December 2018 News
December 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetic engineering,
NLP/
This is the December 2018 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, November 2018 (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
“Internet Search Tips”: effective use of Google/
Google Scholar/ Libgen & other resources for papers/ books/ pages (I’m also offering bounties for papers/ books I haven’t been able to get )
Media
Links
Genetics:
Everything Is Heritable:
“Genomic Prediction of Complex Disease Risk”, et al 2018 (followup to et al 2017: lasso for improved GWASes of many disease traits in UKBB)
“Polygenic Risk Scores for Prediction of Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Subtypes”, et al 2018
“It Runs in the Family: A Study of Political Candidacy Among Swedish Adoptees”, et al 2018
23andMe GWAS on ice cream flavor preferences (overlap with chocolate preference GWAS)
Engineering:
“China Shrinks From the Gattaca Age”; He Jiankui under house arrest? (see also: Wired, and previously, “China’s crackdown on genetics breaches could deter data sharing” & highly fragmented competing datasets—why does China continue to abdicate genetics leadership?)
“In vitro breeding: application of embryonic stem cells to animal production”, et al 2018 (a review of & proposal to start IES in cattle)
“The Missing Response to Selection in the Wild”, et al 2018 (possible reasons for failure of the univariate breeder’s equation in wild populations)
“In vitro gametogenesis and reproductive cloning: Can we allow one while banning the other?”, et al 2018 (no)
“The Fertility Clinic That Cut IVF Prices in Half” (IVF doesn’t have to be nearly as expensive as it is)
“Rescue of American chestnut with extraspecific genes following its destruction by a naturalized pathogen”, et al 2017 (success of GMO & cross-bred blight-resistant American chestnut trees expected in next 1–2 decades after a century of work)
“Genetically Modified People Are Walking Among Us” (the history of mitochondrial transfer)
AI:
“BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding”, et al 2018 (blog; “The Illustrated BERT and ELMo (How NLP Cracked Transfer Learning)”)
“A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi and Go through self-play”, et al 2018 (expanded Alpha Zero paper; link compilation)
Reward hacking examples in AI (previously, et al 2018)
“Human-level performance in first-person multiplayer games with population-based deep reinforcement learning”, et al 2018b (blog)
“StyleGAN: A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks”, et al 2018 (video; source; ProGAN’s successor: new style-transfer arch, more controllable, halves error for even more photorealistic faces with much-improved hair/
eyes/ backgrounds. ProGAN was already hard for humans to distinguish at much above chance levels, StyleGAN may knock it down to near-chance now. For kicks, compare StyleGAN’s samples to the original 2014 GAN faces 4 years ago.) “MetaMimic: One-Shot High-Fidelity Imitation: Training Large-Scale Deep Nets with RL”, Le et al 2018
“An Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Francois- et al 2018 (DQN, PG, exploration, benchmarking, POMDPs, transfer & meta-learning, multi-agent RL)
“Differentiable Image Parameterizations: A powerful, under-explored tool for neural network visualizations and art” (feature visualization & style transfer in 3D; an answer to the VGG/
style-transfer anomaly —checkerboard artifacts?)“Go-Explore: a New Approach for Hard-Exploration Problems”, et al 2019 (preliminary announcement; discussion)
Statistics/
Clair Patterson’s clean-room innovations, reducing bias in chemistry, led to his anti-lead crusade
“A Rational Choice Framework for Collective Behavior”, 2017 (large noisy/
mimicking human groups can approximate distributed Bayesian inference for Thompson sampling, as a kind of particle filtering) “Exploration in the wild”, et al 2018 (Deliveroo dataset: 1,613,967 meal orders 30,552 restaurants by 195,333 customers)
“Information Theory [its early history]”, et al 2001 (on psychology of innovation & computational constraints)
“The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising”, 2015
“Poisson clumping” (why rare events can happen in ‘clusters’ even if there is no trend)
Politics/
“The Mao Mango Cult of 196857ya and the Rise of China’s Working Class”; “China’s curious cult of the mango”
“Things I Learned By Spending Five Thousand Years In An Alternate Universe” (online micro-nations)
Psychology/
“Academic achievement across the day: Evidence from randomized class schedules”, 2018
