Our columnist on digital culture suggests technology--or anti-technology technology--to give this holiday season. We are entering a Surrealist phase of personal technology. Any device you might imagine can be found online courtesy of an obscure Chinese factory, ready to be shipped out for a loved one's holiday enjoyment: pocket-size artificial-intelligence gizmos ( Rabbit r1, $199), in-home hologram machines (Code 27 Character Livehouse, $558), human-size robot servants ( 1X NEO, $20,000). The components of tech have become better and cheaper, from microchips to speakers and screens (have you seen how cheap a good TV is these days?), enabling out-there innovation. On the consumer side, we are bored of rote device designs; we've seen a dozen models of iPhone and crave something refreshingly different.

Cross-frequency transfer learning (CFTL) has emerged as a popular framework for curating large-scale time series datasets to pre-train foundation forecasting models (FFMs). Although CFTL has shown promise, current benchmarking practices fall short of accurately assessing its performance. This shortcoming stems from many factors: an over-reliance on small-scale evaluation datasets; inadequate treatment of sample size when computing summary statistics; reporting of suboptimal statistical models; and failing to account for non-negligible risks of overlap between pre-training and test datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce a unified reimplementation of widely-adopted neural forecasting networks, adapting them for the CFTL setup; we pre-train only on proprietary and synthetic data, being careful to prevent test leakage; and we evaluate on 15 large, diverse public forecast competition datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals that statistical models' accuracy is frequently underreported. Notably, we confirm that statistical models and their ensembles consistently outperform existing FFMs by more than 8.2% in sCRPS, and by more than 20% MASE, across datasets. However, we also find that synthetic dataset pre-training does improve the accuracy of a FFM by 7% percent.

Gear Home Smart Home These are the best Amazon Black Friday deals on smart home gear and they're live right now Whether you're just starting your smart home setup or upgrading your current gear, these Amazon deals are worth taking advantage of. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. If you're thinking about starting a smart home system or just existing your current smart home gear, Black Friday is a great time to do it. But, you don't have to wait for Black Friday proper. These early Black Friday Amazon deals are live right now and they include some of the lowest prices we have seen this year.

Gear Audio Speakers Get a JBL Dolby Atmos soundbar + subwoofer system for as little as $499 during Amazon's Early Black Friday sale Get immersive experiences at significant savings with JBL soundbar systems discounted up to 30% off. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. After all, company namesake James B. Lansing cemented his reputation for sound reinforcement helping develop the Shearer Horn cinema speaker system in the 1930s, followed by the Voice of the Theatre standard bearers in the 1940s. Cinema soundtracks have come a long way in a century, and so have JBL home theater products. It used to be that you needed separate components for surround systems .

Science Biology Humans sync their blinks and brain waves to a song's beat Our bodies react to music whether we want it to our not. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A good song can easily get a listener nodding their head or tapping their foot along to the beat. While you may not initially realize you're doing it, those physical responses to music are still conscious decisions that you can stop whenever you want. According to neuroscientists, however, music also has the ability to influence even some of our involuntary movements.

Pick up a new Meta headset,, and pocket a $50 gift card in the process. If you've been dreaming of getting into virtual reality but you've been holding out for a good deal, this may be your moment. I spotted a Meta Quest 3S bundle at Best Buy that not only knocks $50 off the normal price, but also includes and a $50 Best Buy digital gift card. That's quite the deal on a product that doesn't often see major discounts, and you can use that gift card to accessorize your new headset. Meta's lineup of stand-alone headsets has slowly improved over the last few years, with frequent updates adding functionality and growing the library of games.

From runaway robots to "sonic bombs," we reviewed offbeat alarm clocks designed to awaken even the heaviest sleepers. Not every alarm clock is created equal. Heavy sleepers know how easy it is to snooze through the overly genteel alarms on your phone. For people who can't get out of bed without a bigger jolt, extreme alarms have popped up in recent years--from relatively simple puzzle-alarm phone apps to alarms on wheels to alarms that shake the bed. Not only are these an innovative way to get chronic snoozers out of bed, but they can be great for those who are hard of hearing, utilizing different frequencies and pitches as well as movement through vibration.

Breville makes the best smart ovens and air fryers around and they're deeply discounted during these early Black Friday deals. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. I have't used my full-sized oven in years. I haven't had to because I have one of Breville's compact smart ovens on my counter and it can handle pretty much any cooking task my home can throw at it. Amazon's official Black Friday deals don't kick off until November 20th, but this early deal knocks $100 or more off of our favorite air fryer/smart oven .

Jeff Bezos has a unique set of management practices he used and espoused during his time as CEO of Amazon. Amazon founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos honed his leadership philosophy running one of the world's largest companies. Project Prometheus, which Bezos co-founded with scientist Vik Bajaj, will use AI to accelerate engineering and manufacturing in fields like aerospace and automobiles, the New York Times reported. The startup has $6.2 billion in funding, sourced in part from Bezos himself, and employees counted in the dozens, some of whom were poached from leading AI labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. As co-CEO with Bajaj, Bezos is back in a formal executive post for the first time since stepping down from Amazon in 2021.

The Newsvendor problem is a fundamental model in inventory management (Rossi, 2021) that accommodates both known (Dvoretzky et al., 1952a) and unknown (Dvoretzky et al., 1952b) demand distributions. Since its inception (Edgewort, 1888), it has been widely applied in inventory control and policy-making (Arrow et al., 1951), as well as various real-world situations (Choi, 2012; Chen et al., 2016). Its simplicity stems from considering a single product for sale, for which the optimal initial stock level must be determined to satisfy forecasted demand over a given period without restocking. The interplay among purchasing cost, selling price, and stock ordered at the beginning of the period determines the inventory management policies (Whitin, 1952; Rosenblatt, 1954; Petruzzi and Dada, 1999). The model has been extensively studied for single stock-keeping units (SKUs). Electronic marketplaces introduce an extra complication to the problem, as they need to manage a large number of SKUs at distribution centers alongside highly variable demand received through electronic platforms.