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You're reading your weather app wrong! Scientists reveal what a '30% chance of rain' REALLY means

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Meghan unveils new As Ever line with Lilibet... amid claims Netflix has been left with huge $10m surplus of her unsold products amid'split' with streamer Outrageous full story of scandalous affair that's the talk of Manhattan's exclusive private schools: Family insiders reveal humiliating sex secrets... shock'confession' letter... and the furious relative who exposed it all Sinister truth about explosive resignation of Trump's top counter-terror chief Joe Kent... and his shock claim Israel is manipulating the president: MARK HALPERIN Canada's ultimate revenge on Trump over tariffs gathers pace Ugly new Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban divorce fight ERUPTS: Her friends share humiliating details of'midlife crisis'... and reveal brutal REAL reason daughter Sunday Rose'snubbed' him Kim Kardashian takes a VERY dramatic tumble in towering $80 'stripper heels' and accidentally grabs an'old lady' as she falls on her way out of Vanity Fair Oscars party USA baseball stars slammed over'disgraceful' national anthem gesture before WBC final vs Venezuela Israel says Iran's intelligence chief has been killed in overnight airstrike in latest attack on regime: Live updates Presidential hopeful JB Pritzker's bold defiant bet against black caucus pays off Supreme Court's top judge issues chilling warning as Trump targets his own appointees Heath Ledger's lookalike daughter Matilda steps out days after 17 year anniversary of late actor's Oscar win Fox News anchor issues blistering takedown of liberal media's delusional take on Iran: 'A stalemate? I ditched my realtor and used ChatGPT to sell my Florida house instead. Here's my exact prompts and steps for you to do it too Hollywood's top insider makes VERY catty observation about Kaitlan Collins Everything JFK Jr told friends about his love affair with'sexual dynamo' Madonna... her unprintable pillow talk... and his perverse incest request that she couldn't go through with Mamdani forces New York beloved preschool to hike annual fee to $36,000... and parents are fuming Alix Earle stuns in white bikini in first glimpse at 2026 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition... after turning heads with Tom Brady and Joe Burrow Scientists reveal what a '30% chance of rain' REALLY means Are you always getting caught in the rain without an umbrella? If so, you might be reading your weather forecast app wrong. When many people see a '30% chance of rain' on their app, they think this corresponds to the heaviness of the downpour, or the area of land that will experience it.


A Quantum Leap for the Turing Award

WIRED

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard pioneered quantum information theory. Now they've been awarded the highest honor in computer science. Today it's widely acknowledged that the future of computing will involve the quantum realm . Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and a few well-funded startups are frantically building quantum computers and routinely claiming advances that seem to bring this exotic, world-changing technology within reach. In 1979 all of this was unthinkable.


Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces 'catastrophic' cuts

BBC News

Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces'catastrophic' cuts When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm in October 2013, the world was watching. Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century earlier, had predicted the existence of a particle believed to hold the cosmos together - the Higgs boson. The announcement, broadcast live from Sweden, was what many scientists had hoped for since a year earlier, when experiments at CERN had finally confirmed Higgs's theory by discovering the Higgs boson - hailed as one of the biggest discoveries in a generation. At the time Higgs, who has since passed away, said in a statement: I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research. Blue-sky research asks questions to understand the universe, rather than design new products.


What your WALK says about you: Study reveals how your swagger can reveal how you're really feeling

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Ugly new Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban divorce fight ERUPTS: Her friends share humiliating details of'midlife crisis'... and reveal brutal REAL reason daughter Sunday Rose'snubbed' him Supreme Court's top judge issues chilling warning as Trump targets his own appointees SARAH VINE: How telling that Meghan's joined the ranks of those peddling wellness and fake lifestyles to the gullible I moved my family OFF-GRID after a horrific series of events... now our tiny home saves us thousands each MONTH. We are richer and happier than ever. Here's how you can do it too Furious US troops erupt at CNN's $20m steak and lobster claims as grim photos expose reality Mother of cheating nurse shares horrific way daughter was killed after SUV sex... and shares heartbreaking details of her marriage to doctor Hollywood's top insider makes VERY catty observation about Kaitlan Collins CIA accused of'poisoning the sky' with toxins as files expose secret weather control agenda Mysterious'three-sided pyramid' similar to those in Egypt spotted on Mars in NASA footage Trump says he's'not afraid' of Vietnam-style ground combat in Iran I've always been embarrassed by my spotty skin. I'd tried every lotion and potion, until I found a science-backed plan that restored my skin's health and my confidence Alix Earle stuns in white bikini in first glimpse at 2026 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition... after turning heads with Tom Brady and Joe Burrow'We no longer need NATO': Trump sends shockwaves through Europe with ferocious attack on allies Everything JFK Jr told friends about his love affair with'sexual dynamo' Madonna... her unprintable pillow talk... and his perverse incest request that she couldn't go through with What your WALK says about you: Study reveals how your swagger can reveal how you're really feeling READ MORE: 'Tough guy' walk in western movies makes you look powerful A new study has revealed exactly what your walk says about you - whether it's a slow swagger or a peppy stride. Scientists from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan carried out several experiments as part of their study.


