Latest news with #Parakeet
Indian Express
16-05-2025
- General
- Indian Express
Parakeet rescued from inside Parliament
A young rose-ringed Parakeet found its way into the Parliament complex on Friday. The bird, disoriented and unable to fly, was rescued by a team of wildlife enthusiasts. The security personnel alerted Wildlife SOS, a wildlife conservation non-profit, which sent its rapid response team to the spot. The bird was found sitting still and exposed, at the risk of injury. Veterinarians assessed the parakeet and found it was suffering from heat stress, which had left it weak and temporarily unable to fly. 'It is currently under close observation and receiving supportive medication to aid its recovery,' said the rescue team. 'A parakeet in Parliament may seem unusual, but it highlights how closely human spaces overlap with wild ones. Every call matters — whether from a city lane or significant institutions,' said Kartick Satyanarayan, Co-founder and CEO of Wildlife SOS. The species is protected under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, due to which it is illegal for sale or to be kept as a pet in India. However, in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) list, it is listed as least concern. The bird species is native to Africa and South Asian regions, as per experts. The species, which is a common captive bird, is illegal to be caged as it is a native Indian bird which enjoys protection through the Wildlife Protection Act. Geeta Seshamani, co-founder and secretary of the organisation, added, 'It's amazing how even in the heart of our most guarded and urban spaces, a small bird can remind us of the wild lives we share this country with.' The team carefully captured the parakeet, placing it in a ventilated box designed to protect it from potential injuries or attacks from other animals in the vicinity. The bird was transported to the Wildlife SOS transit facility, for observation and supportive care. The team made sure that the bird remained protected from injuries or attacks by other birds or mammals in the area. It also said in a statement, Friday, 'The species' popularity as a pet and unpopularity with farmers have reduced their numbers in some parts of its native range, and remain major threats to the bird.' 'Our team ensured the rescue was swift and stress-free for the bird,' said Suvidha Bhatnagar, Director of Communications at Wildlife SOS. 'It's currently recuperating well, and we are hopeful it will soon be ready to return to the skies.' Once the parakeet is deemed fit to fly, it will be released into a suitable green space where it can thrive naturally, the team said. 'We have had more than 30 such heat-related bird rescue cases that took place since temperatures started increasing. This mostly happens due to exhaustion or heat stroke, causing dehydration,' said Neel Banerjee, communications officer at Wildlife SOS. Regarding the protocol to rescue bird species, Banerjee added, 'If a bird is found unable to fly or is disoriented, the rescuer first provides drinking water on site to rehydrate the bird.' The bird is later taken to the vet for a health assessment and kept under observation for a minimum of 1-2 days. The birds are then released upon recovery after adequate water and nourishment. 'Black kite, which are birds of prey, are one of the biggest victims of excess heat as they fly at high altitudes. They are vulnerable particularly to the scorching sun because they do this on a daily basis in search of prey.,' said Banerjee.
Business Mayor
05-05-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
Nvidia launches fully open source transcription AI model Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-V2 on Hugging Face
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Nvidia has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in recent years thanks to the stock market noticing how much demand there is for graphics processing units (GPUs), the powerful chips Nvidia makes that are used to render graphics in video games but also, increasingly, train AI large language and diffusion models. But Nvidia does far more than just make hardware, of course, and the software to run it. As the generative AI era wears on, the Santa Clara-based company has also been steadily releasing more and more of its own AI models — mostly open source and free for researchers and developers to take, download, modify and use commercially — and the latest among them is Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that can, in the words of Hugging Face's Vaibhav 'VB' Srivastav, 'transcribe 60 minutes of audio in 1 second [mind blown emoji].' This is the new generation of the Parakeet model Nvidia first unveiled back in January 2024 and updated again in April of that year, but this version two is so powerful, it currently tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with an average 'Word Error Rate' (times the model incorrectly transcribes a spoken word) of just 6.05% (out of 100). To put that in perspective, it nears proprietary transcription models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o-transcribe (with a WER of 2.46% in English) and ElevenLabs Scribe (3.3%). And it's offering all this while remaining freely available under a commercially permissive Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license, making it an attractive proposition for commercial enterprises and indie developers looking to build speech recognition and transcription services into their paid applications. The model boasts 600 million parameters and leverages a combination of the FastConformer encoder and TDT decoder architectures. It is capable of transcribing an hour of audio in just one second, provided it's running on Nvidia's GPU-accelerated hardware. The performance benchmark is measured at an RTFx (Real-Time Factor) of 3386.02 with a batch size of 128, placing it at the top of current ASR benchmarks maintained by Hugging Face. Released globally on May 1, 2025, Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2 is aimed at developers, researchers, and industry teams building applications such as transcription services, voice assistants, subtitle generators, and conversational AI platforms. The model supports punctuation, capitalization, and detailed word-level timestamping, offering a full transcription package for a wide range of speech-to-text needs. Developers can deploy the model using Nvidia's NeMo toolkit. The setup process is compatible with Python and PyTorch, and the model can be used directly or fine-tuned for domain-specific tasks. The open-source license (CC-BY-4.0) also allows for commercial use, making it appealing to startups and enterprises alike. Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2 was trained on a diverse and large-scale corpus called the Granary dataset. This includes around 120,000 hours of English audio, composed of 10,000 hours of high-quality human-transcribed data and 110,000 hours of pseudo-labeled speech. Sources range from well-known datasets like LibriSpeech and Mozilla Common Voice to YouTube-Commons and Librilight. Nvidia plans to make the Granary dataset publicly available following its presentation at Interspeech 2025. The model was evaluated across multiple English-language ASR benchmarks, including AMI, Earnings22, GigaSpeech, and SPGISpeech, and showed strong generalization performance. It remains robust under varied noise conditions and performs well even with telephony-style audio formats, with only modest degradation at lower signal-to-noise ratios. Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2 is optimized for Nvidia GPU environments, supporting hardware such as the A100, H100, T4, and V100 boards. While high-end GPUs maximize performance, the model can still be loaded on systems with as little as 2GB of RAM, allowing for broader deployment scenarios. NVIDIA notes that the model was developed without the use of personal data and adheres to its responsible AI framework. Although no specific measures were taken to mitigate demographic bias, the model passed internal quality standards and includes detailed documentation on its training process, dataset provenance, and privacy compliance. The release drew attention from the machine learning and open-source communities, especially after being publicly highlighted on social media. Commentators noted the model's ability to outperform commercial ASR alternatives while remaining fully open source and commercially usable. Developers interested in trying the model can access it via Hugging Face or through Nvidia's NeMo toolkit. Installation instructions, demo scripts, and integration guidance are readily available to facilitate experimentation and deployment.
New York Times
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Hauntings Include: Dead Parents, Bad Sex and a Weird Painting of Cher
It is best to go into certain books — the ones that sit at the intersection of bizarre and stellar — knowing nothing about them, so as to undergo an experience that starts at enjoyment and escalates to conversion. It's too bad that a person who writes about books professionally rarely gets the opportunity. It's a critic's duty (and often her privilege!) to read the back catalog of an author before toeing up to a new work. If the critic is lazy, there's always a press packet to leaf through. If the critic is unforgivably derelict, she will at minimum scan the blurbs. My copy of Marie-Helene Bertino's new short story collection, 'Exit Zero,' featured no blurbs and I read it while visiting a far Nordic country where her previous books — 'Beautyland,' 'Parakeet' and two others — were unavailable for immediate purchase. And so it was that, by a combination of poor preparation and good fortune, I was converted. 'Exit Zero' is a death-obsessed book. Sometimes death sets a story in motion, as when a woman's estranged father dies and she discovers a unicorn living in his yard. Sometimes death is tangential, as when a fatal car crash leaves the survivor with an unlikely souvenir — a fine art portrait of Cher — that becomes a sort of religious icon in her wrecked life. The stories are dense with funeral homes, cancer, gravestones, emergency surgeries, war. Dense, but not heavy. This is partly because Bertino is a very funny writer: She will describe a man's facial hair as 'erratic'; when an event planner is asked what she does for work, she replies, 'I make God laugh.' It is also because, as the unicorn suggests, we are in the presence of whimsy. In one story, a woman's ex-lovers fall from the sky like hailstones. In another, balloons float into a character's garden carrying cryptic messages from who knows where ('YOU SEEM LONELY,' 'WE ARE UNDER ATTACK'). These and other premises verge on precious, but the prose is photorealistic enough to neutralize the taste of sugar. These stories frolic in the nether zone between fantasy and reality. Reality: The characters exist in concrete locations (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York) and in an era that is recognizably our own — a present infested with streaming television, emojis, Taylor Swift and promotional emails from J. Crew. But this terra firma is also home to saints, ghosts, vampires and unnameable but palpable emissaries from other realms. Short stories submit to technical scrutiny far more readily than novels; their small scale makes the elements of craft — setups, incidents, reversals — easier to extract and examine than they are in a lengthier work. This vulnerability to dissection makes the form tricky to master and terrifying to write. But when a short story works, it can wield truly occult powers, exerting a force disproportionate to its dimensions. Through all of 'Exit Zero' Bertino blurs the line between writer and magician. Among the more dazzling spells is a story called 'Kathleen in Light Colors,' which conflates the alienation of language with the alienation of love. The conflict is simple: A couple suffer from an unsatisfying sex life. Their lovemaking is 'muted,' the contact between their flesh muffled by 'an unseen body' that prevents them from truly feeling each other: 'an invisible obfuscating blanket.' The adventurous pair gamely try to 'outsmart' this presence by fooling around in a pool, a vestibule, on a fire escape. No luck. They seek advice from a witchy woman who performs a kind of exorcism. The incompatibility abides. It is only a failed attempt at dirty talk that reveals the heart of the problem. 'No matter how we tried to gain linguistic purchase,' the narrator says, 'we were still wearing oven mitts.' The suggestion is this: A couple who fail to share an understanding of words cannot hope to please each other's bodies. True or not, it's one of countless provocations served up in a style as lavish and strictly composed as a formal garden. And it is no accident that flowers, fruits and trees are abundant in these stories. A character pruning the dead ends of lilies in her garden considers herself to be 'an assistant to unburdening,' as though the routines of gardening were acts of palliative care. How true! Few writers can revolve your mind in the space of four words. Bertino is one of them.
