Game Theory: Why did Africa boycott the 1966 World Cup? Game Theory Why did Africa boycott the 1966 World Cup? A record 10 African teams are competing at the 2026 World Cup. But 60 years ago, not one African nation played in the 1966 World Cup. Al Jazeera's Samantha Johnson looks at the 1966 boycott that helped reshape the tournament for generations to come. Why are World Cup tickets so expensive?

Canada's Carney has enjoyed a long political honeymoon. Mark Carney arrived on Canada's political scene last year as an Ivy League and Oxford educated economist and a former central banker for two countries. He had an impressive resume and ambitions to be prime minister but had never run for public office until replacing Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader. There was concern his lack of political experience would be a liability, but under his leadership, the Liberals won a minority government, which in a year had solidified into a narrow majority following the defection of five opposition members of parliament to his party. Carney tore up the rulebook, jumping from political neophyte to leading a G7 nation, and he is enjoying a lengthy honeymoon both in Canada and around the world as a globetrotting prime minister.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. There are myriad reasons to loathe Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who has become a top ally of Donald Trump. OG haters have long accused Musk of endangering road users by exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla's navigation assistance systems, misleadingly named Autopilot and Full-Self Driving. The ranks of the angry have steadily grown, fueled by Musk's habit of amplifying trans-bashing and antisemitism as well as his demolition of Twitter. Now, as Musk cozies up to extremists across Europe, wields the Department of Government Efficiency as a wrecking ball against the federal government, and generally acts as an unelected leader, the furor is reaching a fever pitch.

The FIFA World Cup in Qatar was discussed extensively in the news and on social media. Due to news reports with allegations of human rights violations, there were calls to boycott it. Wearing a OneLove armband was part of a planned protest activity. Controversy around the armband arose when FIFA threatened to sanction captains who wear it. To understand what topics Twitter users Tweeted about and what the opinion of German Twitter users was towards the OneLove armband, we performed an analysis of German Tweets published during the World Cup using in-context learning with LLMs. We validated the labels on human annotations. We found that Twitter users initially discussed the armband's impact, LGBT rights, and politics; after the ban, the conversation shifted towards politics in sports in general, accompanied by a subtle shift in sentiment towards neutrality. Our evaluation serves as a framework for future research to explore the impact of sports activism and evolving public sentiment. This is especially useful in settings where labeling datasets for specific opinions is unfeasible, such as when events are unfolding.

Retrieval-augmented generation integrates the capabilities of large language models with relevant information retrieved from an extensive corpus, yet encounters challenges when confronted with real-world noisy data. One recent solution is to train a filter module to find relevant content but only achieve suboptimal noise compression. In this paper, we propose to introduce the information bottleneck theory into retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach involves the filtration of noise by simultaneously maximizing the mutual information between compression and ground output, while minimizing the mutual information between compression and retrieved passage. In addition, we derive the formula of information bottleneck to facilitate its application in novel comprehensive evaluations, the selection of supervised fine-tuning data, and the construction of reinforcement learning rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements across various question answering datasets, not only in terms of the correctness of answer generation but also in the conciseness with $2.5\%$ compression rate.

Dr. Fallon Wilson is, like civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, sick and tired of being sick and tired. Hamer and Wilson were both talking about a lack of progress on civil rights, but Wilson is talking specifically about data, AI, and tech from companies that have for years failed to make meaningful progress on diversity and inclusion initiatives. In a speech at the Kapor Center in Oakland, California, she said people cannot rely on companies like Facebook or Google to bring about meaningful change. "The truth is that the business of diversity and inclusion in tech companies will never eradicate structural racism, and I think we have to be clear about that," she said. "They cannot be the weathervane, nor should they, of what equitable progress looks like for Black people in this country as it relates to tech. Wilson was not referencing recent events like boycotts over Facebook's willingness to profit from hate or renewed diversity promises from Google and Microsoft.

Should artificial intelligence be used as part of weapons systems? Last week, Google cancelled its contract with the US Department of defence to develop a machine vision system known as Project Maven, which would analyse imagery captured by military drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motion and provide data to the military. The company's employees signed en masse a letter to the company's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, stating that such a project would outsource the moral responsibility for the application of their work to a third party, and that they were not prepared to countenance Google or its contractors building what they referred to as "warfare technology". This term of course makes clear what has for many decades been a convenient euphemism: renaming the business of developing weapons and technology for warfare as "defence". The British establishment adopted this figure of speech in 1964, when the War Office – which had existed under that name since 1857 – passed over its functions to the Ministry of Defence. Google's repositioning is not the first example of pressure being applied to stop AI from being developed for military applications.

If scientific journals don't make their articles available to everyone, we want nothing to do with them. That's the gist of a petition signed by more than 2,000 artificial intelligence researchers publicized in a tweet on Saturday. Specifically, the scientists are boycotting a recently-announced journal, Nature Machine Intelligence, because it would trap the articles published there behind a paywall. Artificial intelligence research should be transparent and open to the community at large, argues Tom Dietterich of Oregon State University, the machine learning researcher who began the boycott, according to Retraction Watch. Reminder: science publishing is a business. Many journals, especially the most reputable ones (which include those from the Nature Publishing Group), require payment from anyone who wants to read a full article.

Popular science journal Nature recently announced it will begin accepting machine learning papers for submission to a new paywalled section of its journal. This didn't sit well with the AI community in general.

An autonomous sentry freezes an "intruder" during a 2006 test of the weapons system by the South Korean military. Fifty-seven scientists from 29 countries have called for a boycott of a top South Korean university because of a new center aimed at using artificial intelligence (AI) to bolster national security. The AI scientists claim the university is developing autonomous weapons, or "killer robots," whereas university officials say the goal of the research is to improve existing defense systems. A web page that has since been removed by the university said the center, to be operated jointly with South Korean defense company Hanwha Systems, would work on "AI-based command and decision systems, composite navigation algorithms for mega-scale unmanned undersea vehicles, AI-based smart aircraft training systems, and AI-based smart object tracking and recognition technology." Toby Walsh, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who organized the boycott, fears that the research will be applied to autonomous weapons, which can include unmanned flying drones or submarines, cruise missiles, autonomously operated sentry guns, or battlefield robots.