Random Walk: A Modern Introduction (2010) [pdf]
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Researchers this month will begin testing a high-voltage circuit breaker that can quench an arc and clear a fault with supercritical carbon dioxide fluid. The first-of-its-kind device could replace conventional high-voltage breakers, which use the potent greenhouse gas sulfur hexafluoride, or SF 6. Such equipment is scattered widely throughout power grids as a way to stop the flow of electrical current in an emergency. “SF 6 is a fantastic insulator, but it’s very bad for the environment—probab
Solving LinkedIn Queens with APL 14 Jun 2025 on Peter Vernigorov’s blog A couple months ago I noticed that LinkedIn now has a few simple games. They’re not much to write home about, but I really enjoy playing Queens. This week I saw two posts about solving the Queens game programmatically. Both were quite interesting to me, so I thought this was a good opportunity to also solve the game in my favourite language - APL - and share my experience. Having been using APL for Advent of Code, I wante
Nanonets-OCR-s is a powerful, state-of-the-art image-to-markdown OCR model that goes far beyond traditional text extraction. It transforms documents into structured markdown with intelligent content recognition and semantic tagging, making it ideal for downstream processing by Large Language Models (LLMs). Nanonets-OCR-s is packed with features designed to handle complex documents with ease: LaTeX Equation Recognition: Automatically converts mathematical equations and formulas into properly fo
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Benchmark corpus To compile our benchmark corpus, we utilized a broad list of sources (Methods), ranging from completely novel, manually crafted questions over university exams to semi-automatically generated questions based on curated subsets of data in chemical databases. For quality assurance, all questions have been reviewed by at least two scientists in addition to the original curator and automated checks. Importantly, our large pool of questions encompasses a wide range of topics and que
< (From left) Master's Student Gyurim Jang, Professor Kyeongha Kwon > KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced on June 9th that a research team led by Professor Kyeongha Kwon from the School of Electrical Engineering, in a joint study with Professor Hanjun Ryu's team at Chung-Ang University, has developed a self-powered wireless carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring system. This innovative system harvests fine vibrational energy from its surroundings to periodically measure CO2 concentrations.
In a series of recent tests in New Mexico, the Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program achieved several new records for transmitting power over distance. The team recorded more than 800 watts of power delivered during a 30-second transmission from a laser 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away. Over the course of the test campaign, more than a megajoule of energy was transferred. Previously, the greatest reported distance records for an appreciable amount of optical power (>1 microwat
Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with several mechanical models, in which gravity was not a pull, but a push. For example, space might be filled with unseen particles that bombard the objects on all sides. The object on the left absorbs the particles coming from the left, the one on the right absorb
NesDev.org A community of homebrew game developers and hardware researchers for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and other retro consoles.
Lisp-Stat is conceptually similar to R and will be familiar to most people from that ecosystem. It is suitable for both exploratory data analysis as well as front-line production deployments. Common Lisp is currently used at Google in several high-availability, high-volume transactional systems. Why Lisp? We had a few requirements when evaluating options. Specifically the system had to: Work well in the kind of exploratory environment conducive to analytics and AI Be robust enough to work in
Jokes and Humour in the public Android API Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful. Easter eggs, jokes, whatever you want to call them, that are visible to Android app developers rather than regular users. ActivityManager.
