chapman
Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces 'catastrophic' cuts
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.
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Canadian snowbirds are still unhappy with Trump. And Palm Springs is feeling the chill
Things to Do in L.A. Canadian snowbirds are still unhappy with Trump. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Palm Springs relies heavily on Canadian tourists, who are declining to travel to the U.S. or shortening their stays because of Trump. The number of Canadian visitors to California plummeted more than 18% in 2025 compared with the year prior.
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Catching heuristics are optimal control policies
Boris Belousov, Gerhard Neumann, Constantin A. Rothkopf, Jan R. Peters
Such internal models allow for planning and potentially optimal action generation, e.g., they enable optimal catching strategies where humans predict the interception point and move there as fast as mechanically possible to await the ball. Clearly, there exist situations where latencies of the catching task require such strategies (e.g., when
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Concerns raised over AI trained on 57 million NHS medical records
An artificial intelligence model trained on the medical data of 57 million people who have used the National Health Service in England could one day assist doctors in predicting disease or forecast hospitalisation rates, its creators have claimed. However, other researchers say there are still significant privacy and data protection concerns around such large-scale use of health data, while even the AI's architects say they can't guarantee that it won't inadvertently reveal sensitive patient data. The model, called Foresight, was first developed in 2023. That initial version used OpenAI's GPT-3, the large language model (LLM) behind the first version of ChatGPT, and trained on 1.5 million real patient records from two London hospitals. Now, Chris Tomlinson at University College London and his colleagues have scaled up Foresight to create what they say is the world's first "national-scale generative AI model of health data" and the largest of its kind.
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Catching heuristics are optimal control policies Boris Belousov, Jan Peters Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt
Two seemingly contradictory theories attempt to explain how humans move to intercept an airborne ball. One theory posits that humans predict the ball trajectory to optimally plan future actions; the other claims that, instead of performing such complicated computations, humans employ heuristics to reactively choose appropriate actions based on immediate visual feedback. In this paper, we show that interception strategies appearing to be heuristics can be understood as computational solutions to the optimal control problem faced by a ball-catching agent acting under uncertainty. Modeling catching as a continuous partially observable Markov decision process and employing stochastic optimal control theory, we discover that the four main heuristics described in the literature are optimal solutions if the catcher has sufficient time to continuously visually track the ball. Specifically, by varying model parameters such as noise, time to ground contact, and perceptual latency, we show that different strategies arise under different circumstances. The catcher's policy switches between generating reactive and predictive behavior based on the ratio of system to observation noise and the ratio between reaction time and task duration. Thus, we provide a rational account of human ball-catching behavior and a unifying explanation for seemingly contradictory theories of target interception on the basis of stochastic optimal control.
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Duchess Sarah Ferguson's former personal assistant murdered: 'I'm shocked and saddened'
Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Sarah Ferguson expressed her shock and grief as she mourned the death of her former personal assistant, Jenean Chapman, who was murdered in Texas this week. The 63-year-old Duchess of York paid tribute to Chapman in an Instagram post that she shared on Thursday. "I am shocked and saddened to learn that Jenean Chapman, who worked with me as my personal assistant many years ago, has been murdered in Dallas aged just 46. A suspect is in custody," Ferguson wrote.
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What Stone-Carving Robots Tell Us About the Architecture of the Future
Last week, a pair of videos circulating on social media caught my eye. Each showed a robotic arm milling a block of marble into a fine, classical sculpture. Never stand behind a robot arm. Unless you're a trained professional. One of these cyborg sculptors belongs to Robotor, a company based in Carrara, Italy.
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AI can identify and design good-looking cars by itself now
Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' Automakers spend tens of millions of dollars and thousands of hours each year trying to come up with the next popular automotive design, but what if they could do for a fraction of the cost in minutes? That's what General Motors and the MIT Sloan School of Management tried to find out in a recent study. Sloan marketing professor John Hauser told Fox News Digital that a neural network was trained with data collected from General Motors clinics by inputting images and the scores given by attendees. "These were actually evaluations from consumers in theme clinics of what they thought was an aesthetic image," Hauser said.
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'The Last of Us' Is a Zombie Story with Heart
HBO's hit series The Last of Us is based on a popular video game from Naughty Dog. Science fiction author Zach Chapman appreciates that the show is a faithful adaptation of one of his favorite games. "The show is in many episodes a shot-for-shot remake of the game," Chapman says in Episode 539 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "The script is almost exactly the same, you just don't get the gameplay." The Last of Us has a reputation as one of the best video game stories ever told.
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A Few Words About Bullshit
"what I find is that it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." I can't wait to see the fawning New York Times story tomorrow morning. But…wait…well, um, how do I put this politely? Just like every other large language model I have seen.