The US Government Is Trying To Make Coal Cute. Trump complained that coal needed better PR. The original Coalie was just a lump of coal with eyes and nothing more. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Can a lump of coal ever be cute?

Abstract--In recent years, the explosion of malware and extensive code reuse have formed complex evolutionary connections among malware specimens. The rapid pace of development makes it challenging for existing studies to characterize recent evolutionary trends. In addition, intuitive tools to untangle these intricate connections between malware specimens or categories are urgently needed. This paper introduces a manually-reviewed malware source code dataset containing 6032 specimens. Building on and extending current research from a software engineering perspective, we systematically evaluate the scale, development costs, code quality, as well as security and dependencies of modern malware. We further introduce a multi-view genealogy analysis to clarify malware connections: at an overall view, this analysis quantifies the strength and direction of connections among specimens and categories; at a detailed view, it traces the evolutionary histories of individual specimens. Experimental results indicate that, despite persistent shortcomings in code quality, malware specimens exhibit an increasing complexity and standardization, in step with the development of mainstream software engineering practices. Meanwhile, our genealogy analysis intuitively reveals lineage expansion and evolution driven by code reuse, providing new evidence and tools for understanding the formation and evolution of the malware ecosystem. With the rapid development of information technology and large language models, malware has experienced a surge in recent years, exhibiting strong connections among categories and specimens, as well as high code reuse rates [1]. In the past 12 months, more than 107 million new malicious or potentially unwanted applications were detected [2], [3]. Many of these malware specimens are variants of previously known malware, which indicates the prevalence of code reuse and family-oriented evolution. However, the difficulty of collecting, reviewing, and labeling has resulted in a scarcity of source code datasets [4]. Existing datasets lack human curation, reliable labels, and timestamps.

Counterfactual explanations provide an intuitive way to understand model decisions by identifying minimal changes required to alter an outcome. However, applying counterfactual methods to time series models remains challenging due to temporal dependencies, high dimensionality, and the lack of an intuitive human-interpretable representation. We introduce MASCOTS, a method that leverages the Bag-of-Receptive-Fields representation alongside symbolic transformations inspired by Symbolic Aggregate Approximation. By operating in a symbolic feature space, it enhances interpretability while preserving fidelity to the original data and model. Unlike existing approaches that either depend on model structure or autoencoder-based sampling, MASCOTS directly generates meaningful and diverse counterfactual observations in a model-agnostic manner, operating on both univariate and multivariate data. We evaluate MASCOTS on univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets, demonstrating comparable validity, proximity, and plausibility to state-of-the-art methods, while significantly improving interpretability and sparsity. Its symbolic nature allows for explanations that can be expressed visually, in natural language, or through semantic representations, making counterfactual reasoning more accessible and actionable.

A viral video shows a high school principal engaging in a seemingly risqué dance with the school's mascot during the back-to-school rally. A high school principal in central California has been placed on administrative leave as an investigation is underway into a video showing him dancing in what some have called an inappropriate manner with the school's mascot during a back-to-school rally. The Merced Union High School District shared a statement with Fox News Digital that said Robert Nunes, principal of Buhach Colony High School in Atwater, was on administrative leave effective Aug. 19. The district said this action is in response to an incident at the back-to-school rally on Aug. 16. "The District is conducting a comprehensive review of the situation. While the investigation is ongoing, Mr. Nunes will not be participating in any school-related responsibilities or activities," Viviana Fuentes, director of communications for the school district, said in the statement.

Tiffany Henyard, the embattled mayor of Dolton, Illinois, faced such an outcry of anger from town residents that many had to be kept outside the building. Much like Dolton, Illinois self-declared "Super Mayor" Tiffany Henyard, Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal has been slammed with allegations of wild offenses ranging from spending department money on promotional items like trading cards with her likeness to having bogus news stories about her being generated by AI. While Bilal testified before the City Council last year that her department is underfunded to the point it "jeopardizes the lives and safety of our sworn and civilian personnel," her department's spending habits indicate that money may have been used in questionable ways, according to a new report from The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Philadelphia Sheriff's Office allegedly spent 9,250 on a new mascot, an African-American Wild Western-style female sheriff named Deputy Sheriff Justice, who debuted at the Thanksgiving Day parade, made by a company that makes some of the world's most recognizable mascot costumes, like that of the Geico gecko. Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal speaks at a news conference, Philadelphia, Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023.

With the release of Android 14 creeping closer, Google just announced a makeover for the Android brand, which was last updated in 2019. The logo has been modernized, and the Android mascot, called Bugdroid, has a fresh 3D look. The company also unveiled a handful of new features for Google apps and Android devices, including a Google Assistant-powered widget and the option to store digital versions of library and gym cards in your Google Wallet. The new look is designed to "reflect Android's core ethos of being open, iterative, and inclusive." From now on, it's Android with a capital "A," and the Android logo has grown curvier, bringing it closer to the style of the Google logo.

And then there were four. With the Washington Commanders unveiling "Major Tuddy" last week, the commander pig of your dreams, there are now only four teams remaining without mascots in the NFL. The Packers, Chargers, Jets and Giants are the final holdouts from joining the rest of the league in having a fun anthropomorphic figure that not only children can enjoy, but drunk fans can worship like a god as well. At this point there's no reason to hold out, and I felt a need to pitch in and help these teams settle on their new mascots. To do this I used a highly scientific process of getting some keywords courtesy of Google autocomplete, and plugging them into the A.I. art program "DALL E 2" in order to get the perfect mascot designs for these teams.

While several fans might feel slighted by Ash's exclusion in the series going forward, the far more revealing exclusion lies in Pikachu. Pikachu is easily the most iconic Pokémon of all time, and Nintendo and the Pokémon Company have heavily leaned into it as their mascot through several avenues. In fact, the Pokémon Company at one point felt that having a dedicated mascot for the franchise was so important that they needed it to become a duopoly. This is most evident by their push to make Eevee a co-mascot via the "Let's Go Pikachu" and "Let's Go Eevee" games. Some fans believe the thought process was that Eevee might be a counterpart that young girls could connect with more, as Pikachu represented more traits that young boys would connect with.

This June marks the 30th anniversary of an iconic and timeless video game mascot: Sonic the Hedgehog. After arriving on the Sega Genesis--the 16-bit little console that could--on June 23, 1991, the game quickly became a buzzworthy system seller and corporate mascot. It was a defining character of the '90s, and a phenomenon the company needed to stand a chance against rival Nintendo. The brainchild of Yuji Naka, Sonic the Hedgehog touted vibrant graphics and innovative level design. The speed of its gameplay ran rings around Mario and became the emphasis of Sega's famously angsty and clever "Sega Does What Nintendon't" marketing campaign.

In 1977, Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo, a company then known for selling toys, playing cards, and trivial novelties. Miyamoto was twenty-four, fresh out of art school. His employer, inspired by the success of a California company named Atari, was hoping to expand into video games. Miyamoto began tinkering with a story about a carpenter, a damsel in distress, and a giant ape. Four years later, Miyamoto had turned the carpenter into a plumber; Mario, and the Super Mario Bros. franchise, had arrived.