--- title: April 2017 News created: 2017-03-31 status: finished previous: /newsletter/2017/03 next: /newsletter/2017/05 confidence: log cssExtension: dropcaps-de-zs backlink: False ... This is the April 2017 edition of [the Gwern.net newsletter](https://gwern.substack.com/ "'Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)', Branwen 2013"); previous, [March 2017](/newsletter/2017/03 "'March 2017 News', Branwen 2017") ([archives](/doc/newsletter/index)). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my [Changelog](/changelog); brought to you by my donors on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gwern). # Writings - [mineral water taste test](/water "Blind randomized taste-test of mineral/distilled/tap waters using Bayesian best-arm finding; no large differences in preference") # Media ## Links Recent evolution: - ["Soft sweeps are the dominant mode of adaptation in the human genome"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/090084.full), 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"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/125799.full "'Comparative genomic evidence for self-domestication in Homo sapiens', Theofanopoulou et al 2017"), 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"](/doc/genetics/selection/2017-owers.pdf), Owers et al 2017 (recent human evolution leading to between-group differences) - ["Investigating the case of human nose shape and climate adaptation"](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006616), 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"](/doc/genetics/selection/2017-librado.pdf), Librado et al 2017 ([media](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/science/horses-genetics-domestication-scythians.html "Ancient Horse DNA Shows Scythian Warriors Were Adept Domesticators"); more recent evolution in complex behavioral traits in mammals: the neural crest shows up, again) - [Everything Is Heritable]{.smallcaps}: - ["Polygenic prediction of the phenome, across ancestry, in emerging adulthood"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5971142/), Docherty et al 2017 - ["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"](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-park/517779/) - ["Intersection of diverse neuronal genomes and neuropsychiatric disease: The Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network"](/doc/genetics/heritable/2017-mcconnell.pdf), 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"](https://sciencebulletin.org/archives/9946.html) - ["How Humans Are Shaping Our Own Evolution"](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/evolution-genetics-medicine-brain-technology-cyborg "Like other species, we are the products of millions of years of adaptation. Now we're taking matters into our own hands.") **AI**: - ["Recurrent Environment Simulators"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02254), Chiappa et al 2017 (towards deep model-based planning; [related discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/66x02v/d_rl_gans_as_mcts_environment_simulator_for_deep/ "[D] RL: GANs as MCTS environment simulator for deep model-based planning?")) - ["Using Human Brain Activity to Guide Machine Learning"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05463), 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]"](/doc/ai/scaling/hardware/2017-jouppi.pdf), 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"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05629#google), 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"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01088), Liao et al 2017 ([supplemental examples of style transfer/image analogies](https://liaojing.github.io/html/data/analogy_supplemental.pdf)) - ["Artist Agent: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Automatic Stroke Generation in Oriental Ink Painting"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.4634), 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"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00522#deepmind), Czarnecki et al 2017 - ["Machine Learning Predicts Laboratory Earthquakes"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05774), Rouet-Leduc et al 2017 ([media](https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/03/03/153427/machine-learning-algorithm-predicts-laboratory-earthquakes/ "Machine-Learning Algorithm Predicts Laboratory Earthquakes: The breakthrough has astonished geologists and raises the possibility that real earthquake prediction could be next."); [since debunked as data leakage?](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/c4ylga/d_misuse_of_deep_learning_in_nature_journals/)) - [Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego with CNNs](https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/) ([HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889)); [details on the software implementation](https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-lego-the-software-side/) **Statistics/Meta-Science**: - ["How readers understand causal and correlational expressions used in news headlines"](/doc/statistics/causality/2017-adams.pdf), Adams et al 2017 (people do not understand the difference between correlation and causation) **Politics/religion**: - [Robert Caro on political power and Lyndon Johnson](/doc/history/2016-caro.html "Robert Caro, The Art of Biography No. 5") - ["Historical Dynamics & contingent conditions of religion"](https://www.