Links

Everything is heritable:

• “Genome-wide analyses for personality traits identify six genomic loci and show correlations with psychiatric disorders”, Lo et al 2016
• “Cognitive Performance Among Carriers of Pathogenic Copy Number Variants: Analysis of 152,000 UK Biobank Subjects”, Kendall et al 2016
• “Schizophrenia risk alleles and neurodevelopmental outcomes in childhood: a population-based cohort study”, Riglin et al 2016
• “The genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes”, Fuchsberger et al 2016 (rare variants continue to disappoint those who don’t want the missing heritability to just be the common variants)
• “Associations of coffee genetic risk scores with coffee, tea and other beverages in the UK Biobank”, Taylor & Munafo 2016
• recent human evolution: “Archaic adaptive introgression in TBX15/WARS2”, Racimo et al 2016 (media)

AI:

• “Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks”, Kirkpatrick et al 2016
• “Delivering real-time AI in the palm of your hand” (Style transfer was invented hardly a year ago or so, but it’s gone from requiring hours to now being doable in realtime on an ordinary smartphone at higher quality. Progress in deep learning is fast, and this also illustrates the optimization potential of neural networks: they start off grossly overparameterized, but can be specialized down to much more powerful faster systems…)
• “Value Iteration Networks”, Tamar et al 2016; “The Predictron: End-To-End Learning and Planning”, Silver et al 2016 (MCTS and NNs are going together like chocolate & peanut butter right now, because NNs can’t effectively plan. What might a explicit planning over future paths for NNs look like? This is one step.)
• “Convolutional Neural Fabrics”, Saxena & Verbeek 2016
• “StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks”, Zhang et al 2016 (Another nice improvement to DCGANs: a pair of GANs (one for prototyping, a second for upscaling) generating sharp images at 256px. I hope they release source code—I’d like to try it out with my anime dataset from Danbooru, which earlier DCGANs couldn’t cope with); “Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks”, Huang et al 2016
• “PILCO: A Model-Based and Data-Efficient Approach to Policy Search”, Deisenroth & Rasmussen 2011 (One of the most impressive RL algorithms around, this demonstrates the power of forward model-based planning for optimization & learning—a paradigm which thus far has been weirdly absent from deep reinforcement learning.)
• AI risk reading list

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “The price of being wrong: Newborn screening saves babies, but lives can be shattered when state labs ignore science and common sense” (When cutoffs are set for decision-making without explicit consideration of costs and benefits.)
• The Schiehallion experiment (weighing the earth with a mountain’s gravity)

Politics/religion:

• “The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States”, Anonymous & Anonymous 2013
• “A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? The Mosul Dam is failing. A breach would cause a colossal wave that could kill as many as a million and a half people”
• Specific corruption accusations in the Park/Choi Soon-il scandal
• “The American Leader in the Islamic State”
• “The movie that doesn’t exist and the Redditors who think it does”
• “The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time”

Psychology/biology:

• “Childhood forecasting of a small segment of the population with large economic burden”, Caspi et al 2016 (“Figure 4: The Big Footprint of Multiple-High-Cost-Users”; for the genetic version, see Belsky et al 2016)

• Psychedelics & psychological well-being (media):

  • “The paradoxical psychological effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)”, Carhart-Harris et al 2016
  • “Psilocybin for anxiety and depression in cancer care? Lessons from the past and prospects for the future”, Nutt 2016
  • “Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial”, Griffiths et al 2016
  • “Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial”, Ross et al 2016
  • “Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences”, Carbonaro et al 2016
  • “The Challenging Experience Questionnaire: Characterization of challenging experiences with psilocybin mushrooms”, Barrett et al 2016

• “When the music’s over. Does music skill transfer to children’s and young adolescents’ cognitive and academic skills? A Meta-Analysis”, Sala & Gobet 2016 (no)

• “Effects of dietary restriction on adipose mass and biomarkers of healthy aging in human”, Lettieri-Barbato et al 2016 (Not keen on how they lump together caloric restriction with intermittent fasting etc, or casually dump a few correlational trials in with the randomized ones… I’d rather see it split by intervention type, the correlation trials excluded entirely, and maybe redone as a network meta-analysis or better yet, a network SEM, since there are multiple measures of body fat and inflammation under consideration.)

