ATTACK OF THE KILLER CONJUNCTIVITIS FROM THE PLANET PINK-EYE.

The city has repeatedly pressed for a special regulation from the national government

OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

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Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change. In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial user criticism.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media. The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Irish mixed martial artist Conor McGregor claimed to have had consensual sex with a woman who is accusing him of rape, a court has heard.

1. Year-long action plan to combat diabetes to be launched on World Diabetes Day  The Hindu
2. World Diabetes Day 2024  PIB
3. World Diabetes Day: Why diabetes is more than abnormal blood sugar level  The Times of India
4. World Diabetes Day 2024: 10 Foods That Are Secretly Increasing Your Risk Of Diabetes  NDTV
5. World Diabetes Day 2024: 5 ways to detect diabetes quickly  Health shots

1. John Krasinski reveals wife Emily Blunt's reaction to his Sexiest Man Alive title  Hindustan Times
2. Actor John Krasinski Named 'Sexiest Man Alive' Of 2024 By People Magazine  NDTV
3. Is Jim from The Office really the sexiest man in the world?  The Guardian
4. Not Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Leonardo Dicaprio, Chris Evans, or Tom Cruise, THIS actor is the sexiest  India.com
5. John Krasinski Is PEOPLE's 2024 Sexiest Man Alive!  PEOPLE

1. Watch: Nitish Kumar bows to touch PM’s feet at Bihar event. Here’s how Modi reacted  Moneycontrol
2. Watch: PM Modi's unexpected gesture as Nitish Kumar bows down to touch his feet  The Times of India
3. Nitish Kumar tries to touch PM's feet at Bihar event. Modi does this next  India Today
4. PM Modi lays foundation stone for AIIMS Darbhanga in Bihar, says NDA Govt committed to welfare of people  The Hindu
5. PM Modi states ‘1 lakh medical seats in India’, vows to add ‘75,000 more’, lays foundation stone of AIIMS in Bihar  Mint

Reading depends on spoken language. This is a simple statement with profound consequences for children whose spoken language differs from the language they are expected to read. For most children, the language skills they bring to school will support learning to read, which is mainly learning to understand their spoken language in a new form: print. However, some children’s language skills differ in important ways from the classroom language variety, and teachers rarely receive sound guidance on how to enhance their literacy instruction to meet these children’s needs.

Filed under: Skiing, North America, United States

• 16 Easy Ski Vacation Ideas from U.S. Cities
• 50 Ways to Ski in 50 States

Where to Ski In Every State and 16 Ski Vacations Near Big U.S. Cities originally appeared on Gadling on Thu, 05 Dec 2013 11:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Internet Tools, News

Continue reading Facebook, Instagram Release Top Checked-in Locations of 2013

Facebook, Instagram Release Top Checked-in Locations of 2013 originally appeared on Gadling on Fri, 13 Dec 2013 14:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: North America, United States

Continue reading Sorry Indianapolis, You're No Longer the Sole Location Offering TSA PreCheck Enrollment Background Checks

Sorry Indianapolis, You're No Longer the Sole Location Offering TSA PreCheck Enrollment Background Checks originally appeared on Gadling on Mon, 16 Dec 2013 15:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Business, Talking Travel

Skift Acquires Gadling Travel From AOL originally appeared on Gadling on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 09:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Left-handed reliever Mike Dunn's recovery from season-ending left shoulder surgery has gone well enough that the Rockies are cautiously optimistic he will be ready to open the season -- the final one in his three-year, $19 million contract.

Fans and analysts spend the entire offseason speculating where the top free agents could go, but sometimes an under-the-radar pickup can end up making a world of difference. As positional competitions begin to heat up at Spring Training camps this month, MLB.com's beat writers were asked to identify one potentially overlooked acquisition for each of the 30 clubs. Here's who they came up with.

Rockies outfielder Charlie Blackmon can identify with third baseman Nolan Arenado, which puts him in position to offer support rather than advice.

