October 2017 gwern.net newsletter with links on heritability, AlphaGo Zero, peer review, gifted-and-talented; 1 book & 1 movie review.
2017-09-08–2021-01-04
finished
certainty: log
importance: 0
This is the October 2017 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, September 2017 (archives). This is a summary of the revision-history RSS feed, overlapping with my Changelog & /
Writings
- On the history of the tank/
neural-net urban legend - fulltexted most of the Arthur Jensen bibliography by tracking down and jailbreaking/
scanning ~153 papers/ books/ magazines/ encyclopedia-articles
Media
Links
genetics:
Everything Is Heritable:
- “Genome-wide meta-analysis associates HLA-DQA1/
DRB1 and LPA and lifestyle factors with human longevity” , Joshi et al 2017; “Biological Insights Into Muscular Strength: Genetic Findings in the UK Biobank”, Tikkanen et al 2017 - “Genome-wide association study of social relationship satisfaction: loci and correlations with psychiatric conditions”, Warrier et al 2017
- “CNV-association meta-analysis in 191,161 European adults reveals new loci associated with anthropometric traits”, Macé et al 2017 (Some interestingly large effects here.)
- “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Household Financial Distress”, Xu et al 2017
- “The molecular genetics of participation in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children”, Taylor et al 2017 (GWASes show everything is heritable, including participating in GWASes)
- “‘Obedience to traditional authority’: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness”, Ludeke et al 2013; “Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement”, Dawes et al 2015
- One interesting bit of behavioral genetics: identical twin correlations are sometimes argued to be just because of how other people treat them based on their appearance. But we know this is false because of “look-alikes”: totally unrelated people who happen to look identical, nevertheless, are no more similar on personality or other measures. Nancy Segal has identified a number of look-alikes and discusses how they differ dramatically from identical twins: background/
history , Segal 2013a, Segal et al 2013b - “Heritability of schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum based on the nationwide Danish Twin Register”, Hilker et al 2017 (Measurement error due to censoring biases schizophrenia heritability down by 5%)
- “Cross-sectional association between soda consumption and BMI in a community-based sample of twins”, Eney et al 2017 (Correlation is not causation: Fat people are more likely to drink soda, but the fatter twin in a pair is not more likely to drink soda; so soda/
obesity appears to be largely confounded, perhaps by more generic eating or exercise tendencies) - “Brain structure mediates the association between height and cognitive ability”, Vuoksimaa et al 2017
- “Why are children in the same family so different from one another?”, Plomin & Daniels 1987 -“Genetic influences on measures of the environment: a systematic review”, Kendler & Baker 2006 (The environment is genetic too.)
- “Genome-wide meta-analysis associates HLA-DQA1/
Engineering:
AI:
“Mastering The Game of Go without Human Knowledge”, Silver et al 2017:
Detailed commentary; the final hurrah of the now-closed DM research programme, AlphaGo Zero is trained from scratch without any human data using pure self-play to truly superhuman levels of Go play, far surpassing AlphaGo Sedol, using an order of magnitude less computing power; the key ingredient appears to be a breakthrough in stabilizing self-play, by training the NN’s value estimates, each move, towards the value estimates as finetuned by a MCTS search. This provides improved estimates, but also (somehow?) manages to prevent catastrophic forgetting and provides incredibly stable self-play training. It may be clearer to read the independent invention of “Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search”, Anthony et al 2017, as well as “Learning Generalized Reactive Policies using Deep Neural Networks”, Groshev et al 2017. Self-play has been underused in deep RL because it is so hard to stabilize despite being a seductively general technique, and despite the limitation of requiring a MCTS-able setting, I think this may turn out to be a big breakthrough for deep RL, and perhaps in the long run more important than the original AlphaGo paper.
AlphaGo Zero: ‘just stack moar layers lol!’ “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation”, Karras et al 2017 (source; video; GANs generating photorealistic 1024x1024px faces, better than StackGAN++ This jumps right over the uncanny valley to, for many of these, I can no longer tell the difference)
“PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing”, Hitaj et al 2017 (GANs will be much slower than the rule-based or Markov chain generators currently used, but that matters less for long passwords where you can’t hope to brute force them normally and you rely on good guessing. Passwords were already dead, and this emphasizes it.)
