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FATHER Christmas is set to roll into Colchester today in a bid to boost residents' mood... and raise some dosh for Colchester Foodbank at the same time.

The Falcon 9, the first manned space flight to leave US soil in nine years, will appear low in the south-western part of the UK night-sky and pass the left side of the moon.

Kellie Chauvin, a former Mrs. Minnesota winner, is seeking a divorce from Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, her lawyers said, following his Friday murder charge for George Floyd's death.

silverjacket writes: A story in this week's issue of Science. Artificial intelligence (AI) just seems to get smarter and smarter. Each iPhone learns your face, voice, and habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster chips, more data, and better algorithms. But some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than the core innovations their inventors claim -- and some of the gains may not exist at all, says Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blalock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches to improving neural networks -- software architectures that loosely mimic the brain. "Fifty papers in," he says, "it became clear that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was." The researchers evaluated 81 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming unneeded connections. All claimed superiority in slightly different ways. But they were rarely compared properly -- and when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements over a 10-year period. The result [PDF], presented in March at the Machine Learning and Systems conference, surprised Blalock's Ph.D. adviser, MIT computer scientist John Guttag, who says the uneven comparisons themselves may explain the stagnation. "It's the old saw, right?" Guttag said. "If you can't measure something, it's hard to make it better." Researchers are waking up to the signs of shaky progress across many subfields of AI. A 2019 meta-analysis of information retrieval algorithms used in search engines concluded the "high-water mark ... was actually set in 2009." Another study in 2019 reproduced seven neural network recommendation systems, of the kind used by media streaming services. It found that six failed to outperform much simpler, nonneural algorithms developed years before, when the earlier techniques were fine-tuned, revealing "phantom progress" in the field. In another paper posted on arXiv in March, Kevin Musgrave, a computer scientist at Cornell University, took a look at loss functions, the part of an algorithm that mathematically specifies its objective. Musgrave compared a dozen of them on equal footing, in a task involving image retrieval, and found that, contrary to their developers' claims, accuracy had not improved since 2006. "There's always been these waves of hype," Musgrave says.

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A PLUCKY pensioner who cheated death twice has celebrated her 100th birthday with a card from the Queen.

A Louisville Metro Police Department officer (left) fired pepper balls at a local television news reporter, Kaitlin Rust (right), who was covering a protest in downtown Louisville on Friday night.

Two lions could be put down after they attacked a Shoalhaven Zoo worker, in New South Wales, while she was cleaning their cage.

The preliminary results of Tuesday's autopsy on the body of George Floyd, 46, concluded it saw 'no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxiation or strangulation'.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Greenhouse gas emissions in the EU continued their fall in 2018, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, according to a new report from Europe's environment watchdog. Emissions fell by 2.1% compared with 2017, to a level 23% lower than in 1990, the baseline for the bloc's emission cuts under the UN's climate agreements. If the UK is excluded, the decline since 1990 was smaller, standing at 20.7%. The continuing fall, revealed in a report by the European Environment Agency, came as the result of EU-wide and country-specific policies, with energy generation showing the biggest decline in emissions as coal was phased out further and renewable power increased. Carbon dioxide emissions from transport flattened off in 2018, after rising for the previous four years, giving hope that this major source of emissions may be brought under control. However, emissions must be brought down much further and faster to satisfy the EU's obligations under the Paris agreement, campaigners said. Annual falls of about 7% are estimated to be needed to keep global heating within the Paris upper limit of 2C above pre-industrial levels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.