#kahira

[alicepupurred]

It's nice to see you laughing my dear.

Haha you thought I can't?

I never saw it before. I'm happy you are happy now.

With you by my side I'm and will always be. 💜

Day 3. Kagura and Kikyo in heaven

Uncensored here

[curryvillain]

"Vybz Kartel IS FREE" Reactions

After well over a decade, Dancehall Artist Vybz Kartel along with three of his co-accused Shawn Storm, Kahira Jones, and Andre St. John are now free Men. Vybz Kartel has been incarcerated since 2011, and was given the official sentencing in 2014, and since then there have been attempts for an appeal which was made successful earlier this year through the Privy Council. The world of…

[timberwind]

Yarragardee Basin, Mangala, 7995 A.D. [this image is no longer canon due to changing of the timescale on which Mangala was terraformed]

------------------------

Accompanying music: You’re On Fire by They Might Be Giants. Summer road trip music of all time, in my opinion.

Here’s a little expository write-up on the history and geography of the worlds shown here. Someday I’ll have more to show of the personal story of these two critters and their travels; until then, a more macro-level description.

------------------------

(most of this info has become outdated as modeling invalidated some original assumptions and I changed my mind on what I wanted here; future art of Mangala will reflect this)

Mangala and its sister world Kahira (visible in the background) are binary planets, orbiting one another in a manner not entirely unlike that of Pluto and Charon in the Solar System. Mangala is a relatively small world - just about twenty percent the mass of the Earth, something like if you took two copies of Mars and smushed them together; without the internal heat to drive a carbonate cycle long term, it had long been a frozen, dusty, and arid place when transhumanity first established a permanent presence in the Tahoka system almost a thousand years ago. Since those early days, terraforming using a Birchian soletta system (a huge but foil-thin Fresnel lens of mirrors, with a secondary focal lens for burning atmospheric gasses out of the regolith) has rendered it shirtsleeve habitable to baseline humans across much of the surface, although the global water inventory remains low* and the air in the “continental” uplands is stratospheric, with only the hardiest lichens establishing a foothold. Most of Mangala’s major metropolitan areas are located in the deep rift valleys and basins, where air pressure is highest.

Kahira on the other hand, a rock almost a fifth the mass of its sister world (a little under the mass of old Mercury), remains only slightly terraformed - surface conditions are persistently cold, with a thin barely-Martian atmosphere. Some of its larger rift valleys and craters have been tented over, aerated, and planted with tall low-gravity forest and grassland, a style of habitat construction dating back to the first Mars colonists almost six thousand years ago. Industrial complexes and buried cities sprawl out across the bare surface of the moon, with huge low-gravity lava tubes seeing extensive urban development.

The Yarragardee Basin, pictured above, is a graben basin in Mangala’s northern hemisphere, notable for the historic industrial city of Tirupati - here we see two road-trippers between cities on the basin’s great plain, taking a break in the long late afternoon of a sunset-day***. Having stopped for a night at a motel near Tirupati’s aerospace complex, they’re now continuing their journey to the city of Redmond-Tonasket, located in the Woronora Valles trench system about two thousand kilometers to the southwest.

* While plenty of water could have been imported from Tahoka’s cometary halo, it was decided not to do so in order to avoid inundating pre-existing cities in the valleys and deep basins. The extremely humid hothouse conditions that come after slamming dismantled ice moons through the stratosphere at over six kilometers a second were also broadly considered unacceptable.

** Smaller worlds have been terraformed in transhuman space, both by worldhouse and more open-air methods, but it’s largely the kind of thing that much more energy-rich systems do as a vanity project. Kahira may someday see blue skies, but likely not for a thousand years at least. (edit, one year later: I actually changed up some of this while simulating this system for stability. I’ll be posting more about this soon.)

*** Mangala and Kahira, being tidally locked to each other such that they always show one another the same face as they orbit their common center of mass, both have days exactly as long as their orbital periods - 403 kiloseconds, or roughly 112 hours. This is for convenience divided into month-weeks comprising four “circadian days” of 100 kiloseconds (~26 hours), with the remaining three kiloseconds added on to the last day of a month-week to keep synchronization.

[wlfs-zzz-archive]

A (Currently Being Updated) Cast of Characters

@pyxilate *

Amethyst / Nzyndale (HSR)

Aphrodite (Genshin Impact)

Camazotz Bloodmoon Valorant (ZZZ)

Cascade Lumière (Genshin Impact)

Cayde Foreshadow (Genshin Impact)

Daedalus (Genshin Impact)

Danai / Lilith (HSR)

Dionysia Laodice (ZZZ)

Genevieve (Genshin Impact) 

Ixchel (Genshin Impact)

Jiàn (HSR)

Jikan (HI3)

Jinlian (HSR)

Jíshǒu (HSR)

Julian Silver (ZZZ)

Kagami (ZZZ)

Malori Vex (ZZZ)

Malum (Genshin Impact)

Maxine (HSR)

October (ZZZ)

Prajna Konton (ZZZ)

Qiao Lin

Quartz (HSR)

Ravyn Daggervytch (HSR)

Starchasm Nyx (HSR)

Thanatos (HI3)

Thirteen (ZZZ)

Thursday / Stelle (ZZZ)

Xiu Long (HSR)

Yuki Fujimoto (Genshin Impact)

Zerø Destovox (ZZZ)

Zoismos Laodice (ZZZ)

1999 / Carina (HI3/ZZZ)

20-77 / Nicole Scorpion (HSR)

911 (ZZZ)

Seir (she is not included in this list due to being present in every universe)

@the-all-consuming (I’m leaving you to alphabetize and categorize these bitches cuz I ain’t doing it myself)

Rosémond Fossoyeur

Kaine Amadeo

Carlo Fossoyeur

Death-Do-Us-Part

Vulture

WARDEN

Curie Burnman

Enki

Ju Long

Jago

Kahira Kamisato

Valentyn Myroslav

Xuĕ Tao

Gonzalo

Ekkhard

Carmine Cassius

Eumbrel Kaimen/Joel Lazarus

10-65/ Akil Amastan

Kaosu riron

Josefina Kaimen/Misericordia Lazarus

Nobody/Maikel Lazaru/ Serafina Lazarus

Bian Lian

Haywood Ellington

Hikari Katshuito

Dubhán Ceallach

NPC’s:

@pyxilate

Luxo (Source of Everything)

Council of Evil: (Genshin)

Fides Cordis Adamari Timeo Fortitudo Implete Tempus

Cult of Dreams: Basalt Calcite ONE

Aeonstruck Moonhunters:**

Lucifer Hecate Augustus Midas Angel Velvet The Illuminator (Svajonė, Aeon of Dreams) The Cutter

@the-all-consuming

Crudêl, Aeon of terror (TL2&1)

Mortala, Aeon of Desolation (TL2&1)

Wolfsbane (TL2)

The Emperor, Aeon of Conquest (TL2)

Tobia Lazarus

D'Angelo Constantino

The Agency Against Akil Amastan (The A.A.A.A)

The Poacher

The Ethereal Cultist/Hunters

The Eradication Protocol 

The Party Animals

*two omniverses exist because of this. Pyxilate has two omniverses, one shared with the-all-consuming and one individual universe where their characters never existed. This is due to Pyxilate a selfish bish who wants everything to herself. However there are also two HSR timelines in the-all-consuming’s universe so it’s not all bad.