“Where’s Waldo, Terminator Edition” (finding Waldo in large images using image segmentation CNNs)
“What does a convolutional neural network recognize in the moon?”, Shoji 2017
How Buzzfeed used random forests & airplane data to find domestic US spy planes
Statistics/
- “‘Peer review’ is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?”; “Peer Review: The end of an error?”
- “Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial”, Thompson et al 2017 (media)
- “The Number Of Killings In Southern Rural Norway, 1300–1569”, Kadane & Næshagen 2013 (Unusual applications of capture-recapture statistics.)
Politics/
- “Randomized Controlled Trial of the Metropolitan Police Department Body-Worn Camera Program”/
“A Big Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations” (A large pre-registered randomized trial of police bodycams shows tiny effects at best despite promising initial results in other places & experiments. Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero”; the Stainless Steel Law: “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”) - “The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics”
- “Hating on Herbert Hoover: He was a brilliant manager, a wizard of logistics, and an extraordinarily effective humanitarian. How come we remember him as a failure?”
- “The Creative Personality and the Ideal Pupil”, Torrance 1969
Psychology/
“The limitations of the backfire effect”, Haglin 2017 (the “backfire effect” apparently picks up its 4th failure to replicate.)
“Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not?”, Kennedy & Read 2017
“Multiplying 10-digit numbers using Flickr: The power of recognition memory”, Drucker 2010
“Promethea Unbound” (The strange and unfortunate saga of a child prodigy; also illustrates the curse of curiosity, lack of ambition, and ‘culture of poverty’.)
“Giftedness and Genius: Crucial Differences”, Jensen 1996
“Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels”, Annalyn et al 2017 (If you are wondering—for signaling purposes—which genres correlate the most with the generally perceived as “healthy” personality dimensions (low Neuroticism, high Agreeableness/
Extraversion/ Openness/ Conscientiousness), that would seem to be: religion, philosophy, and self-help; and conversely, the worst genres are: paranormal/ comics/ drama/ memoir/ graphic novels/ young adult/ manga—especially manga.) “Lessons from Bar Fight Litigation” (eye witness unreliability)
“On The Rheology of Cats”, Fardin 2014 (a 2017 Ig Nobel Prize winner; demonstrates cats can be modeled as complex fluids, solids, and gases—see also “How Many Liters is Liquid Maru?” [9.2l]).
Another winner is “Is That Me or My Twin? Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins”, Martini et al 2015.
Economics:
- “Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis”, Nutt et al 2010
- “How the Elderly Lose Their Rights: Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent—and reap a profit from it”
- “Lending without creditor rights, collateral, or reputation—The ‘trusted-assistant’ loan in 19th century China”, Miao et al 2017 (A most peculiar evolved institution.)
- The subsidization, invention, and marketing of “Bailey’s Irish Cream”
Philosophy:
- “Gender and Philosophical Intuition”, Buckwalter & Stich 2013
Misc:
Books
Nonfiction:
- Artificial Life, Levy
- Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, Dobzhansky 1973
Fiction:
- Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen monk Shōtetsu, Steven D. Carter
- Twig, Wildbow (better than Pact, focusing on small-group dynamics, but I found the ultimately political arc less interesting than the worldbuilding which is mostly discarded halfway through, a number of subplots whimpering out, and Wildbow succumbs to pacing problems halfway again like in Pact & Worm, with several long dull arcs which badly need to be cut down to size)
Film/TV
Live-action:
Music
Touhou:
- “Dreaming Again -T.V. Million Glittering Stars Remix” (Tim Vegas feat. SYO; Double Key {C83}) [electropop]
Link Bibliography
Bibliography of page links in reading order (with annotations when available):
“September 2017 News”, (2017-08-16):
September 2017 gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics (GWAS, engineering, evolution), intelligence, AI, metformin, lithium; 2 book and 6 movie reviews
“Gwern.net newsletter archives”, (2013-12-01):
Newsletter tag: archive of all issues back to 2013 for the gwern.net newsletter (monthly updates, which will include summaries of projects I’ve worked on that month (the same as the changelog), collations of links or discussions from my subreddit, and book/movie reviews.)
