Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genome-wide association study of cognitive functions and educational attainment in UK Biobank (n = 112151)”, Davies et al 2016

  • “Variants near CHRNA3/5 and APOE have age- and sex-related effects on human lifespan”, Joshi et al 2016

  • “National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A Cautious Exploration”, Proto & Oswald2015 (dubious)

  • Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins (media)

  • everything is correlated: Continuation of the recent phenome theme of inter-correlations of negative traits and inter-correlation of positive traits:

    • “Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain”, Anttila et al 2016

    • “Genetic variants associated with subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism identified through genome-wide analyses”, Okbay et al 2016

    • “Physical and neurobehavioral determinants of reproductive onset and success”, Day et al 2016

    • “Association between stressful life events and psychotic experiences in adolescence: evidence for gene–environment correlations”, Shakoor et al 2016

• Engineering:

  • “Introducing precise genetic modifications into human 3PN embryos by CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome editing”, Kang et al 2016 (see also Liang et al 2015; both describe the CRISPR state-of-the-art as of early 2014, 2+ years ago)

  • “Monkey kingdom: China is positioning itself as a world leader in primate research”

Politics/religion:

• Book Review: Albion’s Seed

• “Peer review: Troubled from the start”

• “My Year in San Francisco’s $2 Million Secret Society Startup”

AI:

• “Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth”, Huang et al 2016 (dropout of random layers, which does not just work, but works better and enables >1200-layer residual networks. This might be related to Liao & Poggio2016 claim that deep residual nets are effectively unrolled RNNs which apply slight variants of an algorithm to many timesteps.)

• “Generating Large Images from Latent Vectors”

• “Foveation-based Mechanisms Alleviate Adversarial Examples”, Luo et al 2016

• “Convolutional Networks for Fast, Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing”, Esser et al 2016

Statistics/meta-science:

• “A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook”, Gordon et al 2019 (How often does correlation=causation? <50% of the time in Internet advertising, with gross over/underestimates even with detailed covariate & advanced modeling.)

• “The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism” (So Bialystok is refusing a collaboration because a pre-registered protocol is unscientific and she refuses to work with someone so ‘biased’ that they would damage the non-pre-registered results, and besides, publication bias doesn’t exist—“there is absolutely no evidence”. I see…)

• “Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery: A new study shows that peer-review scores for grant proposals are random anyway”

• “Bandit based Monte-Carlo planning”, Kocsis & Szepesvári2006

• “How Kalman Filters Work, Part 1”/part 2/part 3

• “The importance of ‘gold standard’ studies for consumers of research”

Psychology/biology:

• “The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments”, Fryer2016 (education; lots of small effects)

• “A Meta-Analysis of Blood Glucose Effects on Human Decision Making”, Orquin & Kurzban2016

• “Is Ego-Depletion a Replicable Effect? A Forensic Meta-Analysis of 165 Ego Depletion Articles”

• “Indoor air quality and academic performance”, Stafford2015 (???; apropos of harms of CO2 discussion)

• “Seven Pervasive Statistical Flaws in Cognitive Training Interventions”, Moreau et al 2016

• “The Voyeur’s Motel”

Technology:

• “What the game ‘Werewolf’ teaches us about Trust & Security”

• The Raising of Chicago

Economics:

• “Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging”, Gavrilov & Gavrilova2010

• Interview with short seller Jim Chanos (Short sellers are always so interesting. Few people are so motivated to see through the miasma of lies and bias and self-serving optimism in the business and finance world.)

Books

Nonfiction:

• A Life of Sir Francis Galton (review)

• On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine, Rasmussen2008 (particularly interesting for the inside information about how early American pharmacorps & drug development worked, but much weaker past the ’70s; at least, if you can get past Rasmussen’s huge bias against amphetamines and blind support for the disastrous War on Drugs)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Pirates of Silicon Valley (review)

Anime:

• Megazone 23 (a strange relict. It’s as if Macross cuckolded Streets of Fire with Akira while Miyazaki perved at the window and the Gainax boys took notes. Episode 1 in particular crosses so many genres and does so much in so little time that even non-fans of 1980s anime might find it worthwhile.)

• Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro (review)

Music

Touhou:

• “音の瓶詰—河童の里” (ジャム; 守矢幻燈録 ～ Separation of Spirit {R12}) [classical]

• “Reincarnation” (Mitty; Imitation Circus {C89}) [classical]

• “Anois –” (Casket/Escarmew; 幻想パブ:午後11時23分58秒 {科学世紀のカフェテラス6}) [Celtic]

• “デザイアドライブ” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]

• “古きユアンシェン” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]

• “聖徳伝説 ～ True Administrator” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]

• “欲深き霊魂” (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]