Media
California rattled by rapid succession of earthquakes with shaking felt hundreds of miles from epicenter
Leaked recording reveals Campbell's exec's sickening remarks about iconic soup's ingredients How Lauren Sanchez would REALLY look if she'd never had rumored plastic surgery Trump's losing control... MAGA's imploding... and White House insiders tell me why they're REALLY worried: ANDREW NEIL Billionaire family posts VERY unusual obituary after heir, 40, met violent end at $2.8m hunting lodge following marriage scandal These women have lost as much as nine stone WITHOUT jabs: Now they reveal secret to their stunning success, the extraordinary event that brought them together and how it's changed their lives... Judge throws out Comey and James cases as Trump's beauty queen prosecutor is humiliated Her moving videos about the handsome boyfriend who ghosted her went viral and catapulted her to overnight fame. Kate Gosselin's ex Jon is seen at his splashy wedding for the first time as son Collin weighs in on his siblings not attending Fugitive'Slender Man' stabber Morgan Geyser snapped'just Google me' when asked for ID by cops who found her with MUCH older lover It all seems to be falling apart now! Pete Hegseth drops hammer on Democrat senator in'sedition' storm as court martial looms after Trump's execution threat Sabrina Carpenter looks unrecognisable in throwback snap from seven years ago as fans call her rebranding'wild' Neuralink's'Patient 4' feared missing months after getting revolutionary brain chip... now his wife tells the REAL heartbreaking story NFL's first transgender cheerleader makes explosive allegation against Carolina Panthers Slash your cholesterol by a third in just a month... hundreds of thousands are on a new diet that's transforming lives. California was shaken early Monday as a series of earthquakes struck in quick succession, raising concern in the seismically active region. At least seven tremors have been reported, ranging in magnitude from 1.1 to 4.1, with the epicenter near The Geysers.
Inside the world's longest underwater cave: Subterranean water 'web' in Mexico extends at least 325 MILES
Leaked recording reveals Campbell's exec's sickening remarks about iconic soup's ingredients How Lauren Sanchez would REALLY look if she'd never had rumored plastic surgery Trump's losing control... MAGA's imploding... and White House insiders tell me why they're REALLY worried: ANDREW NEIL Billionaire family posts VERY unusual obituary after heir, 40, met violent end at $2.8m hunting lodge following marriage scandal These women have lost as much as nine stone WITHOUT jabs: Now they reveal secret to their stunning success, the extraordinary event that brought them together and how it's changed their lives... Judge throws out Comey and James cases as Trump's beauty queen prosecutor is humiliated Her moving videos about the handsome boyfriend who ghosted her went viral and catapulted her to overnight fame. Kate Gosselin's ex Jon is seen at his splashy wedding for the first time as son Collin weighs in on his siblings not attending Fugitive'Slender Man' stabber Morgan Geyser snapped'just Google me' when asked for ID by cops who found her with MUCH older lover It all seems to be falling apart now! Pete Hegseth drops hammer on Democrat senator in'sedition' storm as court martial looms after Trump's execution threat Sabrina Carpenter looks unrecognisable in throwback snap from seven years ago as fans call her rebranding'wild' Neuralink's'Patient 4' feared missing months after getting revolutionary brain chip... now his wife tells the REAL heartbreaking story NFL's first transgender cheerleader makes explosive allegation against Carolina Panthers Slash your cholesterol by a third in just a month... hundreds of thousands are on a new diet that's transforming lives. Inside the world's longest underwater cave: Subterranean water'web' in Mexico extends at least 325 MILES Beneath the idyllic resort towns of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, daring explorers have uncovered a hidden world of grand chambers and twisting tunnels. The Ox Bel Ha, Mayan for'Three Paths of Water', is a sprawling water'web' that makes up the world's longest underwater cave system.
The Hard-Left Shooters Leading a Gun Culture Revolution
Earlier this year, I attended a shooting competition for queer, often trans, very online misfits. Then Charlie Kirk was killed. This isn't the story I set out to write. I was going to talk about a pretty feel-good firearms competition I went to earlier this year, where trans and queer people made up about a quarter of participants and the unofficial rule was you're not allowed to be a bigot. I was going to describe the strange and whimsical mix of subcultures people embraced there--like polyamory and Mad Max cosplay--wrapped up in pro-LGBT and Black Lives Matter patches. Then Charlie Kirk was killed. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should write this story at all. If doing so would put my sources--gun-loving trans people in Trump's America--in danger.