Learning and Inference in Hilbert Space with Quantum Graphical Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Quantum Graphical Models (QGMs) generalize classical graphical models by adopting the formalism for reasoning about uncertainty from quantum mechanics. Unlike classical graphical models, QGMs represent uncertainty with density matrices in complex Hilbert spaces. Hilbert space embeddings (HSEs) also generalize Bayesian inference in Hilbert spaces. We investigate the link between QGMs and HSEs and show that the sum rule and Bayes rule for QGMs are equivalent to the kernel sum rule in HSEs and a special case of Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression, respectively. We show that these operations can be kernelized, and use these insights to propose a Hilbert Space Embedding of Hidden Quantum Markov Models (HSE-HQMM) to model dynamics. We present experimental results showing that HSE-HQMMs are competitive with state-of-the-art models like LSTMs and PSRNNs on several datasets, while also providing a nonparametric method for maintaining a probability distribution over continuous-valued features.


NeuralFDR: Learning Discovery Thresholds from Hypothesis Features

Neural Information Processing Systems

As datasets grow richer, an important challenge is to leverage the full features in the data to maximize the number of useful discoveries while controlling for false positives. We address this problem in the context of multiple hypotheses testing, where for each hypothesis, we observe a p-value along with a set of features specific to that hypothesis. For example, in genetic association studies, each hypothesis tests the correlation between a variant and the trait. We have a rich set of features for each variant (e.g. its location, conservation, epigenetics etc.) which could inform how likely the variant is to have a true association. However popular testing approaches, such as Benjamini-Hochberg's procedure (BH) and independent hypothesis weighting (IHW), either ignore these features or assume that the features are categorical. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralFDR, which automatically learns a discovery threshold as a function of all the hypothesis features. We parametrize the discovery threshold as a neural network, which enables flexible handling of multi-dimensional discrete and continuous features as well as efficient end-to-end optimization. We prove that NeuralFDR has strong false discovery rate (FDR) guarantees, and show that it makes substantially more discoveries in synthetic and real datasets. Moreover, we demonstrate that the learned discovery threshold is directly interpretable.


Learning to Compose Domain-Specific Transformations for Data Augmentation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Data augmentation is a ubiquitous technique for increasing the size of labeled training sets by leveraging task-specific data transformations that preserve class labels. While it is often easy for domain experts to specify individual transformations, constructing and tuning the more sophisticated compositions typically needed to achieve state-of-the-art results is a time-consuming manual task in practice. We propose a method for automating this process by learning a generative sequence model over user-specified transformation functions using a generative adversarial approach. Our method can make use of arbitrary, non-deterministic transformation functions, is robust to misspecified user input, and is trained on unlabeled data. The learned transformation model can then be used to perform data augmentation for any end discriminative model. In our experiments, we show the efficacy of our approach on both image and text datasets, achieving improvements of 4.0 accuracy points on CIFAR-10, 1.4 F1 points on the ACE relation extraction task, and 3.4 accuracy points when using domain-specific transformation operations on a medical imaging dataset as compared to standard heuristic augmentation approaches.


Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Nets

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose in this paper a novel approach to tackle the problem of mode collapse encountered in generative adversarial network (GAN). Our idea is intuitive but proven to be very effective, especially in addressing some key limitations of GAN. In essence, it combines the Kullback-Leibler (KL) and reverse KL divergences into a unified objective function, thus it exploits the complementary statistical properties from these divergences to effectively diversify the estimated density in capturing multi-modes. We term our method dual discriminator generative adversarial nets (D2GAN) which, unlike GAN, has two discriminators; and together with a generator, it also has the analogy of a minimax game, wherein a discriminator rewards high scores for samples from data distribution whilst another discriminator, conversely, favoring data from the generator, and the generator produces data to fool both two discriminators. We develop theoretical analysis to show that, given the maximal discriminators, optimizing the generator of D2GAN reduces to minimizing both KL and reverse KL divergences between data distribution and the distribution induced from the data generated by the generator, hence effectively avoiding the mode collapsing problem. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world large-scale datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10, ImageNet), where we have made our best effort to compare our D2GAN with the latest state-of-the-art GAN's variants in comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The experimental results demonstrate the competitive and superior performance of our approach in generating good quality and diverse samples over baselines, and the capability of our method to scale up to ImageNet database.


Learning Efficient Object Detection Models with Knowledge Distillation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite significant accuracy improvement in convolutional neural networks (CNN) based object detectors, they often require prohibitive runtimes to process an image for real-time applications. State-of-the-art models often use very deep networks with a large number of floating point operations. Efforts such as model compression learn compact models with fewer number of parameters, but with much reduced accuracy. In this work, we propose a new framework to learn compact and fast object detection networks with improved accuracy using knowledge distillation [20] and hint learning [34]. Although knowledge distillation has demonstrated excellent improvements for simpler classification setups, the complexity of detection poses new challenges in the form of regression, region proposals and less voluminous labels. We address this through several innovations such as a weighted cross-entropy loss to address class imbalance, a teacher bounded loss to handle the regression component and adaptation layers to better learn from intermediate teacher distributions. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluation with different distillation configurations over multiple datasets including PASCAL, KITTI, ILSVRC and MS-COCO. Our results show consistent improvement in accuracy-speed trade-offs for modern multi-class detection models.


Analyzing Hidden Representations in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural networks have become ubiquitous in automatic speech recognition systems. While neural networks are typically used as acoustic models in more complex systems, recent studies have explored end-to-end speech recognition systems based on neural networks, which can be trained to directly predict text from input acoustic features. Although such systems are conceptually elegant and simpler than traditional systems, it is less obvious how to interpret the trained models. In this work, we analyze the speech representations learned by a deep end-to-end model that is based on convolutional and recurrent layers, and trained with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. We use a pre-trained model to generate frame-level features which are given to a classifier that is trained on frame classification into phones. We evaluate representations from different layers of the deep model and compare their quality for predicting phone labels. Our experiments shed light on important aspects of the end-to-end model such as layer depth, model complexity, and other design choices.