**Calcite is The Cutter, he defected from the cult to a different cult group!

[harepare]

secimlerin hepsi ayni bok bu arada. ne rte ne kk destekliyorum hicbirinin de iki eliyle bi siki dogrultabilecegine inanmiyorum. tek istedigim su halkin azicik olsun bilinclenmesi ve gozunu acmasi. ama bu istedigim seyin imkansizligini birinin cikip uc bes siyasi sey ugruna insanlarin hayatina laf etmesi kanitliyor biktim su zihniyetlerden. kendi gorusune zit dusen seylere sayip sovmeye baslayan, olumu hafife alan insanlar da kahirdan kahira suruklensin, dipsiz kuyularda merdivensiz kalsin. benim vicdanimda siyasete masum insanlarin hayatlari dahil olana kadar malesef.

[oxalisvulcanicola]

"Doyle was just a man of his time" is of course correct, but I think our perception is skewed by what literature from the period made it into becoming classics. On the topic of colonialism I'd like to share what Marie Corelli, a bestseller writer of the time, wrote in 1897:

It was the full “season” in Cairo. The ubiquitous Britisher and the no less ubiquitous American had planted their differing “society” standards on the sandy soil watered by the Nile, and were busily engaged in the work of reducing the city, formerly called Al Kahira or The Victorious, to a more deplorable condition of subjection and slavery than any old-world conqueror could ever have done. For the heavy yoke of modern fashion has been flung on the neck of Al Kahira, and the irresistible, tyrannic dominion of “swagger” vulgarity has laid The Victorious low. The swarthy children of the desert might, and possibly would, be ready and willing to go forth and fight men with men’s weapons for the freedom to live and die unmolested in their own native land; but against the blandly-smiling, white-helmeted, sun-spectacled, perspiring horde of Cook’s “cheap trippers,” what can they do save remain inert and well-nigh speechless? For nothing like the cheap tripper was ever seen in the world till our present enlightened and glorious day of progress; he is a new-grafted type of nomad, like and yet unlike a man. The Darwin theory asserts itself proudly and prominently in bristles of truth all over him—in his restlessness, his ape-like agility and curiosity, his shameless inquisitiveness, his careful cleansing of himself from foreign fleas, his general attention to minutiæ, and his always voracious appetite; and where the ape ends and the man begins is somewhat difficult to discover. The “image of God” wherewith he, together with his fellows, was originally supposed to be impressed in the first fresh days of Creation, seems fairly blotted out, for there is no touch of the Divine in his mortal composition. Nor does the second created phase—the copy of the Divine—namely, the Heroic,—dignify his form or ennoble his countenance. There is nothing of the heroic in the wandering biped who swings through the streets of Cairo in white flannels, laughing at the staid composure of the Arabs, flicking thumb and finger at the patient noses of the small hireable donkeys and other beasts of burden, thrusting a warm red face of inquiry into the shadowy recesses of odoriferous bazaars, and sauntering at evening in the Esbekiyeh Gardens, cigar in mouth and hands in pockets, looking on the scene and behaving in it as if the whole place were but a reflex of Earl’s Court Exhibition. History affects the cheap tripper not at all; he regards the Pyramids as “good building” merely, and the inscrutable Sphinx itself as a fine target for empty soda-water bottles, while perhaps his chiefest regret is that the granite whereof the ancient monster is hewn is too hard for him to inscribe his distinguished name thereon. It is true that there is a punishment inflicted on any person or persons attempting such wanton work—a fine or the bastinado; yet neither fine nor bastinado would affect the “tripper” if he could only succeed in carving “’Arry” on the Sphinx’s jaw. But he cannot, and herein is his own misery. Otherwise he comports himself in Egypt as he does at Margate, with no more thought, reflection, or reverence than dignify the composition of his far-off Simian ancestor.

[cleverhottubmiracle]