Familiar sounds of encouragement and needling filled a practice field at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick on Monday as Nolan Arenado, Trevor Story and the infielders took grounders and Charlie Blackmon and the outfielders gathered their bats and spikes. Only a few faces that always seemed to be around are missing as Spring Training begins.

If German Marquez, Kyle Freeland and Jon Gray want to battle it out for tops on the staff, that's perfectly fine with Rockies manager Bud Black.

A year after looking for ways to move Charlie Blackmon out of the leadoff spot, Rockies manager Bud Black is counting the reasons to keep him up top.

On this opening week of Spring Training, all 30 Major League teams have one thing in common: optimism. Here's an optimism cheat sheet for each of them.

Rockies manager Bud Black said the team prefers that longtime center fielder Charlie Blackmon move to right field, rather than left.

The Blue Jays will start determining who their catcher of the future will be when Danny Jansen and Reese McGuire battle it out behind the plate this spring.

Fans and analysts spend the entire offseason speculating where the top free agents could go, but sometimes an under-the-radar pickup can end up making a world of difference. As positional competitions begin to heat up at Spring Training camps this month, MLB.com's beat writers were asked to identify one potentially overlooked acquisition for each of the 30 clubs. Here's who they came up with.

Here are the top players in each league who could get the opportunity to show what they can do at the highest level this year, perhaps even contending for Rookie of the Year honors

The Blue Jays have followed the lead of several other teams around Major League Baseball by using a Rapsodo machine to analyze spin-rate data. A Rapsodo camer is used to understand how much movement, velocity and spin pitchers are getting on every toss.

On this opening week of Spring Training, all 30 Major League teams have one thing in common: optimism. Here's an optimism cheat sheet for each of them.

Marcus Stroman made himself available to the media for the first time this spring on Sunday morning, and what followed was an eventful 21 minutes that touched on almost every aspect of his game and the Blue Jays roster.

Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election, but asserting that he did became a prerequisite for Republicans standing for nomination to Congress or the Senate to win their primaries. An entire party became a vehicle for disinformation.1 Trump did win the 2024 presidential election, and key to that victory was building on the success of that lie. If you control enough of the information ecosystem, truth no longer matters.Another telling example: Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not eating cats and dogs. US vice president elect, JD Vance, the source of that claim, admitted as much even as he justified it. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I'm going to do,” he said.2Disinformation in politics is nothing new. History is replete with claims that were fabricated to advance political aims. Although...

Terminally ill adults in England and Wales who are expected to die within six months would be able to get help to end their lives if their applications were approved by two doctors and a High Court judge, under proposed new legislation.1Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who proposed the bill, said it provided the “strictest safeguards anywhere in the world.” The law would apply only to people who have full mental capacity and are terminally ill. Mental illness and disability are both excluded as eligibility criteria, and a person would need to declare twice in writing that they wanted to be helped to die.A person who wished to end their life would have to administer the medication themselves. It will remain illegal for a doctor or anybody else to end a person’s life. No doctor will be obliged to participate in any part of the process.The bill would also make it...

Goal-directed visual attention is a fundamental cognitive process that enables animals to selectively focus on specific regions of the visual field while filtering out irrelevant information. However, given the domain specificity of social behaviors, it remains unclear whether attention to faces versus nonfaces recruits different neurocognitive processes. In this study, we simultaneously recorded activity from temporal and frontal nodes of the attention network while macaques performed a goal-directed visual search task. V4 and inferotemporal (IT) visual category-selective units, selected during cue presentation, discriminated fixations on targets and distractors during the search but were differentially engaged by face and house targets. V4 and IT category-selective units also encoded fixation transitions and search dynamics. Compared with distractors, fixations on targets reduced spike–LFP coherence within the temporal cortex. Importantly, target-induced desynchronization between the temporal and prefrontal cortices was only evident for face targets, suggesting that attention to faces differentially engaged the prefrontal cortex. We further revealed bidirectional theta influence between the temporal and prefrontal cortices using Granger causality, which was again disproportionate for faces. Finally, we showed that the search became more efficient with increasing target-induced desynchronization. Together, our results suggest domain specificity for attending to faces and an intricate interplay between visual attention and social processing neural networks.