“Changelog”, (2013-09-15):
This page is a changelog for Gwern.net: a monthly reverse chronological list of recent major writings/
changes/ additions. Following my writing can be a little difficult because it is often so incremental. So every month, in addition to my regular /
r/ subreddit submissions, I write up reasonably-interesting changes and send it out to the mailing list in addition to a compilation of links & reviews (archives).Gwern “/r/gwern subreddit”, (2018-10-01):
A subreddit for posting links of interest and also for announcing updates to gwern.net (which can be used as a RSS feed). Submissions are categorized similar to the monthly newsletter and typically will be collated there.
“The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend”, (2011-09-20):
A cautionary tale in artificial intelligence tells about researchers training an neural network (NN) to detect tanks in photographs, succeeding, only to realize the photographs had been collected under specific conditions for tanks/
non-tanks and the NN had learned something useless like time of day. This story is often told to warn about the limits of algorithms and importance of data collection to avoid “dataset bias”/ “data leakage” where the collected data can be solved using algorithms that do not generalize to the true data distribution, but the tank story is usually never sourced. I collate many extent versions dating back a quarter of a century to 1992 along with two NN-related anecdotes from the 1960s; their contradictions & details indicate a classic “urban legend”, with a probable origin in a speculative question in the 1960s by Edward Fredkin at an AI conference about some early NN research, which was subsequently classified & never followed up on.
I suggest that dataset bias is real but exaggerated by the tank story, giving a misleading indication of risks from deep learning and that it would be better to not repeat it but use real examples of dataset bias and focus on larger-scale risks like AI systems optimizing for wrong utility functions.
“Genome-wide meta-analysis associates HLA-DQA1/DRB1 and LPA and lifestyle factors with human longevity”, (2017-10-13):
Genomic analysis of longevity offers the potential to illuminate the biology of human aging. Here, using genome-wide association meta-analysis of 606,059 parents’ survival, we discover two regions associated with longevity (HLA-DQA1/DRB1 and LPA). We also validate previous suggestions that APOE, CHRNA3/5, CDKN2A/B, SH2B3 and FOXO3A influence longevity. Next we show that giving up smoking, educational attainment, openness to new experience and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels are most positively genetically correlated with lifespan while susceptibility to coronary artery disease (CAD), cigarettes smoked per day, lung cancer, insulin resistance and body fat are most negatively correlated. We suggest that the effect of education on lifespan is principally mediated through smoking while the effect of obesity appears to act via CAD. Using instrumental variables, we suggest that an increase of one body mass index unit reduces lifespan by 7 months while 1 year of education adds 11 months to expected lifespan.
“Biological Insights Into Muscular Strength: Genetic Findings in the UK Biobank”, (2017-10-10):
Background: Hand grip strength, a simple indicator of muscular strength, has been associated with a range of health conditions, including fractures, disability, cardiovascular disease and premature death risk. Twin studies have suggested a high (50-60%) heritability, but genetic determinants are largely unknown.
Aims
In this study, our aim was to study genetic variation associated with muscular strength in a large sample of 334,925 individuals of European descent from the UK Biobank, and to evaluate shared genetic aetiology with and causal effects of grip strength on physical and cognitive health.
Methods and Results
In our discovery analysis of 223,315 individuals, we identified 101 loci associated with grip strength at genome-wide significance (P<5×10−8). Of these, 64 were associated (P<0.01 and consistent direction) also in the replication dataset (n = 111,610). Many of the lead SNPs were located in or near genes known to have a function in developmental disorders (FTO, SLC39A8, TFAP2B, TGFA, CELF1, TCF4, BDNF, FOXP1, KIF1B, ANTXR2), and one of the most significant genes based on a gene-based analysis (ATP2A1) encodes SERCA1, the critical enzyme in calcium uptake to the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which plays a major role in muscle contraction and relaxation. Further, we demonstrated a significant enrichment of gene expression in brain-related transcripts among grip strength associations. Finally, we observed inverse genetic correlations of grip strength with cardiometabolic traits, and positive correlation with parents’ age of death and education; and showed that grip strength was causally related to fitness, physical activity and other indicators of frailty, including cognitive performance scores.
