Links

Recent evolution:

• “Soft sweeps are the dominant mode of adaptation in the human genome”, Schrider & Kern 2017 (Detection of 2000 instances of recent human selection, half of which are specific to individual human populations, and many of which affect the central nervous system. Note this doesn’t cover polygenic selection, so it’s a very loose lower bound on how much recent human evolution there has been.)
• “Comparative Genomic Evidence For Self-Domestication In Homo sapiens”, Theofanopoulou et al 2017 (gene-culture co-evolution in selection for cognitive traits involved in domestication?)
• “Adaptation to infectious disease exposure in indigenous Southern African populations”, Owers et al 2017 (recent human evolution leading to between-group differences)
• “Investigating the case of human nose shape and climate adaptation”, Zaidi et al 2017 (Recent human evolution leading to between-group differences: local adaptations of noses to local climates.)
• “Ancient genomic changes associated with domestication of the horse”, Librado et al 2017 (media; more recent evolution in complex behavioral traits in mammals: the neural crest shows up, again)

Everything is heritable:

• “Polygenic prediction of the phenome, across ancestry, in emerging adulthood”, Docherty et al 2017
• “Syphilis in Renaissance Europe: rapid evolution of an introduced sexually transmitted disease?”, Knell 2003 (still an open question, apparently)
• “Welcome to Pleistocene Park: In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths”
• “Intersection of diverse neuronal genomes and neuropsychiatric disease: The Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network”, McConnell et al 2017 (Towards explaining non-shared-environment effects on intelligence, psychiatric disorders, and other cognitive traits—developmental noise such as post-conception mutations in individual cells or groups of cells)
• “Tuberculosis-resistant cows developed for the first time using CRISPR technology”
• “How Humans Are Shaping Our Own Evolution”

AI:

• “Recurrent Environment Simulators”, Chiappa et al 2017 (towards deep model-based planning; related discussion)

• “Using Human Brain Activity to Guide Machine Learning”, Fong et al 2017

  If I’m understanding this right, it can be seen as related to Hinton’s ‘dark knowledge’ and knowledge distillation in NNs: you use a teacher NN to provide additional supervision on the image classification problem by indicating hard & easy examples and also what is the ‘right’ probability to assign to all the wrong classifications in order to refine the loss function. In this case, the SVM is guided by the human brain fMRI activations which indicate which instances are hard/easy and so which ones it should concentrate on (an error on a hard instance should lead to smaller adjustments than an error on an easy one). This sort of supervision could be quite interesting if you think about its use for AI risk problems—moral dilemmas, for example.

• “In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of A Tensor Processing Unit [TPU]”, Jouppi et al 2017 (the nitty-gritty on what Google’s TPUs can and cannot do)

• “Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data”, McMahan et al 2017 (distributed NN backpropagation turns out to be not just possible but easy, obviating the need for companies like Google to harvest all your data onto their servers)

• “Visual Attribute Transfer through Deep Image Analogy”, Liao et al 2017 (supplemental examples of style transfer/image analogies)

• “Artist Agent: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Automatic Stroke Generation in Oriental Ink Painting”, Xie et al 2012 (RL is good for art experiments like this because many artistic criteria tend to be ‘global’ and non-differentiable or local—RMSE on pixels is not a good criterion.)

• “Understanding Synthetic Gradients and Decoupled Neural Interfaces”, Czarnecki et al 2017

• “Machine Learning Predicts Laboratory Earthquakes”, Rouet-Leduc et al 2017 (media; since debunked as data leakage?)

• Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego with CNNs (HN); details on the software implementation

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “How readers understand causal and correlational expressions used in news headlines”, Adams et al 2017 (people do not understand the difference between correlation and causation)

Politics/religion:

• Robert Caro on political power and Lyndon Johnson
• “Historical Dynamics & contingent conditions of religion”
• 66 failed social interventions
• “‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death”

Psychology/biology:

• “Sex Differences In The Adult Human Brain: Evidence From 5,216 UK Biobank Participants”, Ritchie et al 2017
• “Effect of Alternate-Day Fasting on Weight Loss, Weight Maintenance, and Cardioprotection Among Metabolically Healthy Obese Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial”, Trepanowski et al 2017 (worse compliance for intermittent fasting than caloric restriction)
• “A randomized controlled trial to establish effects of short-term rapamycin treatment in 24 middle-aged companion dogs”, Urfer et al 2017
• “On Being One’s Own Rabbit: The Story of a Skirmish in the War on Disease [Tetany]”, J.B.S. Haldane 1927, Possible Worlds And Other Essays
• “In Support of Yak Shaving”
• “Shorn Scalps and Perceptions of Male Dominance”, Mannes 2012

Technology:

• PowerPoint is Turing-complete (video)
• “A Mind Is Born” (256-byte C64 demo)

Economics:

• The moral imperative of economic growth (Tyler Cowen)
• “Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much”
• Whatever happened to Google Books?
• “Medieval and Early Modern Coinage and its Problems”, Kohn 1999

Books

Nonfiction:

• Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, Smith 2005 (review)

Fiction:

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja (the long-running series comes to an end; having read it since ~2008, it’s surprising to reread the whole series and realize that in between all the humorous action drama like banditos riding raptors or surfing a robotic Dracula back from the Moon, was lurking a fairly complex & well-thought-out time-travel SF story with very long callbacks and a bittersweet ending, with writing that improves as much as the art does over its 2006–2017 run. In some respects, it’s a little dated—looking back, I recognize it as something of an artifact of the ’00s Western Internet culture in being part of a ninja fad along with Real Ultimate Power, Ninja Burger, Megatokyo etc—but I’m still impressed at how Hastings makes it all come together, suggesting either he planned it out much further back than I ever expected or is a master of retcons. It is not the greatest time-travel story ever, or greatest martial arts story, but I will always enjoy reading action with a brain. It is no surprise to me that I would enjoy Hasting’s later Unbelievable Gwenpool.)

Film/TV

Animated:

• The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013; review)

Live-action:

• DNA Dreams (short 2013 documentary on Beijing Genomics Institute and the research on IQ; the results still haven’t come out, having been pre-empted by Rietveld et al 2013 finding the first IQ hits, subsequent GWASes’ demonstration that the BGI bet on rare variants was wrong, and reportedly internal BGI disarray due to a disastrous bet on in-house development of DNA sequencers to try to break free of the Illumina sequencer quasi-monopoly; the documentary is fatally compromised by the lack of any actual discussion of genetics, instead settling for occasional ominous music, wandering BGI’s admittedly impressive facilities, and occasional idiosyncratic scenes of dating or family life.)

Music

Touhou:

• “Bullet Raid” (玖原　イヅナ; PHANTASY STAR SYMPHONY {C91}) [orchestral]
• “KICKING TRICK (24BL EDM Remix)” (24BL feat. 3L; Descending from the Skies She Appears as a Goddess {C91}) [Jpop]
• “A Love Canon (FS Remix)” (Babbe feat. Renko; memories II {C91}) [Jpop]

Doujin:

• “たまゆらのかぜ” (ハム; よなごみさん家のおうちカフェ {C91}) [folk]
• “Life is Journey” (Junk; AD:PIANO IV Monochrome {C91}) [instrumental]
• “Smooth Call” (古川''good-cool''竜也; AD:PIANO IV Monochrome {C91}) [jazz]
• “Acheron” (qurter; AD:PIANO IV Monochrome {C91}) [trance]
• “Closer” (Avans; AD:PIANO IV Monochrome {C91}) [electronic]
• “Proud” (黒魔; AD:PIANO IV Monochrome {C91}) [instrumental]
• “Higher (Original Mix)” (ITM; KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES. {C91}) [electronic]
• “drAg.” (Na/sh; KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES. {C91}) [electronic]
• “Pear flowers ～梨衣しょんの花～” (アクリロ; KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES. {C91}) [instrumental]
• “Calm forest” (だ; KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES. {C91}) [instrumental]
• “七色の日常” (マンダリン; KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES. {C91}) [classical]