Somatosensory coding in rodents has been mostly studied in the whisker system and hairy skin, whereas the function of low-threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMRs) in the rodent glabrous skin has received scant attention, unlike in primates where the glabrous skin has been the focus. The relative activation of different LTMR subtypes carries information about vibrotactile stimuli, as does the rate and temporal patterning of LTMR spikes. Rate coding depends on the probability of a spike occurring on each stimulus cycle (reliability), whereas temporal coding depends on the timing of spikes relative to the stimulus cycle (precision). Using in vivo extracellular recordings in male rats and mice of either sex, we measured the reliability and precision of LTMR responses to tactile stimuli including sustained pressure and vibration. Similar to other species, rodent LTMRs were separated into rapid-adapting (RA) or slow-adapting based on their response to sustained pressure. However, unlike the dichotomous frequency preference characteristic of RA1 and RA2/Pacinian afferents in other species, rodent RAs fell along a continuum. Fitting generalized linear models to experimental data reproduced the reliability and precision of rodent RAs. The resulting model parameters highlight key mechanistic differences across the RA spectrum; specifically, the integration window of different RAs transitions from wide to narrow as tuning preferences across the population move from low to high frequencies. Our results show that rodent RAs can support both rate and temporal coding, but their heterogeneity suggests that coactivation patterns play a greater role in population coding than for dichotomously tuned primate RAs.

The sudden appearance of a visual distractor shortly before saccade initiation can capture spatial attention and modulate the saccade trajectory in spite of the ongoing execution of the initial plan to shift gaze straight to the saccade target. To elucidate the neural correlates underlying these curved saccades, we recorded from single neurons in the frontal eye field of two male rhesus monkeys shifting gaze to a target while a distractor with the same eccentricity appeared either left or right of the target at various delays after target presentation. We found that the population level of presaccadic activity of neurons representing the distractor location encoded the direction of the saccade trajectory. Stronger activity occurred when saccades curved toward the distractor, and weaker when saccades curved away. This relationship held whether the distractor was ipsilateral or contralateral to the recorded neurons. Meanwhile, visually responsive neurons showed asymmetrical patterns of excitatory responses that varied with the location of the distractor and the duration of distractor processing relating to attentional capture and distractor inhibition. During earlier distractor processing, neurons encoded curvature toward the distractor. During later distractor processing, neurons encoded curvature away from the distractor. This was observed when saccades curved away from distractors contralateral to the recording site and when saccades curved toward distractors ipsilateral to the recording site. These findings indicate that saccadic motor planning involves dynamic push–pull hemispheric interactions producing attraction or repulsion for potential but unselected saccade targets.

Headlines for November 13, 2024; ACLU Attorney Lee Gelernt on How Rights Groups Are Preparing to Fight Trump’s Mass Deportations; Immigrant Activist to Biden: Close Deportation Cases Now to Take a Weapon Away from Trump; Trump Taps Fossil Fuel Ally Lee Zeldin to Head EPA, Push “Anti-Environmental Agenda”; Head of U.N. Climate Summit in Azerbaijan Caught on Tape Pushing Oil & Gas Deals

Staff from OM SportsLink and Campus Crusade for Christ cycled from Pretoria to Cape Town to minister to people in rural villages along the way.

Community leaders in South Africa met with SportsLink to discuss how coaches can impact the fatherless in Randfontein.

God unexpectedly provides just what a family needs.

The church in Russia is facing a new threat-HIV/AIDS. OM Russia works in rehab-centres to show God's love and compassion.