Links

Genetics:

• everything is heritable:

  • Genetic Endowments and Wealth Inequality, Barth et al 2018 (Lee et al 2018 EDU/IQ PGS predicts education, longevity, retirement wealth, stock investments, risk-taking, and rationality)
  • The personal and clinical utility of polygenic risk scores, Torkamani et al 2018; the value of accurate PGSes - can predict unnecessary chemotherapy in 70% of breast cancer patients: Adjuvant Chemotherapy Guided by a 21-Gene Expression Assay in Breast Cancer, Sparano et al 2018
  • GWAS for risk taking propensity indicates shared pathways with body mass index, Clifton et al 2018
  • Frequency and distribution of 152 Mendelian genetic disease variants in over 100,000 mixed breed and purebred dogs, Donner et al 2018 (consumer dog genetics going impressively well)
  • The genetic architecture of hair colour in the UK population, Morgan et al 2018; GWAS reveals sex-specific genetic architecture of facial attractiveness, Hu et al 2018
  • GWAS meta-analysis highlights light-induced signaling as a driver for refractive error, Tedja et al 2018; Education and myopia: assessing the direction of causality by Mendelian randomisation, Mountjoy et al 2018 (genetic support for the bright-light theory of myopia? The various enrichments don’t seem consistent with near work or other theories of nearsightedness.)
  • wMT-GWAS: Improving genetic prediction by leveraging genetic correlations among human diseases and traits, Maier et al 2018
  • 30 loci identified for heart rate response to exercise and recovery implicate autonomic nervous system, Ramírez et al 2018 (calories in, calories out?)
  • Genetic influence on social outcomes during and after the Soviet era in Estonia, Rimfeld et al 2018 (a nice counterpoint to Okbay et al 2016: de-Communization increased meritocracy and EA PGS predictive power went up, while Swedish school mandating more public schooling for everyone made EA PGS predictive power go down.)
  • The contribution of common genetic risk variants for ADHD to a general factor of childhood psychopathology, Brikell et al 2018; Genetics of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Faraone & Larsson 2018 review
  • Personality and Genetic Associations With Military Service, Miles & Haider-Markel 2018
  • Grandma’s trauma - a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans, Kevin Mitchell
  • Do Jobs Run in Families? (Perhaps one day Facebook will produce some pedigree analyses nailing down heritability of all measured traits.)
  • Consumer whole-genome sequencing (30x) now down to $500
  • Re-identification of genomic data using long range familial searches, Erlich et al 2018 (we leveraged genomic data of 600,000 individuals tested with consumer genomics to investigate the power of such long-range familial searches. We project that half of the searches with European-descent individuals will result with a third cousin or closer match)
  • Behaviour Genetic Frameworks of Causal Reasoning for Personality Psychology, Briley et al 2018 (review)

• recent evolution:

  • Evidence of a nonadaptive buildup of mutational load in human populations over the past 40,000 years, Aris-Brosou 2018
  • Mega-analysis of 31,396 individuals from 6 countries uncovers strong gene-environment interaction for human fertility, Tropf et al 2016
  • Quantification of genetic components of population differentiation in UK Biobank traits reveals signals of polygenic selection, Liu et al 2018
  • Canine transmissible venereal tumor genome reveals ancient introgression from coyotes to arctic sled dogs, Wang et al 2018 (transmissible cancer is weird)
  • Racial differences: Study of short Peruvians reveals new gene with a major impact on height (Admixture study identifies FBN1 gene reducing height by 2-4cm in Peruvians, possibly selected for.)
  • Where Female Elephants Without Tusks Roam - and Poachers Stay Away: South Africa’s Addo elephant park has few females with tusks, a trait that has died off because of hunting but also keeps poachers away (recent evolution of tusklessness as a sex-linked trait due to selection from poaching)

• engineering:

  • Besting Johnny Appleseed: With a few tricks, and a lot of patience, fruit geneticists are undoing the work of an American legend, Kean 2010 (genomic selection; cryogenic storage; accelerated maturation; and intensified environments for accurate measurement)

AI:

• OpenAI progress on 5x5 DoTA: amateur human level (commentary; Human amateur level 5x5 DoTA using nothing but simple PPO LSTMs and a lot of computing power to power self-play over 19 days. No need for anything fancy for ultra-long-range temporal learning, just LSTMs are enough memory to learn strategizing. Deep learning scales. More concerningly: they note that their code can reach human levels even with crashing bugs…)
• One-Shot Imitation from Watching Videos: imitation learning + MAML, Yu & Finn
• Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation (Kalashnikov et al 2018: 96% grasping success; generalizing DQN to continuous robot actions by biting the bullet of blackbox optimizing over Q-values to get next-action choices)
• Ultra-low bit-rate audio for tiny podcasts with Codec2 and WaveNet decoders (1 hour = 1MB)
• The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic: Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself (the disaster that derailed early NN research)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• Two Cheers For Corporate Experimentation: The A/B Illusion And The Virtues Of Data-Driven Innovation, Meyer 2015 (excerpts)
• The Impostor Cell Line That Set Back Breast Cancer Research
• What does it mean to have a low R²? A warning about misleading interpretation (Small r correlation coefficients can still be highly effective for ranking/selection. This is a particularly common illusion in individual differences/genetics discussions.)

