West Nile virus is a significant, and growing, public health issue in the United States. With no human vaccine, mosquito control programs rely on accurate forecasting to determine when and where WNV will emerge. Recently, spatial Graph neural networks (GNNs) were shown to be a powerful tool for WNV forecasting, significantly improving over traditional methods. Building on this work, we introduce a new GNN variant that linearly connects graph attention layers, allowing us to train much larger models than previously used for WNV forecasting. This architecture specializes general densely connected GNNs so that the model focuses more heavily on local information to prevent over smoothing. To support training large GNNs we compiled a massive new dataset of weather data, land use information, and mosquito trap results across Illinois. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms both GNN and classical baselines in both out-of-sample and out-of-graph WNV prediction skill across a variety of scenarios and over all prediction horizons.

The Season 4, Week 6 Battle Pass challenges are live in Fortnite: Battle Royale, and in keeping with tradition we've got to search between three objects to find a battle star. That's how the game goes: one week it's a treasure map, the other week it's a search between. This time around the game asks us to search between a playground, a campsite and a footprint: you're free to give the thing a roll on your own, but if you'd like a little bit of help you can look below. See the rest of the Week 6 challenges and how to solve them here. The best orienting point that we have to work with is the footprint, which is we can find in the southwestern part of the map.

We've got a new set of weekly challenges in Fortnite: Battle Royale, asking us to search all over the map to complete challenges and nab battle stars to keep pushing our Season 4 Battle Passes up to Tier 100. The Week 6 challenges aren't so bad, though you might need a bit of help with some of them. Look below to find where to spray over seven Carbide and Omega posters to complete this particular Week 6 challenge. See the rest of the Week 6 challenges and how to solve them here. We should note that things are a little bit different this time because you'll need some equipment beyond what the game gives you at the start: you don't have a spray until Season 4 Battle Pass Tier 3. Nearly everyone completing weekly challenges has Tier 3, of course, but the point stands just the same.

Searching chests in Loot Lake is one of Fortnite's Season 4, Week 6 challenges. Searching for 7 treasure chests in Loot Lake is one of the Season 4, Week 6 challenges in Fortnite: Battle Royale. Given that this is Loot Lake, a body of water practically overflowing with loot, searching for chests shouldn't prove too problematic. One issue with this area of the map, however, is exposure. Getting to some of these chests means leaving yourself exposed to enemy fire from all directions.

Just like they do every week, the Season 4, Week 6 challenges have leaked online, courtesy of the dataminers at Fortnite Tracker. We're more than halfway through the season now, and many players are closing in on the ultimate goals of the season: for some that might mean unlocking and upgrading the Omega skin, which requires Battle Pass Tier 100 and Season Level 80. For others, that might mean unlocking the Blockbuster skin, which requires finishing seven complete weeks of challenges. Whatever you're working towards, the weekly challenges are your best source of Battle Pass tiers and experience, so let's take a look at what we've got. Take note that these are subject to change, and have done so in the past: last week one of the collection challenges wound up replaced by the charming disco ball dance challenge.

Welcome to the robot on the road revolution.

Slate and Future Tense are discussing Mr. Robot and the technological world it portrays throughout the show's second season. You can follow this conversation on Future Tense, and Slate Plus members can also listen to Hacking Mr. Robot, a members-only podcast series featuring Lily Newman and Fred Kaplan. In this episode of Hacking Mr. Robot, Fred and Lily discuss Episode 7. Fred Kaplan is the author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.

"Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only'learning about' the subject matter but also'learning to be' a full participant in the field." This quote is a passage from the readings this week that really resonated with me. Social learning is a way to really engage in the subject matter because you are not only passively participating in the subject matter by reading it but also engaging in the subject by discussing it with your peers and in some instances with the instructor. The chapter also discusses surface learning in comparison with deep learning. Surface learning is when you know the basic facts of the material but don't understand it enough to use it out of direct context, or at least that was my understanding.