--- title: October 2016 News created: 2016-09-25 status: finished previous: /newsletter/2016/09 next: /newsletter/2016/11 confidence: log cssExtension: dropcaps-de-zs backlink: False ... This is the October 2016 edition of [the Gwern.net newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Branwen 2013"); previous, [September 2016](/newsletter/2016/09 "'September 2016 News', Branwen 2016"). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with [Changelog](/changelog); brought to you by my donors on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern). If you have not been receiving issues, please check your email account's spam folder. (Gmail in particular has been flagging as spam.) # Writings - [genetic correlation Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation) # Media ## Links **Genetics**: - [Everything Is Heritable]{.smallcaps}: - ["Association between polygenic risk scores for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and educational and cognitive outcomes in the general population"](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/46/2/421/2617257), Stergiakouli et al 2016 - ["Educational attainment and personality are genetically intertwined"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/078014.full), Mottus et al 2016 - ["Ultra-rare disruptive and damaging mutations influence educational attainment in the general population"](/doc/genetics/heritable/rare/2016-ganna.pdf), Ganna et al 2016 - ["Genome-wide analyses of empathy and systemizing: heritability and correlates with sex, education, and psychiatric risk"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/050682.full), Warrier et al 2016a; ["Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and brain anatomy"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/081844.full){#warrier-2}, Warrier et al 2016b - ["Personality Polygenes, Positive Affect, and Life Satisfaction"](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/personality-polygenes-positive-affect-and-life-satisfaction/4DB2BE673BF122FB9A0AF2147EED80C0), Weiss et al 2016 - [Recent Evolution]{.smallcaps}: - ["Going global by adapting local: A review of recent human adaptation"](/doc/genetics/selection/2016-fan.pdf), Fan et al 2016 **Politics/religion**: - ["The Long-Term Effects of Cash Assistance"](https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/djprice_jmp.pdf), Price & Song 2016 (An unusually long-term followup to one of the old American basic income experiments. No large harmful effects... but no large benefits either, nothing remotely like we observe in the Third World BI/transfer experiments. And if money helps with social outcomes, it should've helped more in the 1970s than it does now, so I feel more pessimistic about Give Directly/YC's USA BI experiment.) - ["Men's status and reproductive success in 33 nonindustrial societies: Effects of subsistence, marriage system, and reproductive strategy"](/doc/sociology/2016-vonrueden.pdf), von Rueden & Jaeggi 2016 - ["The illusion of the perfect alibi: Establishing the base rate of non-offenders’ alibis"](/doc/psychology/2016-nieuwkamp.pdf), Nieuwkamp et al 2016 **AI**: - ["Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external memory"](/doc/reinforcement-learning/model-free/2016-graves.pdf#deepmind), Graves et al 2016 ([blog](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/)); scaling to extremely large external memories: ["Scaling Memory-Augmented Neural Networks with Sparse Reads and Writes"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09027#deepmind), Rae et al 2016 - ["Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05256), Xiong et al 2016 - ["Video Pixel Networks"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00527#deepmind "‘VPN: Video Pixel Networks’, Kalchbrenner et al 2016"), Kalchbrenner et al 2016 - ["Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning (A3C)"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783#deepmind "'Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning', Mnih et al 2016"), Mnih et al 2016 - ["Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00633#google "'Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation with Asynchronous Off-Policy Updates', Gu et al 2016"), Gu et al 2016 ([video](https://sites.google.com/site/deeproboticmanipulation/); [blog](https://blog.research.google/2016/10/how-robots-can-acquire-new-skills-from.html "How Robots Can Acquire New Skills from Their Shared Experience")) - ["Uncertainty in Deep Learning"](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/yarin.gal/website/blog_2248.html), Gal 2016 (using dropout to turn NNs into ensembles of Bayesian NNs, allowing extraction of posterior distributions and thus uncertainty of outputs, which helps active learning & reinforcement learning) - ["Sim-to-Real Robot Learning from Pixels with Progressive Nets"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.04286), Rusu et al 2016 - [Training A3C to solve Atari Pong in <4 minutes on a