Prediction markets are starting to look less like crowd polls and more like electronic markets. The central question is therefore no longer only whether these markets forecast well, but what happens when institutional liquidity enters: do spreads tighten, does price discovery improve, and do those gains actually reach the traders who are slowest to react when information arrives? This paper offers a research design for answering that question. It defines a broad market-quality lens, separates the main channels through which institutional liquidity enters, and maps the identification problems that arise in live venue data. It also uses a synthetic microstructure laboratory as a proof of concept for the measurement pipeline. The main lesson of the synthetic exercise is deliberately narrow. Market-maker coverage, liquidity incentives, and automation do not have to work through the same channel; average liquidity gains do not have to translate into equal gains for all traders; and the sharpest welfare losses are most likely to appear in shock states, when slower takers receive the least pass-through of tighter quoted markets. The synthetic results are useful because they stress-test th
We show that time series foundation models scale: a single training recipe produces reliable forecast-quality improvements from 4M to 2.5B parameters. We release Toto 2.0, a family of five open-weights forecasting models trained under this recipe. The Toto 2.0 family sets a new state of the art on three forecasting benchmarks: BOOM, our observability benchmark; GIFT-Eval, the standard general-purpose benchmark; and the recent contamination-resistant TIME benchmark. This report describes our experimental results and details the design decisions behind Toto 2.0: its architecture and training recipe, training data, and the u-muP hyperparameter transfer pipeline. All five base checkpoints are released under Apache 2.0.
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a low frequency radio interferometer designed and developed by an international consortium, operated on behalf of the consortium by Curtin University. The MWA is a Precursor for the low frequency Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and is located at the SKA site in Western Australia, Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. Commencing science operations in 2013 after an extended development period, the MWA has performed observations over a wide set of science objectives, has been upgraded multiple times, and has played a fundamental role in the development of the low frequency SKA. As MWA Program Manager from 2008 to 2011, as Director from 2011 until 2015, and then again from 2021 to the present, I describe some personal reflections on the MWA's activities and successes in these different dimensions, as well as my view of some of the approaches that have enabled these successes. I offer some of the lessons I've perceived over the last 17+ years in the project.
Thirty years after the first observation of on-shell top quarks the investigation of the heaviest elementary particle remains a thriving field of basic research, as was illustrated by the 18th edition of the annual Workshop on Top-Quark Physics hosted by Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea. Observing new scattering processses involving top quarks, precision measurements of top-quark properties, and the usage of top quarks as a means of exploration remain key elements of research, but are most recently complemented by the observation of even more subtle effects based on the application of refined experimental techniques. Based on the selection made in the experimental summary talk, this article highlights the most striking experimental results presented at the conference.
MORFEO (Multi-conjugate adaptive Optics Relay For ELT Observations, formerly MAORY), the MCAO system for the ELT, will provide diffraction-limited optical quality to the large field camera MICADO. MORFEO has officially passed the Preliminary Design Review and it is entering the final design phase. We present the current status of the project, with a focus on the adaptive optics system aspects and expected milestones during the next project phase.
The race to build data centers in space is gaining momentum as AI drives unprecedented demand for computing power。 Orbital facilities could tap into abundant solar energy and avoid many of the environmental challenges faced on Earth。 Yet space remains a harsh and expensive place to operate, with major hurdles including cooling, maintenance, radiati
A problem of the definition of the heat transported in thermomagnetic phenomena has been well realized in the late sixties, but not solved up to date. Ignoring this problem, numerous recent theories grossly overestimate the thermomagnetic coefficients in strongly interacting systems. Here we develop a gauge-invariant microscopic approach, which shows that the heat transfer should include the energy of the interaction between electrons and a magnetic field. We also demonstrate that the surface currents induced by the magnetic field transfer the charge in the Nernst effect, but do not transfer the heat in the Ettingshausen effect. Only with these two modifications of the theory, the physically measurable thermomagnetic coefficients satisfy the Onsager relation. We critically revised the Gaussian fluctuation model above the superconducting transition and show that the gauge invariance uniquely relates thermomagnetic phenomena in the Fermi liquid with the particle-hole asymmetry.
After 41 years of travel, the Voyager 2 spacecraft joins its twin in interstellar space. A suite of papers report Voyager 2's experience of its transition through the heliosheath and heliopause to what lies beyond.
We present a generalization of the Haus master equation in which a dynamical boundary condition allows to describe complex pulse trains such as the Q-switched and harmonic transitions of passive mode-locking as well as the weak interactions between localized states. As an example, we investigate the influence of group velocity dispersion on the stability boundaries of the Q-switched regime. We compare our results with that of a time-delayed system.