It’s been almost four months since Vybz Kartel walked out of Kingston’s General Penitentiary as a free man after serving nearly 13 years behind bars. Way back in September of 2011, the dancehall star was arrested for possession of cannabis before being hit with a murder charge. After a 64-day trial, the longest in Jamaican history, Kartel and his co-defendants—Kahira Jones, Andre St. John, and fellow dancehall artist Shawn Storm—were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Kartel never gave up hope.After appealing all the way to the highest court in the UK, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the conviction in March 2024 due to misconduct—one of the jurors was accused of bribing others on the jury, which should have resulted in a mistrial. Months later the Jamaican government decided to drop the controversial case once and for all.After so many years in captivity the artist, born Adidja Palmer, is now enjoying life with his new fiancee Sidem Öztürk, reuniting with his family—including his sons Likkle Addi, Likkle Vybz, and his first grandchild—and savoring his first ever Grammy nomination for the album Party With Me. More importantly, after suffering from a serious thyroid condition while in prison, he finally has proper medical care and has been recovering well. “God is the greatest,” Kartel states in a new interview with Boomshots, recorded during the run-up to Freedom Street, his first live performance in more than a decade.“I was never a religious person, but going through what I’ve been through, it changed me,” Kartel said. “And it made me have a different perspective on what God has in store for my life. So yes, I became close to God—unfortunately in prison, but it is what it is.”Kartel will close out this remarkable year by performing alongside his sons, and many of his the young artists he helped to become stars including Spice, Popcaan, Tommy Lee, Shawn Storm, and Sheba, as well as new generation artists inspired by him like Skillibeng and Chronic Law. A few surprise guests are likely to pop out at Jamaica’s National Stadium on the evening of December 31. “This is the greatest assemblance of artists in dancehall,” Kartel said. “It’s like the Avengers, so obviously I have to be Tony Starks. Thanos, watch out!”Arguably the most dominant and divisive dancehall artist of the new millennium, Vybz Kartel’s career so far can be divided into three distinct eras. During the first era, from 1993 to 2000, he was Adi Banton, struggling in obscurity as part of a trio known as Vibes Cartel. The second era began when he went solo in the early 2000s, changing his name to its current spelling, and writing songs for Bounty Killer and Elephant Man before releasing his first hit song, “Gun Clown.” By the end of the second era, Kartel was a seemingly unstoppable force until his arrest in 2011. The third and longest era has played out behind bars, as Kartel continued his prolific run against all odds.Although Kartel has not touched a stage since 2011, he’s maintained his place at the top of the Jamaican dancehall scene despite being incarcerated. By secretly recording on smart phones and emailing his vocals to a close circle of trusted producers, Kartel was able to release hundreds of hit singles like his 2016 smash “Fever,” which got heavy international airplay and was certified gold. Although he released more than a dozen albums during his time in prison, Party With Me is his first release to be nominated for Best Reggae Album.“Long overdue, Academy,” Kartel said. “But we haffi big up the Academy same way. It’s a great feeling, it’s a humbling feeling… This doesn’t come as a surprise but it’s welcomed.”Of all the songs he recorded in captivity, Kartel says his favorite may be “Any Weather,” an inspirational 2016 tune recorded at Spanish Town Prison with a chorus that states defiantly “We’re not going under.”“That’s a powerful song,” he said. “It’s an anthem right now. The concept behind it, the message is also true dancehall. Tell the youths them to uplift themselves from poverty and just do the right thing. It’s like me speaking my future into existence.”Since his release Kartel has wasted no time, kicking off the fourth era of his career with new singles like “The Comet” as well as “Nobody Move,” a collaboration with the international collective Major Lazer. Kartel has also recorded a soon-to-be-released collab with Nicki Minaj, and says new songs with Cardi B and Drake are in the works. A longtime Kartel supporter, Drake—who is rumored to make an appearance at the show—appears to have earned the dancehall star’s loyalty. Asked about the battle with Kendrick Lamar, Kartel says that contrary to popular belief, he feels that Drake won. “Kendrick is a lyricist and I am also a lyricist,” Kartel said. “So I appreciate his art. But to me, Drake gets the point across on a global scale.”When speaking of dancehall artists, Kartel gives maximum respect to Bounty Killer, the artist who first gave him a break in by making Kartel part of his crew the Alliance in the early 2000s. “He gave a bunch of us an opportunity to feed our families, to showcase our talent, and to become stars,” says Kartel, who was inspired to “pay it forward” by forming his own crew, the Portmore Empire, which brought future stars like Popcaan, Tommy Lee, and Gaza Slim to prominence. “I remember when all of them came around,” Kartel said. “Now they’re making money, taking care of their families. It’s beautiful. That’s how it should go though. Spread the love. Spreads the energy. God is the greatest.”Although Kartel had a lyrical feud with Bounty Killer before going to prison, he says that’s all in the past. Likewise he says he’s on good terms with his old rival Mavado, his arch-rival during the epic Gaza vs Gully wars. “The original Vybz Kartel was the war angel. Now I’m just chilling, I’m not involved in any feuding," Kartel says. "I don’t think I’ll go back there either. Leave that to the kids.” Once he tackles his homecoming concert, Kartel plans to continue recording and performing as well as promoting his rum and rolling paper brands, and working on a book about his time in prison, the follow-up to his previous title, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto. Source link

[norajworld]

It’s been almost four months since Vybz Kartel walked out of Kingston’s General Penitentiary as a free man after serving nearly 13 years behind bars. Way back in September of 2011, the dancehall star was arrested for possession of cannabis before being hit with a murder charge. After a 64-day trial, the longest in Jamaican history, Kartel and his co-defendants—Kahira Jones, Andre St. John, and fellow dancehall artist Shawn Storm—were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Kartel never gave up hope.After appealing all the way to the highest court in the UK, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the conviction in March 2024 due to misconduct—one of the jurors was accused of bribing others on the jury, which should have resulted in a mistrial. Months later the Jamaican government decided to drop the controversial case once and for all.After so many years in captivity the artist, born Adidja Palmer, is now enjoying life with his new fiancee Sidem Öztürk, reuniting with his family—including his sons Likkle Addi, Likkle Vybz, and his first grandchild—and savoring his first ever Grammy nomination for the album Party With Me. More importantly, after suffering from a serious thyroid condition while in prison, he finally has proper medical care and has been recovering well. “God is the greatest,” Kartel states in a new interview with Boomshots, recorded during the run-up to Freedom Street, his first live performance in more than a decade.“I was never a religious person, but going through what I’ve been through, it changed me,” Kartel said. “And it made me have a different perspective on what God has in store for my life. So yes, I became close to God—unfortunately in prison, but it is what it is.”Kartel will close out this remarkable year by performing alongside his sons, and many of his the young artists he helped to become stars including Spice, Popcaan, Tommy Lee, Shawn Storm, and Sheba, as well as new generation artists inspired by him like Skillibeng and Chronic Law. A few surprise guests are likely to pop out at Jamaica’s National Stadium on the evening of December 31. “This is the greatest assemblance of artists in dancehall,” Kartel said. “It’s like the Avengers, so obviously I have to be Tony Starks. Thanos, watch out!”Arguably the most dominant and divisive dancehall artist of the new millennium, Vybz Kartel’s career so far can be divided into three distinct eras. During the first era, from 1993 to 2000, he was Adi Banton, struggling in obscurity as part of a trio known as Vibes Cartel. The second era began when he went solo in the early 2000s, changing his name to its current spelling, and writing songs for Bounty Killer and Elephant Man before releasing his first hit song, “Gun Clown.” By the end of the second era, Kartel was a seemingly unstoppable force until his arrest in 2011. The third and longest era has played out behind bars, as Kartel continued his prolific run against all odds.Although Kartel has not touched a stage since 2011, he’s maintained his place at the top of the Jamaican dancehall scene despite being incarcerated. By secretly recording on smart phones and emailing his vocals to a close circle of trusted producers, Kartel was able to release hundreds of hit singles like his 2016 smash “Fever,” which got heavy international airplay and was certified gold. Although he released more than a dozen albums during his time in prison, Party With Me is his first release to be nominated for Best Reggae Album.“Long overdue, Academy,” Kartel said. “But we haffi big up the Academy same way. It’s a great feeling, it’s a humbling feeling… This doesn’t come as a surprise but it’s welcomed.”Of all the songs he recorded in captivity, Kartel says his favorite may be “Any Weather,” an inspirational 2016 tune recorded at Spanish Town Prison with a chorus that states defiantly “We’re not going under.”“That’s a powerful song,” he said. “It’s an anthem right now. The concept behind it, the message is also true dancehall. Tell the youths them to uplift themselves from poverty and just do the right thing. It’s like me speaking my future into existence.”Since his release Kartel has wasted no time, kicking off the fourth era of his career with new singles like “The Comet” as well as “Nobody Move,” a collaboration with the international collective Major Lazer. Kartel has also recorded a soon-to-be-released collab with Nicki Minaj, and says new songs with Cardi B and Drake are in the works. A longtime Kartel supporter, Drake—who is rumored to make an appearance at the show—appears to have earned the dancehall star’s loyalty. Asked about the battle with Kendrick Lamar, Kartel says that contrary to popular belief, he feels that Drake won. “Kendrick is a lyricist and I am also a lyricist,” Kartel said. “So I appreciate his art. But to me, Drake gets the point across on a global scale.”When speaking of dancehall artists, Kartel gives maximum respect to Bounty Killer, the artist who first gave him a break in by making Kartel part of his crew the Alliance in the early 2000s. “He gave a bunch of us an opportunity to feed our families, to showcase our talent, and to become stars,” says Kartel, who was inspired to “pay it forward” by forming his own crew, the Portmore Empire, which brought future stars like Popcaan, Tommy Lee, and Gaza Slim to prominence. “I remember when all of them came around,” Kartel said. “Now they’re making money, taking care of their families. It’s beautiful. That’s how it should go though. Spread the love. Spreads the energy. God is the greatest.”Although Kartel had a lyrical feud with Bounty Killer before going to prison, he says that’s all in the past. Likewise he says he’s on good terms with his old rival Mavado, his arch-rival during the epic Gaza vs Gully wars. “The original Vybz Kartel was the war angel. Now I’m just chilling, I’m not involved in any feuding," Kartel says. "I don’t think I’ll go back there either. Leave that to the kids.” Once he tackles his homecoming concert, Kartel plans to continue recording and performing as well as promoting his rum and rolling paper brands, and working on a book about his time in prison, the follow-up to his previous title, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto. Source link

