Links

Genet­ics:

• Every­thing Is Her­i­ta­ble:

  • “Quan­ti­fy­ing the impact of rare and ultra­-rare cod­ing vari­a­tion across the phe­no­typic spec­trum”, Ganna et al 2017
  • “Dis­cov­ery Of The First Genome-Wide Sig­nif­i­cant Risk Loci For ADHD”, Demon­tis et al 2017
  • “Genetic con­tri­bu­tion to two fac­tors of neu­roti­cism is asso­ci­ated with afflu­ence, bet­ter health, and longer life”, Hill et al 2017
  • “Envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors dom­i­nate over host genet­ics in shap­ing human gut micro­biota com­po­si­tion”, Roth­schild et al 2017 (com­men­tary; “bio­me-­ex­plain­abil­ity”—a rare use of vari­ance com­po­nents to check whether there is even a nee­dle in the haystack)

• Recent Evo­lu­tion:

  • “Wide­spread sig­na­tures of pos­i­tive selec­tion in com­mon risk alle­les asso­ci­ated to autism spec­trum dis­or­der”, Poli­manti & Gel­ern­ter 2017

  • dys­gen­ics:

    • dis­ease muta­tion load: “The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins”, Berens et al 2017 (media; +35% per­centile increase in gen­eral dis­ease risks over past ~mil­len­ni­a?)
    • selec­tion against edu­ca­tion in the UK: “Sig­na­tures of neg­a­tive selec­tion in the genetic archi­tec­ture of human com­plex traits”, Zeng et al 2018
    • “Detect­ing poly­genic adap­ta­tion in admix­ture graphs”, Racimo et al 2017 (No sign of selec­tion is found for Euro­peans, but if I under­stand the method right, it’s only look­ing at net selec­tion with time steps cor­re­spond­ing to pop­u­la­tions branch­ing. So given the Euro­pean pat­tern of selec­tion for intel­li­gence at least up until agri­cul­ture and then heavy recent dys­gen­ics against education/intelligence, those might mostly can­cel com­pared to an East Asian pop­u­la­tion like Japan which started lat­er.)

• Engi­neer­ing:

  • “The Moral Ques­tion That Stan­ford Asks Its Bio­engi­neer­ing Stu­dents: It’s about the capac­ity to print a human genome.”

AI:

• “Deep rein­force­ment learn­ing from human pref­er­ences”, Chris­tiano et al 2017 (blogs: 1, 2)
• “Relu­plex: An Effi­cient SMT Solver for Ver­i­fy­ing Deep Neural Net­works”, Katz et al 2017
• “A sim­ple neural net­work mod­ule for rela­tional rea­son­ing”, San­toro et al 2017 (blog)
• “One Model To Learn Them All”, Kaiser et al 2017 (a sin­gle NN for mul­ti­-­modal tasks: from image clas­si­fi­ca­tion to image cap­tion­ing to Eng­lish pars­ing to Eng­lish⟺Ger­man⟺French trans­la­tion)
• “Atten­tion Is All You Need” for SOTA machine trans­la­tion, Vaswani et al 2017
• “Deal or No Deal? End-­to-End Learn­ing for Nego­ti­a­tion Dia­logues”, Lewis et al 2017 (blog)
• “Learn­ing to Learn from Noisy Web Videos”, Yeung et al 2017

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “Is the stag­ger­ingly prof­itable busi­ness of sci­en­tific pub­lish­ing bad for sci­ence?”
• “Mea­sure­ment Error, Regres­sion to the Mean, and Group Dif­fer­ences”
• “What works in e-com­merce—a meta-­analy­sis of 6700 online exper­i­ments”, Brown & Jones 2017 (In­for­ma­tive pri­ors: most A/B exper­i­ments fail and the suc­cess­ful ones have small effects on the order of a few % at most. Note the impli­ca­tions that most suc­cess­ful, in the sense of p < 0.05, A/B tests will grossly over­es­ti­mate the true effect size; detect­ing real­is­tic effects may require large sam­ple sizes; and some cat­e­gories of tests may well not be worth run­ning at all. It would also be inter­est­ing to know how many of those nulls were based on cor­re­la­tional data…)

Politics/religion:

• “In Defense of Indi­vid­u­al­ist Cul­ture”
• “The Dark Legacy of Car­los Cas­taneda”

Psychology/biology:

• “Does High Self­-es­teem Cause Bet­ter Per­for­mance, Inter­per­sonal Suc­cess, Hap­pi­ness, or Health­ier Lifestyles?”, Baumeis­ter et al 2003; “The Man Who Destroyed Amer­i­ca’s Ego: How a rebel psy­chol­o­gist chal­lenged one of the 20th cen­tu­ry’s biggest—and most dan­ger­ous—ideas”; “‘It was qua­si­-re­li­gious’: the great self­-es­teem con”
• “Lithium in Drink­ing Water and Inci­dence of Sui­cide: A Nation­wide Indi­vid­u­al-Level Cohort Study with 22 Years of Fol­low-Up”, Knud­sen et al 2017 (a major blow to the lithium hypoth­e­sis)
• “Where do hypothe­ses come from?”, Das­gupta et al 2017
• “How To Fall To Your Death And Live To Tell The Tale”
• “My déjà vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more”

Tech­nol­o­gy:

• “Com­pu­ta­tional Com­plex­ity of Air Travel Plan­ning”, De Mar­cken 2003 / ITA Soft­ware (Air­line ticket search is not just NP-hard or worse, but unde­cid­able.)
• “Infor­ma­tion Leak­age from Opti­cal Ema­na­tions”, Loughry & Umphress 2002
• “Google-Wide Pro­fil­ing: A Con­tin­u­ous Pro­fil­ing Infra­struc­ture for Data Cen­ters”, Ren et al 2010 (“…GWP pro­files revealed that the zlib library accounted for nearly 5% of all CPU cycles con­sumed…”)

Eco­nom­ics:

• “Prop­erty Is Another Name for Monopoly: Facil­i­tat­ing Effi­cient Bar­gain­ing with Par­tial Com­mon Own­er­ship of Spec­trum, Cor­po­ra­tions, and Land”, Pos­ner & Weyl 2016
• “The Per­fect Heist: Recipes from Around the World”, Lafleur et al 2014

Film/TV

Live-ac­tion:

• L.A. Con­fi­den­tial (one of the best noir films; Exley is par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing as nei­ther hero nor anti-hero)
• All About Eve (review)
• Amy (2015) (review)
• 8 1⁄2 (a lame waste of time; not remotely funny nor insight­ful nor ren­dered suf­fi­ciently inter­est­ing by the now-ex­otic set­ting of 1960s Catholic Italy, as the mak­ing of 8 1⁄2 is Fellini’s excuse for mak­ing 8 1⁄2 in a third-rate break­ing-the-­fourth-wall exer­cise)
• Annie Hall (a few one-­lin­ers aside, Woody Allen’s neu­rotic humor is unbear­able to watch. It would seem that Allen movies are not for me.)

Music

Touhou:

• “冬中火葬” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]
• “人別離苦” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]
• “廃獄のロア” (Cororo feat. Sara Mat­sumo­to; Edis revir -River­side vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
• “揺籃曲 -Pure Japan­ese Ver.-” (Cororo feat. Sara Mat­sumo­to; Edis revir -River­side vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
• “Aisya -ye ru amma-” (Cororo feat. Sara Mat­sumo­to; Edis revir -River­side vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]

Dou­jin:

• “Kemono Friends BGM” (Kou Ogata; {2017}) [Celtic]