Conclusion: In our study of over 330,000 individuals from the general population, the genetic findings for hand grip strength suggest an important role of the central nervous system in strength performance. Further, our results indicate that maintaining good muscular strength is important for physical and cognitive performance and healthy aging.
“Genome-wide association study of social relationship satisfaction: significant loci and correlations with psychiatric conditions”, (2017-10-05):
Dissatisfaction in social relationships is reported widely across many psychiatric conditions. We investigated the genetic architecture of family relationship satisfaction and friendship satisfaction in the UK Biobank. We leveraged the high genetic correlation between the two phenotypes (rg = 0.87±0.03; p < 2.2×10-16) to conduct multi-trait analysis of Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) (Neffective family = 164,112; Neffective friendship = 158,116). We identified two genome-wide significant associations for both the phenotypes: rs1483617 on chromosome 3 and rs2189373 on chromosome 6, a region previously implicated in schizophrenia. eQTL and chromosome conformation capture in neural tissues prioritizes several genes including NLGN1. Gene-based association studies identified several significant genes, with highest expression in brain tissues. Genetic correlation analysis identified significant negative correlations for multiple psychiatric conditions including highly significant negative correlation with cross-psychiatric disorder GWAS, underscoring the central role of social relationship dissatisfaction in psychiatric diagnosis. The two phenotypes were enriched for genes that are loss of function intolerant. Both phenotypes had modest, significant additive SNP heritability of approximately 6%. Our results underscore the central role of social relationship satisfaction in mental health and identify genes and tissues associated with it.
“CNV-association meta-analysis in 191,161 European adults reveals new loci associated with anthropometric traits”, (2017-09-29):
There are few examples of robust associations between rare copy number variants (CNVs) and complex continuous human traits. Here we present a large-scale CNV association meta-analysis on anthropometric traits in up to 191,161 adult samples from 26 cohorts. The study reveals five CNV associations at 1q21.1, 3q29, 7q11.23, 11p14.2, and 18q21.32 and confirms two known loci at 16p11.2 and 22q11.21, implicating at least one anthropometric trait. The discovered CNVs are recurrent and rare (0.01–0.2%), with large effects on height (>2.4 cm), weight (>5 kg), and body mass index (BMI) (>3.5 kg/m2). Burden analysis shows a 0.41 cm decrease in height, a 0.003 increase in waist-to-hip ratio and increase in BMI by 0.14 kg/m2 for each Mb of total deletion burden (p = 2.5 × 10−10, 6.0 × 10−5, and 2.9 × 10−3). Our study provides evidence that the same genes (e.g., MC4R, FIBIN, and FMO5) harbor both common and rare variants affecting body size and that anthropometric traits share genetic loci with developmental and psychiatric disorders.
“Genetic and Environmental Influences on Household Financial Distress”, (2017-01-08):
Heterogeneity of household financial outcomes emerges from various individual and environmental factors, including personality, cognitive ability, and socioeconomic status (SES), among others. Using a genetically informative data set, we decompose the variation in financial management behavior into genetic, shared environmental and non-shared environmental factors. We find that about half of the variation in financial distress is genetically influenced, and personality and cognitive ability are associated with financial distress through genetic and within-family pathways. Moreover, the genetic influences of financial distress are highest at the extremes of SES, which in part can be explained by neuroticism and cognitive ability being more important predictors of financial distress at low and high levels of SES, respectively.
“The molecular genetics of participation in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children”, (2017-10-20):
Background: It is often assumed that selection (including participation and dropout) does not represent an important source of bias in genetic studies. However, there is little evidence to date on the effect of genetic factors on participation.
Methods: Using data on mothers (n = 7,486) and children (n = 7,508) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, we 1) examined the association of polygenic risk scores for a range of socio-demographic, lifestyle characteristics and health conditions related to continued participation, 2) investigated whether associations of polygenic scores with body mass index (BMI; derived from self-reported weight and height) and self-reported smoking differed in the largest sample with genetic data and a sub-sample who participated in a recent follow-up and 3) determined the proportion of variation in participation explained by common genetic variants using genome-wide data.
