Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Psychiatric Genomics: An Update and an Agenda”, Sullivan et al 2017

  • “Genetic Variation in the Social Environment Contributes to Health and Disease”, Baud et al 2017 (where does culture come from?)

  • “Genome-Wide Analysis Of 113,968 Individuals In UK Biobank Identifies Four Loci Associated With Mood Instability”, Ward et al 2017 (UK Biobank, the gift that keeps on giving; continuing the themes of “everything is heritable” and “abnormal is normal”)

  • “Genetic overlap between schizophrenia and developmental psychopathology: a longitudinal approach applied to common childhood disorders between age 7 and 15 years”, Nivard et al 2016 (more generalized psychiatric genetic risk)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Excess of genomic defects in a woolly mammoth on Wrangel island”, Rogers & Slatkin2017 (media; consequences of increasing genetic load: mutational meltdown. Did this finish off the last population of woolly mammoths?)

  • “Selective sweep analysis using village dogs highlights the pivotal role of the neural crest in dog domestication”, Pendleton et al 2017 (More on complex intellectual changes in higher mammals due to recent evolution due to soft sweeps: dog physical & behavioral domestication is due to a lot of small recent genetic changes. Evolution doesn’t stop at the neck.)

  • “Urban Evolution: How Species Adapt, or Don’t, to City Living; A Conversation With Jonathan B. Losos”

  • “Selection in Europeans on Fatty Acid Desaturases Associated with Dietary Changes”, Buckley et al 2017 (More on recent human evolution with large between-country differences due to local adaptations.)

• Engineering:

  • “CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human zygotes using Cas9 protein”, Tang et al 2017 (no off-target mutations and efficiencies of 20/50/100% for various edits. As I predicted, the older papers, Liang et al 2015 / Kang et al 2016 / Komor et al 2016, were not state-of-the-art and would be improved on considerably.)

AI:

• Nvidia announces the 1080ti GPU (Titan replacement at $852.43^$700₂₀₁₇)

• “…The workshop will mark the last of the ImageNet Challenge competitions, and focus on unanswered questions and directions for the future…” (RIP)

• “Deep Learning Reinvents the Hearing Aid: Finally, wearers of hearing aids can pick out a voice in a crowded room” (If anything, the audio samples sound too good to be true.)

• “The Shattered Gradients Problem: If resnets are the answer, then what is the question?”, Balduzzi et al 2017 (successfully training 198-layer non-resnet fully-connected NNs w/better initialization; apparently residual networks were never necessary—humans just have no idea how to train neural networks…)

• “Neural Episodic Control”, Pritzel et al 2017 (commentary)

• “Parallel Multiscale Autoregressive Density Estimation”, Reed et al 2017 (Generating 512px photorealistic images & video with PixelCNNs rather than GANs)

• “Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks”, Kim et al 2017 (Unclear how CycleGAN, released a few days later, differs. See also pix2px; To quote the Reddit summary: “DiscoGANs—Answering the age old question: What would your face look like if it were actually a car.” Paging Dr Hofstadter…)

• “Evolving Deep Neural Networks”, Miikkulainen et al 2017

• “Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers”, Real et al 2017 (grossly inefficient and hobbled in some ways but still cool)

• “Network Morphism”, Wei et al 2016 (A nice inspiration from category theory. I wish I saw this out in the wild, because it would speed up architecture and hyperparameter optimization immeasurably if we didn’t have to keep starting from scratch with every model.)

• “On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines”, Garfinkel et al 2017; “G.K. Chesterton on AI Risk”

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature”, Szucs & Ioannidis2017

• “Meta-assessment of bias in science”, Fanelli et al 2017

• “When Medical Evidence Says No, But Doctors Say Yes”

• “A Failure of Intelligence: Prominent physicist Freeman Dyson recalls the time he spent developing analytical methods to help the British Royal Air Force bomb German targets during World War II”

• “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught”, Rota1996

• “Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research”, Weisse2012

• “Mind-hack: the Lehmer mental math pseudo-random number generators”: “An RNG that runs in your brain”

Politics/religion:

• “The Checkpoint: Terror, Power, and Cruelty”

• “The System that Wasn’t There: Ayn Rand’s Failed Philosophy (and why it matters)”

• “The Dark Enlightenment”, Nick Land

• On the care and feeding of wealthy donors

• The Politics of Harry Potter

• “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception”, Dietz1986

• “Propaganda as Literature: A Distant Reading of the Korean Central News Agency’s Headlines”

• “The Strange Rise and Fall of North Korea’s Business Empire in Japan”

Psychology/biology:

• “Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life”, Gottfredson1997

• The Flexner Report

• “Who Buried Paul?” (A fun retrospective on the “Paul McCartney is actually dead” Beatles conspiracy theory which, if you’re like me, you’ve never heard of before but was apparently quite a thing. Featuring conspiracy theorists literally connecting the dots and seeing stars.)