[ellajme0]

It’s been almost four months since Vybz Kartel walked out of Kingston’s General Penitentiary as a free man after serving nearly 13 years behind bars. Way back in September of 2011, the dancehall star was arrested for possession of cannabis before being hit with a murder charge. After a 64-day trial, the longest in Jamaican history, Kartel and his co-defendants—Kahira Jones, Andre St. John, and fellow dancehall artist Shawn Storm—were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Kartel never gave up hope.After appealing all the way to the highest court in the UK, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the conviction in March 2024 due to misconduct—one of the jurors was accused of bribing others on the jury, which should have resulted in a mistrial. Months later the Jamaican government decided to drop the controversial case once and for all.After so many years in captivity the artist, born Adidja Palmer, is now enjoying life with his new fiancee Sidem Öztürk, reuniting with his family—including his sons Likkle Addi, Likkle Vybz, and his first grandchild—and savoring his first ever Grammy nomination for the album Party With Me. More importantly, after suffering from a serious thyroid condition while in prison, he finally has proper medical care and has been recovering well. “God is the greatest,” Kartel states in a new interview with Boomshots, recorded during the run-up to Freedom Street, his first live performance in more than a decade.“I was never a religious person, but going through what I’ve been through, it changed me,” Kartel said. “And it made me have a different perspective on what God has in store for my life. So yes, I became close to God—unfortunately in prison, but it is what it is.”Kartel will close out this remarkable year by performing alongside his sons, and many of his the young artists he helped to become stars including Spice, Popcaan, Tommy Lee, Shawn Storm, and Sheba, as well as new generation artists inspired by him like Skillibeng and Chronic Law. A few surprise guests are likely to pop out at Jamaica’s National Stadium on the evening of December 31. “This is the greatest assemblance of artists in dancehall,” Kartel said. “It’s like the Avengers, so obviously I have to be Tony Starks. Thanos, watch out!”Arguably the most dominant and divisive dancehall artist of the new millennium, Vybz Kartel’s career so far can be divided into three distinct eras. During the first era, from 1993 to 2000, he was Adi Banton, struggling in obscurity as part of a trio known as Vibes Cartel. The second era began when he went solo in the early 2000s, changing his name to its current spelling, and writing songs for Bounty Killer and Elephant Man before releasing his first hit song, “Gun Clown.” By the end of the second era, Kartel was a seemingly unstoppable force until his arrest in 2011. The third and longest era has played out behind bars, as Kartel continued his prolific run against all odds.Although Kartel has not touched a stage since 2011, he’s maintained his place at the top of the Jamaican dancehall scene despite being incarcerated. By secretly recording on smart phones and emailing his vocals to a close circle of trusted producers, Kartel was able to release hundreds of hit singles like his 2016 smash “Fever,” which got heavy international airplay and was certified gold. Although he released more than a dozen albums during his time in prison, Party With Me is his first release to be nominated for Best Reggae Album.“Long overdue, Academy,” Kartel said. “But we haffi big up the Academy same way. It’s a great feeling, it’s a humbling feeling… This doesn’t come as a surprise but it’s welcomed.”Of all the songs he recorded in captivity, Kartel says his favorite may be “Any Weather,” an inspirational 2016 tune recorded at Spanish Town Prison with a chorus that states defiantly “We’re not going under.”“That’s a powerful song,” he said. “It’s an anthem right now. The concept behind it, the message is also true dancehall. Tell the youths them to uplift themselves from poverty and just do the right thing. It’s like me speaking my future into existence.”Since his release Kartel has wasted no time, kicking off the fourth era of his career with new singles like “The Comet” as well as “Nobody Move,” a collaboration with the international collective Major Lazer. Kartel has also recorded a soon-to-be-released collab with Nicki Minaj, and says new songs with Cardi B and Drake are in the works. A longtime Kartel supporter, Drake—who is rumored to make an appearance at the show—appears to have earned the dancehall star’s loyalty. Asked about the battle with Kendrick Lamar, Kartel says that contrary to popular belief, he feels that Drake won. “Kendrick is a lyricist and I am also a lyricist,” Kartel said. “So I appreciate his art. But to me, Drake gets the point across on a global scale.”When speaking of dancehall artists, Kartel gives maximum respect to Bounty Killer, the artist who first gave him a break in by making Kartel part of his crew the Alliance in the early 2000s. “He gave a bunch of us an opportunity to feed our families, to showcase our talent, and to become stars,” says Kartel, who was inspired to “pay it forward” by forming his own crew, the Portmore Empire, which brought future stars like Popcaan, Tommy Lee, and Gaza Slim to prominence. “I remember when all of them came around,” Kartel said. “Now they’re making money, taking care of their families. It’s beautiful. That’s how it should go though. Spread the love. Spreads the energy. God is the greatest.”Although Kartel had a lyrical feud with Bounty Killer before going to prison, he says that’s all in the past. Likewise he says he’s on good terms with his old rival Mavado, his arch-rival during the epic Gaza vs Gully wars. “The original Vybz Kartel was the war angel. Now I’m just chilling, I’m not involved in any feuding," Kartel says. "I don’t think I’ll go back there either. Leave that to the kids.” Once he tackles his homecoming concert, Kartel plans to continue recording and performing as well as promoting his rum and rolling paper brands, and working on a book about his time in prison, the follow-up to his previous title, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto. Source link