Results: We found evidence that polygenic scores for higher education, agreeableness and openness were associated with higher participation and polygenic scores for smoking initiation, higher BMI, neuroticism, schizophrenia, ADHD and depression were associated with lower participation. Associations between the polygenic score for education and self-reported smoking differed between the largest sample with genetic data (OR for ever smoking per SD increase in polygenic score:0.85, 95% CI:0.81,0.89) and sub-sample (OR:0.95, 95% CI:0.88,1.02). In genome-wide analysis, single nucleotide polymorphism based heritability explained 17-31% of variability in participation.
Conclusion: Genetic association studies, including Mendelian randomization, can be biased by selection, including loss to follow-up. Genetic risk for dropout should be considered in all analyses of studies with selective participation.
http:/
/ rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ content/ 370/ 1683/ 20150015 /
docs/ genetics/ heritable/ 2017-segal-twinmythconceptions-ch12.pdf https:/
/ www.gwern.net/ docs/ genetics/ heritable/ 2013-segal-1.pdf https:/
/ www.gwern.net/ docs/ genetics/ heritable/ 2013-segal-2.pdf “Censoring (statistics)”, (2020-12-22):
In statistics, censoring is a condition in which the value of a measurement or observation is only partially known.
https:/
/ nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/ articles/ 10.1186/ s12937-017-0269-y “Brain structure mediates the association between height and cognitive ability”, (2017-09-01):
Height and general cognitive ability (GCA) are positively associated, but the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are unclear. We used a sample of 515 middle-aged male twins with structural magnetic resonance imaging data to study if the association between height and cognitive ability is mediated by cortical size. We used genetically, ontogenetically and phylogenetically distinct cortical metrics of cortical surface area (SA) and cortical thickness (CT). Our results indicate that the well-replicated height-GCA association is accounted for by individual differences in total cortical SA (highly heritable metric related to global brain size), and not mean CT, and that the genetic association between SA and GCA underlies the phenotypic height-GCA relationship.
https:/
/ pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ 0717/ 7feac98fc3e751e34db14493bf159ade56d0.pdf https:/
/ www.bloomberg.com/ news/ articles/ 2017-08-07/ horse-clones-start-heading-to-the-races “Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge”, (2017-10-19):
A long-standing goal of artificial intelligence is an algorithm that learns, tabula rasa, superhuman proficiency in challenging domains. Recently, AlphaGo became the first program to defeat a world champion in the game of Go. The tree search in AlphaGo evaluated positions and selected moves using deep neural networks. These neural networks were trained by supervised learning from human expert moves, and by reinforcement learning from self-play. Here we introduce an algorithm based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance or domain knowledge beyond game rules. AlphaGo becomes its own teacher: a neural network is trained to predict AlphaGo’s own move selections and also the winner of AlphaGo’s games. This neural network improves the strength of the tree search, resulting in higher quality move selection and stronger self-play in the next iteration. Starting tabula rasa, our new program AlphaGo Zero achieved superhuman performance, winning 100–0 against the previously published, champion-defeating AlphaGo.
“Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search”, (2017-05-23):
Sequential decision making problems, such as structured prediction, robotic control, and game playing, require a combination of planning policies and generalisation of those plans. In this paper, we present Expert Iteration (ExIt), a novel reinforcement learning algorithm which decomposes the problem into separate planning and generalisation tasks. Planning new policies is performed by tree search, while a deep neural network generalises those plans. Subsequently, tree search is improved by using the neural network policy to guide search, increasing the strength of new plans. In contrast, standard deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms rely on a neural network not only to generalise plans, but to discover them too. We show that ExIt outperforms REINFORCE for training a neural network to play the board game Hex, and our final tree search agent, trained tabula rasa, defeats MoHex 1.0, the most recent Olympiad Champion player to be publicly released.
