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The Winter Olympics Are Here. Is the Sports Betting World Ready? For the 2026 Winter Games, sportsbooks and betting platforms are watching for illicit activity while testing new ways to get people to bet. For all their prestige and gravitas, the Olympic Games have lately proven to be a hotbed for scandals. From a famous judging controversy in 2002 to bid bribery probes and even the resignation of a top Olympic official who was filmed offering to sell tickets for the 2012 London games on the black market, the modern Games have always felt vulnerable to bad actors.

This paper describes the participation of the SINAI team in the eRisk@CLEF lab. Specifically, one of the proposed tasks has been addressed: Task 2 on the early detection of signs of pathological gambling. The approach presented in Task 2 is based on pre-trained models from Transformers architecture with comprehensive preprocessing data and data balancing techniques. Moreover, we integrate Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) architecture with automodels from Transformers. In this Task, our team has been ranked in seventh position, with an F1 score of 0.126, out of 49 participant submissions and achieves the highest values in recall metrics and metrics related to early detection.

Readers respond to John Seabrook's piece on floods, Eyal Press's article on the National Restaurant Association, and Adam Gopnik's essay on the history of gambling in New York. John Seabrook's piece on the increasing frequency and formidable power of river flooding is both moving and scientifically instructive (" The Flood Will Come, " July 28th). I served as Vermont's commissioner of health for eight years, during which time I participated in the state's annual flood-disaster response, and I believe it's important to expand the public-safety discussion so that it includes the protection of human health and wellness. Climate change poses the biggest threat to public health, and storms and floods have abundant immediate impacts: drinking-water contamination; mold damage to homes and businesses; the spread of infectious disease; soil erosion that affects food quality; and limitations on recreation, transportation, and medical-care access. Climate change is also a major source of stress on the population's mental health, and on the country's already fragile mental-health system.

SocialCredit+ is AI powered credit scoring system that leverages publicly available social media data to augment traditional credit evaluation. It uses a conversational banking assistant to gather user consent and fetch public profiles. Multimodal feature extractors analyze posts, bios, images, and friend networks to generate a rich behavioral profile. A specialized Sharia-compliance layer flags any non-halal indicators and prohibited financial behavior based on Islamic ethics. The platform employs a retrieval-augmented generation module: an LLM accesses a domain specific knowledge base to generate clear, text-based explanations for each decision. We describe the end-to-end architecture and data flow, the models used, and system infrastructure. Synthetic scenarios illustrate how social signals translate into credit-score factors. This paper emphasizes conceptual novelty, compliance mechanisms, and practical impact, targeting AI researchers, fintech practitioners, ethical banking jurists, and investors.

As Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote concluded on Monday, market watchers couldn't help but notice that the company's stock price was down, perhaps a reaction to Apple's relatively low-key approach to incorporating AI compared to most of its competitors. Still, Apple Intelligence-based features and upgrades were plentiful, and while some are powered using the company's privacy and security-focused cloud platform known as Private Cloud Compute, many run locally on Apple Intelligence-enabled devices. Apple's new Messages screening feature automatically moves texts from phone numbers and accounts you've never interacted with before to an "Unknown Sender" folder. The feature automatically detects time-sensitive messages like login codes or food delivery updates and will still deliver them to your main inbox, but it also scans for messages that seem to be scams and puts them in a separate spam folder. All of this sorting is done locally using Apple Intelligence.

The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) is well-studied for convolutional neural networks but has been validated only empirically for graph neural networks (GNNs), for which theoretical findings are largely lacking. In this paper, we identify the expressivity of sparse subnetworks, i.e. their ability to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs, as crucial for finding winning tickets that preserve the predictive performance. We establish conditions under which the expressivity of a sparsely initialized GNN matches that of the full network, particularly when compared to the Weisfeiler-Leman test, and in that context put forward and prove a Strong Expressive Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. We subsequently show that an increased expressivity in the initialization potentially accelerates model convergence and improves generalization. Our findings establish novel theoretical foundations for both LTH and GNN research, highlighting the importance of maintaining expressivity in sparsely initialized GNNs. We illustrate our results using examples from drug discovery.

Over the last few months, the makers of a popular card game have been wrestling with the byzantine process that surrounds video game age classifications. Age ratings are intended to help parents determine whether or not a game is appropriate for their children. But in practice, an erroneous label doesn't just mislead consumers – it can be the difference between success or failure. Balatro is an award-winning poker game made by an anonymous game developer known as LocalThunk, in which the only guiding principle is chaos. In each match the player must divine the best possible poker hand out of a randomised draw, but the conditions fluctuate constantly.

Everyone's favorite sorta-poker game Balatro is set to cause yet another dip in global productivity levels. The roguelike -- which encourages you to bend and twist the rules of poker in all kinds of wild ways -- is available on Game Pass Ultimate, PC and Standard. Apple Arcade subscribers also have access to it at no extra cost. A trailer that premiered during Monday's ID@Xbox showcase also revealed the latest batch of cosmetic crossover card decks that are now available on all platforms. They include tie-ins with Critical Role, Dead by Daylight, Assassin's Creed, Fallout, Bugsnax and Rust.

In her 2012 book, Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll lays out the different technological mechanisms casinos employ to keep people gambling. From the architecture of buildings and placement of ATMs to the design of casino carpets--all of it exemplifies strategic calculation. As a blurb for a gambling trade show once put it, the various elements making up the modern gambling experience are "symphonies of individual technologies" that come together to "create a single experience," calibrated in a way to keep people playing, to maximize "time on device." "There's something very similar about the mechanisms that are built into dating apps, especially with swiping," she says. "Swiping left and right--it's almost like a horizontal slot machine. You really don't know what you're going to get."