Links

Genetics:

• everything is heritable:

  • Genome-wide polygenic scores for common diseases identify individuals with risk equivalent to monogenic mutations, Khera et al 2018 (PGSes for coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and breast cancer are now of clinical utility: Figure 2/3 - more extremizing for depicting PGS power)
  • Genome-wide statistically-significant regions in 43 Utah high-risk families implicate multiple genes involved in risk for completed suicide, Coon et al 2018 (Suicide is hard to study, but some more progress.)
  • Consumer genomics will change your life, whether you get tested or not, Khan & Mittelman 2018; There could be 100 million genotyping kits sold by January 1st 2020 (Figure 1)

• recent evolution:

  • Enrichment of genetic markers of recent human evolution in educational and cognitive traits, Srinivasan et al 2018 (Net selection for human intelligence from 400kya-present)
  • Red fox genome assembly identifies genomic regions associated with tame and aggressive behaviours, Kukekova et al 2018 (media)

• engineering:

  • Correction of the Marfan Syndrome pathogenic FBN1 mutation by CRISPR base editing in human cells and heterozygous embryos, Zeng et al 2018 (media)
  • Inside the Very Big, Very Controversial Business of Dog Cloning (update on Hwang Woo-suk’s Sooam Biotech - bigger than ever)
  • Heredity before genetics: a history, Cobb 2006 (a look into why heritability and selective breeding, so apparently easy to see, were difficult & had to be invented; I was particularly fascinated by the description of Robert Bakewell inventing selective breeding using sheep & influencing Charles Darwin/Gregor Mendel - for more, see Wykes 2004, Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) of Dishley: farmer and livestock improver/Housman 1894/Lawrence 1805)
  • Chromosome transplantation as a novel approach for correcting complex genomic disorders, Paulis et al 2015 (possibly useful for implementing an optimal chromosome selection)
  • Crunch: Building a Better Apple (on apple selective breeding & the development of the Honeycrisp & SweeTango varieties)

AI:

• OpenAI/DoTA2:

  • OpenAI Five Benchmark: Results (OpenAI 5x5 DoTA agent crushes audience & pro teams; link roundup & commentary)
  • The International 2018: Results (0/2) (round & commentary: game 1, game 2 - losses, but pure PPO self-play went further than it had any right to. If PPO can go so far in a large-scale fog-of-war team game, one wonders what DM has achieved on SC2 with its access to even more compute and high-throughput DRL architectures like Ape-X & Impala…)
• Safety-first AI for autonomous data centre cooling and industrial control, Kasparik/Gamble/Gao (Finally, DeepMind provides some details: +12% efficiency, increasing to 30%. The July patent provides more details on the RL implementation, implying it uses standard LSTM RNNs w/Osband’s bootstrap ensemble for exploration etc)
• Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning, Burda et al 2018
• Dijkstra’s Algorithm in Disguise, Eric Jang (optimizing graph traversals in currency arbitrage, Q-learning, & ray-tracing/light-transport)
• Fast.ai: training ImageNet in 18m for $40 (progressive resizing + rectangular convolutions + weight decay + dynamic batch sizes + warmup)
• OpenAI files proposal for new larger campus near Golden Gate Bridge in SF, by developing Fort Winfield Scott (OA has big plans.)
• John von Neumann on the Singularity

• Improving Shape Deformation in Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation, Gokaslan et al 2018 (Some new work using my Danbooru2017 anime dataset for anime⟺face CycleGAN. It’s far from perfect but recognizable.)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• Don’t believe the mice: Experiments using mice are often heavily publicized - but very, very few of them translate into humans. Anthony King reports on why animal models are of questionable value
• Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18 (being unable to even try to replicate critical papers is worse than a non-replication)
• What Do Workplace Wellness Programs Do? Evidence from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, Jones et al 2018 (media; How often does correlation=causation? In this demonstration of the Stainless & Brass Laws of evaluation, a workplace wellness program randomized experiment finds half its measures don’t even have overlapping CIs; comparing to the (correlational) research literature on workplace wellness effects, they reject equality for 20/22, 23/33, 43/55, 43/60, and 96/115 of previous reported effects. Graphs: figure 8, Jones vs prior correlational literature/table 5, Jones, randomized vs correlational results/table 5, NYT visualization)
• Researcher at the center of an epic fraud remains an enigma to those who exposed him

Politics/religion:

• The American Voter in 1932: Evidence from a Confidential Survey, Norporth 2018 (FDR voters cared more about his promise to end Prohibition than the Great Depression? This is a surprising result, but there’s nothing clearly wrong with the survey…)

Psychology/biology:

• Personality, IQ, and lifetime earnings, Gensowski 2018
• Are bigger brains smarter? Evidence from a large-scale pre-registered study, Nave et al 2018 (yes)
• Searching for the bottom of the ego well: failure to uncover ego depletion in Many Labs 3, Vadillo et al 2018
• Pre-sleep treatment with galantamine stimulates lucid dreaming: A double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, LaBerge et al 2018
• This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms: It Also Makes Their Butts Fall Off (see also Convergent evolution of psilocybin biosynthesis by psychedelic mushrooms, Awan et al 2018; Discovery of psychoactive plant and mushroom alkaloids in behavior-modifying fungal cicada pathogens, Boyce et al 2018 - makes one think…)
• Exploring the effect of microdosing psychedelics [psilocybin] on creativity in an open-label natural setting, Prochazkova et al 2018 (disappointingly, unlike my microdosing self-experiment, this was not blinded)

Technology:

• The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History (Few firms have paid more dearly for dragging their feet on security…)
• Capturing the Unicorn: How two mathematicians came to the aid of the Met
• Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier, Hu et al 2018 (Our programs are insecure because they have so many bugs, which is why we need to add more bugs)

Economics:

• The Shape of Human Progress: 40 Ways the World Is Getting Better
• Pricing the Future in the Seventeenth Century: Calculating Technologies in Competition, Deringer 2017 (most interesting point: 99-year leases were badly underpriced compared to full ownership/perpetuities, despite near-identical economic value)
• Private Ordering at the World’s First Futures Exchange, West 2000 (Edo-period Japan developed a remarkably complete rice futures market centuries before you expect such a thing, roughly contemporaneous with the more famous Dutch stock exchange which had futures for the Dutch East India Company)

Philosophy:

Fiction:

• Slow Tuesday Night (R.A. Lafferty’s classic (SF?) short story; see also Robin Hanson’s ems & The Hyperbolic Time Chamber)

Misc:

Books

Nonfiction:

• Low Aptitude Men in the Military: Who Profits, Who Pays?, Laurence & Ramsberger 1991
• Confusion of Confusions, Joseph de la Vega 1688 (First long description of the Dutch stock exchange & market manipulation/trading strategies. Amusing.)

Fiction:

Film/TV

Live-action:

Animated:

Games

Music

Touhou:

Doujin:

Vocaloid:

Misc: