Links

Everything is heritable:

• “Going global by adapting local: A review of recent human adaptation”, Fan et al 2016
• “Association between polygenic risk scores for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and educational and cognitive outcomes in the general population”, Stergiakouli et al 2016
• “Educational attainment and personality are genetically intertwined”, Mottus et al 2016
• “Ultra-rare disruptive and damaging mutations influence educational attainment in the general population”, Ganna et al 2016
• “Genome-wide analyses of empathy and systemizing: heritability and correlates with sex, education, and psychiatric risk”, Warrier et al 2016a; “Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and brain anatomy”, Warrier et al 2016b
• “Personality Polygenes, Positive Affect, and Life Satisfaction”, Weiss et al 2016

Politics/religion:

• “The Long-Term Effects of Cash Assistance”, Price & Song 2016 (An unusually long-term followup to one of the old American basic income experiments. No large harmful effects… but no large benefits either, nothing remotely like we observe in the Third World BI/transfer experiments. And if money helps with social outcomes, it should’ve helped more in the 1970s than it does now, so I feel more pessimistic about Give Directly/YC’s USA BI experiment.)
• “Men’s status and reproductive success in 33 nonindustrial societies: Effects of subsistence, marriage system, and reproductive strategy”, von Rueden & Jaeggi 2016
• “The illusion of the perfect alibi: Establishing the base rate of non-offenders’ alibis”, Nieuwkamp et al 2016

AI:

• “Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external memory”, Graves et al 2016 (blog); scaling to extremely large external memories: “Scaling Memory-Augmented Neural Networks with Sparse Reads and Writes”, Rae et al 2016
• “Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition”, Xiong et al 2016
• “Video Pixel Networks”, Kalchbrenner et al 2016
• “Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning (A3C)”, Mnih et al 2016
• “Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation”, Gu et al 2016 (video; blog)
• “Uncertainty in Deep Learning”, Gal 2016 (using dropout to turn NNs into ensembles of Bayesian NNs, allowing extraction of posterior distributions and thus uncertainty of outputs, which helps active learning & reinforcement learning)
• “Sim-to-Real Robot Learning from Pixels with Progressive Nets”, Rusu et al 2016
• Training A3C to solve Atari Pong in <4 minutes on a supercomputer through brute parallelism
• “Image Synthesis from Yahoo’s open_nsfw” (hilarious)
• Active learning demo: interactively drag and drop photos to train a CNN+random forest to binary classify along some trait

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “Active Learning Literature Survey”, Settles 2010

  You can see this as a way to most economically increase your dataset size by only labeling the most valuable instances; it can also be used to improve dataset quality by targeting instead the errors a model makes on a noisy corpus for examination by the oracle; and finally, it can be seen as a demonstration of the advantages of reinforcement learning over simple supervised learning over heaps of data—given the curse of dimensionality, most data is useless for training a model because it is so redundant and already a solved problem, and the data the model needs to improve its performance is a needle in a haystack. So by giving a model RL capabilities, you improve its supervised/inference performance! The way I put this: “tool AIs want to be agent AIs”.

• A brief history by Andrew Gelman of the replication crisis in psychology, from the 1960s to now

• “We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results” (random error vs systematic error)

• “Close but no Nobel: the scientists who never won; Archives reveal the most-nominated researchers who missed out on a Nobel Prize” (Nobels have considerable measurement error)

• “Do scholars follow Betteridge’s Law? The use of questions in journal article titles”, Cook & Plourde 2016

• scatterplots work much better than several other forms of visualizing data for understanding correlations, Kay & Heer 2015 (also a nice demonstration of fitting progressively more complex & realistic Bayesian models)

Psychology/biology:

• “The negative Flynn Effect: A systematic literature review”, Dutton et al 2016
• “Safe landing strategies during a fall: systemic review and meta-analysis”, Moon & Sosnoff 2016
• “From Terman to Today: A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity”, Lubinski 2016
• Some early rapamycin anti-aging results from the dog people: improvement in dog heart health after 10 weeks of use.
• “Stereotype (In)Accuracy in Perceptions of Groups and Individuals”, Jussim et al 2015
• “CMV Is a Greater Threat to Infants Than Zika, but Far Less Often Discussed” (it would not surprise me if CMV was responsible for my own hearing-impairment)
• “Does brain creatine content rely on exogenous creatine in healthy youth? A proof-of-principle study”, Merege-Filho et al 2016 (null)
• “Functional MRI in awake dogs predicts suitability for assistance work”, Berns et al 2016
• Home steam distillation of 99% pure nepetalactone from catnip leaves (0.03% yield compared to theoretical max of 0.3%, so can convert 0.45kg of leaves to 143mg nepetalactone)

Technology:

• “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny: Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley?”
• “The Joinery”: animated explanations of traditional nail-less Japanese woodworking joints (background)
• “Uber’s Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic: Forget billboards-motorists now have ads buzzing a few feet above their windshields” (possibly the most cyberpunk thing I’ve seen since VR headsets)
• “Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals”, Ali et al 2015
• “APEX: Automatic Programming Assignment Error Explanation”, Kim et al 2016

Economics:

• Abuse of ‘arbitration’ clauses in international trade treaties to escape criminal liability
• “The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics”, Donaldson & Storeygard 2016
• “The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture”
• “Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution”, Kelly & Grada 2016 (commentary)
• “My First Gulfstream”
• “Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy”
• “Young Rural Women in India Chase Big-City Dreams: Experiments like one in Bangalore, luring migrants to fill factory jobs, collide with an old way of life that keeps women and girls in seclusion until an arranged marriage” (3500 years of female slavery shrinking under industrialization and smartphones: “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”)

Books

Nonfiction:

• Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Le Roy Ladurie 1975
• The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, Fox (review)
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey (review)

Fiction:

• The Tales of Ise, Anonymous (review)

Music

Touhou:

• “Children on their Birthdays” (Asahi feat. Emaru; Lucky 7 {R13}) [acoustic]
• “breathless” (NAGI☆ feat. 美歌; Parallel Cross {C90}) [vocal]

Doujin:

• “Spring ephemeral” (Morrigan feat. Lily; Spring ephemeral {M3 33}) [acoustic]
• “Heure bleue” (RANDO:; RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY {C90}) [electronic]
• “Hall of Mirrors” (sta; RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY {C90}) [rock]
• “Parabola” (tigerlily; RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY {C90}) [post-rock]
• “16777215” (b; RADIAL DIVERSE SYSTEM FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY {C90}) [electronic]
• “てぃんさぐぬ花” (Togo Project feat. Junko Wada(BE THE VOICE); AD:HOUSE 5 {C90}) [folk/house/acoustic]
• “Starlight,tonight” (Hommarju feat. Yukacco; Another Wor1d {C90}) [vocal]
• “Weigh the anchor” (Harito; ‘Sun Flowers’ {C90}) [house/electronic]
• “Epilogue” (n-buna; Walking on the Moon {2016}) [classical]
• “それは、本当に救済なのか” (Morrigan; from080723 DISC EDITION {C90}) [electronic/ambient/vocal]