The field of cycling analytics has only recently started to develop due to limited access to open data sources. Accordingly, research and data sources are very divergent, with large differences in information used across studies. To improve this, and facilitate further research in the field, we propose the publication of a data set which links thousands of professional race results from the period 2017-2023 to detailed geographic information about the courses, an essential aspect in road cycling analytics. Initial use cases are proposed, showcasing the usefulness in linking these two data sources.

Large language models have shown breakthrough potential in many NLP domains. Here we consider their use for stylometry, specifically authorship identification in Early Modern English drama. We find both promising and concerning results; LLMs are able to accurately predict the author of surprisingly short passages but are also prone to confidently misattribute texts to specific authors. A fine-tuned t5-large model outperforms all tested baselines, including logistic regression, SVM with a linear kernel, and cosine delta, at attributing small passages. However, we see indications that the presence of certain authors in the model's pre-training data affects predictive results in ways that are difficult to assess.

Big road projects will often uncover historic finds. During the £1.5bn upgrade of the A14 in Cambridgeshire, an archaeologist found what was believed to be the earliest evidence of beer brewing in Britain, dating back around 2,000 years. Generating as much excitement, for different reasons, was the introduction of a very modern concept on the same scheme. The project team pioneered artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technology to successfully predict times when an accident was more likely to happen – and to take action to stop it. By collecting swathes of information and using the AI, data scientists were able to spot problems before they occurred.

The banana has been the subject of Andy Warhol's cover art for the Velvet Underground's debut album, can arguably be the most devastating item in the Mario Kart video game franchise and is one of the world's most consumed fruits. And humanity's love of bananas may still be on the rise, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. On average, says Chris Barrett, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University, citing that U.N. data, every person on earth chows down on 130 bananas a year, at a rate of nearly three a week. But the banana as we know it may also be on the verge of extinction. The situation led Colombia--where the economy relies heavily on the crop, as it does in several other countries including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Guatemala--to declare a national state of emergency in August.

The billionaire entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley have not all been recycling their earnings into Napa Valley vineyards. With publicity commensurate with their wealth and ambitions, such notable visionaries as Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal, the online payments giant owned by eBay) have staked out claims at and beyond the frontier of available technology, from Tesla's all-electric cars to the proto spaceships of SpaceX. This is a moment when the Silicon Valley style and brand – Go Big or Go Home -- has appeal. The recovery from the Great Recession remains frustratingly slow. In response, governments across the developed world have perversely embraced austerity.

But the point I wish to make is that we can now calculate many thousands of times as fast as we could in 1953 and at least a million times as fast as we could three hundred years ago. Now this change is quite extraordinary, if one compares it for example with the increase in the speed of travel. A satellite orbiting the earth or moving towards the planets is unlikely to go much faster than twenty-five or thirty thousand miles an hour. An ordinary man can usually do two and a half or three, so that the satellite is perhaps ten thousand times as fast as a walking man. The enormous increase in speed of travel has changed our world and our ideas of the potentially possible. We don't use satellites to go from Manchester to Edinburgh in a few minutes, but we hope to explore the solar system.