Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genomic analysis of family data reveals additional genetic effects on intelligence and personality”, Hill 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”, Han et al 2017
  • “Quantitative genetic studies of antisocial behaviour”, Viding et al 2008 (not the most up to date paper but good background for Rautiainen et al 2016)
  • “Human Gene Editing Receives Science Panel’s Support” (Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance 2017)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Holocene selection for variants associated with cognitive ability: Comparing ancient and modern genomes”, Woodley et al 2017
  • “Patterns of shared signatures of recent positive selection across human populations”, Johnson & Voight2017
  • “Evidence that the rate of strong selective sweeps increases with population size in the great apes”, Nam et al 2017

AI:

• “PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks”, Fernando et al 2017 (scalable efficiently-growing multi-task neural nets which can benefit from transfer learning)
• “Deep Voice: Real-time Neural Text-to-Speech”, Arik 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 Barra2017
• “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”, Wicherts 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’”, Cummings2017 (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”, Li et al 2017
• “Search in patchy media: Exploitation-exploration tradeoff”, Chupeau 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”, Stevens 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:

• “If You Read Closely: Aoi Hiragi’s Whisper of the Heart on Page and Screen”
• A history of prog rock
• “The Poet and the Politician: Fujiwara no Teika and the Compilation of the Shinchokusenshu”, Smits1998

Film/TV

Live-action:

• 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)