April 2014 News
This is the April 2014 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; the previous was March.
This is a summarized version of the revision-history RSS feed, overlapping with the Changelog page. It also includes material from my Google+ & the LW media threads.
Writings
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an anonymous user sent in a fanfiction about Satoshi Nakamoto, which was too good to simply delete
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I have posted the past issues of the newsletter online
Media
Links
Politics/religion:
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“Where Was China?: Why the Twentieth-Century Was Not a Chinese Century”
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“The Market for Martyrs”, 2003
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“Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto” (Satoshi Nakamoto left a cool Easter egg in his profile: his birthdate (1975-04-05) is a double reference to the banning & relegalization of gold in the USA.)
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“Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite” (see particularly the “Unrepresentative Democracy” section)
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“Who Is Ali Khamenei? The Worldview of Iran’s Supreme Leader”
Statistics:
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“You’ve just been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, how long will you survive?” (Survival analysis in R)
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“Randomized Controlled Trials Commissioned by the Institute of Education Sciences Since 200222ya: How Many Found Positive Versus Weak or No Effects?”, Coalition for Evidence-Based 2013
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“Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology” (Nice visualizations. Now I understand the appeal of topological approaches to machine learning.)
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“Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death”, et al 2014 (An intriguing application of survival analysis)
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Data scientist interview anthology (Nice selection of domains—computer vision for makeup selection? It’s a thing.)
Literature
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“Equoid” (Charles Stross; Lovecraft meets My Little Pony)
Medicine/biology:
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“New Drug Development: Estimating entry from human clinical trials”, 2003
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“Breeding a better crop seed, trait by trait” (molecular breeding : plants :: embryo selection : humans?)
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“The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?” (Cystic fibrosis as paradigm for general differences in practical effectiveness between hospitals & practitioners. Also a reminder why you need things like multi-level models for analysis: there is hierarchical structure to outcomes.)
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“DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types” (FAQ), Horvath 201311ya; mainstream overview of results: “Biomarkers and Ageing: The clock-watcher; Biomathematician Steve Horvath has discovered a strikingly accurate way to measure human Ageing through epigenetic signatures” (The truly exciting part here is the possibility that his clock will not just be real, but it’ll be caused by aging and not just correlated through the myriads of possible pathways. If you get an actual biomarker for aging, it’ll revolutionize anti-aging studies by letting you test interventions in a decade with a small fraction of the humans you’d need with mortality-based methods. Right now, it takes decades and sample sizes of thousands or tens of thousands of people to show a reduction in all-cause mortality—a highly-precise anti-aging marker would change all that.)
Psychology:
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“Do Elephants Have Souls?” (“Another way of catching elephants, employed less now than it used to be, is to save the babies from a cull and market them. Because of the psychological problems caused by having their entire families slaughtered around them, culling experts now recommend just killing the babies with everybody else.”)
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“Genetic enhancement of cognition in a kindred with cone-rod dystrophy due to RIMS1 mutation”, et al 2007
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“Salt Iodization and the Enfranchisement of the American Worker”, et al 2013
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“Neurological and psychological applications of transcranial lasers and LEDs”, Rojas & Gonzalez-2013
Science/technology
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“The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em” (Weren’t we being told 5 or 10 years ago that—sure, maybe chess is trivial for computers, but poker would be way harder?)
Philosophy:
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“The Great Penguin Sweater Fiasco” (For when you’ve debated ‘effective altruism’ to such an extent that you’ve forgotten what the status quo looks like.)
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“The Unilateralist’s Curse: The Case for a Principle of Conformity”, et al 2016 (see also winner’s curse & bid shading)
Business:
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“Yet another modest proposal: The Roentgen Monetary Standard”
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“The Dead Zoo Gang” (Irish organized crime focusing on rhino horn theft for the Chinese market.)
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“How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)”
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“The Value of a CEO”: estimating the damage done by Steve Ballmer to Microsoft
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“No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices” (see also “Protein stability imposes limits on organism complexity and speed of molecular evolution”, Zeldovich et al 200717ya; “Mutation Induced Extinction in Finite Populations: Lethal Mutagenesis and Lethal Isolation”, Wylie & Shakhnovich 201212ya)
Misc:
Books
Fiction:
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Household’s Rogue Male
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Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch
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Cesares’s The Invention of Morel
Nonfiction:
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Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (brief review)
Film/TV
Animation:
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Madoka: Rebellion (a must-watch for anyone who enjoyed the TV series; I am not certain in general what to make of it, and need to rewatch it. If you’re going to watch it at all, I recommend avoiding spoilers.)
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Frozen (unobjectionable for a Disney movie although not without flaws—slangy dialogue will date it fast, plot made characters unnecessarily evil, Olaf the snowman was the most hateful character since Jar Jar Binks)
Music
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“Welcome to my harbor” (mag; Kantai Collection Arrange Compilation 2 {201311ya}) [instrumental]
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“Old navy never die.” (Morrigan feat. リリィ; Old navy never die. {C85; Kancolle}) [choral]
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“farce” (spctrm; historie {C78}) [instrumental]
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“fable” (spctrm; historie {C78}) [instrumental]
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“Dreaming Tonight” feat. Renko (ORANGE★JAM; Starlight {C85}) [trance/Jpop]
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“Landscape” (ryuryu; Homeland {VM14}) [instrumental]
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“Morning Glory” (Spr+out; Seasons {201311ya}) [pianostep]
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“Every cat dances to the premium music” (OSTER project; ねこのかんづめ☆プレミアム 200915ya) [jazz]
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“青色ブロウティアー” (カミヤシロ; Blue-pencil 201311ya) [instrumental]
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“Inverse Relation” (Miku; Clean Tears; Reverberations {C84}) [trance]
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“Count Down” (Gumi+Gakupo; M@SATOSHI; Wakabairo D-i-s-k {VM17}) [Jpop]
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“Mitasare” (Luka; もふ@, Tinkle-POP, 6人の君と僕の歌 {VM20}) [classical]
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“Counterclockwise” (Miku; ryuryu; Homeland {VM14}) [trance]
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“STEP” (Lily; maretu? Robot☆Anime VOCALOID War {March 2014}) [Jpop]
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“Aqua” (Meiko+Miku; shu-t; AIMS {201014ya}) [trance]