Parents of under-fives in England are to be offered official advice on how long their children should spend watching TV or looking at computer screens. The government says it will publish its first guidance on screen time for the age group in April. It comes as government research was published showing that about 98% of children under two were watching screens on a daily basis - with parents, teachers and nursery staff saying youngsters were finding it harder to hold conversations or concentrate on learning. Children with the highest screen time - around five hours a day - reportedly could say significantly fewer words than those at the other end of the scale who watched for around 44 minutes. A national working group led by Children's Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza and Department for Education scientific adviser Professor Russell Viner will formulate the guidance after speaking to parents, children and early years practitioners.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris closed a big door when she announced Wednesday that she would not run for California governor. But she left open a heap of others. Departing presidents, vice presidents, first ladies and failed presidential candidates have pursued a wide variety of paths in the past. Empowered with name recognition and influence but with no official role to fill, they possess the freedom to choose their next adventure. Al Gore took up a cause in global warming, while George W. Bush took up painting.

Dru Smith, Chief Geodesist of the National Geodetic Survey stands near a measurement device used to survey the height of the Washington Monument in 2017.Susan Walsh/AP This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth's gravitational field. Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former employees and experts say. As the world turns more and more toward operations that need precise coordinate systems like the ones NGS provides, the science that underpins this office's activities, these experts say, is becoming even more crucial. The work of NGS, says Tim Burch, the executive director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors, "is kind of like oxygen. You don't know you need it until it's not there."

Master equations are of fundamental importance in modeling stochastic dynamical systems.However, solving master equations is challenging due to the exponential increase in the number of possible states or trajectories with the dimension of the state space. In this study, we propose repurposing language models as a machine learning approach to solve master equations. We design a prompt-based neural network to map rate parameters, initial conditions, and time values directly to the state joint probability distribution that exactly matches the input contexts. In this way, we approximate the solution of the master equation in its most general form. We train the network using the policy gradient algorithm within the reinforcement learning framework, with feedback rewards provided by a set of variational autoregressive models. By applying this approach to representative examples, we observe high accuracy for both multi-module and high-dimensional systems. The trained network also exhibits extrapolating ability, extending its predictability to unseen data. Our findings establish the connection between language models and master equations, highlighting the possibility of using a single pretrained large model to solve any master equation.

Believe it or not, fighter jets, flying cars, natural gas pipelines and plastic bottles may be more alike than you think. They might one day be made with TuFF -- a high-performance short-fiber composite material invented at the University of Delaware that is superstrong, ultra-lightweight and virtually indestructible. It might even be the Superman of materials. Developed by researchers at UD's Center for Composite Materials as part of a Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office program, TuFF (Tailored Universal Feedstock for Forming) has properties equal to the very best composites used in space and aerospace applications today. And, according to CCM Director Jack Gillespie, the uses for TuFF are starting to take off -- literally.

The technology is mainly used to set up touch-free processes for repetitive functions such as accounts payable and receivable. Machine learning is far more integrated into accounting, planning and forecasting operations than many professionals realize, finance technology consultants said in a CFO.com webinar. A lot of the cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other platforms finance teams use already have machine learning built in, and that will only increase, said Kris Murphy, principal of The Hackett Group. "It's going to get to the point where ... when you enter a forecast number, the machine learning algorithm will say, 'Last time you missed by 10%, you average a miss of 8%, maybe you should think about that number,'" said Murphy. "I believe that is where we're going to be going with machine learning."

Recently, I sat down with Stephen Wu, a shareholder at Silicon Valley Law Group, and Peter Gillespie, a partner at Laner Muchin, to talk about one of the newest ways AI is being deployed: as a way to intelligently forecast risk and measure the development performance of software organizations. This new method of using AI can give software companies a new level of understanding of their software delivery pipeline's performance. But should you use an AI system to judge the performance of people? We discussed the ethics behind this new use of technology and what it holds for the future of performance management and software development. Here's what your team needs to understand about using AI for HR related decisions on software teams.

SYDNEY – After applying his machine-learning programs to central bank policy statements to churn out trading calls, a hedge fund-backed political economy specialist is training his sights on corporate earnings announcements. Evan Schnidman, a 31-year-old who set up his own firm after a Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation that looked at the Federal Reserve's communications, is hoping the approach that lured $3.3 million in a fundraising round last December will work in the corporate sphere. St. Louis-based Prattle has until now focused on applying the artificial intelligence method known as natural-language processing to make assessments of Fed and other central bank policy statements. At a time when analysis is poised to get its own price tag, with the introduction of Europe's MiFID II regulations, research costs are an increasing focus for investment banks and asset managers. BlackRock Inc. has even moved to use robots to design funds.

SYDNEY – After applying his machine-learning programs to central bank policy statements to churn out trading calls, a hedge fund-backed political economy specialist is aiming his sights on corporate earnings announcements. Evan Schnidman, a 31-year-old who set up his own firm after a Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation that looked at the Federal Reserve's communications, is hoping the approach that lured $3.3 million in a fundraising round last December will work in the corporate sphere. St. Louis-based Prattle has until now focused on applying the artificial intelligence method known as natural-language processing to make assessments of Fed and other central bank policy statements. At a time when analysis is poised to get its own price tag, with the introduction of Europe's MiFID II regulations, research costs are an increasing focus for investment banks and asset managers. BlackRock Inc. has even moved to use robots to design funds.

The way tech companies deal with online harassment and abuse is broken. YouTube allows anti-Semitism to stay live. Twitter waffles as targeted harassment runs rampant. Facebook takes down an iconic photo that shouldn't be banned. Now one German politician is tired of letting platforms make excuses.