April 2016 News
This is the April 2016 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, March 2016. This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
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Nothing completed
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Genome-wide association study of cognitive functions and educational attainment in UK Biobank (n = 112151)”, et al 2016
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“Variants near CHRNA3/5 and APOE have age- and sex-related effects on human lifespan”, et al 2016
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“National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A Cautious Exploration”, 2015 (dubious)
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Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins (media)
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everything is correlated: Continuation of the recent phenome theme of inter-correlations of negative traits and inter-correlation of positive traits:
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Engineering:
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“Introducing precise genetic modifications into human 3PN embryos by CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome editing”, et al 2016 (see also et al 2015; both describe the CRISPR state-of-the-art as of early 2014, 2+ years ago)
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“Monkey kingdom: China is positioning itself as a world leader in primate research”
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Politics/religion:
AI:
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“Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth”, et al 2016 (dropout of random layers, which does not just work, but works better and enables >1200-layer residual networks. This might be related to 2016 claim that deep residual nets are effectively unrolled RNNs which apply slight variants of an algorithm to many timesteps.)
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“Foveation-based Mechanisms Alleviate Adversarial Examples”, et al 2016
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“Convolutional Networks for Fast, Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing”, et al 2016
Statistics/meta-science:
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“A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook”, et al 2019 ( How often does correlation=causation? <50% of the time in Internet advertising, with gross over/underestimates even with detailed covariate & advanced modeling.)
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“The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism” (So Bialystok is refusing a collaboration because a pre-registered protocol is unscientific and she refuses to work with someone so ‘biased’ that they would damage the non-pre-registered results, and besides, publication bias doesn’t exist—“there is absolutely no evidence”. I see…)
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“Bandit based Monte-Carlo planning”, Kocsis & 2006
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“The importance of ‘gold standard’ studies for consumers of research”
Psychology/biology:
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“The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments”, 2016 (education; lots of small effects)
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“A Meta-Analysis of Blood Glucose Effects on Human Decision Making”, 2016
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“Is Ego-Depletion a Replicable Effect? A Forensic Meta-Analysis of 165 Ego Depletion Articles”
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“Indoor air quality and academic performance”, 2015 (???; apropos of harms of CO2 discussion)
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“Seven Pervasive Statistical Flaws in Cognitive Training Interventions”, et al 2016
Technology:
Economics:
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Interview with short seller Jim Chanos (Short sellers are always so interesting. Few people are so motivated to see through the miasma of lies and bias and self-serving optimism in the business and finance world.)
Books
Nonfiction:
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On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine, Rasmussen 200816ya (particularly interesting for the inside information about how early American pharmacorps & drug development worked, but much weaker past the ’70s; at least, if you can get past Rasmussen’s huge bias against amphetamines and blind support for the disastrous War on Drugs)
Film/TV
Live-action:
Anime:
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Megazone 23 (a strange relict. It’s as if Macross cuckolded Streets of Fire with Akira while Miyazaki perved at the window and the Gainax boys took notes. Episode 1 in particular crosses so many genres and does so much in so little time that even non-fans of 1980s anime might find it worthwhile.)
Music
Touhou:
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“音の瓶詰—河童の里” (ジャム; 守矢幻燈録 ~ Separation of Spirit {R12}) [classical]
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“Reincarnation” (Mitty; Imitation Circus {C89}) [classical]
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“Anois –” (Casket/Escarmew; 幻想パブ:午後11時23分58秒 {科学世紀のカフェテラス6}) [Celtic]
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“デザイアドライブ” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯<神> ~ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]
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“古きユアンシェン” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯<神> ~ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]
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“聖徳伝説 ~ True Administrator” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯<神> ~ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]
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“欲深き霊魂” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯<神> ~ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]