“Learning Generalized Reactive Policies using Deep Neural Networks”, (2017-08-24):
We present a new approach to learning for planning, where knowledge acquired while solving a given set of planning problems is used to plan faster in related, but new problem instances. We show that a deep neural network can be used to learn and represent a generalized reactive policy (GRP) that maps a problem instance and a state to an action, and that the learned GRPs efficiently solve large classes of challenging problem instances. In contrast to prior efforts in this direction, our approach significantly reduces the dependence of learning on handcrafted domain knowledge or feature selection. Instead, the GRP is trained from scratch using a set of successful execution traces. We show that our approach can also be used to automatically learn a heuristic function that can be used in directed search algorithms. We evaluate our approach using an extensive suite of experiments on two challenging planning problem domains and show that our approach facilitates learning complex decision making policies and powerful heuristic functions with minimal human input. Videos of our results are available at goo.gl/Hpy4e3.
“Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation”, (2017-10-27):
We describe a new training methodology for generative adversarial networks. The key idea is to grow both the generator and discriminator progressively: starting from a low resolution, we add new layers that model increasingly fine details as training progresses. This both speeds the training up and greatly stabilizes it, allowing us to produce images of unprecedented quality, e.g., CelebA images at 1024^2. We also propose a simple way to increase the variation in generated images, and achieve a record inception score of 8.80 in unsupervised CIFAR10. Additionally, we describe several implementation details that are important for discouraging unhealthy competition between the generator and discriminator. Finally, we suggest a new metric for evaluating GAN results, both in terms of image quality and variation. As an additional contribution, we construct a higher-quality version of the CelebA dataset.
“StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks”, (2017-10-19):
Although Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable success in various tasks, they still face challenges in generating high quality images. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) aiming at generating high-resolution photo-realistic images. First, we propose a two-stage generative adversarial network architecture, StackGAN-v1, for text-to-image synthesis. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on given text description, yielding low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. Second, an advanced multi-stage generative adversarial network architecture, StackGAN-v2, is proposed for both conditional and unconditional generative tasks. Our StackGAN-v2 consists of multiple generators and discriminators in a tree-like structure; images at multiple scales corresponding to the same scene are generated from different branches of the tree. StackGAN-v2 shows more stable training behavior than StackGAN-v1 by jointly approximating multiple distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed stacked generative adversarial networks significantly outperform other state-of-the-art methods in generating photo-realistic images.
“PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing”, (2017-09-01):
State-of-the-art password guessing tools, such as HashCat and John the Ripper, enable users to check billions of passwords per second against password hashes. In addition to performing straightforward dictionary attacks, these tools can expand password dictionaries using password generation rules, such as concatenation of words (e.g., "password123456") and leet speak (e.g., "password" becomes "p4s5w0rd"). Although these rules work well in practice, expanding them to model further passwords is a laborious task that requires specialized expertise. To address this issue, in this paper we introduce PassGAN, a novel approach that replaces human-generated password rules with theory-grounded machine learning algorithms. Instead of relying on manual password analysis, PassGAN uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to autonomously learn the distribution of real passwords from actual password leaks, and to generate high-quality password guesses. Our experiments show that this approach is very promising. When we evaluated PassGAN on two large password datasets, we were able to surpass rule-based and state-of-the-art machine learning password guessing tools. However, in contrast with the other tools, PassGAN achieved this result without any a-priori knowledge on passwords or common password structures. Additionally, when we combined the output of PassGAN with the output of HashCat, we were able to match 51 passwords than with HashCat alone. This is remarkable, because it shows that PassGAN can autonomously extract a considerable number of password properties that current state-of-the art rules do not encode.
https:/
/ hackernoon.com/ wheres-waldo-terminator-edition-8b3bd0805741 “What does a convolutional neural network recognize in the moon?”, (2017-08-18):
Many people see a human face or animals in the pattern of the maria on the moon. Although the pattern corresponds to the actual variation in composition of the lunar surface, the culture and environment of each society influence the recognition of these objects (i.e., symbols) as specific entities. In contrast, a convolutional neural network (CNN) recognizes objects from characteristic shapes in a training data set. Using CNN, this study evaluates the probabilities of the pattern of lunar maria categorized into the shape of a crab, a lion and a hare. If Mare Frigoris (a dark band on the moon) is included in the lunar image, the lion is recognized. However, in an image without Mare Frigoris, the hare has the highest probability of recognition. Thus, the recognition of objects similar to the lunar pattern depends on which part of the lunar maria is taken into account. In human recognition, before we find similarities between the lunar maria and objects such as animals, we may be persuaded in advance to see a particular image from our culture and environment and then adjust the lunar pattern to the shape of the imagined object.
