England's Liz Young wins the Women's Indian Open by one shot to claim her second Ladies European Tour title.

Bernhard Langer, 67, wins a title for the 18th year in a row on the PGA Tour Champions' circuit.

Anna Davies scores five tries as a rampant England side sweep aside Wales in a record 82-0 win at Headingley.

Watch highlights as Anna Davies scores five tries for England in a record 82-0 win against Wales at Headingley, their biggest ever margin of victory.

Warren Gatland's Wales equal the country's record losing international streak of 10 successive Test defeats after Fiji triumph in Cardiff.

Lloyd Martin, who has Down's syndrome, runs the New York Marathon after a record-breaking London run.

Teenager Nick Griggs admits he didn't set out to break the Parkrun world record after achieving the feat in Belfast on Saturday.

Manx Care meets 52% of the recommendations outlined in a series of Care Quality Commission reviews.

The Italian food is at the heart of a project to give young people "focus and a bit of purpose".

A total of 152 secondary school students were excluded during the 2023/24 academic year.

Economy Minister Conor Murphy has said he hopes Trump will not bring "uncertainty" to US/Irish business relations.

Despite raising £70,000, a group against second home planning permission cannot launch appeal.

Residents raise concerns about the plans in an east Suffolk village.

Paul Waring birdies the final two holes to win the Abu Dhabi Championship by two shots from fellow Englishman Tyrell Hatton.

Plans to demolish the former Wordsworth Tavern in Parson Cross are approved by the council.

The 88-year-old began the role four years ago after his wife died.

Truro City manager John Askey says his side looked "weary" in their 1-0 loss at Boreham Wood in National League South.

A £12m cash boost from the council has seen newly refurbished homes make Maryport more desirable.

Eco groups call for a mining firm to "break its silence" over a coal mine.

North Yorkshire councillors say £1m from the second homes tax premium will fund community-led plans.

Despite the increase, the lender warns mortgage costs could remain "higher for longer" following the Budget.

Mayor of London says increasing access to affordable housing is vital to the city's economic growth

Poole sailor Pip Hare wants to be the first woman to complete the gruelling 24,300-mile Vendée Globe race twice.

Former Premier League sides Blackpool and Birmingham City are drawn together in the second round of the FA Cup.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from an A&R person at a global dance music label. It was a pretty standard email along the lines of “hey we like your song, would you be interested in licensing it to us?” which I’ve received before and usually they amount to nothing. This often...

George Clarke will staff the most southerly post office in the world, living among a penguin colony.

Son of a nutcracker!

One of the more persistent criticisms I get these days is that by being public about my really rather normal experience of sex work, I am "silencing" people who label themselves a victims.

I'm not going to rehash the particular arguments regarding Happy Hookers vs. Abused Victims here, in part because Maggie McNeill has already done it. Suffice it to say that people who have read my writing know my experience of sex work, while useful, positive, and not abusive, was not quite the shopping-and-shoe-buying fantasy critics paint it as. But then most people who think that about me have never encountered my writing firsthand and are instead basing their impressions off a half-remembered advert featuring Billie Piper's tits. I understand. It's easy to get confused.

But it did give me a moment of pause: is my writing crowding out other voices in the market? I decided to examine this further.

Since many people purport to tell the story of sex workers for them, I excluded books that were either not written by or not straight biographies of a particular sex worker. I also excluded all that were fiction (such as my own Playing the Game) or deal with post-sex work life (such as Lily Burana's I Love a Man in Uniform).

Anyway, here are the results:


As you can see, my books are outnumbered by hooker memoirs that predate mine (Tracy Quan and Xaviera Hollander in particular). Outspoken strippers also chalk up plenty of contributions to the genre.

But outnumbering all of us by far are the 'misery memoirs' about prostitution. (Don't get angry at me for the sweeping generalisation. That is what the genre actually is called.) There are, to use the technical term, fucking shedloads of these books. You'll notice more than a few bestsellers in that stack as well. These were just the ones I could fit into the graphic; there are dozens upon dozens more. Many if not most of which were published after my books first came out.