Politics/religion:

• Observations on the Puerto Rico death toll (The baseline for this hurricane study is suspicious, and just 3 fewer reported deaths in the survey would’ve made the statistical-significance go away.)
• How the Startup Mentality Failed Kids in San Francisco (We tried to make it work, Brown insisted as we sat in his office. We put kids in uniform, we did everything. He shook his head as if astonished by the outcome.)
• Fads in politics: Up and down with ecology - the issue-attention cycle, Downs 1972; On Anthony Downs’s Up and Down with Ecology: The Issue-Attention Cycle, Gupta & Jenkins-Smith 2015
• Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality, Baumeister & Twenge 2002 (excerpts)

Psychology/biology:

• Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness, Pinto et al 2017 (Non-replication of the classic split-brain consciousness studies)
• Pharmacological cognitive enhancement among non-ADHD individuals - A cross-sectional study in 15 countries, Maier et al 2018 (Modafinil use prevalence & self-reported efficacy in GDS: Figure 2)
• When Children Say They’re Trans: Hormones? Surgery? The choices are fraught - and there are no easy answers
• The case of Kirk Allen - The Jet-Propelled Couch: Part I: The man who traveled through space/Part II: Return to Earth (republished in The Fifty-Minute Hour, Lindner 1955; see also Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch: Cordwainer Smith and Kirk Allen, Elms 2002)
• Association of Efficacy of Resistance Exercise Training With Depressive Symptoms: Meta-analysis and Meta-regression Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials, Gordon et al 2018 (supplement)
• The Devil’s in the g-tails: Deficient letter-shape knowledge and awareness despite massive visual experience, Wong et al 2018 (media; the poverty of perception & mental imagery)
• Nocebo effects with antidepressant clinical drug trial placebos, Reeves et al 2007 (overdosing on placebos)
• Perceived mental health from men’s facial appearance reflects actual mental health, Ward et al 2018
• Fine Water: A Blind Taste Test, Capehart & Berg 2018

• cats:

  • Object play in adult domestic cats: the roles of habituation and disinhibition, Hall et al 2002 (Excerpts/commentary; we’re doing cat toys wrong.)
  • Pinch-induced Behavioral Inhibition (Clipnosis) in Domestic Cats, Pozza et al 2007 (useful tip)
  • The genesis of the cat’s responses to the rat, Kuo 1930; Further study of the behavior of the cat toward the rat, Kuo 1938 (Apparently kittens raised with mice will not attack or eat them - unless they see other cats attacking mice, in which case they turn on the mice.)
  • The Wild Cat: A Highland Gentleman, Frances Pitt 1950 (Pitt’s account of difficulties raising Scottish wild cats & offspring, with cute photos.)

Technology:

• Lessons of Amish Hackers (chapter 10 of Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants 2010)
• BitWhisper: Covert Signaling Channel between Air-Gapped Computers Using Thermal Manipulations, Guri et al 2015 (Another slightly terrifying sidechannel escape from boxing.)

Economics:

• Who Owns Your Body Parts? Everyone’s making money in the market for body tissue - except the donors
• 1,000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly (The rise of Patreon/Kickstarter/live-streaming really exemplifies this dynamic.)

Books

Nonfiction:

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Carreyrou 2018 (review)
• Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993, Roland & Shiman 2002 (review)
• On the Historicity of Jesus, Carrier 2014 (review)
• Research Fraud in the Behavioral and Biomedical Sciences, Miller et al 1993 (review)
• 100 Years of Nobel Prizes, Shalev 2003 (review)

Fiction:

• Fujiwara Teika’s Hundred-Poem Sequence of the Shōji Era, 1200: A Complete Translation, with Introduction and Commentary, Brower 1978 (review)
• The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Watts 2018

Film/TV

Animated:

• Pop Team Epic (tremendous visual imagination and dedication married to some of the worst humor inflicted on me yet; I was dubious but Poptepipic’s meme game was so stronk I figured it had to be good. But it was not. Except for the Hellshake Yanno skit which ranks up with the manga-mation scene in FLCL for mixed-media greatness and is well worth watching on its own.)

Music

Touhou:

• stardust catalyst (crescentia; Touhou Orchestral Suite II - Resurrection {RDT2017}) [orchestral rock]

Doujin:

• 夜祭 (B.rose&crown; Alfheim {M3-37}) [Celtic]
• Starflake Valley (Nago; ENIGMATIC LINER {C93}) [trance]
• senpai, notice me! (Camellia feat. Nanahira; Force! {C93}) [electronic/Jpop]
• Morning Glory (Ujico*; [FLOWERS] {C92}) [house]
• Hydrangea (Ujico*; [FLOWERS] {C92}) [house]
• Carnation (Ujico*; [FLOWERS] {C92}) [house]

Vocaloid:

• Hello, Worker (Marasy; Vocalo Piano {2017}) [classical]
• 心做し (Marasy; Vocalo Piano {2017}) [classical]
• ENERGY CORE CORD D (GINnNo feat. Miku; Synergy-Style Vol. 7 {C91}) [dubstep]
• Alice in Freezer (Orangestar feat. MARY; No Doubt He Uses Magic. {2017}) [Jpop]

Misc:

• The Pass (Rush; Presto {1989}) [rock]