https:/
/ sappingattention.blogspot.com/ 2017/ 09/ peer-review-is-younger-than-you-think.html https:/
/ www.the-tls.co.uk/ articles/ public/ the-end-of-an-error-peer-review/ https:/
/ pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ 437a/ 902934056604855cde3dcf8dff959ed29b68.pdf http:/
/ www.nature.com/ news/ wikipedia-shapes-language-in-science-papers-1.22656 https:/
/ projecteuclid.org/ download/ pdfview_1/ euclid.aoas/ 1372338470 https:/
/ www.nytimes.com/ 2017/ 10/ 20/ upshot/ a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html “The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules”, (2012-09-18):
Problems with social experiments and evaluating them, loopholes, causes, and suggestions; non-experimental methods systematically deliver false results, as most interventions fail or have small effects.
https:/
/ www.newyorker.com/ magazine/ 2017/ 10/ 23/ hating-on-herbert-hoover http:/
/ journals.sagepub.com/ doi/ full/ 10.1177/ 2053168017716547 http:/
/ rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ content/ 284/ 1851/ 20162562 “Multiplying 10-digit numbers using Flickr: The power of recognition memory”, (2011):
In this informal article, I’ll describe the “recognition method”—a simple, powerful technique for memorization and mental calculation. Compared to traditional memorization techniques, which use elaborate encoding and visualization processes [1], the recognition method is easy to learn and requires relatively little effort…The method works: using it, I was able to mentally multiply two random 10-digit numbers, by the usual grade-school algorithm, on my first attempt! I have a normal, untrained memory, and the task would have been impossible by a direct approach. (I can’t claim I was speedy: I worked slowly and carefully, using about 7 hours plus rest breaks. I practiced twice with 5-digit numbers beforehand.)
…It turns out that ordinary people are incredibly good at this task [recognizing whether a photograph has been seen before]. In one of the most widely-cited studies on recognition memory, Standing [2] showed participants an epic 10,000 photographs over the course of 5 days, with 5 seconds’ exposure per image. He then tested their familiarity, essentially as described above. The participants showed an 83% success rate, suggesting that they had become familiar with about 6,600 images during their ordeal. Other volunteers, trained on a smaller collection of 1,000 images selected for vividness, had a 94% success rate.
https:/
/ magazine.atavist.com/ promethea-unbound-child-genius-montana http:/
/ blogs.sciencemag.org/ pipeline/ archives/ 2017/ 10/ 04/ a-nobel-for-cryo-em “Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels”, (2017-07-20):
Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as ’tags’, created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences.
http:/
/ ordinary-gentlemen.com/ 2014/ 01/ 21/ lessons-from-bar-fight-litigation/ “List of Ig Nobel Prize winners”, (2020-12-22):
This is a list of Ig Nobel Prize winners from 1991 to the present day.
“Ig Nobel Prize”, (2020-12-28):
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research, its stated aim being to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and the word ignoble.
“Rheology”, (2020-12-22):
Rheology is the study of the flow of matter, primarily in a liquid or gas state, but also as "soft solids" or solids under conditions in which they respond with plastic flow rather than deforming elastically in response to an applied force. Rheology is a branch of physics, and it is the science that deals with the deformation and flow of materials, both solids and liquids.
“Is That Me or My Twin? Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins”, (2015-01-27):
Despite the increasing interest in twin studies and the stunning amount of research on face recognition, the ability of adult identical twins to discriminate their own faces from those of their co-twins has been scarcely investigated. One’s own face is the most distinctive feature of the bodily self, and people typically show a clear advantage in recognizing their own face even more than other very familiar identities. Given the very high level of resemblance of their faces, monozygotic twins represent a unique model for exploring self-face processing.
