February 2017 News
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:
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 behavior”, Viding et al 200817ya (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)
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:
Politics/religion:
GiveDirectly in Kenya; “The Exposed Nest”, Robert Frost
“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?)
Psychology/biology:
Technology:
“The first collision for full SHA-1”, et al 2017
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?)
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”
“Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low!”; “Guessing the Teacher’s Password”
Philosophy:
Fiction:
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)