Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL gang rape video: Classmates speak out on sick'taking turns' footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Live Nation executives mocked'stupid' concert-goers in emails where they bragged about how to best rip them off: '$60 for closer grass' NFL superstar Xavier Worthy spills all on Travis Kelce, the Chiefs' struggles... and having Taylor Swift as his No 1 fan Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Nancy Mace throws herself into Iran warzone as she goes rogue on Middle East rescue mission: 'I AM that person' Hidden toxins in kids' treats EXPOSED: Health guru Jillian Michaels' sit-down with Casey DeSantis reveals dangers lurking in popular foods Why are animals picking on Punch the monkey? Scientists have revealed the tragic truth about Punch the monkey - the viral macaque who has stolen the hearts of millions across social media. The seven-month-old Japanese macaque was born at Ichikawa Zoo last year, where he was rejected by his mother. Zookeepers gave him a stuffed orangutan toy, who he quickly formed a bond with - with viral footage showing him clinging to the plushie. Fans were briefly relieved when footage emerged of another macaque grooming and comforting Punch.

The 2020s have been witnessing a very significant advance in the development of generative artificial intelligence tools, including text generation systems based on large language models. These tools have been increasingly used to generate texts in the most diverse domains -- from technical texts to literary texts --, which might eventually lead to a lower volume of written text production by humans. This article discusses the possibility of a future in which human beings will have lost or significantly decreased their ability to write due to the outsourcing of this activity to machines. This possibility parallels the loss of the ability to write in other moments of human history, such as during the so-called Greek Dark Ages (approx. 1200 BCE - 800 BCE).

In the quest to improve services, companies offer customers the option to interact with agents via texting. Such contact centers face unique challenges compared to traditional call centers, as measuring customer experience proxies like abandonment and patience involves uncertainty. A key source of this uncertainty is silent abandonment, where customers leave without notifying the system, wasting agent time and leaving their status unclear. Silent abandonment also obscures whether a customer was served or left. Our goals are to measure the magnitude of silent abandonment and mitigate its effects. Classification models show that 3%-70% of customers across 17 companies abandon silently. In one study, 71.3% of abandoning customers did so silently, reducing agent efficiency by 3.2% and system capacity by 15.3%, incurring $5,457 in annual costs per agent. We develop an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate customer patience under uncertainty and identify influencing covariates. We find that companies should use classification models to estimate abandonment scope and our EM algorithm to assess patience. We suggest strategies to operationally mitigate the impact of silent abandonment by predicting suspected silent-abandonment behavior or changing service design. Specifically, we show that while allowing customers to write while waiting in the queue creates a missing data challenge, it also significantly increases patience and reduces service time, leading to reduced abandonment and lower staffing requirements.

In the quest to improve services, companies offer customers the opportunity to interact with agents through contact centers, where the communication is mainly text-based. This has become one of the favorite channels of communication with companies in recent years. However, contact centers face operational challenges, since the measurement of common proxies for customer experience, such as knowledge of whether customers have abandoned the queue and their willingness to wait for service (patience), are subject to information uncertainty. We focus this research on the impact of a main source of such uncertainty: silent abandonment by customers. These customers leave the system while waiting for a reply to their inquiry, but give no indication of doing so, such as closing the mobile app of the interaction. As a result, the system is unaware that they have left and waste agent time and capacity until this fact is realized. In this paper, we show that 30%-67% of the abandoning customers abandon the system silently, and that such customer behavior reduces system efficiency by 5%-15%. To do so, we develop methodologies to identify silent-abandonment customers in two types of contact centers: chat and messaging systems. We first use text analysis and an SVM model to estimate the actual abandonment level. We then use a parametric estimator and develop an expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate customer patience accurately, as customer patience is an important parameter for fitting queueing models to the data. We show how accounting for silent abandonment in a queueing model improves dramatically the estimation accuracy of key measures of performance. Finally, we suggest strategies to operationally cope with the phenomenon of silent abandonment.