It's probably fair to conclude that not only has my writing not stopped others from contributing their experience to the general debate on sex work, but that you're actually more likely to get noticed if you're unhappy with prostitution than generally satisfied with it.

With the swirling vortex of Kristof/trafficking/concern porn making the rounds, in fact, now might just be the right time to do it. If you were of a mind to write a book like that.

I encourage people with real firsthand views on the topic, whatever they are, to write. In fact moreso if you are not white, or not a cis woman, or not from the US or Western Europe. Women who look and sound approximately like me are already pretty well represented in the hallowed halls of sex worker lit. Let's diversify it all over the damn place until the orientalists and anti-migration-disguised-as-anti-trafficking types have to eat every last one of their words.

Just so long as we all understand that there is no such thing as one story of sex work - they are as diverse as the people in it. My story is my story. Your story is your story. None of us speak for all sex workers. And be honest. As Bob Dylan memorably put it “If you live outside the law you must be honest.” So long as we are all on the level, then getting as many true voices out there as possible is no bad thing.

Now back to the critics...

For pity's sake don't come crying to me if you're not as popular as you like. As the objective evidence shows, it categorically is not down to me whether or not people want to read your writing.

As regards writing as a career, it is dangerous to assume I or anyone else is getting "vastly rich" off of writing (as one bitter soul recently accused). Many people seem to think that writing a book, even a bestselling one, is a ticket to financial freedom and nets far beyond what even your common-or-garden escort can potentially make. I hate to break it to the dreamers, but that is not so.

If it was, do you think I'd still be writing? Hell, no. I'd be kicking back with J.K. Rowling and E.L. James in our secret volcano fortress warming my toes on a fire built by our minions entirely out of £50 notes and cackling madly. As opposed to the reality - sitting in my home office in a very average house in one of the poorest areas of the country. I'm not bankrolled by any grant-grabbing NGOs, my personal appearances usually only cover expenses, and nuisance legal threats from people with a lot of time on their hands cost more than all my living expenses combined. I've done better than most by writing and am still a long way off being a millionaire.

As it turns out, I hear the person who made that accusation supposedly comes from family money herself and spends her time as a dilettante poetess. If that's true, well, good luck with that. Whatever works amirite?

Best of luck, former fellow hos. This is not exactly the road less traveled but is no less bumpy for it.

In the round-up: Alpine must make up for 0.3-second deficit with 2025 chassis - Briatore • Stolen Lauda helmet goes on display • Wittich 'has not resigned'

Decision creates incentives for more secrecy

Sound public policy ideas are needed for families and businesses to thrive

This post announces Search Console recommendations, a new feature that provides websites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions they can take to improve their presence on Google Search.

This work describes an online handwritten character recognition system working in combination with an offline recognition system. The online input data is also converted into an offline image, and in parallel recognized by both online and offline strategies. Features are proposed for offline recognition and a disambiguation step is employed in the offline system for the samples for which the confidence level of the classier is low. The outputs are then combined probabilistically resulting in a classier out-performing both individual systems. Experiments are performed for Kannada, a South Indian Language, over a database of 295 classes. The accuracy of the online recognizer improves by 11% when the combination with offline system is used.

In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous technique for fast and accurate recognition of online handwritten Kannada and Tamil characters. Based on the primary classifier output and prior knowledge, the best classifier is chosen from set of three classifiers for second stage classification. Prior knowledge is obtained through analysis of the confusion matrix of primary classifier which helped in identifying the multiple sets of confused characters. Further, studies were carried out to check the performance of secondary classifiers in disambiguating among the confusion sets. Using this technique we have achieved an average accuracy of 92.6% for Kannada characters on the MILE lab dataset and 90.2% for Tamil characters on the HP Labs dataset.

