This is the February 2017 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, January 2017 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
- “Genomic analysis of family data reveals additional genetic effects on intelligence and personality”, et al 2017 (GREML-KIN/family- GCTA: IQ missing heritability resolved with novel GCTA—most/all of the rest is due to semi-rare additive variants, implying that GWASes and future polygenic scores will do much better)
- “Clustering of 770,000 genomes reveals post-colonial population structure of North America”, et al 2017
- “Quantitative genetic studies of antisocial behaviour”, et al 2008 (not the most up to date paper but good background for et al 2016 )
- “Human Gene Editing Receives Science Panel’s Support” (Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance 2017)
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Recent Evolution:
- “Holocene selection for variants associated with cognitive ability: Comparing ancient and modern genomes”, et al 2017
- “Patterns of shared signatures of recent positive selection across human populations”, 2017
- “Evidence that the rate of strong selective sweeps increases with population size in the great apes”, et al 2017
AI:
- “PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks”, et al 2017 (scalable efficiently-growing multi-task neural nets which can benefit from transfer learning)
- “Deep Voice: Real-time Neural Text-to-Speech”, et al 2017
Statistics/Meta-Science:
- “Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails”
- “Reporting bias inflates the reputation of medical treatments: A comparison of outcomes in clinical trials and online product reviews”, de 2017
- “Compressed sensing and single-pixel cameras”
- Interview with Walter Stewart, the “terrorist of the lab”
- “Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results”, et al 2011
Politics/religion:
- GiveDirectly in Kenya; “The Exposed Nest”, Robert Frost
- “PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain”
- “The unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2: ‘Systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’—ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’”, 2017 (what should politics look like in the post-atomic age of existential risk?)
- “James Burnham’s ‘Dante: Politics as Wish’”
Psychology/biology:
- “We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans: Will we look at the new evidence for long enough to at least consider whether we’ve gone too far?”
- “Digital Health: Tracking Physiomes and Activity Using Wearable Biosensors Reveals Useful Health-Related Information”, et al 2017
- “Search in patchy media: Exploitation-exploration tradeoff”, et al 2017
- “Millions and Millions Dead in Death Epidemic”
- “That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger”
Technology:
- “The first collision for full SHA-1”, et al 2017
- The Victorian science race to reach absolute zero
- History of the IMDb movie discussion forums
- “An Oral History of Nintendo’s Power Glove”
- Finding and ranking all anagrammatical pairs of English words
Economics:
- “The Common Law Corporation: The Power of the Trust in Anglo-American Business History” (was the limited-liability corporation necessary?)
- “Game theory in practice”
- “America’s Television Graveyards: How millions of old CRT televisions have wound up abandoned in warehouses all over the country”
- “Earthly concerns: The Catholic church is as big as any company in America. Bankruptcy cases have shed some light on its finances and their mismanagement”
- Behavioral economics and public policy
Misc:
- “The Great Moon Hoax” (early science and Natural Theology predicted life was abundant throughout the solar system and universe; instead, we see a Great Silence)
- Astronauts after walking on the moon; “This Warrior of a Dead World—Gene Wolfe’s literary portrait of Neil Armstrong”
- “Precision first: In the time of Twitter, concision may be a valid goal in student writing. But clarity and accuracy are often emphasized too little”
- “Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low!”; “Guessing the Teacher’s Password”
Philosophy:
- Here is one hand
- Mike Darwin on animal research, moral cowardice, and reasoning in an uncaring universe
- “The Last Temptation of Christ”
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Once Upon A Time In The West (a strikingly spare Western; the opening scene is a memorable set piece, the atmosphere is closer to that of a film noir in its refusal to explain even to the end, and Henry Fonda makes a remarkable villain with an odd homoerotically sadistic relationship with his railroad patron)