In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended
Megalithic monuments in the otherworldly Orkney Islands remain a fundamental part of the landscape. Sheep linger at the Stones of Stenness, the remnants of a ceremonial circle. The Stones of Stenness, a brood of lichen-encrusted megaliths in the far north of the British Isles, could be mistaken for a latter-day work of land art, one with ominous overtones. The stones stand between two lochs on the largest of the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern tip of mainland Scotland. Three colossal planks of sandstone, ranging in height from fifteen feet nine inches to eighteen feet eight inches, rise from the grass, along with a smaller stone that has the bent shape of a boomerang. In contrast to the rectilinear blocks at Stonehenge, the Stenness megaliths are thin slabs with angled upper edges, like upside-down guillotine blades. Remnants of a ceremonial circle, they are placed twenty or more feet apart, creating a chasm of negative space. The monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" inevitably come to mind. Given that the stones were erected five thousand years ago by a culture that left no trace of its belief system, it is unwise to project modern aesthetics onto them. Still, they can be seen only with living eyes. During a recent visit to Orkney, I kept returning to Stenness, at all hours and in all weather. On drizzly days, with skies hanging low, the stones resemble ladders to nowhere. In bright sun, hidden colors emerge: streaks of blue against gray; white and green spatters of lichen; yellowish stains indicating the presence of limonite, an iron ore. Pockmarks and brittle edges show the abrading action of millennia of wind and rain. I watched as tourists approached the stones and hesitantly touched them, as if afraid. When I put my own hands on the rock, I felt no obvious emanations, though I did not feel nothing. One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky.
Kurtis Blow, Still Blowing
After the rapper's 1979 hit "Christmas Rappin'," his song "The Breaks" was the first rap single to go gold. In a rehearsal studio in the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, Kurtis Blow was limbering up and getting loose. Earlier this year, his left arm swelled up abruptly, requiring four surgeries to resolve what was eventually diagnosed as deep-vein thrombosis. Blow usually holds the mike in his right hand when he raps, but he had to get his left arm going, he said, "because it's my'Throw your hands in the air' arm." Lithe at age sixty-six, Blow was dressed in leather cargo pants, a track jacket, and a black baseball cap with the words " above its brim. He was whipping himself into shape for a "Legends of Hip-Hop" concert to be held just after Thanksgiving at the Peacock Theatre, in downtown L.A. He will be on a stage that will also feature such foundational rappers as Big Daddy Kane, Doug E. Fresh, and two members of the Furious Five, Melle Mel and Scorpio. Blow's youngest son, Michael, the studio's owner, manned the d.j. The rapper's eldest, Kurtis, Jr., nodded his do-ragged head to the beat and offered counsel alongside his mother, Kurtis, Sr.,'s wife of forty-two years, Shirley. It has been forty-five years since the release of Blow's song "The Breaks," the first rap single to be certified gold. Blow had already scored a novelty hit, "Christmas Rappin'," at the end of 1979, the watershed year in which rap transitioned from clubs in the Bronx and Harlem to singles pressed on vinyl, chief among them "Rapper's Delight," by the Sugarhill Gang. "I had a singles deal with escalating options," Blow recalled. "I had to sell thirty thousand records in order to do another single.
Sinister patterns in Epstein's emails DECODED: Secret confidants... guru-like advice... and how he reacted as the walls closed in
It all seems to be falling apart now! Cunning new tactic women are using to cheat. Trump delivers savage parting shot to'lowlifes' MTG and Thomas Massie while declaring GOP has'never been so united' Gavin Newsom's inner circle on edge as multiple aides receive ominous letter from FBI just days after California governor's chief of staff was indicted Experts discover there are EIGHT different types of long Covid... do you have any of them? Full House's Jodie Sweetin reveals how addiction struggle began at 14 at costar Candace Cameron Bure's wedding Fans turn on RichTok influencer Becca Bloom over shocking comments... as she makes stunning admission about her marriage and her wild extravagance is revealed Morgan was searching for her soulmate in church... then she uncovered the sinister underbelly of Christian dating in MAGA America. Rich moms of Manhattan go to WAR: Innocent comment plunges gilded zip code into anarchy... and everyone's looking over their shoulder Two Texas men's twisted fantasy to recruit homeless to invade remote island, kill its inhabitants and ravage their women WANTED: One VERY tolerant Lady! Picky aristocrat, 79, launches bid to find a wife.