The Guardian
15-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Dear chefs: what are the perfect sides for Easter lamb?
What are the best sides to pair with lamb at Easter? 'Lamb has a deep, rich flavour; it's distinctive, but it's versatile, too,' say Jay Claus and Syrus Pickhaver of Rake at The Compton Arms in north London. 'As long as you render the fat slowly and fully, so the flavour is released and the lamb is tender, you can take it in all sorts of directions.' Something 'with good salinity', be that gherkins or anchovies, is as good a start as any in their book, as is erring towards a 'Greek vibe' for Anna Hedworth, author of Service (think 'yoghurty, fresh or sharp things, such as tzatziki or salsa verde'). Happily, lamb also lends itself 'beautifully to an abundance of fresh herbs, and to spring produce – asparagus, wild garlic, peas, fennel and globe artichokes,' adds Ben Allen, head chef at the Parakeet in north-west London. When it comes to specific sides, however, that all really depends on how you're cooking the lamb. That said, we can all agree potatoes are non-negotiable. 'If the lamb is quite simple [with herbs and garlic, say], it can take the robustness of a dauphinoise,' says regular Guardian columnist Georgina Hayden. The richest spud dish of all gets Claus and Pickhaver's vote, too – but with added anchovies to tick their salty box: 'Slice potatoes and onions thinly, add anchovies and layer in an oven dish. Cover with cream, milk and some butter, then bake gently.' Hedworth, meanwhile, keeps things simpler, preferring to roast cubes of potato with lots of olive oil, garlic, rosemary and lemon peel, until 'crisp on the outside and soft inside'. Don't forget to eat your greens, either. Hedworth suggests braising cabbage or cavolo nero to dress up with salsa verde: 'Blitz whatever herbs you can get your hands on – mint, tarragon, dill, parsley – with garlic, dijon, red-wine vinegar, olive oil and salt.' Otherwise, give peas a chance: 'These should be Birds Eye and unsullied by anything more creative than salt and butter,' say Claus and Pickhaver. Carrots, on the other hand, should be accompanied by thyme and honey and cooked 'so they're really sticky', Hayden says, or a mustard cream, which is on Rake's menu alongside a Barnsley chop: 'Thin strands of carrot are soaked in sweet vinegar, then we add creme fraiche and a lot of dijon; the creaminess matches the fatty lamb, but it's light and sweet.' For a taste of sunnier climes, Hedworth puts cherry tomatoes (halved, if large) in a tray with smoked paprika, onion seeds, sugar, salt, olive oil and a mix of toasted and ground coriander seeds, cumin seeds and cardamom seeds. Roast until 'fully soft and starting to blacken', then pile on to Greek yoghurt: 'The lamb juices melt into the tomatoes and yoghurt, making them really delicious.' For another simple side, Allen would be inclined to knock up a Turkish-style salad with chickpeas, cucumber, plenty of herbs and sumac. 'Then just toss everything in olive oil and a squeeze of lemon for a vibrant, refreshing side.' And if you're going down the spiced lamb route – a slow-cooked shoulder with harissa, for example – rice would be very nice. 'I'd make a lovely, herby pilaf to soak up all of those juices,' Hayden says, alongside some spiced carrots and braised fennel to seal the deal for the weekend's big meal. Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@
