Benjamin Watson, NFL veteran and Sports Spectrum editor-in-chief, says athletes are now "freer" to speak about their faith as the era of keeping convictions on the sidelines ends.

To train Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to generate realistic imagery requires a loss function that reflects human perception of image similarity. We propose such a loss function based on Watson's perceptual model, which computes a weighted distance in frequency space and accounts for luminance and contrast masking. We extend the model to color images, increase its robustness to translation by using the Fourier Transform, remove artifacts due to splitting the image into blocks, and make it differentiable. In experiments, VAEs trained with the new loss function generated realistic, high-quality image samples. Compared to using the Euclidean distance and the Structural Similarity Index, the images were less blurry; compared to deep neural network based losses, the new approach required less computational resources and generated images with less artifacts.

Australia's beloved weather website got a makeover - and infuriated users It was an unseasonably warm spring day in Sydney on 22 October, with a forecast of 39C (99F) - a real scorcher. The day before, the state of New South Wales had reported its hottest day in over a century, a high of 44.8C in the outback town of Bourke. But little did the team at the national Bureau of Meteorology foresee that they, in particular, would soon be feeling the heat. Affectionately known by Australians as the Bom, the agency's long-awaited website redesign went live that morning, more than a decade after the last update. Within hours, the Bom was flooded with a deluge of complaints.

Food Does the Grocery Cart Actually Need a Makeover? The rolling basket we dump our food in hasn't changed much in almost a century, and for good reason--it works. But meddling tech gurus think they know better. In the past few decades there have been numerous incremental changes to grocery stores, like the crazed proliferation of snacks and frozen food, security cameras tracking anything that moves, and self-checkout robots flashing in panic because they can't detect your Twix bar in the bag. Carts remain the open-ceiling prison cells on wheels they were 50 years ago, and baskets don't look much different either.

Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has died aged 97. His co-discovery of the structure of DNA opened the door to help explain how DNA replicates and carries genetic information, setting the stage for rapid advances in molecular biology. But his honorary titles were stripped in 2019 after he repeated comments about race and intelligence. In a TV programme, he made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. The death of Watson, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, was confirmed to the BBC by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he worked and researched for decades.

In February 1953, two men walked into a pub in Cambridge and announced they had found the secret of life. It was not an idle boast. One was James Watson, an American biologist from the Cavendish laboratory; the other was his British research partner, Francis Crick. The full Promethean power of their achievement would slowly emerge over decades of research by fellow geneticists. It also opened a Pandora's Box of controversial scientific and ethical issues - including human cloning, designer babies and Frankenstein foods.

Perceptual loss functions based on deep neural networks have produced promising results.

's most controversial moment was years in the making. It took many more for the fallout to come into full view. One morning in 2010, Alex Trebek walked onto the IBM campus not far outside New York City and prepared to inspect what would become the most unusual player in's history. The trip, clear across the country from the show's Culver City set, had been carefully planned. David Ferrucci, a computer scientist at IBM, had spent years leading a team to develop what would become the first and, so far, last nonhuman ever to compete on Longtime host Trebek would watch three practice games played with "Watson," as the system was named, and two human contestants. Then the team would be taken to lunch nearby, and Trebek would ultimately take the stage and host two more Watson practice games himself. By then the preparations for a future televised contest with IBM's creation were well underway, but this was the first time Trebek would encounter the technology in person, and his approval was crucial. Ferrucci was eager to show off one element in particular: the display, which had been rigged to show Watson's top three guesses whenever it answered, along with the numerical confidence rate it had in each one. For Ferrucci, this feature was central to demonstrating the computer's language-processing capabilities, because it showed that Watson wasn't just spitting out answers--it was reasoning. If Watson were ever going to be deployed to industries like health care, its human users wouldn't just want to know its best guess. It would be infinitely more valuable to know if Watson was 95 percent confident or just 30 percent, and whether those confidence levels were in line with its actual accuracy rate. It also made for better viewing. Ferrucci had brought his young daughter to the lab earlier in the process and showed her Watson as it played against human opponents. When Watson declined to ring in, Ferrucci's daughter turned to him and asked if the computer had crashed. He struggled to explain that it hadn't--it just wasn't confident enough to hazard a guess.