There has been little exploration of the explicit simulation of the set of options of actors in agent-based models and its evolution over time. This study proposes to use affordances as intermediate entities between agents' environment and agent actions. We illustrated the approach on a typical gravity-fed network in the South-East of France to explore how the abandonment of traditional sharing of water changes the irrigators' options to irrigate. We simulated a typical dry year irrigation season under two institutional arrangements (i.e. traditional coordination through daily slots and its abandonment). Simulation results are consistent with field surveys, and reveal an increase in the number of internal conflicts among irrigators as the counterpart of the abandonment of traditional sharing of water. They also highlight the consequences of the heterogeneity of the irrigators' interests within the collective institution. The sensitivity analysis of the model allowed identification of optimal modalities of coordination, and a potential compromise between past and current institutional arrangements. The key benefits of using affordances in ABM lie in the study of their population dynamics for characterizing the interaction situations between actors and their environment and for better understanding the model dynamics.

Pull-based development has enabled numerous volunteers to contribute to open-source projects with fewer barriers. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of pull requests (PRs) with valid contributions are abandoned by their contributors, wasting the effort and time put in by both the contributors and maintainers. To better understand the underlying dynamics of contributor-abandoned PRs, we conduct a mixed-methods study using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We curate a dataset consisting of 265,325 PRs including 4,450 abandoned ones from ten popular and mature GitHub projects and measure 16 features characterizing PRs, contributors, review processes, and projects. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, we find that complex PRs, novice contributors, and lengthy reviews have a higher probability of abandonment and the rate of PR abandonment fluctuates alongside the projects' maturity or workload. To identify why contributors abandon their PRs, we also manually examine a random sample of 354 abandoned PRs. We observe that the most frequent abandonment reasons are related to the obstacles faced by contributors, followed by the hurdles imposed by maintainers during the review process. Finally, we survey the top core maintainers of the studied projects to understand their perspectives on dealing with PR abandonment and on our findings.

One of the biggest challenges for an ecommerce store is shopping cart abandonment. As a store owner, you have done all the work to get the customer interested, finally engaged with them for them to come to your web site or the app and only to lose them when they were ready to make a purchase. That is one of the biggest nemesis for the e-commerce store owner. The average cart abandonment rate across all the industries is north of 70%. That is even worse for Mobile users which is 85% (15% higher).

Eggs littered the sand, but there was no sign of life around or in them. The seabirds that should have been keeping watch had taken off, terrified by a drone that crash-landed into their nesting grounds on an island at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. "We've never seen such devastation here," said Melissa Loebl, an environmental scientist who manages the Huntington Beach reserve. "This has been really hard for me as a manager." Some 3,000 elegant terns fled the reserve after the drone crashed May 12, leaving behind 1,500 to 2,000 eggs, none of them viable.

This essay first appeared in our "Home" issue way back in 2013. But somehow feels so timely today. Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward the infinite in 2001: A Space Odyssey nearly half a century ago. For Bullock, home is (as it was for Dullea) the Earth, looming below so huge it would seem she couldn't miss it, if she could somehow just fall from her shattered spacecraft. She cares about nothing more than getting back to where she came from, even as 2001's Dullea is in flight, accepting his exile and even embracing it.

The kings of Angkor Wat may have inadvertently caused the downfall of their own vast empire by seizing land from local farmers, a new study claims. Researchers studying the ancient Khmer civilisation, which thrived in modern-day Cambodia for 600 years, wanted to discover the reason for its 15th-century decline. The abandonment of Angkor has long puzzled historians, with many attributing it to the 1431 AD invasion by Thai forces, though this is hotly debated. Angkor was the capital city of this now-extinct culture, and the iconic Angkor Wat temple was built in the early 12th century by King Suryavarman II. But later, in the 1400s, kings sitting on the throne once occupied by the great Suryavarman II saw their empire crumble and eventually disappear.