• “Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of ‘Far Transfer’: Evidence From a Meta-Analytic Review”, Melby-Lervag et al 2016

• “Why don’t all whales have cancer? A novel hypothesis resolving Peto’s paradox”, Nagy et al 2007

• “The Measured Man”

• “Total recall: the people who never forget: An extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory” (spaced repetition at work?)

• “Lost in Time in the Antarctic Ice Age”

• “Will 90yo Become The New 60yo? As our lifespans have increased, so too have our active years. Can that go on?” (gerontology & compression of morbidity)

Technology:

• “Don’t Worry—It Can’t Happen”, Harrington, Scientific American 1940

• “Compromising connectivity: information dynamics between the state and society in a digitizing North Korea”, Kretchun et al 2017

  The details on NK use of digital censorship is interesting: steady progress in locking down Bluetooth and WiFi by software and then hardware modifications; use of Android security system/DRM to install audit logs + regular screenshots to capture foreign media consumption; a whitelist/signed-media system to block said foreign media from ever being viewed, with auto-deletion of offending files; watermarking (courtesy of an American university’s misguided outreach) of media created on desktops to trace them; network blocking and surveillance; and efforts towards automatic bulk surveillance of text messages for ‘South-Korean-style’ phrases/words. Stallman’s warnings about DRM are quite prophetic in the NK context—the system is secured against the user… For these reasons & poverty, radio (including foreign radios like Voice of America) is—surprisingly to me—the top source of information for North Koreans.

• “Fury Road: Did Uber Steal the Driverless Future From Google? Inside the vicious patent fight over self-driving technology”

• “Damn Cool Algorithms: Homomorphic Hashing”

• Computerizing tutoring

Economics:

• Mechanics of the Crazy Eddie stock accounting fraud

• “Foreign Language Requirements Are a Waste of Time and Money”

• Measurement issues in the growth of economic inequality

• Selling one’s life insurance policy

• The Somali Shilling: a proof-of-work fiat currency

• “In Search of the Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex”

• “The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute”, Lim et al 2005

Fiction:

• The Birds (Took second place; “One of the greatest of Euripides’s surviving works, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that came in first.”)

Misc:

• Lotka’s law

• Tiger versus lion

• The pleasures and perils of mincemeat pie

Books

Nonfiction:

• Possible Worlds and Other Essays, J.B.S. Haldane 1927_97ya (review)

• Annual Berkshire Hathaway letters of Warren Buffett (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• 10 Cloverfield Lane (I was fortunate enough to forget entirely what this movie was about in between downloading & watching, and it kept me in suspense and surprised me, particularly with the ending. I appreciated the genre-savvy and competent female lead. A good psychological suspense/horror movie.)

Animated:

• The Wind Rises (review)

Music

Touhou:

• “Twice” (Tim Vegas feat. millie; TWICE {C91}) [Jpop]

• “視的領域-My Territory-” (kirin feat. miko; Ironic Relation {C91}) [trance]

Kancolle:

• “にゃしぃにゃしぃわ～るど” (ぺた; rikka {C91}) [electronic]

Doujin:

• “Call Of Sea” (Osanzi; 東京クリーチャーガール {C91}) [electronic]

• “One’s Off Hours” (Alinut; WINTER STILLNESS {C91}) [trance]

• “Snow Crystal” (P*light; Decoratorz {C91}) [trance]

• “Blue Momentary” (Nago; KALEIDOSCOPE DIVER {C91}) [trance]

• “Myxa” (siqlo; snowflakes {C91}) [trance]

• “Yukibare” (Keisuke Kimura; snowflakes {C91}) [electronic]

• “soft groove” (Conures; snowflakes {C91}) [electronic]