Lighthouse Reports and Le Monde have investigated an algorithm used by France’s Caisse Nationale des Allocations Familiales (CNAF) to predict benefit fraud. The algorithm assigns a risk score to each of the 13 million households in France receiving benefits, with nearly seven in ten investigations being initiated based on a high risk score. The investigation […]
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The Fairphone 5 maintains its modularity and easy access to components, making it a repairable smartphone. It now features a new and improved OLED screen and upgraded cameras. The back cover has a slightly improved IP55 rating, allowing the phone to survive water jets. The battery has a larger capacity of 4200 mAh. There are […]
In a local bookstore, the author stumbled upon a dice game that determines what type of “takeaway” food to order and eat. The author explains that “takeaway” is the British term for American “take-out” or “carry-out.” The author researched the origin of these phrases, noting that they emerged in the mid-twentieth century and can be […]
The author discusses the historical role of women in brewing beer, highlighting the fact that until the 14th century, women dominated the field. The alewife, or brewster, was responsible for a high proportion of ale sales in Europe. Brewing ale was a common domestic activity, and women took on the task to contribute to household […]
Tengen, a company affiliated with Atari Games, made a bold move to break Nintendo’s licensing regime for the NES in the late 1980s. They manufactured their own circuit boards and used a variety of mapper chips to create unlicensed games for the console. Tengen’s most notable titles included “Pac-Man,” “Tetris,” and “After Burner,” each with […]
Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) as the default setting for personal conversations on Messenger. This milestone reflects the company’s commitment to ensuring that only the sender and intended recipients can access personal messages and that messages are authentic. The journey to bring E2EE to Messenger has been complex, involving the rebuilding of application […]
In this web content, the author presents a succinct method for computing a sequence in parallel with two prefix sums. This computation is particularly useful in science and engineering applications. By implementing the method in software and testing it on parallel hardware, the author confirms that it is faster than sequential computation by a factor […]
A proposed fork of the OpenPGP standard called “LibrePGP” has raised concerns and made statements justifying its existence. While some of the criticisms have merit, most of them are misleading. One major concern raised by LibrePGP is the use of GCM encryption mode, which is difficult to implement correctly. However, GCM is optional and users […]
Investors are speculating on the lithium market, causing the price of battery-grade lithium carbonate to drop by 77% in China. This follows the narrative of a lithium shortage, which led to an increase in production and ultimately a glut in the market. Despite this, a startup called Stardust Power plans to go public and build […]
In this study, we explore the combination of model compression and efficient attention mechanisms in language models. We evaluate the impact of knowledge distillation on efficient attention transformers and compare their performance to full attention models. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset, GONERD, for evaluating the performance of Named Entity Recognition (NER) models on long […]