Links

Genetics:

• everything is heritable:

  • Post-genomic behavioral genetics: From revolution to routine, Ashbrook et al 2017
  • Novel genome-wide associations for suicidality in UK Biobank, genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders and polygenic association with completed suicide, Strawbridge et al 2018
  • Giant study links DNA variants to same-sex behavior
  • Using genetics to examine a general liability to childhood psychopathology, Riglin et al 2018 (if the autism PGS is real & correlates with IQ, why doesn’t it correlate with other psychiatric disorders like it should?)
  • Trans-ancestral GWAS of alcohol dependence reveals common genetic underpinnings with psychiatric disorder, Walters et al 2018
  • Understanding the role of bitter taste perception in coffee, tea and alcohol consumption through Mendelian randomization, Ong et al 2018
  • A newly discovered tea plant is caffeine-free: Jin et al 2018 (towards drinkable decaf tea?)
  • the betas will continue until morale improves: Veritas 30x WGS $200 sale; Ancestry.com hits n>14m; Ireland to WGS 10% of population

• recent evolution:

  • Neutral Theory of Evolution Challenged by Evidence for DNA Selection
  • Polygenicity of complex traits is explained by negative selection, O’Connor et al 2018
  • Feral Cats: Their Role in the Population Dynamics of Felis catus, Bradshaw et al 1999 (dysgenics on cat domestication?)
  • The dumbo rat mutation and human analogues (a pleiotropic mutation for domesticity in pet rats? cf foxes/domestication syndrome)
  • Assortative Mating, Class, and Caste, Harpending & Cochran 2015; Some Uses of Models of Quantitative Genetic Selection in Social Science, Weight & Harpending 2017

• engineering:

  • Chinese researcher claims first gene-edited babies; Gene-editing Chinese scientist kept much of his work secret; Amid uproar, Chinese scientist defends creating gene-edited babies; The first CRISPRed babies are here, what’s next? 1. Develop international policy. 2. Communicate responsibly. 3. Recognize that editing is here to stay. 4. A global, collaborative project to edit
  • Despite CRISPR baby controversy, Harvard University will begin gene-editing sperm
  • Embryo Biopsies for Genomic Selection, Mullaart & Wells 2018 (embryo selection is being applied to Holstein cattle)
  • Engineering yeast megachromosomes: The story of how we engineered megachromosomes and studied the contribution of chromosome fusion to reproductive isolation among laboratory yeast strains
  • Is Continued Genetic Improvement of Livestock Sustainable?, Hill 2016 (yes)
  • One Hundred Years of Statistical Developments in Animal Breeding, Gianola & Rosa 2015

AI:

• Reward learning from human preferences and demonstrations in Atari, Ibarz et al 2018
• Prediction of cardiovascular risk factors from retinal fundus photographs via deep learning, Poplin et al 2018 (age/gender/smoking/blood pressure/diabetes/heart attacks—predicted from eye photographs using CNNs)
• Style2Paints NN: V4 now released (paper for V3; multiple layers of anime lineart coloring now supported: flat colors, then adding lines, then color gradients/shading, then illumination. Uses Danbooru2017 for training data via data-augmentation/corruption to train recoloring. Discussion: 1/2/Twitter)
• Resource-efficient Machine Learning in 2KB RAM for the Internet of Things, Kumar et al 2017
• Towards Deep Modeling of Music Semantics using EEG Regularizers, Raposo et al 2017
• Neural Population Control via Deep Image Synthesis, Bashivan et al 2018 (towards human adversarial examples?)
• Can computer science algorithms show us how to live better, or is that a false hope? (a discussion with Brian Christian of Algorithms to Live By: explore vs exploit, optimal stopping, simulated annealing)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Sample and Setting, Klein et al 2018 (28 targets, k=60, n=7000 each, Registered Reports: 14/28 replication rate w/few moderators/country differences & remarkably low heterogeneity)
• Eva Vivalt on development economics & charities (high variance in development study effects of ±100% in replications, expert elicitation of study quality & informative priors, publication bias/p-hacking)
• A Star Surgeon Left a Trail of Dead Patients—and His Whistleblowers Were Punished (organizational incentives & science)
• How Facebook and Twitter could be the next disruptive force in clinical trials
• Causal Inference Animated Plots in R (animations of: Controlling for a Variable, Matching on a Variable, Instrumental Variables, Fixed Effects, Difference-in-Difference, & Regression Discontinuity.)
• Five-Year Follow-up of Antibiotic Therapy for Uncomplicated Acute Appendicitis in the APPAC Randomized Clinical Trial, Salminen et al 2018 (media; most appendicitis surgeries unnecessary—the question is never whether running an RCT is ethical, the question is how can not running it possibly be ethical?)