supercomputer through brute parallelism](https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/high-performance-computing-blog/posts/deep-learning-episode-4-supercomputer-vs-pong-ii) - ["Image Synthesis from Yahoo's `open_nsfw`"](/doc/ai/nn/cnn/2016-goh-opennsfw.html "'Image Synthesis from Yahoo’s open_nsfw', Goh 2016") (hilarious) - [Active learning demo: interactively drag and drop photos to train a CNN+random forest to binary classify along some trait](https://blog.mldb.ai/blog/posts/2016/10/deepteach/) **Statistics/Meta-Science**: - ["Active Learning Literature Survey"](https://burrsettles.com/pub/settles.activelearning.pdf), Settles 2010 You can see this as a way to most economically increase your dataset size by only labeling the most valuable instances; it can also be used to improve dataset quality by targeting instead the errors a model makes on a noisy corpus for examination by the oracle; and finally, it can be seen as a demonstration of the advantages of reinforcement learning over simple supervised learning over heaps of data---given the curse of dimensionality, most data is useless for training a model because it is so redundant and already a solved problem, and the data the model needs to improve its performance is a needle in a haystack. So by giving a model RL capabilities, you improve its supervised/inference performance! The way I put this: ["tool AIs want to be agent AIs"](/tool-ai "'Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs', Branwen 2016"). - [A brief history by Andrew Gelman of the replication crisis in psychology, from the 1960s to now](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ "What has happened down here is the winds have changed") - ["We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results"](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/upshot/the-error-the-polling-world-rarely-talks-about.html) (random error vs systematic error) - ["Close but no Nobel: the scientists who never won; Archives reveal the most-nominated researchers who missed out on a Nobel Prize"](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20781) (Nobels have considerable measurement error) - ["Do scholars follow Betteridge's Law? The use of questions in journal article titles"](/doc/statistics/2016-cook.pdf), Cook & Plourde 2016 - [scatterplots work much better than several other forms of visualizing data for understanding correlations](https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2015-BeyondWebersLaw-InfoVis.pdf "Beyond Weber's Law: A Second Look at Ranking Visualizations of Correlation"), Kay & Heer 2015 (also a nice demonstration of fitting progressively more complex & realistic Bayesian models) **Psychology/biology**: - ["The negative Flynn Effect: A systematic literature review"](/doc/iq/2016-dutton.pdf), Dutton et al 2016 - ["Safe landing strategies during a fall: systemic review and meta-analysis"](/doc/longevity/2016-moon.pdf "'Safe Landing Strategies During a Fall: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis', Moon & Sosnoff 2017"), Moon & Sosnoff 2016 - ["From Terman to Today: A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity"](/doc/iq/high/smpy/2016-lubinski.pdf), Lubinski 2016 - [Some early rapamycin anti-aging results from the dog people: improvement in dog heart health after 10 weeks of use.](https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/06/health/rapamycin-dog-live-longer/index.html) - ["Stereotype (In)Accuracy in Perceptions of Groups and Individuals"](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Current-Directions-in-Psychological-Science-2015-Jussim-490-7.pdf), Jussim et al 2015 - ["CMV Is a Greater Threat to Infants Than Zika, but Far Less Often Discussed"](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/health/cmv-cytomegalovirus-pregnancy.html) (it would not surprise me if CMV was responsible for my own hearing-impairment) - ["Does brain creatine content rely on exogenous creatine in healthy youth? A proof-of-principle study"](/doc/creatine/2016-meregefilho.pdf), Merege-Filho et al 2016 (null) - ["Functional MRI in awake dogs predicts suitability for assistance work"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/080325.full), Berns et al 2016 - [Home steam distillation of 99% pure nepetalactone from catnip leaves](https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Kitty-Crack%3a--ultra-potent-catnip-extract/) (0.03% yield compared to theoretical max of 0.3%, so can convert 0.45kg of leaves to 143mg nepetalactone) **Technology**: - ["Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny: Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley?"](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny) - ["The Joinery": animated explanations of traditional nail-less Japanese woodworking joints](https://twitter.com/TheJoinery_jp) ([background](https://www.spoon-tamago.com/animated-gifs-illustrating-the-art-of-japanese-wood-joinery/)) - ["Uber's Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic: Forget