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1. It Takes Two to Lie: One to Lie, and One to Listen

   Denis Peskov, Benny Cheng (January 2020, Proceedings of ACL)

   Trust is implicit in many online text conversations—striking up new friendships, or asking for tech support. But trust can be betrayed through deception. We study the language and dynamics of deception in the negotiation-based game Diplomacy, where seven players compete for world domination by forging and breaking alliances with each other. Our study with players from the Diplomacy community gathers 17,289 messages annotated by the sender for their intended truthfulness and by the receiver for their perceived truthfulness. Unlike existing datasets, this captures deception in long-lasting relationships, where the interlocutors strategically combine truth with lies to advance objectives. A model that uses power dynamics and conversational contexts can predict when a lie occurs nearly as well as human players. 

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2. From division to ‘divergence’: to understand wood growth across timescales, we need to (learn to) manipulate it

   https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.20390  

   Buttò, Valentina; Peltier, Drew_M P; Rademacher, Tim (March 2025, New Phytologist)

   Summary Wood formation is the Rosetta stone of tree physiology: a traceable, integrated record of physiological and morphological status. It also produces a large and persistent annual sink for terrestrial carbon, motivating predictive understanding. Xylogenesis studies have greatly expanded our knowledge of the intra‐annual controls on wood formation, while dendroecology has quantified the environmental drivers of multi‐annual variability. But these fields operate on different timescales, making it challenging to predict how short (e.g. turgor) and long timescale processes (e.g. disturbance) interactively influence wood formation. Toward this challenge, wood growth responses to natural climate events provide useful but incomplete explanations of tree growth variability. By contrast, direct manipulations of the tree vascular system have yielded unexpected insights, particularly outside of model species like boreal conifers, but they remain underutilized. To improve prediction of global wood formation, we argue for a new generation of experimental manipulations of wood growth across seasons, species, and ecosystems. Such manipulations should expand inference to diverse forests and capture inter‐ and intra‐specific differences in wood growth. We summarize the endogenous and exogenous factors influencing wood formation to guide future experimental design and hypotheses. We highlight key opportunities for manipulative studies integrating measurements from xylogenesis, dendroanatomy, dendroecology, and ecophysiology. 

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3. To Ship or Not to (Function) Ship

   Liu, Feilong; Kamat, Niranjan; Blanas, Spyros; Nandi, Arnab (September 2018, 2018 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC '18))

   Sampling is often used to reduce query latency for interactive big data analytics. The established parallel data processing paradigm relies on function shipping, where a coordinator dispatches queries to worker nodes and then collects the results. The commoditization of high-performance networking makes data shipping possible, where the coordinator directly reads data in the workers’ memory using RDMA while workers process other queries. In this work, we explore when to use function shipping or data shipping for interactive query processing with sampling. Whether function shipping or data shipping should be preferred depends on the amount of data transferred, the current CPU utilization and the sampling method. The results show that data shipping is up to 6.5× faster when performing clustered sampling with heavily-utilized workers. 

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4. Bottom-induced contributions to Higgs plus jet at next-to-next-to-leading order

   https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2021)045  

   Mondini, Roberto; Williams, Ciaran (May 2021, Journal of High Energy Physics)

   A bstract We present a next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD calculation of the bottom-induced contributions to the production of a Higgs boson plus a jet, i.e. the process pp → H + j to $$ \mathcal{O}\left({y}_b^2{\alpha}_s^3\right) $$ O y b 2 α s 3 . We work in the five-flavor scheme (5FS) in which the bottom quark mass is retained only in the coupling to the Higgs boson. Our calculation uses N -jettiness slicing to regulate infrared divergences, allowing for fully-differential predictions for collider observables. After extensively validating the methodology, we present results for the 13 TeV LHC. Our NNLO predictions show a marked improvement in the overall renormalization and factorization scale dependence, the latter of which proves to be particularly troublesome for 5FS calculations at lower orders. In addition, using the same methodology we present a NNLO computation of $$ b\overline{b} $$ b b ¯ → H . Our results are implemented into MCFM. 

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5. Accessible to Whom? Bringing Accessibility to Blocks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3626252.3630770  

   Stefik, Andreas; Allee, Willliam; Contreras, Gabriel; Kluthe, Timothy; Hoffman, Alex; Blaser, Brianna; Ladner, Richard (March 2024, SIGCSE 2024)

   The introduction of block-based programming has gradually changed the landscape of programming education, particularly for school children. Block languages today, however, have serious technical barriers to students with disabilities. For example, block languages are generally not screen reader accessible, incompatible with braille, and contain serious problems for users with motor impairments. No student with a disability should ever be denied access to learning computer science and they do not have to be. To help rectify this, we present a new approach to the design of block languages called Quorum Blocks. Quorum Blocks uses a custom hardware accelerated graphical rendering pipeline that takes into account how screen readers and other devices work under the hood. We discuss these technical details and demonstrate that accessibility support can be fully achieved without meaningfully losing either the look of modern blocks or their visual output. We present the results from focus groups that highlight the barriers students faced with a variety of disabilities when using the first version of Quorum Blocks. We focus especially on challenges with low vision users, screen reader users, or those using no mouse and only one hand to type. Block languages built using either our techniques, or on top of our libraries, would become accessible out of the box. 

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