This is the December 2016 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, November 2016 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
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Writings
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compiled my epigrams
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Gwern.net: CSS, logo, and index page redesigns; redirects for broken incoming URLs; scripts & YAML updates for upstream Pandoc/Hakyll changes
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Schizophrenia risk alleles and neurodevelopmental outcomes in childhood: a population-based cohort study”, et al 2016
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“The genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes”, et al 2016 (rare variants continue to disappoint those who don’t want the missing heritability to just be the common variants)
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“Associations of coffee genetic risk scores with coffee, tea and other beverages in the UK Biobank”, 2016
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Recent Evolution:
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“Archaic adaptive introgression in TBX15/WARS2”, et al 2016 ( media)
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AI:
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“Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks”, et al 2016
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“Delivering real-time AI in the palm of your hand” (Style transfer was invented hardly a year ago or so, but it’s gone from requiring hours to now being doable in realtime on an ordinary smartphone at higher quality. Progress in deep learning is fast, and this also illustrates the optimization potential of neural networks: they start off grossly overparameterized, but can be specialized down to much more powerful faster systems…)
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“Value Iteration Networks”, et al 2016; “The Predictron: End-To-End Learning and Planning”, et al 2016 ( MCTS and NNs are going together like chocolate & peanut butter right now, because NNs can’t effectively plan. What might an explicit planning over future paths for NNs look like? This is one step.)
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“StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks”, et al 2016 (Another nice improvement to DCGANs: a pair of GANs (one for prototyping, a second for upscaling) generating sharp images at 256px. I hope they release source code—I’d like to try it out with my anime dataset from Danbooru, which earlier DCGANs couldn’t cope with); “Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks”, et al 2016
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“PILCO: A Model-Based and Data-Efficient Approach to Policy Search”, 2011 (One of the most impressive RL algorithms around, this demonstrates the power of forward model-based planning for optimization & learning—a paradigm which thus far has been weirdly absent from deep reinforcement learning.)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“The price of being wrong: Newborn screening saves babies, but lives can be shattered when state labs ignore science and common sense” (When cutoffs are set for decision-making without explicit consideration of costs and benefits.)
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The Schiehallion experiment (weighing the earth with a mountain’s gravity)
Politics/religion:
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“The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States”, 2013
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Specific corruption accusations in the Park/Choi Soon-il scandal
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“The movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does”
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“The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time”
Psychology/biology:
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“Childhood forecasting of a small segment of the population with large economic burden”, et al 2016 ( “Figure 4: The Big Footprint of Multiple-High-Cost-Users”; for the genetic version, see et al 2016 ); “Clustering of health, crime and social-welfare inequality in 4 million citizens from two nations”, Richmond-et al 2020
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Psychedelics & Psychological Well-Being (media):
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“The paradoxical psychological effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)”, Carhart-et al 2016
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“Effects of dietary restriction on adipose mass and biomarkers of healthy aging in human”, Lettieri-et al 2016 (Not keen on how they lump together caloric restriction with intermittent fasting etc, or casually dump a few correlational trials in with the randomized ones… I’d rather see it split by intervention type, the correlation trials excluded entirely, and maybe redone as a network meta-analysis or better yet, a network SEM, since there are multiple measures of body fat and inflammation under consideration.)
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“Men’s preferences for women’s breast size and shape in four cultures”, et al 2016
Technology:
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“The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think”
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“Liquid Haskell: Haskell as a Theorem Prover”, 2016 (One encouraging aspect of programming language theory is how SMT solvers and dependent typing are gradually making progress and enabling languages of the future to express and prove many invariants and properties about code. It’s true that maybe you don’t want to do full-blown theorem proving on a random script or IO processing program, but it’s good for everyone that libraries and infrastructure can be easily locked down and rendered extremely reliable. The larger our systems get, the more important it is that the foundations not be buggy.)
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“[0day] [exploit] Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES‽”
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“Furiosa’s Cat Feeder: The trick is to be smarter than the animal with a brain the size of a walnut” (Difficulties in engineering a cat-proof feeder—trial-and-error learning is extremely powerful.)
Economics:
Philosophy:
Fiction:
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“A Ghost, a Real Ghost”, Randall Jarrell (pg262–263, The Complete Poems; originally, The Woman at the Washington Zoo):
I think of that old woman in the song
Who could not know herself without the skirt
They cut off while she slept beside a stile.
Her dog jumped at the unaccustomed legs
And barked till she turned slowly from her gate
And went—I never asked them where she went.The child is hopeful and unhappy in a world
Whose future is his recourse: she kept walking
Until the skirt grew, cleared her head and dog—
Surely I thought so when I laughed. If skirts don’t grow,
If things can happen so, and you not know
What you could do, why, what is there you could do?I know now she went nowhere; went to wait
In the bare night of the fields, to whisper:
“I’ll sit and wish that it was never so.”
I see her sitting on the ground and wishing,
The wind jumps like a dog against her legs,
And she keeps thinking: “This is all a dream.”“Who would cut off a poor old woman’s skirt?
So good too. No, it’s not so:
No one could feel so, really.” And yet one might.
A ghost must; and she was, perhaps, a ghost.
The first night I looked into the mirror
And saw the room empty, I could not believeThat it was possible to keep existing
In such pain: I have existed.Was the old woman dead? What does it matter?
—Am I dead? A ghost, a real ghost
Has no need to die: what is he except
A being without access to the universe
That he has not yet managed to forget?
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Florence Foster Jenkins (An improbable-sounding plot, but it works and is moving, offering rewards beyond cringe-humor and the usual watching Hollywood recreate the 1940s. I checked WP on the original person, and was amazed how close the film hews to history and how few & reasonable liberties it took with events.)
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Going Clear (Scientology expose; one can learn much more about Scientology online reading articles like “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology”, and this documentary is no substitute for them or for books like Bare-Faced Messiah: A Biography of L. Ron Hubbard, but benefits from the use of archival footage—it definitely adds something to see footage of Hubbard himself and especially David Miscavige, to put faces & voices to the quotes & facts.)
Animated:
Music
Touhou:
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“promise flower” (Kirin feat. ahiru; Still Moment {R10}) [electronic]
Vocaloid:
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“God-Tier Tune” (Miku; おにゅうP; 初音ミク-Project DIVA-F Complete Collection {201311ya}) [Jpop]
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“ぼくも屑だから” (Miku+PinocchioP; PinocchioP; It’s Matsuri, Hey Come On! {2015}) [electronic] (original)