billboards-motorists now have ads buzzing a few feet above their windshields"](https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/10/14/156949/ubers-ad-toting-drones-are-heckling-drivers-stuck-in-traffic/) (possibly the most cyberpunk thing I've seen since VR headsets) - ["Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals"](https://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/2015/papers/p90-aliA.pdf), Ali et al 2015 - ["APEX: Automatic Programming Assignment Error Explanation"](https://yirugi.github.io/papers/apex.pdf), Kim et al 2016 **Economics**: - [Abuse of 'arbitration' clauses in international trade treaties to escape criminal liability](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrishamby/super-court) - ["The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics"](/doc/economics/2016-donaldson.pdf), Donaldson & Storeygard 2016 - ["The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture"](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/09/magazine/big-food-photo-essay.html) - ["Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution"](/doc/economics/2016-kelly.pdf), Kelly & Grada 2016 ([commentary](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/10/what_do_crimina.html)) - ["My First Gulfstream"](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1998/10/gulfstream-199810) - ["Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy"](https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/) - ["Young Rural Women in India Chase Big-City Dreams: Experiments like one in Bangalore, luring migrants to fill factory jobs, collide with an old way of life that keeps women and girls in seclusion until an arranged marriage"](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/world/asia/bangalore-india-women-factories.html) (3500 years of female slavery shrinking under industrialization and smartphones: "all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...") ## Books **Nonfiction**: - [_Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montaillou_\(book\)), [Le Roy Ladurie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Le_Roy_Ladurie) 1975 - [_The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code_](https://www.amazon.com/Riddle-Labyrinth-Quest-Crack-Ancient/dp/0062228862), Fox ([review](/review/book#the-riddle-of-the-labyrinth-fox-2013)) - _[Confessions of an English Opium-Eater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opium-Eater)_, by Thomas De Quincey ([review](/review/book#confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-quincey-2003)) **Fiction**: - [_Tales of Ise_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tales_of_Ise), Anonymous ([review](/review/book#tales-of-ise-anonymous-1968)) ## Music **Touhou**: - ["Children on their Birthdays"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlqg8l6VNqM) (Asahi feat. Emaru; _Lucky 7_ {R13}) [acoustic] - ["breathless"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHaCE3SEIVo) (NAGI☆ feat. 美歌; _Parallel Cross_ {C90}) [vocal] **Doujin**: - ["Spring ephemeral"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZRbh3_hibo) (Morrigan feat. Lily; _Spring ephemeral_ {M3 33}) [acoustic] - ["Heure bleue"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/up6dmutwl4h94re/rando-radialdiversesystemfifteenthanniversary-heurebleue.ogg) (RANDO:; _RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY_ {C90}) [electronic] - ["Hall of Mirrors"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/q8nfgj7yxkbaa3j/sta-radialdiversesystemfifteenthanniversary-hallofmirrors.ogg) (sta; _RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY_ {C90}) [rock] - ["Parabola"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/aicai14gdz14p6i/tigerlily-radialdiversesystemfifteenthanniversary-parabola.ogg) (tigerlily; _RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY_ {C90}) [post-rock] - ["16777215"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/fslrukxwwz3gapc/b-radialdiversesystemfifteenthanniversary-16777215.ogg) (b; _RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY_ {C90}) [electronic] - ["てぃんさぐぬ花"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNMy2UHpnEI) (Togo Project feat. Junko Wada(BE THE VOICE); _AD:HOUSE 5_ {C90}) [folk/house/acoustic] - ["Starlight,tonight"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPFXk4zJZ1g) (Hommarju feat. Yukacco; _Another Wor1d_ {C90}) [vocal] - ["Weigh the anchor"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShjSplbL3FQ) (Harito; 'Sun Flowers' {C90}) [house/electronic] - ["Epilogue"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/co1x45wjnmfod2h/nbuna-walkingonthemoon-epilogue.ogg) (n-buna; _Walking on the Moon_ {2016}) [classical] - ["それは、本当に救済なのか"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v5uq5nwuppewy5o/morrigan-from080723discedition-%E3%81%9D%E3%82%8C%E3%81%AF%E6%9C%AC%E5%BD%93%E3%81%AB%E6%95%91%E6%B8%88%E3%81%AA%E3%81%AE%E3%81%8B.ogg) (Morrigan; _from080723 DISC EDITION_ {C90}) [electronic/ambient/vocal]