Cate Blanchett among BBC Radio 4 festive guest editors
Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and former prime minister Baroness Theresa May are among the six public figures who will guest edit BBC Radio 4's Today programme over the Christmas period. Broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, historian and podcaster Tom Holland, inventor Sir James Dyson and Microsoft's head of artificial intelligence (AI) Mustafa Suleyman will also guest edit shows between 24 December and 31 December. For the past 22 years, the news programme has handed over the editorial reins to guest editors during the festive period. Owenna Griffiths, editor of Today, said: In a rapidly changing world, this year's guest editors will help bring illumination and understanding. She added: Every Christmas on Today, a new set of guest editors take up residence and bring with them a wonderful range of new stories, fresh ideas and, hopefully, a sprinkling of joy.
MusicAIR: A Multimodal AI Music Generation Framework Powered by an Algorithm-Driven Core
Liao, Callie C., Liao, Duoduo, Zhang, Ellie L.
Recent advances in generative AI have made music generation a prominent research focus. However, many neural-based models rely on large datasets, raising concerns about copyright infringement and high-performance costs. In contrast, we propose MusicAIR, an innovative multimodal AI music generation framework powered by a novel algorithm-driven symbolic music core, effectively mitigating copyright infringement risks. The music core algorithms connect critical lyrical and rhythmic information to automatically derive musical features, creating a complete, coherent melodic score solely from the lyrics. The MusicAIR framework facilitates music generation from lyrics, text, and images. The generated score adheres to established principles of music theory, lyrical structure, and rhythmic conventions. We developed Generate AI Music (GenAIM), a web tool using MusicAIR for lyric-to-song, text-to-music, and image-to-music generation. In our experiments, we evaluated AI-generated music scores produced by the system using both standard music metrics and innovative analysis that compares these compositions with original works. The system achieves an average key confidence of 85%, outperforming human composers at 79%, and aligns closely with established music theory standards, demonstrating its ability to generate diverse, human-like compositions. As a co-pilot tool, GenAIM can serve as a reliable music composition assistant and a possible educational composition tutor while simultaneously lowering the entry barrier for all aspiring musicians, which is innovative and significantly contributes to AI for music generation.
The PLLuM Instruction Corpus
Pęzik, Piotr, Żarnecki, Filip, Kaczyński, Konrad, Cichosz, Anna, Deckert, Zuzanna, Garnys, Monika, Grabarczyk, Izabela, Janowski, Wojciech, Karasińska, Sylwia, Kujawiak, Aleksandra, Misztela, Piotr, Szymańska, Maria, Walkusz, Karolina, Siek, Igor, Chrabąszcz, Maciej, Kołos, Anna, Karlińska, Agnieszka, Seweryn, Karolina, Krasnodębska, Aleksandra, Betscher, Paula, Cieślińska, Zofia, Kowol, Katarzyna, Wilczek, Artur, Trzciński, Maciej, Dziewulska, Katarzyna, Roszko, Roman, Bernaś, Tomasz, Vaičenonienė, Jurgita, Roszko, Danuta, Levchuk, Paweł, Kowalski, Paweł, Prawdzic-Jankowska, Irena, Kozłowski, Marek, Dadas, Sławomir, Poświata, Rafał, Wróblewska, Alina, Krasnowska-Kieraś, Katarzyna, Ogrodniczuk, Maciej, Rudolf, Michał, Rybak, Piotr, Saputa, Karolina, Wołoszyn, Joanna, Oleksy, Marcin, Koptyra, Bartłomiej, Ferdinan, Teddy, Woźniak, Stanisław, Piasecki, Maciej, Walkowiak, Paweł, Wojtasik, Konrad, Janz, Arkadiusz, Kazienko, Przemysław, Moska, Julia, Kocoń, Jan
This paper describes the instruction dataset used to fine-tune a set of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) developed in the PLLuM (Polish Large Language Model) project. We present a functional typology of the organic, converted, and synthetic instructions used in PLLuM and share some observations about the implications of using human-authored versus synthetic instruction datasets in the linguistic adaptation of base LLMs. Additionally, we release the first representative subset of the PLLuM instruction corpus (PLLuMIC), which we believe to be useful in guiding and planning the development of similar datasets for other LLMs.