The last parameter of big-bang nucleosynthesis, the baryon density, is being pinned down by measurements of the deuterium abundance in high-redshift hydrogen clouds. When it is determined, it will fix the primeval light-element abundances. D, ^3He and ^7Li will become ``tracers'' for the study of Galactic and stellar chemical evolution, and big-bang nucleosynthesis will become an even sharper probe of particle physics, e.g., the bound to the number of light neutrino species will be tightened significantly. Two key tests of the consistency of the standard theory are on the horizon: an independent, high-precision determination of the baryon density from anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation and a precision determination of the primeval $^4$He abundance.
Continuous diffusion language models lag behind autoregressive transformers, partly because diffusion is applied in spaces poorly suited to language denoising and token recovery. We propose DiHAL, a geometry-guided diffusion-transformer hybrid that asks where diffusion should enter a pretrained transformer. DiHAL scores layers with geometry-based proxies, selects a diffusion-friendly hidden-state interface, and replaces the lower transformer prefix with a diffusion bridge while retaining the upper layers and original LM head. By reconstructing the selected-layer hidden state rather than tokens, DiHAL avoids direct continuous-to-discrete recovery. Experiments on 8B-scale backbones show that the geometry score predicts effective shallow insertion layers under a fixed bridge-training protocol and that hidden-state recovery improves over continuous diffusion baselines in a diagnostic comparison matching the diffusion/recovery training budget. These results suggest that hidden-state geometry helps identify where diffusion-based replacement is feasible inside pretrained language models.
We perform an updated global analysis of the known and unknown parameters of the standard $3ν$ framework as of 2025. The known oscillation parameters include three mixing angles $(θ_{12},\,θ_{23},\,θ_{13})$ and two squared mass gaps, chosen as $δm^2=m^2_2-m^2_1>0$ and $Δm^2=m^2_3-{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}(m^2_1+m^2_2)$, where $α=\mathrm{sign}(Δm^2)$ distinguishes normal ordering (NO, $α=+1$) from inverted ordering (IO, $α=-1$). With respect to our previous 2021 update, the combination of oscillation data leads to appreciably reduced uncertainties for $θ_{23}$, $θ_{13}$ and $|Δm^2|$. In particular, $|Δm^2|$ is the first $3ν$ parameter to enter the domain of subpercent precision (0.8\% at $1σ$). We underline some issues about systematics, that might affect this error estimate. Concerning oscillation unknowns, we find a relatively weak preference for NO versus IO (at $2.2σ$), for CP violation versus conservation in NO (1.3$σ$) and for the first $θ_{23}$ octant versus the second in NO ($1.1σ$). We discuss the status and qualitative prospects of the mass ordering hint in the plane $(δm^2,\,Δm^2_{ee})$, where $Δm^2_{ee}=|Δm^2|+{\textstyle\frac{1}{2}}α(\cos^2θ_{12}-\sin^2θ_{12})δm^2$, to
In 2011, Friedmann [F 7] claimed to have proved that pathological linear programs existed for which the Simplex method using Zadeh's least-entered rule [Z 14] would take an exponential number of pivots. In 2019, Disser and Hopp [DH 5] argued that there were errors in Friedmann's 2011 construction. In 2020, Disser, Friedmann, and Hopp [DFH 3,4] again contended that the least-entered rule was exponential. We show that their arguments contain multiple flaws. In other words, the worst-case behavior of the least-entered rule has not been established. Neither [F 7] nor [DFH 3,4] provides pathological linear programs that can be tested. Instead, the authors contend that their pathological linear programs are of the form (P) as shown on page 12 of [DFH 3]. The authors contend that the constraints of (P) ensure that the probability of entering a vertex u is equal to the probability of exiting u. In fact, we note that the authors' constraints (P) are flawed in at least three ways: a) they require the probability of exiting u to exceed the probability of entering u, b) they require the probability of exiting some nodes to exceed 1, and c) they overlook flows from decision nodes to decision no
Objective: Enteral nutrition (EN) delivery in the ICU remains suboptimal due to limited personalization and uncertainty regarding appropriate calorie, protein, and fluid targets under dynamic metabolic demands. We introduce DeepEN, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for personalized EN optimization using electronic health record data. Methods: DeepEN was trained on over 11,000 ICU patients from MIMIC-IV to generate 4-hourly, patient-specific caloric, protein, and fluid targets. The state representation incorporated demographics, comorbidities, vital signs, laboratory values, and recent interventions. A physiologically aligned reward framework balanced biomarker stability with long-term survival. Policy learning employed a dueling double deep Q-network with Conservative Q-Learning regularization to enable safe offline training. Results: DeepEN achieved the highest estimated policy value ($V^π= 9.48$) and the lowest calibrated mortality (18.8 +/- 1.0%), representing a 4.0 percentage-point absolute reduction compared with clinician practice (22.8%). The policy also demonstrated superior metabolic stability, achieving the highest proportion of glucose, phosphate, and sodium values
