Genetics

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Quantifying the impact of rare and ultra-rare coding variation across the phenotypic spectrum”, Ganna et al 2017

  • “Discovery Of The First Genome-Wide Statistically-Significant Risk Loci For ADHD”, Demontis et al 2017

  • “Genetic contribution to two factors of neuroticism is associated with affluence, better health, and longer life”, Hill et al 2017

  • “Environmental factors dominate over host genetics in shaping human gut microbiota composition”, Rothschild et al 2017 (commentary; “biome-explainability”—a rare use of variance components to check whether there is even a needle in the haystack)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Widespread signatures of positive selection in common risk alleles associated to autism spectrum disorder”, Polimanti & Gelernter2017

  • dysgenics:

    • disease mutation load: “The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins”, Berens et al 2017 (media; +35% percentile increase in general disease risks over past ~millennia?)

    • selection against education in the UK: “Signatures of negative selection in the genetic architecture of human complex traits”, Zeng et al 2018

    • “Detecting polygenic adaptation in admixture graphs”, Racimo et al 2017 (No sign of selection is found for Europeans, but if I understand the method right, it’s only looking at net selection with time steps corresponding to populations branching. So given the European pattern of selection for intelligence at least up until agriculture and then heavy recent dysgenics against education/intelligence, those might mostly cancel compared to an East Asian population like Japan which started later.)

• Engineering:

  • “The Moral Question That Stanford Asks Its Bioengineering Students: It’s about the capacity to print a human genome.”

AI

• “Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences”, Christiano et al 2017 (blogs: 1, 2)

• “Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks”, Katz et al 2017

• “A simple neural network module for relational reasoning”, Santoro et al 2017 (blog)

• “One Model To Learn Them All”, Kaiser et al 2017 (a single NN for multi-modal tasks: from image classification to image captioning to English parsing to English⟺German⟺French translation)

• “Attention Is All You Need” for SOTA machine translation, Vaswani et al 2017

• “Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues”, Lewis et al 2017 (blog)

• “Learning to Learn from Noisy Web Videos”, Yeung et al 2017

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”

• “Measurement Error, Regression to the Mean, and Group Differences” (Kelley’s paradox is a bitter one)

• “What works in e-commerce—a meta-analysis of 6700 online experiments”, Browne & Jones2017 (Informative priors: most A/B experiments fail and the successful ones have small effects on the order of a few % at most. Note the implications that most successful, in the sense of p < 0.05, A/B tests will grossly overestimate the true effect size; detecting realistic effects may require large sample sizes; and some categories of tests may well not be worth running at all. It would also be interesting to know how many of those nulls were based on correlational data…)

Politics/religion

• “In Defense of Individualist Culture”

• “The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda”

Psychology/biology

• “Does High Self-esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?”, Baumeister et al 2003_21ya; “The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego: How a rebel psychologist challenged one of the 20^th century’s biggest—and most dangerous—ideas”; “‘It was quasi-religious’: the great self-esteem con”

• “Lithium in Drinking Water and Incidence of Suicide: A Nationwide Individual-Level Cohort Study with 22 Years of Follow-Up”, Knudsen et al 2017 (a major blow to the lithium hypothesis)

• “Where do hypotheses come from?”, Dasgupta et al 2017

• “How To Fall To Your Death And Live To Tell The Tale”

• “My déjà vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more”

Technology

• “Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning”, De Marcken 2003_21ya / ITA Software (Airline ticket search is not just NP-hard or worse, but undecidable.)

• “Information Leakage from Optical Emanations”, Loughry & Umphress2002

• “Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers”, Ren et al 2010_14ya (“…GWP profiles revealed that the zlib library accounted for nearly 5% of all CPU cycles consumed…”)

Economics

• “Property Is Another Name for Monopoly: Facilitating Efficient Bargaining with Partial Common Ownership of Spectrum, Corporations, and Land”, Posner & Weyl2016

• “The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World”, Lafleur et al 2014

The Digital Antiquarian

On PC gaming history. Jimmy Maher has an excellent blog on working & playing his way through the early computing industry as it impinged on gaming, covering the wild ferment of the times, D&D, the European scenes, the economic backstabbing, game creators and studios’ swift rises & even swifter falls, and everything (often benefiting from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp archives).

There are many curious parts of gaming/computing history: for example, there is a striking prevalence of mtf (but not ftm) transsexuals; and exemplifying the chaos, it’s hard to identify any thing that people consistently got wrong—for every tactic that worked brilliantly one time & place, there appears to be an equal & opposite failure elsewhere. For one 1980s company, a foray into business software doomed it, while the same pivot works out brilliantly for another who is still around; one company dominates the market by leaping boldly onto a cutting-edge new system, while another bets the wrong way & dies or blows the revenue from its hit & is left scrambling; one company unwisely abandons the cash cow of older systems, while another reaps cash flow from obsolete microcomputers until it’s too late. The industry bet on computers rather than video game consoles looks like genius—right up until Nintendo invades. Many companies profit massively from selling hardware and commoditizing licensed OSes or software, unless they are IBM/Microsoft and it works out the other way etc. Given the sheer number of computer & video game platforms, people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs come off as having been both inevitable & far more lucky than good. (See also my review of Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.)

Many posts are worth the read:

Live-Action

• L.A. Confidential (one of the best noir films; Exley is particularly interesting as neither hero nor anti-hero)

• All About Eve (review)

• Amy (2015) (review)

• 8 1⁄2 (a lame waste of time; not remotely funny nor insightful nor rendered sufficiently interesting by the now-exotic setting of 1960s Catholic Italy, as the making of 8 1⁄2 is Fellini’s excuse for making 8 1⁄2 in a third-rate breaking-the-fourth-wall exercise)

• Annie Hall (a few one-liners aside, Woody Allen’s neurotic humor is unbearable to watch. It would seem that Allen movies are not for me.)

Touhou

• “冬中火葬” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]

• “人別離苦” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]

• “廃獄のロア” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]

• “揺籃曲 -Pure Japanese Ver.-” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]

• “Aisya -ye ru amma-” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]

Doujin

• “Kemono Friends BGM” (Kou Ogata; {2017}) [Celtic]