Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genomic prediction of cognitive traits in childhood and adolescence”⁠, Allegrini et al 2018 (More replication of Lee et 2018: 11% IQ/​​​16% education, boosted by genetic correlations—Figure 2: multi-trait boosted PGSes)
  • “A Polygenic Score for Higher Educational Attainment is Associated With Larger Brains”⁠, Elliott et al 2018; “The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex”⁠, Grasby et al 2018
  • “The genetics of the mood disorder spectrum: GWASes of over 185,000 cases and 439,000 controls”⁠, Coleman et al 2018
  • “Genetic influences on eight psychiatric disorders based on family data of 4 408 646 full and half-siblings, and genetic data of 333 748 cases and controls”⁠, Pettersson et al 2018 (population registry methods using siblings/​​​half-siblings continue to confirm twin study results)
  • “Machine Learning to Predict Osteoporotic Fracture Risk from Genotypes”⁠, Forgetta et al 2018 (Lasso regression improves osteoporosis fracture prediction from 18% to 25%—the cost of using uninformative priors & stock linear regression)
  • “Genome-wide association study results for educational attainment aid in identifying genetic heterogeneity of schizophrenia”⁠, Bansal et al 2018 (The IQ/​​​schizophrenia relationship is clearly negative, for a variety of reasons, but some studies have found contrary results; Bansal et al 2018 may resolve this by finding heterogeneity within schizophrenia genetics—a BPD/​​​education (and thus potentially IQ) and a sub-schizophrenia trait. Something like this may also explain the puzzling IQ/​​​autism spectrum symptoms genetic correlation, pace Grove et al 2017…)
  • “Association Between Population Density and Genetic Risk for Schizophrenia”⁠, Colodro-Conde et al 2018; “Genetic evidence of assortative mating in humans”⁠, Robinson et al 2017 (confounding)
  • “Evidence for gene-environment correlation in child feeding: Links between common genetic variation for BMI in children and parental feeding practices”⁠, Selzam et al 2018
  • “Analysis of the genetic basis of height in large Jewish nuclear families”⁠, Zeevi et al 2018
  • “Genetics of self-reported risk-taking behaviour, trans-ethnic consistency and relevance to brain gene expression”⁠, Strawbridge et al 2018
  • “Common DNA Variants Accurately Rank an Individual of Extreme Height”⁠, Sexton et al 2018 (media⁠; Shawn Bradley, 7-foot-6, is +4.2SD above the mean on the GIANT height PGS)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Detecting past and ongoing natural selection among ethnically Tibetan women at high altitude in Nepal”⁠, Jeong et al 2018 (more on the Tibetan altitude adaptations)
  • “Combination of 247 Genome-Wide Association Studies Reveals High Cancer Risk as a Result of Evolutionary Adaptation”⁠, Voskarides 2018
  • “Evolutionary history and adaptation of a human pygmy population of Flores Island, Indonesia”⁠, Tucci et al 2018 (convergent evolution of hobbits & contemporary pygmies on Flores Island)
  • “The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world”⁠, Ottoni et al 2017 (media)

• Engineering:

  • “Generation of human oogonia from induced pluripotent stem cells in vitro”⁠, Yamashiro et al 2018 (media: “The successful accomplishment of the same in human [cells] is just a matter of time. We’re not there yet, but this cannot be denied as a spectacular next step”; steps towards massive/​​​iterated embryo selection)
  • “A CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive targeting doublesex causes complete population suppression in caged Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes”⁠, Kyrou et al 2018 (Lab demo of driving malaria mosquitoes to extinction with CRISPR gene drive and no evolved resistance)
  • “Large Genetic Change at Small Fitness Cost in Large Populations of Drosophila melanogaster Selected for Wind Tunnel Flight: Rethinking Fitness Surfaces”⁠, Weber 1996; “Population Size and Long-term Selection”⁠, Weber 2004; Walsh & Lynch 2018 discussion⁠, graph of selection effects (The power of intense selection in large populations: Weber’s fruit-fly flying speed experiment was able to increase peak flying speed in a wind tunnel by >85x over 100 generations. See also the viral evolution lagoon which uses a similar mechanism to efficiently rank & select en masse.)
  • “Accurate classification of BRCA1 variants with saturation genome editing”, Findlay et al 2018 (Creating 4000 BRCA mutations with CRISPR to measure their harmful effects)
  • “Scientists Are Retooling Bacteria to Cure Disease” (Treating phenylketonuria (PKU) by ingesting bacteria genetically engineered to breakdown phenylalanine in the microbiome!)
  • “Genome-edited skin epidermal stem cells protect mice from cocaine-seeking behaviour and cocaine overdose”⁠, Li et al 2018
  • “First test of in-body gene editing shows promise” (Gene editing people’s livers with zinc finger nucleases—unclear if it worked, but genetic editing keeps expanding.)