This paper examines whether students are entering the generative AI era with sufficiently strong educational foundations, focusing on the relationship between learning environments and changes in ICT related career aspirations across countries. The analysis uses country-level data from PISA 2018 and 2022, combining indicators of student autonomy, digital skills and teacher support. A mixed-method approach is applied, including descriptive statistics, regression analysis, clustering, latent representation learning (using Variational Autoencoder-VAE), discriminant analysis and probabilistic modeling to capture both observable and latent dimensions of educational readiness. Unlike prior research that treats learning loss, digital skills and career expectations separately, our analysis integrates them within a comparative longitudinal framework. It shifts the focus from short-term post-pandemic effects to the structural capacity of education systems to prepare students for digital and AI-driven labor markets. Results show a global but uneven increase in ICT career aspirations. Digital skills emerge as the strongest and most consistent predictor, while teacher support plays a complement
Neural tissues of the central nervous system are among the softest and most fragile in the human body, protected from mechanical perturbation by the skull and the spine. In contrast, the enteric nervous system is embedded in a compliant, contractile tissue and subject to chronic, high-magnitude mechanical stress. Do neurons and glia of the enteric nervous system display specific mechanical properties to withstand these forces? Using nano-indentation combined with immunohistochemistry and second harmonic generation imaging of collagen, we discovered that enteric ganglia in adult mice are an order of magnitude more resistant to deformation than brain tissue. We found that glia-rich regions in ganglia have a similar stiffness to neuron-rich regions and to the surrounding smooth muscle, of ~3 kPa at 3 $μ$m indentation depth and of ~7 kPa at 8 $μ$m depth. Differences in the adhesion strength of the different tissue layers to the glass indenter were scarce. The collagen shell surrounding ganglia and inter-ganglionic fibers may play a key role in strengthening the enteric nervous system to resist the manifold mechanical challenges it faces.
In this paper, we present ENTER, an interpretable Video Question Answering (VideoQA) system based on event graphs. Event graphs convert videos into graphical representations, where video events form the nodes and event-event relationships (temporal/causal/hierarchical) form the edges. This structured representation offers many benefits: 1) Interpretable VideoQA via generated code that parses event-graph; 2) Incorporation of contextual visual information in the reasoning process (code generation) via event graphs; 3) Robust VideoQA via Hierarchical Iterative Update of the event graphs. Existing interpretable VideoQA systems are often top-down, disregarding low-level visual information in the reasoning plan generation, and are brittle. While bottom-up approaches produce responses from visual data, they lack interpretability. Experimental results on NExT-QA, IntentQA, and EgoSchema demonstrate that not only does our method outperform existing top-down approaches while obtaining competitive performance against bottom-up approaches, but more importantly, offers superior interpretability and explainability in the reasoning process.
Background. Women bring unique problem-solving skills to software development, often favoring a holistic approach and attention to detail. In software testing, precision and attention to detail are essential as professionals explore system functionalities to identify defects. Recognizing the alignment between these skills and women's strengths can derive strategies for enhancing diversity in software engineering. Goal. This study investigates the motivations behind women choosing careers in software testing, aiming to provide insights into their reasons for entering and remaining in the field. Method. This study used a cross-sectional survey methodology following established software engineering guidelines, collecting data from women in software testing to explore their motivations, experiences, and perspectives. Findings. The findings reveal that women enter software testing due to increased entry-level job opportunities, work-life balance, and even fewer gender stereotypes. Their motivations to stay include the impact of delivering high-quality software, continuous learning opportunities, and the challenges the activities bring to them. However, inclusiveness and career developme
While the quantum realm seems hidden, it can also reach examples of infinite energy, especially when a part of space is roughly removed until it disappears, possibly forever. Since it follows that Nothing can enter a region where the space is missing, the quantum realm, as seen now in affine quantization, will automatically come to help everything else by creating colossal `quantum walls' that will ensure that everything stays out of all black holes. In this article, we show that the expanded quantum realm allows Nothing to ever fall into a black hole.