“Clusters of Individual Experiences form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults”, 2013 (minimal and mostly negative effects of enlightenment-like experiences on cognition & daily life; see also “Words”)
“Catnip, Valerian, Honeysuckle and other cat-attractant plants”, 2008
“Psychedelic Turk: A Platform for People on Altered States of Consciousness” (truly diverse polling or worker groups)
“Night Vision: The forgotten theory of dreams that inspired Vladimir Nabokov”
“Human Tails: Ownership and Control of Extended Humanoid Avatars in VR”, et al 2013
“Sex, Steroids, And Arnold: The Story Of The Gym That Shaped America”
Technology:
“Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”, Engelbart 196263ya (background for The Mother of All Demos)
David Denkenberger interview on “ALLFED” (research into radical strategies for food production in case of global agricultural disaster to prevent mass starvation)
“11 Forgotten Women who Invented the British Industrial Revolution”
Economics:
“Uber insiders describe infighting and questionable decisions before its self-driving car killed a pedestrian” (Challenger redux)
“Prime & Punishment: Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace” (the tactics used in seller wars)
Deku-shrub & Besa Mafia: “The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante… and a murder”
“Demon Underneath: John DeLorean and the invention of the future” (on John DeLorean; the thin line between automobile conman & visionary, and hustling & felonies—Elon Musk, if he were much more incompetent & unlucky)
“Just Desserts: Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, So he started stealing—and got a little carried away.” (remarkably shabby & unimaginative ways of spending the bezzle)
Fiction:
“The Cowboy Hávamál”, 2012
“‘Tattúínárdǿla saga’: If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga”, 2010
“The Tatooine Cycle”, Donn 2015 (if Star Wars were an Irish epic)
Misc:
After the radiator coolant was gone, the Belgians started sipping gasoline. You would too. Call it petroposia: Saharans have recommended it to me as a way of staying off battery acid. The woman wrote that it seemed to help. They drank their urine. She reported that it was difficult at first, but that afterward it wasn’t so bad.
The boy was the weakest, and was suffering terribly. In desperation they burned their car, hoping someone would see the smoke. No one did. They killed their son to stop his pain. Later the husband cut himself and the wife drank his blood. At his request she somehow broke his neck with a rock. Alone she no longer wanted to live. Still, the Sahara was fabulous, she wrote, and she was glad to have come. She would do it again. She regretted only one thing—that she had not seen Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III. Those were her last lines. The family’s remains were found later, and returned to Tamanrasset.
Books
Nonfiction:
Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays, 2001 (see also 2010)
Fiction:
An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro 198639ya (strikingly like The Remains of the Day, and successful for similar reasons)
The Buried Giant, 2015 (review)
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Ishiguro (inoffensively meandering short stories about musicians and failing or succeeding)
The Alehouse at the End of the World, 2018 (peeked into as part of Christmas book exchange; dropped after 50 pages & skipping forward to check. Painfully unfunny and then descends into dirty-old-man skeevishness where he writes endlessly about sex in a manner nauseating enough to make one want to take a vow of celibacy. I’ll stick with Neil Gaiman, thanks.)
Film/TV
Live-action:
They Shall Not Grow Old, 2018 (review)
Animated:
Music
MLP:
“Wandering (Sweet Apple Acres)” (Equestria Electric Symphony Orchestra {2018}) [country]
“Winter Wrap Up (Symphonic Metal Cover)” (Rockin’Brony {2018}) [instrumental rock]
“Alone” (Tre; Scraps {2017}) [pop]
“Your Kindness” (ertrii {2018}) [house]
“Another Way” (Lorris; Lollipop {2017}) [electronic/
synthwave] “Changes” (StealingShad3z feat. GhostXb; Recollections {2018}) [Alt. Rock]
“Step! Buck! Leap! Touch!” (Mane in Green; Recollections {2018}) [folk/
Celtic] “Train Bells” (Wandering Artist; Recollections {2018}) [orchestral]
“Not Much to Miss” (4EverfreeBrony feat. EileMonty; Recollections {2018}) [pop]
“Spearmint” (Viricide Filly; Lollipop {2017}) [electronic]
“Giggles & Gumdrops” (4everfreebrony; Small Horses and Other Stuff) [acoustic]