner.
How can you tell if your new favourite artist is a real person?
How can you tell if your new favourite artist is a real person? There's a new song doing the rounds, and in the immortal words of Kylie Minogue, you just can't get it out of your head. But what if it was created by a robot, or the artist themself is a product of artificial intelligence (AI)? Do streaming sites have an obligation to label music as AI-generated? And does it even matter, if you like what you hear?
Dynamic Revenue Sharing
Many online platforms act as intermediaries between a seller and a set of buyers. Examples of such settings include online retailers (such as Ebay) selling items on behalf of sellers to buyers, or advertising exchanges (such as AdX) selling pageviews on behalf of publishers to advertisers. In such settings, revenue sharing is a central part of running such a marketplace for the intermediary, and fixed-percentage revenue sharing schemes are often used to split the revenue among the platform and the sellers. In particular, such revenue sharing schemes require the platform to (i) take at most a constant fraction \alpha of the revenue from auctions and (ii) pay the seller at least the seller declared opportunity cost c for each item sold. A straightforward way to satisfy the constraints is to set a reserve price at c / (1 - \alpha) for each item, but it is not the optimal solution on maximizing the profit of the intermediary.