The first stage of what will be Australia’s biggest battery project has been energised – little more than a year after securing its development contract – and will soon be in operation to help flatten the growing solar duck in Western Australia’s main grid.

The Collie battery is being built by Neoen in two stages, including a 219 MW/877 MWh first stage that was among the first winners of special contracts issued last year to soak up rooftop solar in the middle of the day and time shift it to the evening peak.

A second stage of the battery – even bigger at 341 MW and 1,263 MWh – won a similar contract in a new tender held earlier this year and will become the biggest battery in the country when complete at 560 MW and 2,240 MWh.

MediaTek is a former supplier to Huawei.

To support my work & the Biolands saga https://www.patreon.com/AzeAlterThe planet has been divided by a mysterious phenomena known as ‘The Bloom’, a biologi…

A new theory that accounts for disorder in a protein’s structure sheds light on the development inside a cell of tiny droplets that are vital to a cell’s function.

Through the $1.4 billion partnership, DARPA will establish a domestic center for microelectronics manufacturing at the university.

Cambodia has welcomed 60 baby Siamese crocodiles — a hatching record for the endangered species in this century, conservationists say.

They have called it a “real sign of hope”, after more than 20 years of efforts to revive the reptile’s numbers in the remote Cardamom Mountains.

The olive green freshwater reptile has a distinct bony crest at the back of its head — by some estimates, it can grow up to 3m or nearly 10ft.

The pressures at which some elements start superconducting are so high that making detailed measurements of the transition has been impossible—until now.

For the first time, an international research team has succeeded in observing a two-photon decay on a so-called bare atomic nucleus from which the entire electron shell has been removed.

Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models are being increasingly adopted in diverse global communities where they create visual representations of their unique cultures. Current T2I benchmarks primarily focus on faithfulness, aesthetics, and realism of generated images, overlooking the critical dimension of cultural competence. In this work, we introduce a framework to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models along two crucial dimensions: cultural awareness and cultural diversity, and present a scalable approach using a combination of structured knowledge bases and large language models to build a large dataset of cultural artifacts to enable this evaluation. In particular, we apply this approach to build CUBE (CUltural BEnchmark for Text-to-Image models), a first-of-its-kind benchmark to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models. CUBE covers cultural artifacts associated with 8 countries across different geo-cultural regions and along 3 concepts: cuisine, landmarks, and art. CUBE consists of 1) CUBE-1K, a set of high-quality prompts that enable the evaluation of cultural awareness, and 2) CUBE-CSpace, a larger dataset of cultural artifacts that serves as grounding to evaluate cultural diversity. We also introduce cultural diversity as a novel T2I evaluation component, leveraging quality-weighted Vendi score. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the cultural awareness of existing models across countries and provide valuable insights into the cultural diversity of T2I outputs for under-specified prompts. Our methodology is extendable to other cultural regions and concepts, and can facilitate the development of T2I models that better cater to the global population.

From: Nithish Kannen [view email].