Herein we examined the ability of monozygotic twins to distinguish their own face from the face of their co-twin and of a highly familiar individual. Results show that twins equally recognize their own face and their twin’s face. This lack of self-face advantage was negatively predicted by how much they felt physically similar to their co-twin and by their anxious or avoidant attachment style.
We speculate that in monozygotic twins, the visual representation of the self-face overlaps with that of the co-twin. Thus, to distinguish the self from the co-twin, monozygotic twins have to rely much more than control participants on the multisensory integration processes upon which the sense of bodily self is based. Moreover, in keeping with the notion that attachment style influences perception of self and significant others, we propose that the observed self/co-twin confusion may depend upon insecure attachment.
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/ www.newyorker.com/ magazine/ 2017/ 10/ 09/ how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights https:/
/ helda.helsinki.fi/ bof/ bitstream/ handle/ 123456789/ 14908/ dp1317.pdf https:/
/ www.irishtimes.com/ culture/ books/ in-1973-i-invented-a-girly-drink-called-baileys-1.3240945 /
docs/ genetics/ heritable/ 1973-dobzhansky-geneticdiversityandhumanequality.pdf “Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen Monk Shōtetsu”, (1997):
[This volume presents translations of over 200 poems by Shōtetsu, who is generally considered to be the last great poet of the uta form. Includes an introduction, a glossary of important names and places and a list of sources of the poems.]
The Zen monk Shōtetsu (1381–1459) suffered several rather serious misfortunes in his life: he lost all the poems of his first thirty years—more than 30,000 of them—in a fire; his estate revenues were confiscated by an angry shogun; and rivals refused to allow his work to appear in the only imperially commissioned poetry anthology of his time. Undeterred by these obstacles, he still managed to make a living from his poetry and won recognition as a true master, widely considered to be the last great poet of the classical uta, or waka, tradition. Shōtetsu viewed his poetry as both a professional and religious calling, and his extraordinarily prolific corpus comprised more than 11,000 poems—the single largest body of work in the Japanese canon.
The first major collection of Shōtetsu's work in English, Unforgotten Dreams presents beautifully rendered translations of more than two hundred poems. The book opens with Steven Carter's generous introduction on Shōtetsu's life and work and his significance in Japanese literature, and includes a glossary of important names and places and a list of sources of the poems. Revealing as never before the enduring creative spirit of one of Japan's greatest poets, this fine collection fills a major gap in the English translations of medieval Japanese literature.
“Blade Runner 2049”, (2020-12-28):
Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 American neo-noir science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. A sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner, the film stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, with Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, Dave Bautista, and Jared Leto in supporting roles. Ford and Edward James Olmos reprise their roles from the original. Gosling plays K, a Nexus-9 replicant "blade runner" who uncovers a secret that threatens to destabilize society and the course of civilization.
“Gwern.net newsletter (Substack subscription page)”, (2013-12-01):
Subscription page for the monthly gwern.net newsletter. There are monthly updates, which will include summaries of projects I’ve worked on that month (the same as the changelog), collations of links or discussions from my subreddit, and book/movie reviews. You can also browse the archives since December 2013.
“Simple statistical gradient–following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning”, (1992):
This article presents a general class of associative reinforcement learning algorithms for connectionist networks containing stochastic units. These algorithms, called REINFORCE algorithms, are shown to make weight adjustments in a direction that lies along the gradient of expected reinforcement in both immediate-reinforcement tasks and certain limited forms of delayed-reinforcement tasks, and they do this without explicitly computing gradient estimates or even storing information from which such estimates could be computed. Specific examples of such algorithms are presented, some of which bear a close relationship to certain existing algorithms while others are novel but potentially interesting in their own right. Also given are results that show how such algorithms can be naturally integrated with backpropagation. We close with a brief discussion of a number of additional issues surrounding the use of such algorithms, including what is known about their limiting behaviors as well as further considerations that might be used to help develop similar but potentially more powerful reinforcement learning algorithms.
“Hex (board game)”, (2020-12-27):
Hex is a two player abstract strategy board game in which players attempt to connect opposite sides of a hexagonal board. Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and independently by John Nash in 1948.
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/ www.sas.upenn.edu/ psych/ rust-lab/ publications/ standing_73.pdf