This study examines whether LLMs can simulate culturally grounded psychological patterns based on demographic information. Using DeepSeek, we generated 2943 virtual participants matched to demographic distributions from the CFPS2018 and compared them with human responses on the Big Five personality traits and subjective well-being across seven Chinese regions.Personality was measured using a 15-item Chinese Big Five inventory, and happiness with a single-item rating. Results revealed broad similarity between real and simulated datasets, particularly in regional variation trends. However, systematic differences emerged:simulated participants scored lower in extraversion and openness, higher in agreeableness and neuroticism, and consistently reported lower happiness. Predictive structures also diverged: while human data identified conscientiousness, extraversion and openness as positive predictors of happiness, the AI emphasized openness and agreeableness, with extraversion predicting negatively. These discrepancies suggest that while LLMs can approximate population-level psychological distributions, they underrepresent culturally specific and affective dimensions. The findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLM-based virtual participants for large-scale psychological research and underscore the need for culturally enriched training data and improved affective modeling.

Multiple unauthorized drones flew above the Palisades fire Friday afternoon, forcing firefighting aircraft to leave the area for safety and angering those working on the front lines, authorities said. These sightings came just a day after a drone collided with a Super Scooper fixed-wing aircraft, grounding the plane for several days of repairs and reducing the number of aircraft available to fight the fire. "This is not just harmless fun. This is incredibly dangerous," said Chris Thomas, public information officer for the Palisades fire. "Seriously, what if that plane had gone down? It could have taken out a row of homes. It could have taken out a school."

Congressman Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, discusses the future of drone security in the United States during an appearance on'America Reports.' The Federal Aviation Administration issued more restrictions on drone flights across the Northeast on Friday in response to increased sightings in recent weeks. One day after announcing temporary restrictions on most drone flights in New Jersey, the FAA issued 27 No-Fly Zone notices for "special security reasons" in New York on Friday. The restrictions last through Jan. 18, 2025, and apply to some of the most populated areas in the Empire State, including nearly every NYC borough. The Federal Aviation Administration has issued temporary restrictions on drone flights in 27 areas of New York in response to the influx of reported sightings in recent weeks.

Mayor Michael Melham of Belleville, New Jersey, gives an update on the mysterious drone sightings across the Garden State on'The Faulkner Focus.' Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked a Senate bill Wednesday that would have authorized resources for state and local authorities to track drones that have mystified residents across New Jersey and the Northeast in recent weeks. Paul objected to the passage of the bill, citing his long-standing concerns over expanding governmental powers. "This body must not rush to grant sweeping surveillance powers without proper consideration and debate by the committees of jurisdiction," he said. Sen. Rand Paul, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, blocked a bill Wednesday that would have allowed local law enforcement agencies to track aerial drones.

None of the mysterious drones reported over the skies of the U.S. Northeast are being flown by the Pentagon or are part of secret government tests, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday. Major General Pat Ryder told reporters that top department officials take seriously any cases of drones flying near or over U.S. military sites, though he added this was not a new concern given the volume of daily drone flights. "We will typically, when we detect them, attempt to classify them and take appropriate measures," Ryder said. "Is it possible that some of those are surveilling? But can you make that assumption in every case, not necessarily."

Two people were arrested for allegedly conducting a'hazardous drone operation' near a Massachusetts airport as people in New Jersey demand answers for similar sightings. Robert Duffy, 42, of Charlestown, and Jeremy Folcik, 32, of Bridgewater, were taken into custody Saturday evening after flying an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) near Boston's Logan Airport. The incident began at 4.30pm ET when a police officer specializing in real-time crime surveillance detected the UAS, which was smaller than the crafts being reported in New Jersey. 'Leveraging advanced UAS monitoring technology, the Officer identified the drone's location, altitude, flight history, and the operators' position on Long Island,' which is located in the Boston Harbor on the approach to the airport, the department added. Officers were dispatched to that location and found three individuals inside the decommissioned Long Island Health Campus, finding a drone inside a backpack carried by Duffy.

Ultra High Resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery (RSI) (e.g. 100,000 $\times$ 100,000 pixels or more) poses a significant challenge for current Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models (RSMLLMs). If choose to resize the UHR image to standard input image size, the extensive spatial and contextual information that UHR images contain will be neglected. Otherwise, the original size of these images often exceeds the token limits of standard RSMLLMs, making it difficult to process the entire image and capture long-range dependencies to answer the query based on the abundant visual context. In this paper, we introduce ImageRAG for RS, a training-free framework to address the complexities of analyzing UHR remote sensing imagery. By transforming UHR remote sensing image analysis task to image's long context selection task, we design an innovative image contextual retrieval mechanism based on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique, denoted as ImageRAG. ImageRAG's core innovation lies in its ability to selectively retrieve and focus on the most relevant portions of the UHR image as visual contexts that pertain to a given query. Fast path and slow path are proposed in this framework to handle this task efficiently and effectively. ImageRAG allows RSMLLMs to manage extensive context and spatial information from UHR RSI, ensuring the analysis is both accurate and efficient.

Brandon Allinger, COO of Prop Store and Treasure Hunter, told Fox News Digital he came across the hat Harrison Ford wore in'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' when researching a different item. A pair of video game designers created a real-life, real-time treasure hunt in the Northeast with a hefty reward for the lucky individual who finds the unique treasure. The game is called Project Skydrop, and players compete against one another to locate a 24-karat gold sculpture valued at 26,000. "This treasure hunt is a prototype, just experimenting to see if people like it, if people like the format," Project Skydrop co-creator Jason Rohrer told Boston 25 News. The game started Sept. 19 and will end on Oct. 10.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been used for sequential decision making in interactive environments. However, leveraging environment reward signals for continual LLM actor improvement is not straightforward. We propose Skill Set Optimization (SSO) for improving LLM actor performance through constructing and refining sets of transferable skills. SSO constructs skills by extracting common subtrajectories with high rewards and generating subgoals and instructions to represent each skill. These skills are provided to the LLM actor in-context to reinforce behaviors with high rewards. Then, SSO further refines the skill set by pruning skills that do not continue to result in high rewards. We evaluate our method in the classic videogame NetHack and the text environment ScienceWorld to demonstrate SSO's ability to optimize a set of skills and perform in-context policy improvement. SSO outperforms baselines by 40% in our custom NetHack task and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in ScienceWorld by 35%.

The United States has hundreds of soldiers in Syria, mostly in the northeast, part of its mission to fight the remnants of the Islamic State alongside its ally, Kurdish-led forces. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has long demanded that the United States withdraw from all parts of Syria. The Syrian Army's general command said it "considers this cowardly terrorist act an unprecedented criminal act and affirms that it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations wherever they are found," according to the Syrian state media. Syrian government forces carried out artillery and missile attacks after the drone strike on Thursday, targeting several towns in the country's northwestern Idlib Province and killing at least eight people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. That part of the country is under the control of armed groups not backed by the United States.