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/08/historical-dynamics-and-contingent-conditions-of-religion) - [66 failed social interventions](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/social-interventions-gone-wrong/) - ["'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen's death"](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge "She is venerated around the world. She has outlasted 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and order. But her kingdom is in turmoil, and her subjects are in denial that her reign will ever end. That's why the palace has a plan.") **Psychology/biology**: - ["Sex Differences In The Adult Human Brain: Evidence From 5,216 UK Biobank Participants"](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/123729.full "'Sex differences in the adult human brain: Evidence from 5,216 UK Biobank participants', Ritchie et al 2017"), 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"](/doc/longevity/fasting/2017-trepanowski.pdf "'Effect of Alternate-Day Fasting on Weight Loss, Weight Maintenance, and Cardioprotection Among Metabolically Healthy Obese AdultsA Randomized Clinical Trial', Association 2017"), 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"](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-017-9972-z), Urfer et al 2017 - ["On Being One's Own Rabbit: The Story of a Skirmish in the War on Disease [Tetany]"](https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160325#Page_107), J.B.S. Haldane 1927, _Possible Worlds And Other Essays_ - ["In Support of Yak Shaving"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nbiZc7KM2KEyCAaCP/in-support-of-yak-shaving) - ["Shorn Scalps and Perceptions of Male Dominance"](/doc/psychology/2012-mannes.pdf), Mannes 2012 **Technology**: - [PowerPoint is Turing-complete](https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twildenh/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf "'On the Turing Completeness of MS PowerPoint', Wildenhain 2017") ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8)) - ["A Mind Is Born"](https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/) (256-byte C64 demo) **Economics**: - [The moral imperative of economic growth](https://web.archive.org/web/20160903194154/https://medium.com/stubborn-attachments/stubborn-attachments-full-text-8fc946b694d) (Tyler Cowen) - ["Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They're One Reason Health Care Costs So Much"](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/magazine/those-indecipherable-medical-bills-theyre-one-reason-health-care-costs-so-much.html) - [Whatever happened to Google Books?](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ "Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: 'Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.'") - ["Medieval and Early Modern Coinage and its Problems"](/doc/economics/1999-kohn.pdf), Kohn 1999 ## Books **Nonfiction**: - [_Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth_](https://www.amazon.com/Moondust-Search-Men-Fell-Earth/dp/0007155425), Smith 2005 ([review](/review/book#moondust-smith-2006)) **Fiction**: - [_The Adventures of Dr. McNinja_](http://drmcninja.com/newreaders.php) (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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Ultimate_Power), [Ninja Burger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Burger), [Megatokyo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbelievable_Gwenpool)_.) ## Film/TV **Animated**: - [_The Tale of the Princess Kaguya_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Princess_Kaguya_\(film\)) (2013; [review](/review/anime#the-tale-of-the-princess-kaguya)) **Live-action**: - [_DNA Dreams_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dVv5RMwzuo) ([review](/review/movie#dna-dreams)) ## Music **Touhou**: - ["Bullet Raid"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/hbw9e5zd9h12n9g/%E7%8E%96%E5%8E%9F%E3%80%80%E3%82%A4%E3%83%85%E3%83%8A-%E6%B0%B8%E5%8A%AB%E6%BA%80%E6%9C%88phantasystarsymphony-bulletraid.ogg?dl=0) (玖原 イヅナ; _PHANTASY STAR SYMPHONY_ {C91}) [orchestral] - ["KICKING TRICK (24BL EDM Remix)"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q6a7gNu4lk) (24BL feat. 3L; _Descending from the Skies She Appears as a Goddess_ {C91}) [Jpop] - ["A Love Canon (FS Remix)"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbuo324g-7w) (Babbe feat. Renko; _memories II_ {C91}) [Jpop] **Doujin**:
- ["たまゆらのかぜ"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1istntu1IA4) (ハム; _よなごみさん家のおうちカフェ_ {C91}) [folk] - ["Life is Journey"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAONfTdJ9i4) (Junk; _AD:PIANO IV Monochrome_ {C91}) [instrumental] - ["Smooth Call"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTScPAEyeuY) (古川\'\'good-cool\'\'竜也; _AD:PIANO IV Monochrome_ {C91}) [jazz] - ["Acheron"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xJ0GAz7ylE) (qurter; _AD:PIANO IV Monochrome_ {C91}) [trance] - ["Closer"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WuetN1UCZg) (Avans; _AD:PIANO IV Monochrome_ {C91}) [electronic] - ["Proud"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaIXzS2xTQo) (黒魔; _AD:PIANO IV Monochrome_ {C91}) [instrumental] - ["Higher (Original Mix)"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/okqgmpdc7x6okyq/itm-koebuticmusicfes-higheroriginalmix.ogg?dl=0) (ITM; _KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES._ {C91}) [electronic] - ["drAg."](https://www.dropbox.com/s/3qmnbyrvewum7qu/nash-koebuticmusicfes-drag.ogg?dl=0) (Na/sh; _KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES._ {C91}) [electronic] - ["Pear flowers ~梨衣しょんの花~"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wdz69l6vvl7ylli/%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%83%AA%E3%83%AD-koebuticmusicfes-pearflowers%EF%BD%9E%E6%A2%A8%E8%A1%A3%E3%81%97%E3%82%87%E3%82%93%E3%81%AE%E8%8A%B1%EF%BD%9E.ogg?dl=0) (アクリロ; _KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES._ {C91}) [instrumental] - ["Calm forest"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4zwnjfd8pu1mb4a/%E3%81%A0-koebuticmusicfes-calmforest.ogg?dl=0) (だ; _KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES._ {C91}) [instrumental] - ["七色の日常"](https://www.dropbox.com/s/8p7j0j86i7cj290/%E3%83%9E%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%83%AA%E3%83%B3-koebuticmusicfes-%E4%B8%83%E8%89%B2%E3%81%AE%E6%97%A5%E5%B8%B8.ogg?dl=0) (マンダリン; _KOEBUTIC MUSIC FES._ {C91}) [classical]