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Faber Birren (EX’23) was a self-taught color theorist who became a leading 20th‑century consultant. From Chicago to New York, he showed how color can boost sales and safety and shape mood—advising a meat company, DuPont, the U.S. Army, and Disney on Bambi, Fantasia, and Pinocchio. He popularized ‘color at work,’ codifying practices like yellow for hazards and blue‑green hospital rooms, and authored works on color psychology and therapy. Birren argued color permeates mass psychology and well‑being, making color a central cultural and commercial force.
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Beginning in 2003, retired food-industry executive Helio da Silva planted trees on a neglected São Paulo site. Over two decades, thousands of trees across 160 species transformed the area into Tiquatira Park, a 3.2-kilometre linear urban forest. Five years in, the city officially recognised it as its first linear park, now a green corridor that hosts wildlife and cools the urban heat in a metropolis of about 12 million. Da Silva, still active at 73, funds and maintains the project from his own savings (~$7,000/year) and aims for 50,000 trees, earning the nickname “Tree Planter.”
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Estonia's 'home cafe days' turn private gardens, courtyards and garages into pop-up eateries each summer, inviting strangers to share homemade meals. About 150 events run nationwide from April to September, ranging from simple lemonade stands to tents and full outdoor restaurants. The tradition began on Hiiumaa in 2007 to draw visitors and highlights islanders' long history of hospitality; today hosts include Kehra's Heiki Kalvik and Kalamaja residents who host Ukrainian refugees' families, serving local dishes to curious visitors. The low-tech, cash-only gatherings offer a rare window into everyday Estonian life and neighbourliness.
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WSJ’s 404 page notes the requested page can’t be found and suggests checking the URL or emailing [email protected]. It also showcases popular articles (investors whose SpaceX shares vanished before cashing in; airlines pushing back against ICE enforcement at airports; Senate panel obtaining a copy of Fauci’s Covid-era phone) and highlights latest podcasts (Why AI Models Keep Hacking Other Companies; Dow Ends Winning Streak; TNB Tech Minute: SpaceX and Tesla Plan Texas Chip Plant).
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New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI Emergency Call Triage to triage and route calls, not replace, human dispatchers. The OPCD began using AI for 311 non-emergency calls in April to provide information. For 911, the AI assesses calls and can offer updates; if the call isn’t about the incident, it goes to a human dispatcher. The system aims to reduce overload from thousands of daily calls. Potential risks include biases, misrecognition of accents, reliability, and cybersecurity.
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On Common Voice data, Whisper ASR does not degrade with speaker age; older groups are transcribed as well or better than twenties (twenties 6.53% WER vs sixties 5.23%, seventies 4.67% with matched accents/genders). When using a fixed silence threshold for turn-taking, older speakers are talked over 2–2.5x more, creating a large age-related penalty in real-world agent conversations. A semantic turn model (smart-turn v3) largely closes this gap. Limitations: healthy aging, read-speech, accent confounding, and corpus-specific effects; results may not generalize to disordered speech.
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The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem says any finite noncollinear set of points in the plane has a line through exactly two of them. Kelly’s proof selects the closest point–line pair (P, l). If l passed through more than two points, two would lie on the same side of P′, and constructing a line through P and a point plus a perpendicular from the other would create a shorter distance than the minimum, a contradiction. Therefore l contains exactly two points.
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Access to medium.com is blocked by Cloudflare's security service. The block can be triggered by certain words, SQL commands, or malformed data. To resolve, the user should contact the site owner, explain what they were doing, and include the Cloudflare Ray ID shown on the page. The message also displays the user's IP and notes Cloudflare's performance and security.
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A Zenodo data-and-code archive for the preprint analyzes sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD/QSCI) on iron–sulfur clusters to test convergence to the target spin. Using a rotation-invariant spin audit (determinant-space ⟨S²⟩, invariant S²-Gram spectra, higher moments), the authors find no audited run reaches the named singlet at a competitive energy; at the largest dimension, the lowest root is ~170 mHa below the published energy but ⟨S²⟩ ≈ 1.37, far from singlet, with hardware samples offering no energy advantage. They urge including measured spin moments as benchmarks. The archive provides full data, code, and reproducibility materials (START_HERE.md, SHA hashes).
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NSF's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) team reports the first high-resolution observation of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) on the Sun's photosphere, seen as small vortex-like swirls at magnetic boundaries. Combined with simulations (MURaM) from HAO and MPS, the findings confirm KHI as a driver of magnetic energy diffusion and possibly heating the outer solar atmosphere, contributing to space weather processes. The study, published in Nature, suggests KH vortices constantly twist and mix magnetized plasma, potentially fueling flares and CMEs. Future work will automate detection to quantify energy transport to higher layers.
