In this exclusive book extract, the former Italy goalkeeper describes a moment of crisis before a game against Reggina
If I have to identify the most important moment of this crisis, it was just before a Juventus-Reggina match in February 2004. It was an evening game. We were six points off the top of the table. There were 13 games left in the season, so anything could still happen, but there was an air of negativity, as if the season was already over. We had just had two crazy and very different games. In our previous league match, we had conceded four goals to Totti and Cassano’s Roma, while in midweek we had won the Coppa Italia semi-final against Inter at San Siro, on penalties. Although we were still in the running in the Champions League and perhaps even a little in the league, inside me I was certain that in that season everything was lost.
It was a classic winter Turin evening, wet and cold, and the stadium was half-empty. The speakers played a song that I only heard as an annoying buzz. During the warm-up I prayed and performed my usual pre-match routine, but it felt as if something was wrong with my muscles. After two minutes I put on my gloves, I stood in the goal and I realised that I was struggling to breathe. I stood there, staring at the pitch, and I felt slightly dizzy. What scared me, however, was the tightness I felt in my diaphragm, between chest and stomach, as if I had been hit.
Continue reading...They’re just the latest stars whose banal pronouncements have triggered a wave of controversy. Surely no one, in their heart of hearts, cares that much
Do you have an opinion on the state of contemporary ballet or keeping cats as pets? There are no right or wrong answers here, only differences of opinion. It is hard to imagine being upset by someone expressing an alternative view on either topic – unless, of course, they are a celebrity and you are on the internet.
The celebrity outrage cycle has never been especially edifying, but lately it has become faster paced and even more stupid. Let’s return to those questions. The actors Timothée Chalamet and Jessie Buckley landed themselves in hot water in the run-up to the Oscars: him for disparaging opera and ballet, her for disliking cats (and, more specifically, pressing her now-husband to get rid of his pair).
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
Continue reading...FOTO: Cole Thomas Allen, de opgepakte, vermoedelijke schutter
Kent u die grap van dat etentje met de president en allerlei journalisten waarbij een boel ongrappige grappen zouden worden gemaakt? Cole Thomas Allen, een 31-jarige (vermoedelijke docent) uit Torrance, Californië, voorkwam met een mislukte aanslag dat er ook maar iets te lachen viel tijdens het Correspondents' Dinner, waar Trump voor het eerst als president bij aanwezig was. De geheime dienst kwam rap in actie toen er plots schoten klonken in het Washington Hilton Hotel. Trump, Melania en ook VP Vance werden subiet van het podium getrokken en in veiligheid gebracht. Wonder boven wonder raakte de schutter alleen een agent van de geheime dienst, die beschermd werd door een kogelvrij vest. De schutter werd door de massale aanwezigheid van beveiliging vrij snel gearresteerd, maar wist ondanks dat nog best ver te komen. Enfin, u heeft het vannacht HIER kunnen lezen.
Naderhand gaf Trump nog een toespraak waarin hij de geheime dienst bedankte en bekendmaakte dat de schutter meerdere wapens bij zich had. Met andere woorden: dit had in een groot drama kunnen eindigen. Het bleef bij heel veel angst en toch weer een nieuwe, mislukte aanslag in de omgeving van Trump. Heel veel angstbeeld, vluchtende gasten, een zwangere Katie Miller, een jankende Erika Kirk en een IJSKOUDE Rudy Bouma hieronder.
Update 09:09 - CBS News meldt op basis van bronnen dat Cole Thomas Allen heeft toegegeven aan de autoriteiten dat hij het had gemunt op leden van de regering Trump.
Bewakingsbeeld van de schutter die langs beveiliging sprint
SocialVolledige toespraak Trump na mislukte aanslag
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SocialSocialSocialSocialSocialSocialSocialSocialSocialSocialRudy Bouma (NOS), de rust zelve
Line of Duty
Na zonsondergang zondag koelt het flink af, en tijdens koningsnacht blijft het droog. Maandag, Koningsdag, begint zonnig en fris, met in de middag grote temperatuurverschillen door het land. Later op de dag komt er meer bewolking, met af en toe een bui, verwacht Weeronline.
Het weerbureau adviseert feestvierders komende nacht een extra jas of trui mee te nemen: in het midden en zuiden van het land koelt het af naar 3 tot 6 graden, terwijl het in het noorden lokaal licht kan vriezen.
Maandag begint op veel plaatsen met een paar graden boven nul. In de loop van de dag wordt het in het noorden 11 graden, maar in het zuiden kan het lokaal 19 graden worden. Er staat bijna geen wind, verwacht Weeronline. Vooral in het noorden en langs de kust neemt de bewolking later op de dag toe. In de kustgebieden kan dan een buitje vallen.
In the Wall Street Journal Ming shares her experiment about which group performed best at predicting real-world events (compared to forecasters on prediction market Polymarket) — AI, human, or human-AI hybrid teams.
The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models — ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case — performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself. But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting. Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These "validators" had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn't true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo.
But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument... These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market's accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it...
We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it. What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They're the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, "What's missing?" rather than default to "Great, that's done." To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it. We don't build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one's mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically.
I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop.
The author just published a book called " Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People." They suggest using AI to "explore uncertainty.... before you accept an AI's answer, ask it for the strongest argument against itself."
And they're also urging new performance benchmarks for AI-human hybrid teams.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.