Ix Ch'ak Ch'een was one of at least four women who oversaw the city of Cobá. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Ongoing analysis of an ancient monument among the Mayan ruins at Cobá has revealed the identity of one of the sprawling city's previously unknown rulers. According to archaeologists with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the king referenced multiple times in the historical accounts described on the city's Foundation Rock wasn't a king at all. She was a queen named Ix Ch'ak Ch'een.

As the Trump Administration tries to rescue symbols of the Lost Cause, an exhibition in Los Angeles, led by Kara Walker, finds meaning in their desecration. Kara Walker's "Unmanned Drone" (2023) transforms a Stonewall Jackson statue. The first thing you see is a horse's ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man's arm descends from the beast's stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a fallen sabre. Every part of the work comes from a statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021.

Algorithmic evaluation of procedurally generated content struggles to find metrics that align with human experience, particularly for composite artefacts. Automatic decomposition as a possible solution requires concepts that meet a range of properties. To this end, drawing on Games Studies and Game AI research, we introduce the nested concepts of \textit{Landmarks}, \textit{Monuments}, and \textit{Beacons}. These concepts are based on the artefact's perceivability, evocativeness, and Call to Action, all from a player-centric perspective. These terms are generic to games and usable across genres. We argue that these entities can be found and evaluated with techniques currently used in both research and industry, opening a path towards a fully automated decomposition of PCG, and evaluation of the salient sub-components. Although the work presented here emphasises mixed-initiative PCG and compositional PCG, we believe it applies beyond those domains. With this approach, we intend to create a connection between humanities and technical game research and allow for better computational PCG evaluation

Books, while often rich in cultural insights, can also mirror societal biases of their eras - biases that Large Language Models (LLMs) may learn and perpetuate during training. We introduce a novel method to trace and quantify these biases using fine-tuned LLMs. We develop BookPAGE, a corpus comprising 593 fictional books across seven decades (1950-2019), to track bias evolution. By fine-tuning LLMs on books from each decade and using targeted prompts, we examine shifts in biases related to gender, sexual orientation, race, and religion. Our findings indicate that LLMs trained on decade-specific books manifest biases reflective of their times, with both gradual trends and notable shifts. For example, model responses showed a progressive increase in the portrayal of women in leadership roles (from 8% to 22%) from the 1950s to 2010s, with a significant uptick in the 1990s (from 4% to 12%), possibly aligning with third-wave feminism. Same-sex relationship references increased markedly from the 1980s to 2000s (from 0% to 10%), mirroring growing LGBTQ+ visibility. Concerningly, negative portrayals of Islam rose sharply in the 2000s (26% to 38%), likely reflecting post-9/11 sentiments. Importantly, we demonstrate that these biases stem mainly from the books' content and not the models' architecture or initial training. Our study offers a new perspective on societal bias trends by bridging AI, literary studies, and social science research.

A mysterious hand that was created around 3,500 years ago and is believed to be Europe's oldest prosthetic limb will go on display in the UK for the first time this week. The artefact, which experts think may also have doubled as a knife, was discovered in western Switzerland in 2017. It is made from bronze with a gold cuff and dates to between 1,500 and 1,400 BC. The hand has been on display only once before, making a brief appearance in Germany, but will now be part of the'World of Stonehenge' exhibition at the British Museum. Detectorists found the hand buried in a human grave near Lake Biel, along with a hair ornament, bronze dagger and cloak pin.

People are now able to walk through the ancient site of Olympia as it stood more than 2,000 years ago, thanks to artificial intelligence. The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport and Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced'Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds', a new collaboration to digitally preserve and restore ancient Olympia, the original home of the Olympic games, using AI. This digital revival project allows viewers around the world to explore ancient Olympia through an immersive experience via an interactive mobile app, web-based desktop experience, or a Microsoft HoloLens 2 exhibition at the Athens Olympic Museum. "Digitally preserving ancient Olympia gives people a way to walk through the site during one of history's most important periods -- brought to life in a realistic, engaging way that was never before possible. This new form of digital archiving will continue to offer a portal to another era, helping us understand what humanity has achieved in the past and reminding us of what we're capable of today," explains Microsoft in a media release about the new project.

Viewers around the world can see the site of the first ever Olympic Games as it looked in its prime more than 2,000 years ago thanks to a digital reconstruction. 'Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds' stems from collaboration between the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport and Microsoft's AI for Cultural Heritage initiative. Microsoft teamed with tech firm Iconem to take hundreds of thousands of images of the ancient site as it lies today -- both with ground- and drone-based cameras. These were processed by Microsoft AI to create models so precise they are photo-realistic and from which the ancient monuments could be digitally reconstructed. The first games took place in Olympia in 776 BC, and recurred every four year until at least AD 393 and they perhaps continued until the Temple of Zeus burnt in 425 AD.

Tourism in India plays a quintessential role in the country's economy with an estimated 9.2% GDP share for the year 2018. With a yearly growth rate of 6.2%, the industry holds a huge potential for being the primary driver of the economy as observed in the nations of the Middle East like the United Arab Emirates. The historical and cultural diversity exhibited throughout the geography of the nation is a unique spectacle for people around the world and therefore serves to attract tourists in tens of millions in number every year. Traditionally, tour guides or academic professionals who study these heritage monuments were responsible for providing information to the visitors regarding their architectural and historical significance. However, unfortunately this system has several caveats when considered on a large scale such as unavailability of sufficient trained people, lack of accurate information, failure to convey the richness of details in an attractive format etc. Recently, machine learning approaches revolving around the usage of monument pictures have been shown to be useful for rudimentary analysis of heritage sights. This paper serves as a survey of the research endeavors undertaken in this direction which would eventually provide insights for building an automated decision system that could be utilized to make the experience of tourism in India more modernized for visitors.

Images showing the internal structure of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, have been revealed for the first time thanks to a 3D scan. Geospatial mapping specialist GeoSLAM produced the never-before-seen digital images of the inside of the famous statue ahead of its 90th birthday on October 12. Emblematic of the city of Rio de Janeiro and the nation of Brazil, the concrete clad statue stands 98 feet tall and spans a mammoth 92 feet wide. The digital re-creation of the iconic statue involved more than 180 million points of data - taken from a drone-mounted laser scanner and someone walking up and down the staircases inside the statue using the same scanner. The new digital images will allow people to virtually explore this world-famous monument in ways never before been possible - inside and out. In 2019, the statue was visited over two million times, with people from all over the globe travelling to admire the monument, which soars 2,320 feet above the city.

After a short summer break, I have prepared a new blog series. In this first part, we will construct a knowledge graph of monuments located in Spain. As you might know, I have lately gained a lot of interest and respect for the wealth of knowledge that is available through the WikiData API. We will continue honing our SPARQL syntax knowledge and fetch the information regarding the monuments located in Spain from the WikiData API. I wasn't aware of this before, but scraping the RDF data available online and importing it into Neo4j is such a popular topic that Dr. Jesus Barrasa developed a Neosemantics library to help us with this process.