Princeton Celebrates Anne Carson, a Nobel Prize Winner Who Was Denied Tenure
Carson, who was awarded the Literature prize on Thursday, was denied tenure when teaching at the university in the 1980s, leading social media users to mock a congratulatory message.
Key Moments From the Georgia Senate Debate Beween Ossoff and Collins
Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, called his Republican opponent, Representative Mike Collins, a bigot. Mr. Collins called the incumbent a radical “trust-fund kid.”
Some Palestinians Express Discomfort With Protest Targeting Mamdani
Palestinian advocates acknowledged the range of viewpoints within their movement but were dismayed by the vitriol directed at Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a longtime ally of their cause.
Fort Hood Shooter’s Execution Will Be Public and Streamed Live, Pentagon Says
If carried out, the public execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad set for Dec. 3 would be the first in modern U.S. history.
Trump Administration Suspends Microsoft From Green Card Program, Alleging Visa Fraud
Vice President JD Vance singled out the tech firm as he and other officials accused an array of companies and universities of abusing the visa system.
‘Battening Down the Hatches’ as Hurricane Isaias Approaches Gulf Coast
Residents are making careful choices about whether to leave their homes or stock up and stay.
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Returns Home After Long and Grueling Deployment
The aircraft carrier, whose crew endured food shortages, spent much of its nearly 11-month deployment in combat without a day off.
US Bars Microsoft, Adobe, and Major IT Firms From Green Card Program
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, Reuters reported.
The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press.
Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers. "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees."
"These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country."
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What to Make of Trump’s Uptick in Profanity
The president’s speech is getting filthier.
Explosions Rattle Saudi Capital
Also, Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in Literature. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.
What Are the Remaining Millennium Prize Problems?
OpenAI’s trove of new math results doesn’t fully solve any of these highly prestigious open questions, but it seems to make progress on some.
Trump Says U.S. Will Not Strike Iran Again Before Midterms as Military Draws Up New Plans
The U.S. military has drafted options for three days of strikes, but in recent months the president has repeatedly vetoed plans to restart the war.
Mamdani Stands By His Handling of Oct. 7 Anniversary After Emotional Day
The mayor expressed no regrets after he was criticized by Jewish leaders over a statement marking the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks and later booed by pro-Palestinian activists at a vigil.
That Daily Brain Rot Break Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages
Welcome to the postliterate era.
Trump Administration Considers Using Ships to Deport Immigrants
Journeys to destinations including El Salvador and Venezuela could take days and cost millions. Officials cautioned that discussions are still preliminary.
Emmy Awards Leave Broadcast TV For Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to the rotating agreement in place years prior. The switch ends the traditional "wheel-deal" setup to broadcast the awards, where ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox took turns hosting the Emmys each year. The system has been in place since at least 1994, with the most recent eight-year contract expiring this year. "Television has never been more global, and the Emmys should be a celebration that the world can share," Television Academy chair Cris Abrego said in a statement. "Having a dedicated home with Prime Video allows us to build on that legacy with unprecedented global reach and a broader commitment to the Television Academy and our mission throughout the year."
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Female AI Agents 'Paid' Less Than Males, Study Finds
Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought.
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Chrome 155 Ships Decoding Support For JPEG XL
Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust to ensure memory safety first, the extensive performance work that makes it fast, and what the journey tells us about developer feedback and the web standards ecosystem.
[...] With JPEG XL officially landing in Chrome, the web becomes faster, richer, and safer. We encourage developers, content creators, and platform owners to start using .jxl images and animations in their pipelines. Try it out, file bugs, and help us continue building a faster and safer web for everyone.
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OpenAI Unleashes Hundreds More Math Results Upon a Field Already In Shock
OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in computing power," reports Scientific American. From the report: OpenAI revealed the results in a GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. The deluge will take mathematicians months to parse through and understand -- including to determine whether the proofs contain novel and important ideas or are mostly mash-ups of existing techniques. But many of the results have already been verified in Lean -- a programming language that validates a proof's logic -- and are therefore all but certain to be correct.
Among the results claimed are a solution to the four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, improvements on some of the world's most important computer algorithms and actual progress toward math's scariest problem, the Riemann hypothesis.
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For Mamdani, Oct. 7 Anniversary Sets Off Anger and Bitterness
Hours after some Jewish leaders denounced Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s remarks about the attacks on Israel, activists interrupted a vigil to call him a traitor to the Palestinian cause.