Media
'Tiger King' star Jeff Lowe claims Carol Baskin, husband Howard were spying on his property with drones
Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. Jeff Lowe claims Carole Baskin and her husband Howard Baskin have been snooping on him utilizing drone technology. The owner of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma alleged to TMZ on Tuesday that he called local police to report some activity at his plot in Thackerville after his son supposedly spotted a drone flying high above the property. The "Tiger King" star further claims that when he went to confront a film crew that appeared to be filming, Baskin and Howard bolted and Lowe ended up in a scuffle with one of his neighbors, who was allegedly with the film crew.
'Citizen Kane' loses perfect Rotten Tomatoes score after addition of 80-year-old review
Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. "Citizen Kane" has lost its edge. The 1941 movie directed by Orson Welles is known as one of the best films in history, and until very recently, held a 100% Fresh score on popular movie review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. However, the website recently added an 80-year-old review of the movie to its already-compiled collection that dropped the score to 99%.
IDMT-Traffic: An Open Benchmark Dataset for Acoustic Traffic Monitoring Research
Abeßer, Jakob, Gourishetti, Saichand, Kátai, András, Clauß, Tobias, Sharma, Prachi, Liebetrau, Judith
In many urban areas, traffic load and noise pollution are constantly increasing. Automated systems for traffic monitoring are promising countermeasures, which allow to systematically quantify and predict local traffic flow in order to to support municipal traffic planning decisions. In this paper, we present a novel open benchmark dataset, containing 2.5 hours of stereo audio recordings of 4718 vehicle passing events captured with both high-quality sE8 and medium-quality MEMS microphones. This dataset is well suited to evaluate the use-case of deploying audio classification algorithms to embedded sensor devices with restricted microphone quality and hardware processing power. In addition, this paper provides a detailed review of recent acoustic traffic monitoring (ATM) algorithms as well as the results of two benchmark experiments on vehicle type classification and direction of movement estimation using four state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures.
BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models
Thakur, Nandan, Reimers, Nils, Rücklé, Andreas, Srivastava, Abhishek, Gurevych, Iryna
Neural IR models have often been studied in homogeneous and narrow settings, which has considerably limited insights into their generalization capabilities. To address this, and to allow researchers to more broadly establish the effectiveness of their models, we introduce BEIR (Benchmarking IR), a heterogeneous benchmark for information retrieval. We leverage a careful selection of 17 datasets for evaluation spanning diverse retrieval tasks including open-domain datasets as well as narrow expert domains. We study the effectiveness of nine state-of-the-art retrieval models in a zero-shot evaluation setup on BEIR, finding that performing well consistently across all datasets is challenging. Our results show BM25 is a robust baseline and Reranking-based models overall achieve the best zero-shot performances, however, at high computational costs. In contrast, Dense-retrieval models are computationally more efficient but often underperform other approaches, highlighting the considerable room for improvement in their generalization capabilities. In this work, we extensively analyze different retrieval models and provide several suggestions that we believe may be useful for future work. BEIR datasets and code are available at https://github.com/UKPLab/beir.
Announcing the AWS DeepComposer Chartbusters challenges 2021 season launch
Chartbusters is a global challenge in which developers use AWS DeepComposer to create original compositions and compete in monthly challenges to showcase their machine learning (ML) and generative artificial intelligence (AI) skills. Regardless of your background in music or ML, one of the two new challenges will be right for you. You can choose between two different challenges this season. In the basic challenge, Melody-Go-Round, you can use any of the generative AI models available in the AWS DeepComposer Music studio to create new compositions. In the advanced challenge, Melody Harvest, you train a custom generative AI model with your own dataset using Amazon SageMaker.
Netflix's Latest Hit Continues an Argument Sci-Fi Fans Have Been Having for Decades
Embedded in the narrative DNA of the new Netflix movie Stowaway is one of the most iconic and controversial science-fiction short stories ever published, "The Cold Equations," by Tom Godwin. Like "The Cold Equations," Stowaway is the story of a spaceship journey that hits a snag when an additional passenger is discovered onboard. The ship can't complete its trip with the extra drain on its resources, so somebody has to go out the airlock. "The Cold Equations" first appeared in the August 1954 edition of Astounding magazine, whose editor, John W. Campbell Jr., played a major role in defining the genre of "hard science fiction"--that is, stories fundamentally concerned with the accurate depiction of science and technology. According to legend, Campbell sent the story back to Godwin several times because the author kept trying to find a way for the characters to wriggle out of the story's central dilemma and achieve a happy ending.
Reviewing every 'Mortal Kombat' character in the new movie
McNamee's portrayal is probably the furthest from the original Sonya, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining. Unlike the rest of the cast, Sonya is the only one who has to "earn" her powers. Is it a commentary on gender inequality? The movie at least retains the original character's central conflict with Kano, her mortal enemy. Their backstory is much different here, but they eventually clash, and it makes for one of the more personal fights of the film.
'Hey Spotify, play Up First:' Two weeks with Car Thing
After years of rumors, confirmation and vague descriptions, Spotify has finally made its first piece of hardware available to select users. Even though the company revealed the full details on Car Thing earlier this month, it's only a "limited release" right now. I've spent two weeks with Car Thing in my car (obviously), and can tell you one thing -- this dedicated Spotify player is really more of a controller for the app on your phone. Spotify first tipped its hand on an in-car music player in 2018. It offered a few Reddit users the opportunity to try a compact device that reportedly featured voice control and 4G connectivity.