Links

Genetics:

• Recent Evolution:

  • dysgenics: “Genome-wide analysis identifies 12 loci influencing human reproductive behavior”, Barban et al 2016 (supplement; genetic correlations with fewer later offspring: r_g = -0.236 and 0.712 respectively. Cross-sectional confirmation of Conley et al 2016’s discovery of longitudinal dysgenics.)

  • “A time transect of exomes from a Native American population before and after European contact”, Lindo et al 2016 (Rapid soft selection sweeps on immune-system genes post-colonization. Presumably ancient genomes would show even more dramatic population collapses & selection in South/Central America.)

  • “Kinship, Fractionalization and Corruption”, Akbari et al 2019

  • “CRISPR gene-editing tested in a person for the first time”

• Everything Is Heritable

  • “Polygenic transmission disequilibrium confirms that common and rare variation act additively to create risk for autism spectrum disorders”, Weiner et al 2016

  • “Genome-Wide Association Study Reveals First Locus for Anorexia Nervosa and Metabolic Correlations”, Duncan et al 2016 (see also “The Thin Gene”)

  • “Lung cancer, genetic predisposition and smoking: the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer”, Hjelmborg et al 2016 (R. A. Fisher would be pleased to see that someone’s finally checked.)

AI:

• “Scaling Memory-Augmented Neural Networks with Sparse Reads and Writes”, Rae et al 2016

• “Neural architecture search with reinforcement learning”, Zoph & Le2016 (800 GPUs!)

• “Designing Neural Network Architectures using Reinforcement Learning”, Baker et al 2016

• “Learning to reinforcement learn”, Wang et al 2016

• human-level lipreading (human-level lipreading + MSR’s transcription + Google’s WaveNet could have major implications for the deaf & hard-of-hearing and the role of sign language):

  • “Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild”, Chung et al 2016 (vide)

  • “LipNet: Sentence-level Lipreading”, Assael et al 2016 (video)

• “Tracking the World State with Recurrent Entity Networks”, Henaff et al 2016

• “DeepCoder: Learning to Write Programs”, Balog et al 2016; “Learning to superoptimize programs”, Bunel et al 2016; DeepMath/“HolStep: A Machine Learning Dataset for Higher-order Logic Theorem Proving”, Kaliszyk et al 2016 (continuing the AlphaGo theme of tree search+NN heuristics; see also “Deep Learning for Real-Time Atari Game Play Using Offline Monte Carlo Tree Search [MCTS] Planning”, Guo et al 2014)

• “Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks”, Jaderberg et al 2016

• “Outrageously large neural networks: the sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts layer”, Shazeer et al 2016 (This is cool. The main net is a little NN which chooses a couple out of a few thousand other NNs to do the real computation. Because only a couple subnets are activated at any time and the others are silent, they are effectively small specialized NNs—which accordingly fit in the GPU and are very fast forwards/backwards. Instead of the complications of learning to use an external memory, huge datasets can effectively be sharded & memorized by individual specialized sub NNs.)

• “Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation”, Johnson et al 2016; “Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google Translate” (the long-awaited high quality translation RNNs finally get rolled out to the masses)

• “Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Nets”, Isola et al 2016 (as has often been noted, mapping images to images is a very common type of operation, and there’s no real reason to have a whole menagerie of DCGANs for upscaling and colorizing and inpainting and…)

• “DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment”

• “Decoding The Thought Vector”

• “miles-deep: Deep Learning Porn Video Classifier/Editor with Caffe”

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Why a pro/con list is 75% as good as your fancy machine learning algorithm”

Politics/religion:

• “History is Written by the Losers”

Psychology/biology:

• “Neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia”, Martínez-Molina et al 2016

Technology:

• “‘It smelled like death’: An oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course”

Fiction:

• “Design”, Robert Frost

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Doctor Strange (review)

• _Five Element Ninjas (good stupid fun; each fight is more ridiculous than the last)

• Arrival (see my review of Stories of Your Life and Others)

Music

Touhou:

• “二人のエンドレス秘封活動” (MasamiT; ゴツまさ倶楽部 {C79}) [folk]

Doujin:

• “美しくも醜いのなら” (君の音。; 少女の海から {M3-2016}) [classical]

• “DEEP FOREST” (Kirin feat.Sarii Yoshida; Altar Fragments {C90}) [electronic]

• “INFINITY” (Kokuchou feat. Misa Kikouden; Altar Fragments {C90}) [electronic]