AI:

• Vast.ai (Vast.ai attempts to create a two-sided market for renting GPU servers from people with idle GPUs, substantially undercutting AWS/​​GCP. Looks interesting—eg Nvidia 1070s at $2/​​day.)

Statistics/​Meta-Science:

• “The prehistory of biology preprints: A forgotten experiment from the 1960s”⁠, Cobb 2017 (Who killed preprints the first time? The commercial academic publishing cartel did. Copyright is why we can’t have nice things.)
• “Replication Failures Highlight Biases in Ecology and Evolution Science”
• “The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases on the apparent efficacy of treatments: the case of depression”⁠, de Vries et al 2018 (Figure 1: the flowchart of bias)
• “Two curious integrals and a graphic proof”⁠, Schmid 2014 (perils of induction: the treacherous identities of the 2*cost(t) integral)
• On Victorian vibrators and peer review: “A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm”⁠, Lieberman & Schatzberg 2018
• “Testing the ability of the ‘surprisingly popular’ method to predict NFL games”⁠, Lee et al 2018 (An interesting opinion aggregation method—/ if you’re contrarian & you know it, clap your hands / Connected to the Bayesian truth serum for measuring/​​forecasting.)

Politics/​religion:

• “Conspiracy As Governance”⁠, Assange 2006
• Government crime labs are still dangerously incompetent at DNA testing: Butler et al 2018

Psychology/​biology:

• “Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction”⁠, Joel et al 2018 (The heart has its reasons reason knows not…)
• “What Use is Intelligence?”⁠, Hunt 2011 (Earl Hunt reviews some of the predictive power of IQ for education, careers, the military, and elsewhere.)
• “Dynamic Human Environmental Exposome Revealed by Longitudinal Personal Monitoring”⁠, Jiang et al 2018 (media⁠; towards the non-shared-environment)
• “California Teenagers Could Sleep Later Under School Start Bill”
• Hallucinogenic fish

Technology:

• “The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web”⁠, Miroglio et al 2018 (“we find statistically-significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control)”—parallel results to my A  /​ ​​ ​B test of advertising effects and the Pandora experiment)
• “SonarSnoop: Active Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks”⁠, Cheng et al 2018

Economics:

• “Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia’s Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities”⁠, Vincent et al 2018

• Trial testimony transcripts from the trial of noted LSD manufacturer William Leonard Pickard, offering interesting insights into the business:

  • Gordon Todd Skinner: 1⁠/​​​2⁠/​​​2.5⁠/​​​3⁠/​​​4⁠/​​​5⁠/​​​5.5⁠/​​​6⁠/​​​6.5⁠/​​​7⁠/​​​7.5⁠/​​​8⁠/​​​8.5⁠/​​​9⁠/​​​9.5⁠/​​​10⁠/​​​10.5
  • Michael Brian Hobbs: 1
  • Carl Nichols: 1⁠/​​​2
  • Roger Ely: 1⁠/​​​2

Philosophy:

• “Philosophers’ Science Fiction: Speculative Fiction Recommendations, Organized by Author   /​ ​​ ​ Director”⁠, Eric Schwitzgebel 2014

Books

Nonfiction:

• Plant Breeding Reviews: Part 1: Long-term Selection: Maize, Volume 24⁠, ed Janick 2004 (an anthology of papers on plant breeding efforts in, primarily, the Midwest, centering mostly on the famous long-term maize selection experiment; I was particularly interested in “Population Size and Long-term Selection”⁠, Weber 2004, but was amazed to learn that the maize selection experiment, despite running for a century and still producing gains on some traits, was founded on a maize population size of just 4! This illustrates the untapped potential in existing genetic variance⁠.)

Music

Touhou:

• “Kid’s Festival ～ Innocent Treasures” (Clonesoldier; Affect a mind {SC42}) [folk]
• “White Flag of Usa Shrine” (Clonesoldier; Affect a mind {SC42}) [folk]
• “Memory of Forgathering Dream” (U2; Affect a mind {SC42}) [folk]

Vocaloid:

• “Reverberations (Reverberations3 Remix)” (Clean Tears feat. Miku; Reverberations 3 {C92}) [trance]
• “Reminiscence” (Clean Tears feat. Miku; Reverberations 3 {C92}) [trance]
• “Into the Blue” (Bernis feat. Miku; On the shore of the Eden {M3-38}) [trance]
• “On the shore of the Eden” (Bernis feat. Miku; On the shore of the Eden {M3-38}) [trance]
• “みどりのつばさ” (You.T. feat. Miku; vita ex machina -inDiscipline- {VM2}) [electronic]

Misc:

• “You Are Enough” (El Ten Eleven⁠; Banker’s Hill) [postrock]
• “We Don’t Have A Sail But We Have A Rudder” (El Ten Eleven; Banker’s Hill) [postrock]
• “Reverie” (El Ten Eleven; Banker’s Hill) [postrock]
• “This Morning With Her, Having Coffee” (El Ten Eleven; Banker’s Hill) [postrock]