[chilimili212]

It’s been almost four months since Vybz Kartel walked out of Kingston’s General Penitentiary as a free man after serving nearly 13 years behind bars. Way back in September of 2011, the dancehall star was arrested for possession of cannabis before being hit with a murder charge. After a 64-day trial, the longest in Jamaican history, Kartel and his co-defendants—Kahira Jones, Andre St. John, and fellow dancehall artist Shawn Storm—were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Kartel never gave up hope.After appealing all the way to the highest court in the UK, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the conviction in March 2024 due to misconduct—one of the jurors was accused of bribing others on the jury, which should have resulted in a mistrial. Months later the Jamaican government decided to drop the controversial case once and for all.After so many years in captivity the artist, born Adidja Palmer, is now enjoying life with his new fiancee Sidem Öztürk, reuniting with his family—including his sons Likkle Addi, Likkle Vybz, and his first grandchild—and savoring his first ever Grammy nomination for the album Party With Me. More importantly, after suffering from a serious thyroid condition while in prison, he finally has proper medical care and has been recovering well. “God is the greatest,” Kartel states in a new interview with Boomshots, recorded during the run-up to Freedom Street, his first live performance in more than a decade.“I was never a religious person, but going through what I’ve been through, it changed me,” Kartel said. “And it made me have a different perspective on what God has in store for my life. So yes, I became close to God—unfortunately in prison, but it is what it is.”Kartel will close out this remarkable year by performing alongside his sons, and many of his the young artists he helped to become stars including Spice, Popcaan, Tommy Lee, Shawn Storm, and Sheba, as well as new generation artists inspired by him like Skillibeng and Chronic Law. A few surprise guests are likely to pop out at Jamaica’s National Stadium on the evening of December 31. “This is the greatest assemblance of artists in dancehall,” Kartel said. “It’s like the Avengers, so obviously I have to be Tony Starks. Thanos, watch out!”Arguably the most dominant and divisive dancehall artist of the new millennium, Vybz Kartel’s career so far can be divided into three distinct eras. During the first era, from 1993 to 2000, he was Adi Banton, struggling in obscurity as part of a trio known as Vibes Cartel. The second era began when he went solo in the early 2000s, changing his name to its current spelling, and writing songs for Bounty Killer and Elephant Man before releasing his first hit song, “Gun Clown.” By the end of the second era, Kartel was a seemingly unstoppable force until his arrest in 2011. The third and longest era has played out behind bars, as Kartel continued his prolific run against all odds.Although Kartel has not touched a stage since 2011, he’s maintained his place at the top of the Jamaican dancehall scene despite being incarcerated. By secretly recording on smart phones and emailing his vocals to a close circle of trusted producers, Kartel was able to release hundreds of hit singles like his 2016 smash “Fever,” which got heavy international airplay and was certified gold. Although he released more than a dozen albums during his time in prison, Party With Me is his first release to be nominated for Best Reggae Album.“Long overdue, Academy,” Kartel said. “But we haffi big up the Academy same way. It’s a great feeling, it’s a humbling feeling… This doesn’t come as a surprise but it’s welcomed.”Of all the songs he recorded in captivity, Kartel says his favorite may be “Any Weather,” an inspirational 2016 tune recorded at Spanish Town Prison with a chorus that states defiantly “We’re not going under.”“That’s a powerful song,” he said. “It’s an anthem right now. The concept behind it, the message is also true dancehall. Tell the youths them to uplift themselves from poverty and just do the right thing. It’s like me speaking my future into existence.”Since his release Kartel has wasted no time, kicking off the fourth era of his career with new singles like “The Comet” as well as “Nobody Move,” a collaboration with the international collective Major Lazer. Kartel has also recorded a soon-to-be-released collab with Nicki Minaj, and says new songs with Cardi B and Drake are in the works. A longtime Kartel supporter, Drake—who is rumored to make an appearance at the show—appears to have earned the dancehall star’s loyalty. Asked about the battle with Kendrick Lamar, Kartel says that contrary to popular belief, he feels that Drake won. “Kendrick is a lyricist and I am also a lyricist,” Kartel said. “So I appreciate his art. But to me, Drake gets the point across on a global scale.”When speaking of dancehall artists, Kartel gives maximum respect to Bounty Killer, the artist who first gave him a break in by making Kartel part of his crew the Alliance in the early 2000s. “He gave a bunch of us an opportunity to feed our families, to showcase our talent, and to become stars,” says Kartel, who was inspired to “pay it forward” by forming his own crew, the Portmore Empire, which brought future stars like Popcaan, Tommy Lee, and Gaza Slim to prominence. “I remember when all of them came around,” Kartel said. “Now they’re making money, taking care of their families. It’s beautiful. That’s how it should go though. Spread the love. Spreads the energy. God is the greatest.”Although Kartel had a lyrical feud with Bounty Killer before going to prison, he says that’s all in the past. Likewise he says he’s on good terms with his old rival Mavado, his arch-rival during the epic Gaza vs Gully wars. “The original Vybz Kartel was the war angel. Now I’m just chilling, I’m not involved in any feuding," Kartel says. "I don’t think I’ll go back there either. Leave that to the kids.” Once he tackles his homecoming concert, Kartel plans to continue recording and performing as well as promoting his rum and rolling paper brands, and working on a book about his time in prison, the follow-up to his previous title, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto. Source link

[oliviajoyice21]