• “Men’s preferences for women’s breast size and shape in four cultures”, Havlíček et al 2016

Technology:

• “The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think”
• “Wikipedia usage survey results”
• “Liquid Haskell: Haskell as a Theorem Prover”, Vazou 2016 (One encouraging aspect of programming language theory is how SMT solvers and dependent typing are gradually making progress and enabling languages of the future to express and prove many invariants and properties about code. It’s true that maybe you don’t want to do full-blown theorem proving on a random script or IO processing program, but it’s good for everyone that libraries and infrastructure can be easily locked down and rendered extremely reliable. The larger our systems get, the more important it is that the foundations not be buggy.)
• “[0day] [exploit] Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES‽”
• “Furiosa’s Cat Feeder: The trick is to be smarter than the animal with a brain the size of a walnut” (Difficulties in engineering a cat-proof feeder—trial-and-error learning is extremely powerful.)

Economics:

• “Governing kidnap for ransom: Lloyd’s as a ‘private regime’”, Shortland 2016 (media)
• “Competition in the Robotaxi world”

Philosophy:

• “Time Travel and Computing”, Moravec 1991

Fiction:

• “A Ghost, a Real Ghost”, Randall Jarrell (pg262–263, The Complete Poems; originally, The Woman at the Washington Zoo):

  I think of that old woman in the song
  Who could not know herself without the skirt
  They cut off while she slept beside a stile.
  Her dog jumped at the unaccustomed legs
  And barked till she turned slowly from her gate
  And went—I never asked them where she went.
  

  The child is hopeful and unhappy in a world
  Whose future is his recourse: she kept walking
  Until the skirt grew, cleared her head and dog—
  Surely I thought so when I laughed. If skirts don’t grow,
  If things can happen so, and you not know
  What you could do, why, what is there you could do?
  

  I know now she went nowhere; went to wait
  In the bare night of the fields, to whisper:
  “I’ll sit and wish that it was never so.”
  I see her sitting on the ground and wishing,
  The wind jumps like a dog against her legs,
  And she keeps thinking: “This is all a dream.”
  

  “Who would cut off a poor old woman’s skirt?
  So good too. No, it’s not so:
  No one could feel so, really.” And yet one might.
  A ghost must; and she was, perhaps, a ghost.
  The first night I looked into the mirror
  And saw the room empty, I could not believe
  

  That it was possible to keep existing
  In such pain: I have existed.
  

  Was the old woman dead? What does it matter?
  —Am I dead? A ghost, a real ghost
  Has no need to die: what is he except
  A being without access to the universe
  That he has not yet managed to forget?
  

Film/TV

Live-action:

• A Beautiful Planet (saw in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum: glorious long shots panning over the Earth from the ISS presented in IMAX 3D. Wallpapers cannot compare, and 3D for once serves its purpose of creating presence & making one feel like one is in the cramped submarine-like confines of the ISS. The ISS unavoidably feels fake in normal photos and videos, but taking a 3D camera-rig’s perspective and floating slowly through the ISS modules or on spacewalks, I finally felt like it was a real place. The biggest flaw is the narration by Jennifer Lawrence, who in attempting gravitas, comes off as almost histrionic & incomprehensible due to sheer levels of obnoxious vocal fry.)
• Florence Foster Jenkins (An improbable-sounding plot, but it works and is moving, offering rewards beyond cringe-humor and the usual watching Hollywood recreate the 1940s. I checked WP on the original person, and was amazed how close the film hews to history and how few & reasonable liberties it took with events.)
• The Sound of Music
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
• Going Clear (Scientology expose; one can learn much more about Scientology online reading articles like “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology”, and this documentary is no substitute for them or for books like Bare-Faced Messiah: A Biography of L. Ron Hubbard, but benefits from the use of archival footage—it definitely adds something to see footage of Hubbard himself and especially David Miscavige, to put faces & voices to the quotes & facts.)

Animated:

• Finding Dory

Music

Touhou:

• “promise flower” (Kirin feat. ahiru; Still Moment {R10}) [electronic]

Vocaloid:

• “God-Tier Tune” (Miku; おにゅうP; 初音ミク-Project DIVA-F Complete Collection {2013}) [Jpop]
• “ぼくも屑だから” (Miku+PinocchioP; PinocchioP; It’s Matsuri, Hey Come On! {2015}) [electronic] (original)