Collaborative Filtering(CF) is a well-known technique in recommender systems. CF exploits relationships between users and recommends items to the active user according to the ratings of his/her neighbors. CF suffers from the data sparsity problem, where users only rate a small set of items. That makes the computation of similarity between users imprecise and consequently reduces the accuracy of CF algorithms. In this article, we propose a clustering approach based on the social information of users to derive the recommendations. We study the application of this approach in two application scenarios: academic venue recommendation based on collaboration information and trust-based recommendation. Using the data from DBLP digital library and Epinion, the evaluation shows that our clustering technique based CF performs better than traditional CF algorithms.

La Russie lance un "nombre record" de drones sur l'Ukraine. Barrage de drones ukrainiens sur Moscou

No Comment : les mariachis se réunissent à Mexico pour battre le record du monde de chant

Improving website structures is the main task of a website designer. In recent years, numerous web engineering researchers have investigated navigation recommendation systems. Page recommendation systems are critical for mobile website navigation. Accordingly, we propose a smart and adaptive navigation recommendation system based on reinforcement learning. In this system, user navigation history is used as the input for reinforcement learning model. The model calculates a surf value for each page of the website; this value is used to rank the pages. On the basis of this ranking, the website structure is modified to shorten the user navigation path length. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results revealed that user navigation paths could be decreased by up to 50% with training on 12 months of data, indicating that users could more easily find a target web page with the help of the proposed adaptive navigation recommendation system.

1. Un iPhone dans sa version Pro reconditionné pour moins de 300 € et c'est grâce à ce code promo exclusif au Black Friday  Lesmobiles
2. iPhone 13 : c’est le moment idéal pour obtenir le smartphone Apple à prix réduit sur Amazon  Capital.fr
3. Ce n’est pas une hallucination, l’iPhone 16 est en promotion dès 799 €, c’est le Black Friday avant l’heure !  Le Figaro
4. C’est le moment ou jamais de vous offrir l’iPhone 15 au meilleur prix : 629 euros seulement  20 Minutes
5. iPhone 14 Pro Max : même en 2024, son prix continue de chuter sans prévenir  Ouest-France

Alien-like signal from 2023 has been decoded. The next step is to figure out what it means  CNN

1. Bear encounter recorded in Whistler Village prompts conservation officer warning  CTV News Vancouver
2. Tourists 'shocked' to see man approach black bear in Whistler  Pique Newsmagazine

(Belga) Quatre membres de la milice d'extrême droite "Oath Keepers" ont été reconnus coupables lundi de sédition pour leur rôle dans l'assaut du Capitole, à l'issue du second procès organisé sur ce chef d'accusation extrêmement rare.

Depuis l'attaque du 6 janvier 2021, plus de 950 partisans de l'ex-président républicain Donald Trump ont été arrêtés et inculpés pour avoir semé le chaos dans le siège de la démocratie américaine. Parmi eux, seuls 14 militants de groupuscules d'extrême droite - neuf membres des "Oath Keepers" et cinq "Proud Boys" - ont été accusés de "sédition", un chef passible de 20 ans de prison qui implique d'avoir planifié l'usage de la force pour s'opposer au gouvernement. Faute de place suffisante dans le tribunal fédéral de Washington, la justice a organisé le procès des Oath Keepers, accusés de s'être entraînés et armés pour l'occasion, en deux temps. Un premier procès s'est conclu fin novembre par un verdict mitigé: le fondateur de cette milice, Stewart Rhodes, et un responsable local ont été déclarés coupables de sédition, mais leurs trois co-accusés ont été acquittés sur ce chef. Lundi, à l'issue du second procès, les jurés ont jugé coupables les quatre derniers Oath Keepers, des hommes âgés de 38 à 64 ans décrits comme de dangereux "traîtres" par l'accusation, mais comme des "fanfarons" par leurs avocats. Le procès des Proud Boys, dont leur leader Enrique Tarrio, s'est ouvert en décembre et était toujours en cours lundi, dans le même tribunal. (Belga)

