2015 News
This is the 2015 summary edition of the Gwern.net newsletter (archives), summarizing the best of the monthly 2015 newsletters:
Previously: 2015.
Writings
Media
Links
2015 saw two important fields continue their abrupt surge, going from strength to strength: genetics (behavioral genetics in particular) and AI. The pace of progress was dizzying, with, it seemed, each month bringing major results to the point where it drowned out important news from other fields and made it difficult to pick just 10; for example, who has time to note a major milestone in cryonics like proof of preservation of long-term memory in C. elegans when CRISPR is increasing in power on a monthly basis and researchers are offhandedly producing feats like myostatin-enhanced beagles or “micropigs” that would have been major R&D efforts just years ago? And the flood of deep learning results has continued to the point where end-of-year roundups of major breakthroughs accidentally omit discoveries like MSR’s residual networks which enable powerful neural networks with literally hundreds of layers to be trained? As Karpathy put it: “BatchNorm, STN, DCGAN, DRAW, soft/
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
“Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies”, et al 2015
“Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome”, et al 2015
intelligence:
Recent Evolution (Soft selection sweeps/
group differences): “Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians”, et al 2015 (media)
“Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe”, et al 2015
“Rabbit genome analysis reveals a polygenic basis for phenotypic change during domestication”, et al 2014 (the power of selection—complex behaviors influenced by many small changes)
“Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication”, et al 2014 (commentary)
AI
“Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition”, et al 2015
“End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies”, et al 2015 (demo; talk)
“Actor-Mimic: Deep Multitask and Transfer Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2015
“End-To-End Memory Networks”, et al 2015
“Generating Images from Captions With Attention”, et al 2015
“Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks”, et al 2015
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”
Statistics/meta-Science
“Compliance with Results Reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov”, et al 2015
“A survey of Bayesian predictive methods for model assessment, selection and comparison”, Vehtari & Ojanen
“How One Man Poisoned a City’s Water Supply (and Saved Millions of Children’s Lives in the Process)” (on John L. Leal & water chlorination)
“Probable Points and Credible Intervals, Part 2: Decision Theory” (Bayesian search theory/
optimization) “The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research”, et al 2015
“The Mystery Machine: End-to-end Performance Analysis of Large-scale Internet Services”
Psychology/biology
“CRISPR/
Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes” , et al 2015; can be considered a followup to “Clinical outcome of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening using next generation sequencing”, et al 2014“Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans”, Vita-2015
“Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry”, et al 2015 (media)
“A 2-Year Randomized Controlled Trial of Human Caloric Restriction: Feasibility and Effects on Predictors of Health Span and Longevity” (the CALERIE study), et al 2015
“A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”, et al 2014
“Synchronizing education to adolescent biology: ‘let teens sleep, start school later’”, et al 2014:
Politics/religion
“The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics”, 2013
“How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist”
“Misperceiving Inequality”, 2015 (excerpts)
“Land without Plea Bargaining: How the Germans Do It”, 1979
“Proving communal warfare among hunter-gatherers: The quasi-Rousseau-an error”, 2015
Technology
“If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?”
“Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons”, Mac1995
“The Tail at Scale”, 2013
“The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot”, 2001
“Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing”, et al 2011
“Crush Point: When large crowds assemble, is there a way to keep them safe?”
“1 to 10 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy”
“Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid for Tor-Breaking Research”
Economics
“Economic Gains Resulting from the Reduction in Children’s Exposure to Lead in the United States”, et al 2002
“Costs and benefits of iodine supplementation for pregnant women in a mildly to moderately iodine-deficient population: a modeling analysis” (excerpts)
“Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem”, 2015 (excerpts)
Children are net losses to parents, even in peasant or hunter-gatherer societies.
Philosophy
Fiction
“Extracts from the Club Diary” (Stross; Coffee steampunk, Mars, the end of the world) & “It Was All For The Tuna”
“Birdless Country”, by Burton Watson
“Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets”, 2009
“Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature”, et al 2012
Books
Fiction
Still Alice (our obituaries)
A Perfect Vacuum, Lem
The Martian (Weir)
Ready Player One, 2011
The Wind-up Girl
Nonfiction
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Schlosser
Bias in Mental Testing, 1980
Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients., on Christopher Murray’s Global Burden of Disease
Do No Harm, Marsh (elegantly written and moving neurosurgeon memoir on the theme of iatrogenics; I did disagree with his comments on the cost-benefit of operating in one case, though)
Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, Popper
TV/movies
Nonfiction movies:
Fiction
Anime
Monogatari Second Season: Nekomonogatari+Kabukimongatari+Otorimonogatari+Onimonogatari+Koimonogatari