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it until a crisis is already here. However, small groups of volunteers with a little bit of time and money can provide crucial initial leadership to bootstrap recovery. An Internet Resil
Nintendo is a lot of things to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. Mario helps, and so do the host of other iconic first-party titles and the movies, toys, theme parks, and endless other IP offshoots they spawned. But beyond how Nintendo looks and plays and sells, it also has a sound, and thanks to the Switch 2, that sound is just as iconic as ever this time around. Seriously, though, listen to the Mario Kart World soundtrack right now. There’s a lot of newfangled Switch 2 music I l
Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition might be tough. Green was a nice easy one, but I was lost on some of the others. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That's a sign that the game has earned enough
is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Anker has announced a new version of its wireless sleep buds that could be even more effective at delivering a peaceful slumber by blocking out disturbing noises using active noise cancellation. Previous versions of the Soundcore Sleep earbuds blocked external sounds passively using just a snug fit inside the ear, but the new Sleep A30 finally ad
While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How so? Well, the Navy’s chief technology officer, Justin Fanelli, says he has spent the last two and a half years cutting through the red tape and shrinking the protracted procurement cycles that once made working with the military a nightmare for startups. The efforts
India has been one of the top recipients of remittances in the world for more than a decade. Inward remittances jumped from $55.6 billion in 2010-11 to $118.7 billion in 2023-24, according to data from the country’s central bank. The bank projects that figure will reach $160 billion in 2029. This means there is an increasing market for digitalized banking experiences for non-resident Indians(NRIs), ranging from remittances to investing in different assets back home. Aspora (formerly Vance) is
Artificial intelligence-generated images of women kissing while mud wrestling and President Donald Trump eating poop are some of the conversations users are unknowingly sharing publicly through Meta's newly launched AI app. The company rolled out the Meta AI app in April, putting it in direct competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT. But the tool has recently garnered some negative publicity and sparked privacy concerns over some of the wacky — and personal — prompts being shared publicly from user ac
Image by Andrew Brodhead Researchers have developed a novel device that literally spins away the clots that block blood flow to the brain and cause strokes. As Stanford explains in a blurb, the novel milli-spinner device may be able to save the lives of patients who experience "ischemic stroke" from brain stem clotting. Traditional clot removal, a process known as thrombectomy, generally uses a catheter that either vacuums up the blood blockage or uses a wire mesh to ensnare it — a procedure
There's no shortage of reasons to stay off the Meta ecosystem, which includes Facebook and Instagram, but there are some places where WhatsApp remains the main form of text-based communication. The app is a great alternative to SMS, since it offers end-to-end encryption and was one of the go-to methods to send uncompressed photos and videos between iPhone and Android users before Apple adopted RCS. Even though Facebook, which later rebranded to Meta, acquired WhatsApp in 2014, it doesn't require
ChatGPT's Codex, which is an AI agent that lets you code and delegate programming tasks, is now testing a new feature that lets you choose the best solution. OpenAI launched Codex in April, and it's a great tool, but it's nowhere close to replacing entry-level engineers. OpenAI insists Codex could help developers achieve more by delegating their tasks to different agents, and a new update brings it closer to the expectations set by the company. As per the release notes, ChatGPT Codex can now
'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or
Japan's Studio Ghibli turns 40 this month with two Oscars and legions of fans young and old won over by its complex plots and fantastical hand-drawn animation. But the future is uncertain, with latest hit "The Boy and the Heron" likely — but not certainly — the final feature from celebrated co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, now 84. In March, the internet was flooded with pictures in Studio Ghibli's distinctively nostalgic style after the release of OpenAI's newest image generator — raising questions o
GNOME and Red Hat Linux Eleven Years Ago By Oscar Laycock Four years ago, I switched on an old PC and found a seven year old (at that time) copy of Linux on it. I still use parts of the 1998 Red Hat Linux, today. Red Hat Linux in 1998 My copy of Red Hat Linux is 5.1, codenamed "Manhattan". It was released on May 22, 1998. The first Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. Finally, Red Hat Linux merged with Fedora on 22 September 2003, when Red Hat started Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
SumatraPDF is a Windows GUI application for viewing PDF, ePub and comic books written in C++. A common need in GUI programs is a callback. E.g. when a button is clicked we need to call a function with some data identifying which button was clicked. Callback is therefore a combo of function and data and we need to call the function with data as an argument. In programming language lingo, code + data combo is called a closure. C++ has std::function<> and lambdas (i.e. closures). Lambdas convert
Scientists have created cyborg embryos by implanting electrode arrays into the developing brains of frogs, mice, and salamanders. Although the researchers reject implants in human embryos as unethical, they suggest their technology might one day help study and treat neurodevelopmental conditions in children. The stretchable technology at the core of the electrode arrays could record brain activity while remaining soft enough to accommodate the children’s growth. Recording the activity of neuron
Within this seemingly simple computation, however, lurks a powerful multiplier. At any given level of the building, the compression figure remains constant; the wind may blow harder, but the structure doesn’t get any heavier. Thus, immense leverage can result from higher wind forces. In the Citicorp tower, the forty-per-cent increase in tension produced by a quartering wind became a hundred-and-sixty-per-cent increase on the building’s bolts. Precisely because of that leverage, a margin of safe
The document describes default date and time functions in SQLite. This document is a supplement to the function documentation found on the SQL Expression Syntax page. Function Overview Five date and time functions are available, as follows: date( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) time( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) datetime( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) julianday( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) strftime( format, timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) All five functions
My earliest memory of the ocean is of a tropical lagoon. Ammonites rose and fell in the warm water column, occasionally propelling themselves forwards, their curled ram’s horn shells surprisingly streamlined in the water. This tropical lagoon was in fact in my imagination, fired as I explored the old limestone quarry near my childhood home in Leicester, some 60 miles from the coast. For a small boy in the 1930s this was a marvellous place for adventures, and the knowledge that millions of year