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Researchers developed a bioengineered chewing gum (bean-gum base with FRIL antiviral protein, enhanced with protegrin) that targets microbes linked to head and neck cancer. In ex vivo tests on patient saliva, gum extracts reduced HPV by up to 93% and lowered two cancer-associated bacteria, Porphyromonas gingivalis and Fusobacterium nucleatum, by almost to zero with a single dose, while sparing beneficial oral bacteria. The approach could supplement or prevent infection alongside existing therapies. Study led by Henry Daniell (UPenn); published in Scientific Reports.
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Oliver Haslam argues that USB-C cables are indistinguishable by sight despite varying charging and data capabilities. He uses a $15 USB-C tester to measure voltage, current, and real-time power drawn, helping identify which cables can fast-charge a 16-inch MacBook Pro and other devices. He notes the importance of e-marker chips and that cables can lie about specs; a tester alone helps, but you can't tell data-speed from the cable without more advanced meters. He pairs testing with a label maker to categorize cables, hoping cables will come with labels or color codes.
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Guajes de Ayala, Guerrero: a 50-person self-defense group formed as cartels pressed into remote communities. Armed with U.S.-made AK-47s and AR-15s, grenades, and drones, they patrol mountains to deter the Nueva Familia Michoacana. Born in 2020 after land seizures, the vigilantes reflect a fractured security landscape where multiple cartels and gangs operate; many residents fled, schools closed, clinics shuttered. The government remains split on vigilantes, and the killing of El Mencho threatens to trigger further violence as power shifts.
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A visual primer on quantizing large language models. It explains how quantization reduces memory by lowering bit-width from FP32 to FP16, BF16, or INT8, and contrasts dynamic/static PTQ with QAT. It covers symmetric (absmax) and asymmetric (zero-point) quantization, range clipping, and calibration for weights and activations. It surveys 4-bit quantization methods like GPTQ (GPU) and GGUF (CPU offload), and contrasts PTQ with QAT. It also describes extreme approaches such as BitNet (1-bit and 1.58-bit ternary) that speed up large models.
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Pokémon Emerald ported to the RP2350 (Cortex-M33) running natively on RP2350B with 16 MB QSPI flash. No emulator; full game at ~60 fps with HDMI output. The decompilation is recompiled for Cortex-M33; the GBA PPU is software-rendered on core1, delivering a 240x160 framebuffer to 640x480 HDMI. Saves persist to QSPI flash; RAM ~378 KB; game image ~11.7 MB on flash. Playable from boot through overworld, battles, and saves, but audio is incomplete, link cable/RFU absent, RTC/time issues, and some features missing. Build uses Pico SDK and includes port docs.
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An in-depth overview of vLLM, a high-throughput LLM inference system. It starts from offline single-GPU basics (paged attention, continuous batching) and builds to online, multi-GPU/multi-node serving with a modular engine (engine core, model executor, KV cache, scheduler) and advanced features (chunked prefill, prefix caching, guided and speculative decoding, disaggregated prefill/decode). It covers scaling to MultiProcExecutor with data-parallel and tensor/pipeline parallelism, distributed serving stacks, and benchmarking/auto-tuning. It also describes architecture details like KV-cache blocks, prefix hashing, and external KV transfer via SharedStorageConnector, plus DP load-balancing and an API server stack.
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Nepal becomes the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned's free government service. Nepal's National Cyber Security Centre will monitor Nepalese government domains against HIBP data, enabling detection of exposed government email accounts and rapid response to breaches. The move strengthens threat monitoring and incident response and places Nepal among a growing list of governments using HIBP to protect public resources from compromised credentials.
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GitHub Status page showing uptime history and offering incident updates via multiple channels: email, SMS (with OTP verification), Slack, and webhooks; users can subscribe to Slack, Atom/RSS feeds, and a developer newsletter, and must agree to privacy policies with reCAPTCHA protection. The page also provides country-code selection for SMS, incident/maintenance alerts, and links to product, company, and support resources in the footer.
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State-Oriented Consistency: don’t force one uniform guarantee on all state. An OOM in a clustered MQTT broker showed the flaw: loading every client session on startup under Uniform Consistency. The fix: classify state, ask what happens if nodes disagree, find the required guarantee, and choose the weakest mechanism. Result: a 5-row table mapping state to guarantee to mechanism (Live sessions: single authoritative owner — Coordinator; Offline sessions: deterministic placement; Topic routing: availability — AP routing; Durable message state: durability — shared storage; Membership: eventual consistency — gossip). Ownership is deterministically computed; memory scales with ownership, not fleet size. Implemented in Keel MQTT Gateway.
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Using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers released the highest-resolution image yet of the Sun’s visible surface. The image shows dynamic, band-like and vortex-like plasma structures in a magnetically active area near a sunspot, with features ranging from about 20 km to thousands of kilometers. The team links many vortices to Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities at granule edges, marking the first observational confirmation of such instabilities on the Sun. These minute flows may help explain coronal heating and the transport of magnetic energy across the surface.
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