Through the unparalleled espousal of theory of planned behaviour, this study intends to significantly add to the current knowledge on social networking sites (SNS) in <i>eWOM</i> information and its role in defining intentions to buy green products. In specie, this study seeks to first investigate the part played by <i>attitude towards SNS information</i> in influencing the <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> and then by <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> in effecting the <i>green purchase intention</i>. Besides this, it also aims to analyse the influence exerted by first <i>credibility of SNS information</i> on <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> and then by <i>acceptance of SNS information</i> on <i>green purchase intention</i>. In doing so, it also examines how well the age of the SNS users moderates all these four associations.

In order to further improve the teaching quality of multimedia teaching in school daily teaching, a classroom facial expression emotion recognition model is proposed based on convolutional neural network. VGGNet and CliqueNet are used as the basic expression emotion recognition methods, and the two recognition models are fused while the attention module CBAM is added. Simulation results show that the designed classroom face expression emotion recognition model based on V-CNet has high recognition accuracy, and the recognition accuracy on the test set reaches 93.11%, which can be applied to actual teaching scenarios and improve the quality of classroom teaching.

To improve the effectiveness of online training for music education, it was investigated how to improve the pulse-coupled neural network in image processing for spectral image segmentation. The study proposes a two-scale descent method to achieve oblique spectral correction. Subsequently, a convolutional neural network was optimised using a two-channel feature fusion recognition network for music theory notation recognition. The results showed that this image segmentation method had the highest accuracy, close to 98%, and the accuracy of spectral tilt correction was also as high as 98.4%, which provided good image pre-processing results. When combined with the improved convolutional neural network, the average accuracy of music theory symbol recognition was about 97% and the highest score of music majors was improved by 16 points. This shows that the method can effectively improve the teaching effect of online training in music education and has certain practical value.

With the expansion of business scope, the environment faced by enterprises has also changed, and competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Traditional financial systems are increasingly difficult to handle complex tasks and predict potential financial risks. In the context of the digital economy era, the booming financial sharing services have reduced labour costs and improved operational efficiency. This paper designs and implements an intelligent financial sharing platform, establishes a fund payment risk early warning model based on an improved support vector machine algorithm, and tests it on the Financial Distress Prediction dataset. The experimental results show that the effectiveness of using F2 score and AUC evaluation methods can reach 0.9484 and 0.9023, respectively. After using this system, the average financial processing time per order decreases by 43%, and the overall financial processing time decreases by 27%. Finally, this paper discusses the role of intelligent financial sharing platform in accounting transformation and optimisation of production.

The application of computer image digitisation has realised the transformation of people's production and lifestyle, and also promoted the development of the construction industry. This article aims to realise the research on architectural decoration design and production under computer network environment and promote the ecological development of indoor and outdoor design in the construction industry. This article proposes to use virtual reality technology in image digitisation to guide architectural decoration design research. In the comparative analysis of the weight of architectural decoration elements, among the calculated weights of secondary elements, the spatial function has the largest weight, which is 0.2155, and the landscape has the smallest weight, which is 0.0113. Among the three-level unit weights, the service area has the largest weight, which is 0.0976, and the fence frame has the smallest weight, which is 0.0119.

Disease pandemics, once thought to be historical relics, are now again challenging healthcare systems globally. Of essential importance is sufficiently investing in preparedness and responsiveness, but approaches to such investments vary significantly by country. These variations provide excellent opportunities to learn and prepare for future pandemics. Therefore, we examine digital health infrastructure and the state of healthcare and public health services in relation to pandemic preparedness and responsiveness. The research focuses on two countries: South Africa and the USA. We apply case analysis at the country level toward understanding digital health policy preparedness and responsiveness to a pandemic. We also provide a teaching note at the end for use in guiding students in this area to formulate digital health policy recommendations for pandemic preparedness and responsiveness.