It’s been almost four months since Vybz Kartel walked out of Kingston’s General Penitentiary as a free man after serving nearly 13 years behind bars. Way back in September of 2011, the dancehall star was arrested for possession of cannabis before being hit with a murder charge. After a 64-day trial, the longest in Jamaican history, Kartel and his co-defendants—Kahira Jones, Andre St. John, and fellow dancehall artist Shawn Storm—were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But Kartel never gave up hope.After appealing all the way to the highest court in the UK, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the conviction in March 2024 due to misconduct—one of the jurors was accused of bribing others on the jury, which should have resulted in a mistrial. Months later the Jamaican government decided to drop the controversial case once and for all.After so many years in captivity the artist, born Adidja Palmer, is now enjoying life with his new fiancee Sidem Öztürk, reuniting with his family—including his sons Likkle Addi, Likkle Vybz, and his first grandchild—and savoring his first ever Grammy nomination for the album Party With Me. More importantly, after suffering from a serious thyroid condition while in prison, he finally has proper medical care and has been recovering well. “God is the greatest,” Kartel states in a new interview with Boomshots, recorded during the run-up to Freedom Street, his first live performance in more than a decade.“I was never a religious person, but going through what I’ve been through, it changed me,” Kartel said. “And it made me have a different perspective on what God has in store for my life. So yes, I became close to God—unfortunately in prison, but it is what it is.”Kartel will close out this remarkable year by performing alongside his sons, and many of his the young artists he helped to become stars including Spice, Popcaan, Tommy Lee, Shawn Storm, and Sheba, as well as new generation artists inspired by him like Skillibeng and Chronic Law. A few surprise guests are likely to pop out at Jamaica’s National Stadium on the evening of December 31. “This is the greatest assemblance of artists in dancehall,” Kartel said. “It’s like the Avengers, so obviously I have to be Tony Starks. Thanos, watch out!”Arguably the most dominant and divisive dancehall artist of the new millennium, Vybz Kartel’s career so far can be divided into three distinct eras. During the first era, from 1993 to 2000, he was Adi Banton, struggling in obscurity as part of a trio known as Vibes Cartel. The second era began when he went solo in the early 2000s, changing his name to its current spelling, and writing songs for Bounty Killer and Elephant Man before releasing his first hit song, “Gun Clown.” By the end of the second era, Kartel was a seemingly unstoppable force until his arrest in 2011. The third and longest era has played out behind bars, as Kartel continued his prolific run against all odds.Although Kartel has not touched a stage since 2011, he’s maintained his place at the top of the Jamaican dancehall scene despite being incarcerated. By secretly recording on smart phones and emailing his vocals to a close circle of trusted producers, Kartel was able to release hundreds of hit singles like his 2016 smash “Fever,” which got heavy international airplay and was certified gold. Although he released more than a dozen albums during his time in prison, Party With Me is his first release to be nominated for Best Reggae Album.“Long overdue, Academy,” Kartel said. “But we haffi big up the Academy same way. It’s a great feeling, it’s a humbling feeling… This doesn’t come as a surprise but it’s welcomed.”Of all the songs he recorded in captivity, Kartel says his favorite may be “Any Weather,” an inspirational 2016 tune recorded at Spanish Town Prison with a chorus that states defiantly “We’re not going under.”“That’s a powerful song,” he said. “It’s an anthem right now. The concept behind it, the message is also true dancehall. Tell the youths them to uplift themselves from poverty and just do the right thing. It’s like me speaking my future into existence.”Since his release Kartel has wasted no time, kicking off the fourth era of his career with new singles like “The Comet” as well as “Nobody Move,” a collaboration with the international collective Major Lazer. Kartel has also recorded a soon-to-be-released collab with Nicki Minaj, and says new songs with Cardi B and Drake are in the works. A longtime Kartel supporter, Drake—who is rumored to make an appearance at the show—appears to have earned the dancehall star’s loyalty. Asked about the battle with Kendrick Lamar, Kartel says that contrary to popular belief, he feels that Drake won. “Kendrick is a lyricist and I am also a lyricist,” Kartel said. “So I appreciate his art. But to me, Drake gets the point across on a global scale.”When speaking of dancehall artists, Kartel gives maximum respect to Bounty Killer, the artist who first gave him a break in by making Kartel part of his crew the Alliance in the early 2000s. “He gave a bunch of us an opportunity to feed our families, to showcase our talent, and to become stars,” says Kartel, who was inspired to “pay it forward” by forming his own crew, the Portmore Empire, which brought future stars like Popcaan, Tommy Lee, and Gaza Slim to prominence. “I remember when all of them came around,” Kartel said. “Now they’re making money, taking care of their families. It’s beautiful. That’s how it should go though. Spread the love. Spreads the energy. God is the greatest.”Although Kartel had a lyrical feud with Bounty Killer before going to prison, he says that’s all in the past. Likewise he says he’s on good terms with his old rival Mavado, his arch-rival during the epic Gaza vs Gully wars. “The original Vybz Kartel was the war angel. Now I’m just chilling, I’m not involved in any feuding," Kartel says. "I don’t think I’ll go back there either. Leave that to the kids.” Once he tackles his homecoming concert, Kartel plans to continue recording and performing as well as promoting his rum and rolling paper brands, and working on a book about his time in prison, the follow-up to his previous title, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto. Source link

[timberwind]

The "dusk chorus" - as evening falls on Mangala, its binary companion's infrastructure belt of orbiting power stations catches the sun, brightening into a ring of stars circling the little Mars analog.

Note the accelerated time here also. Mangala is tidally locked to its huge moon Kahira, and so its rotational period is dictated by the time it takes for the two worlds to circle around each other - about 830 kiloseconds, nine and a half Earth days.

(mocked up in Celestia)

[norainahmadme-blog]

Vybz Kartel Freedom: Appeal Court Details Reasons For Denying DPP Retrial

Vybz Kartel can rest assured that he will never be tried again for the murder case that landed him in prison for over a decade. The dancehall legend, real name Adidja Palmer, was released from prison on July 31, 2024, after being incarcerated for almost 13 years. Vybz Kartel and his co-accused, Shawn ‘Storm’ Campbell, Andre St. John, and Kahira Jones, were found guilty of the murder of Clive…

[jcmarchi]

Google at EMNLP 2023

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/google-at-emnlp-2023/

Google at EMNLP 2023

Google is proud to be a Diamond Sponsor of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023), a premier annual conference, which is being held this week in Sentosa, Singapore. Google has a strong presence at this year’s conference with over 65 accepted papers and active involvement in 11 workshops and tutorials. Google is also happy to be a Major Sponsor for the Widening NLP workshop (WiNLP), which aims to highlight global representations of people, perspectives, and cultures in AI and ML. We look forward to sharing some of our extensive NLP research and expanding our partnership with the broader research community.

We hope you’ll visit the Google booth to chat with researchers who are actively pursuing the latest innovations in NLP, and check out some of the scheduled booth activities (e.g., demos and Q&A sessions listed below). Visit the @GoogleAI X (Twitter) and LinkedIn accounts to find out more about the Google booth activities at EMNLP 2023.

Take a look below to learn more about the Google research being presented at EMNLP 2023 (Google affiliations in bold).

This schedule is subject to change. Please visit the Google booth for more information.

Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs Jiefeng Chen*, Jinsung Yoon, Sayna Ebrahimi, Sercan O Arik, Tomas Pfister, Somesh Jha

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies Alon Jacovi*, Avi Caciularu, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Bernd Bohnet, Mor Geva

1-PAGER: One Pass Answer Generation and Evidence Retrieval Palak Jain, Livio Baldini Soares, Tom Kwiatkowski

MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering Soravit Changpinyo, Linting Xue, Michal Yarom, Ashish V. Thapliyal, Idan Szpektor, Julien Amelot, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut

SDOH-NLI: A Dataset for Inferring Social Determinants of Health from Clinical Notes Adam D. Lelkes, Eric Loreaux*, Tal Schuster, Ming-Jun Chen, Alvin Rajkomar

Machine Reading Comprehension Using Case-based Reasoning Dung Ngoc Thai, Dhruv Agarwal, Mudit Chaudhary, Wenlong Zhao, Rajarshi Das, Jay-Yoon Lee, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum

Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Abdou Aziz DIOP, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles HACHEME, Happy Buzaaba, Ignatius Ezeani, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Albert Kahira, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Akintunde Oladipo, Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Akari Asai, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Ayodele Awokoya, Bernard Opoku, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Christine Mwase, Clemencia Siro, Stephen Arthur, Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Boyd Sinkala, Daniel Ajisafe, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Mofya Phiri, Orevaoghene Ahia, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Sonia Adhiambo

On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Study Polina Zablotskaia, Du Phan, Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Jie Ren, Jeremiah Zhe Liu

Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation Markus Freitag, Behrooz Ghorbani*, Patrick Fernandes*

Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference Tasks Nick McKenna, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Mark Johnson, Mark Steedman

Don’t Add, Don’t Miss: Effective Content Preserving Generation from Pre-selected Text Spans Aviv Slobodkin, Avi Caciularu, Eran Hirsch, Ido Dagan

What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study Aman Madaan*, Katherine Hermann, Amir Yazdanbakhsh

Understanding HTML with Large Language Models Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, Aleksandra Faust

Improving the Robustness of Summarization Models by Detecting and Removing Input Noise Kundan Krishna*, Yao Zhao, Jie Ren, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jiaming Luo, Mohammad Saleh, Peter J. Liu

In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors Roee Hendel, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

Pre-training Without Attention Junxiong Wang, Jing Nathan Yan, Albert Gu, Alexander M Rush

MUX-PLMs: Data Multiplexing for High-Throughput Language Models Vishvak Murahari, Ameet Deshpande, Carlos E Jimenez, Izhak Shafran, Mingqiu Wang, Yuan Cao, Karthik R Narasimhan

PaRaDe: Passage Ranking Using Demonstrations with LLMs Andrew Drozdov*, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler*, Kai Hui

Long-Form Speech Translation Through Segmentation with Finite-State Decoding Constraints on Large Language Models Arya D. McCarthy, Hao Zhang, Shankar Kumar, Felix Stahlberg, Ke Wu

Unsupervised Opinion Summarization Using Approximate Geodesics Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury*, Nicholas Monath, Kumar Avinava Dubey, Amr Ahmed, Snigdha Chaturvedi

SQLPrompt: In-Context Text-to-SQL with Minimal Labeled Data Ruoxi Sun, Sercan O. Arik, Rajarishi Sinha, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Pengcheng Yin, Tomas Pfister

Retrieval-Augmented Parsing for Complex Graphs by Exploiting Structure and Uncertainty Zi Lin, Quan Yuan, Panupong Pasupat, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jingbo Shang

A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection Tao Li, Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang*, Yang Li

Pragmatics in Language Grounding: Phenomena, Tasks, and Modeling Approaches Daniel Fried, Nicholas Tomlin, Jennifer Hu, Roma Patel, Aida Nematzadeh

Improving Classifier Robustness Through Active Generation of Pairwise Counterfactuals Ananth Balashankar, Xuezhi Wang, Yao Qin, Ben Packer, Nithum Thain, Jilin Chen, Ed H. Chi, Alex Beutel

mmT5: Modular Multilingual Pre-training Solves Source Language Hallucinations Jonas Pfeiffer, Francesco Piccinno, Massimo Nicosia, Xinyi Wang, Machel Reid, Sebastian Ruder

Scaling Laws vs Model Architectures: How Does Inductive Bias Influence Scaling? Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Won Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Q. Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler

TaTA: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages Sebastian Gehrmann, Sebastian Ruder, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jan A. Botha, Michael Chavinda, Ankur P Parikh, Clara E. Rivera

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan H. Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean Michel Amath Sarr, Xinyi Wang, John Frederick Wieting, Nitish Gupta, Anna Katanova, Christo Kirov, Dana L Dickinson, Brian Roark, Bidisha Samanta, Connie Tao, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Vera Axelrod, Isaac Rayburn Caswell, Colin Cherry, Dan Garrette, Reeve Ingle, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Panteleev, Partha Talukdar

q2d: Turning Questions into Dialogs to Teach Models How to Search Yonatan Bitton, Shlomi Cohen-Ganor, Ido Hakimi, Yoad Lewenberg, Roee Aharoni, Enav Weinreb

Emergence of Abstract State Representations in Embodied Sequence Modeling Tian Yun*, Zilai Zeng, Kunal Handa, Ashish V Thapliyal, Bo Pang, Ellie Pavlick, Chen Sun

Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering Benjamin Muller*, John Wieting, Jonathan H. Clark, Tom Kwiatkowski, Sebastian Ruder, Livio Baldini Soares, Roee Aharoni, Jonathan Herzig, Xinyi Wang

Weakly-Supervised Learning of Visual Relations in Multimodal Pre-training Emanuele Bugliarello, Aida Nematzadeh, Lisa Anne Hendricks

How Do Languages Influence Each Other? Studying Cross-Lingual Data Sharing During LM Fine-Tuning Rochelle Choenni, Dan Garrette, Ekaterina Shutova

CompoundPiece: Evaluating and Improving Decompounding Performance of Language Models Benjamin Minixhofer, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić

IC3: Image Captioning by Committee Consensus David Chan, Austin Myers, Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan, David A Ross, John Canny

The Curious Case of Hallucinatory (Un)answerability: Finding Truths in the Hidden States of Over-Confident Large Language Models Aviv Slobodkin, Omer Goldman, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Shauli Ravfogel

Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma

Ties Matter: Meta-Evaluating Modern Metrics with Pairwise Accuracy and Tie Calibration Daniel Deutsch, George Foster, Markus Freitag

Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute Yi Tay*, Jason Wei*, Hyung Won Chung*, Vinh Q. Tran, David R. So*, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Jinfeng Rao, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Neil Houlsby, Quoc V. Le, Mostafa Dehghani

Data Similarity is Not Enough to Explain Language Model Performance Gregory Yauney*, Emily Reif, David Mimno

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training Megh Thakkar*, Tolga Bolukbasi, Sriram Ganapathy, Shikhar Vashishth, Sarath Chandar, Partha Talukdar

ReTAG: Reasoning Aware Table to Analytic Text Generation Deepanway Ghosal, Preksha Nema, Aravindan Raghuveer

GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-Resource Machine Translation Alex Jones*, Isaac Caswell, Ishank Saxena

Video-Helpful Multimodal Machine Translation Yihang Li, Shuichiro Shimizu, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi, Wei Li

Symbol Tuning Improves In-Context Learning in Language Models Jerry Wei*, Le Hou, Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Xiangning Chen*, Da Huang, Yi Tay*, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma*, Quoc V Le

“Don’t Take This Out of Context!” On the Need for Contextual Models and Evaluations for Stylistic Rewriting Akhila Yerukola, Xuhui Zhou, Elizabeth Clark, Maarten Sap

QAmeleon: Multilingual QA with Only 5 Examples Priyanka Agrawal, Chris Alberti, Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Ji Ma, Sebastian Ruder, Kuzman Ganchev, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata

Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision Eugene Kharitonov, Damien Vincent, Zalán Borsos, Raphaël Marinier, Sertan Girgin, Olivier Pietquin, Matt Sharifi, Marco Tagliasacchi, Neil Zeghidour

AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Yonghui Wu

Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions Jeremy R. Cole, Michael JQ Zhang, Daniel Gillick, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Bhuwan Dhingra, Jacob Eisenstein

PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (see blog post) Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani*, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu

LM vs LM: Detecting Factual Errors via Cross Examination Roi Cohen, May Hamri, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson

A Suite of Generative Tasks for Multi-Level Multimodal Webpage Understanding Andrea Burns*, Krishna Srinivasan, Joshua Ainslie, Geoff Brown, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Jianmo Ni, Mandy Guo

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Seid Muhie Yimam, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif M. Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Wendimu Baye Messelle, Hailu Beshada Balcha, Sisay Adugna Chala, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur

Optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Reader Models via Token Elimination Moshe Berchansky, Peter Izsak, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Moshe Wasserblat

SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation Elizabeth Clark, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Gehrmann, Joshua Maynez, Roee Aharoni, Vitaly Nikolaev, Thibault Sellam, Aditya Siddhant, Dipanjan Das, Ankur P Parikh

GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints Joshua Ainslie, James Lee-Thorp, Michiel de Jong*, Yury Zemlyanskiy, Federico Lebron, Sumit Sanghai

CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontanon, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai

Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting Preethi Lahoti, Nicholas Blumm, Xiao Ma, Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, Sahitya Potluri, Qijun Tan, Hansa Srinivasan, Ben Packer, Ahmad Beirami, Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen

Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (see blog post) Xingchen Wan*, Ruoxi Sun, Hootan Nakhost, Hanjun Dai, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Sercan O. Arik, Tomas Pfister

TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models Zorik Gekhman, Jonathan Herzig, Roee Aharoni, Chen Elkind, Idan Szpektor

Hierarchical Pre-training on Multimodal Electronic Health Records Xiaochen Wang, Junyu Luo, Jiaqi Wang, Ziyi Yin, Suhan Cui, Yuan Zhong, Yaqing Wang, Fenglong Ma

NAIL: Lexical Retrieval Indices with Efficient Non-Autoregressive Decoders Livio Baldini Soares, Daniel Gillick, Jeremy R. Cole, Tom Kwiatkowski

How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages? Ronak Pradeep*, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam D. Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Q. Tran

Make Every Example Count: On the Stability and Utility of Self-Influence for Learning from Noisy NLP Datasets Irina Bejan*, Artem Sokolov, Katja Filippova

[panelki]

📌Фото: Очередь из машин скорой помощи из Египта у ворот пограничного перехода «Рафах» на въезде в сектор Газа По словам генерального секретаря Египетского Красного Полумесяца на Северном Синае Раеда Абдель Насера, готовы 40 машин скорой помощи. Как сообщает Al-Kahira News, они ожидают в транзитной зоне пограничного перехода на египетской стороне. До сих пор этот КПП «Рафах» использовался в основном для доставки гуманитарной помощи. @BILD_Russian https://52.nn.org.ru

[zouberi]

Festival-Mediaval CZ II, 2023

In the course of the Bavarian-Czech Friendship Weeks, Festival-Mediaval once again moved from Selb to Aš to take place there as a warm-up exactly one week before the main festival. As promised, we were there from 1st to 3rd September 2023 as a two-headed team to report. Although the first day was rainy, you get to see photos of all the bands and more on Zouberi’s Facebook page.

In addition to the music line-up, jugglers and a medieval market, a huge dragon bouncy castle right behind the entrance was a highlight for young and old, inviting them to romp around not only during the concert breaks.

Day 1: Friday, September 1st

After the opening by Bläcky and the mayor of Aš – thanks to the translator, all visitors could understand both the German and the Czech speech – the music started on the big stage. Krless, a medieval crossover band from Prague, set the mood for the three-day festival with oriental sounds. Followed by BrAagas with a performance of traditionals from all over Europe, which captivated the audience in several voices and with historical instruments. A band baby, who joined them on stage in his carrier, visibly enjoyed himself and bobbed happily to the music. The headliner of the first evening was Tomáš Kočko & Orchestr, whose music made the visitors dance to elements of rock, folk and jazz.

Day 2: Saturday, September 2nd

The second day was opened by the German band Wyst, who performed their stories accompanied by electronic sounds and medieval instruments, providing entertainment already in the early afternoon. They were followed by Delva, another German band, whose folk music is inspired by Irish influences and put the audience in a dancing mood on this sunny Saturday. The dancing continued with Za Horyzontem, a pirate band from Poland, who performed many well-known and not so well-known traditionals in maritime folk garb. The headliner was eagerly awaited: Corvus Corax. As in 2022 at the Festival-Mediaval in Selb, the musicians from Berlin performed their "Era Metallum" show, in which they underlay their otherwise medieval sounds with metal. The band was accompanied by the monsters of the "Schattenwelt Südharz", which they incorporated into their show. The mythical creatures already roamed the market during the day and were a popular photo motif.

Day 3: Sunday, September 3rd

In order to attract not only music-loving visitors but also families to the market, the festival was one day longer this time. So, Sunday turned into family day, on which the big stage was not played, but there was a variety of artists on the market. Eleya Folk performed traditionals and shanties as a walking act several times on this day and alternated with the juggler duo Forzarello and the oriental dance shows of Kahira.

Conclusion on the Festival-Mediaval CZ 2023

The Czech version of the Festival-Mediaval was small but beautiful and we had a lot of fun there. According to organiser Bläcky, it will not be the last FM CZ, even if it will take another break next year. Until then, its big brother will take place as usual – from 6th to 8th September 2024.

Text by Nadine aka Kreativhörnchen. Find her on her Instagram or her Website.