Politics/religion:

• Dagger and Swagger: The History of Russian Terrorism (revolutionary terror and literature; see also Toward a [J-curve] theory of revolution, Davies 1962)
• How the GOP Gave Up on Porn; Legalizing Marijuana and Gay Marriage Seemed Impossible—but losing taught libertarians how to win (postmortems)
• How We All Failed In Performance Contracting, Page 1972 (social impact bonds before social impact bonds: killed by failure in one of the largest education randomized experiments ever run—6 contractors, 18 school districts, and 25,000 students)
• Synanon: Shaved Heads, Snipped Tubes, Imperial Marines, and Dope Fiends (the 1960s ex-AA drug rehab program that became a cult)
• Forging Islamic science: Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How?
• Names for the Nameless, Metzger 1980 (Biblical fanfiction)
• When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life (see also Sort By Controversial: a Halloween Tale)

Psychology/biology:

• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession
• How to Control a Machine with Your Brain: A scientist’s work linking minds and machines helps a paralyzed woman escape her body
• Cognitive differences between orangutan species: a test of the cultural intelligence hypothesis, Forss et al 2016
• Physical Correlates Of Human Intelligence, Jensen & Sinha 1993
• Discovery of volatile biomarkers of Parkinson’s disease from sebum, Trivedi et al 2018 (what other diseases could be smelt?)
• Your personality data can do more: Items provide leverage for explaining the variance and co-variance of life outcomes, Mottus et al 2018 (lasso on NEO-PI inventory items outperforms the latent Big Five scores)
• Bracing for the Vanilla Boom: Some of Madagascar’s farmers, made wealthy by this year’s vanilla crop, will spend their cash in crazy hot money sprees
• Taxonomy of bragging

Technology:

• The Epic Saga of The Well (early forums: offline meetups, SJWs, stalkers, marriages)
• Why Doctors Hate Their Computers: Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients?
• Do Proteins Hold the Key to the Past? New methods are allowing a group of scientists to reexamine the world’s libraries and archives, in search of the hidden lives of authors
• The Great British (Industrial) Bake-Off
• Ancient Industrial Machinery (on Roman technology)
• How to Win Founders and Influence Everybody (hidden female networkers in Silicon Valley: the case of Margit Wennmachers)
• The Time Capsule That’s as Big as Human History (the crowdsourced MOM ceramic tablet archive in a German salt mine)
• In Japan, the Kit Kat Isn’t Just a Chocolate. It’s an Obsession.
• I Believe I Can Fry: How a mild-mannered database analyst became the undisputed king of the fair park fryers—and the master of a heart stopping new culinary movement

Economics:

• Fuel to the Fire: How a US biofuel law intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuels has unleashed an environmental disaster in Indonesia (This was what an American effort to save the planet looked like. It was startlingly efficient, extremely profitable and utterly disastrous.)
• Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Moving Into the Gasoline Industry
• Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship, Kim 2018 (quantifying social contagion/peer-effects of innovation: knitting groups & novel knitting designs on Ravelry)
• Toward an Understanding of Learning by Doing: Evidence from an Automobile Assembly Plant, Levitt et al 2013
• How Hollywood lobbying & Congress retroactively banned movie prediction markets
• Stories From the Neopets Economy (on inflation/monetary policy, conspicuous consumption, arbitrage, & transaction costs)
• Silk Road 1: ground-truth drug sale data (6 Feb 2011–2 Oct 2013, GX-940)
• The Curse of the Honeycrisp Apple: Everyone’s favorite apple is leaving Northeastern orchards out on a limb (Good.)

Philosophy:

• Words, Radiolab 2010 (language & abstraction: a deaf adult learning what words are for the first time; brain damage causing enlightenment, see also Martin 2013; <6yo children unable to understand directions like left of the blue wall)
• Legalism in Chinese Philosophy

Fiction:

• The Hours: How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic (the making of The Clock, a 24h supercut; watching it: 1/2)
• Time War // Briefing for Neolemurian Agents, Yves Cross
• Imperialism, Translation, Gunbuster: Introduction/Episode One/Episode Two—NSFW/Episode Three/Episode Four/Episode Five/Episode Six (nationalist subtexts in Gainax anime)
• Oulipo Ends Where the Work Begins
• No Reservations: Narnia (media; Anthony Bourdain does Narnia)

Books

Nonfiction:

• Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, Bradshaw 2013 (review)
• Well-Played 3.0, ed Davidson 2011 (good: And if You Go Chasing Rabbits: The Inner Demons of American McGee’s Alice; The Neverhood; A Different Kind of Never Never Land. You Had Me at Claymation; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves—Becoming a Hero; The World Ends With You; The Opposite of Accessible: Street Fighter IV; Siren is the Scariest Game Ever Made)
• Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning, ed Davidson 2010 (good: Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A.I. [ARG] Game; Resident Evil 4: The Mercenaries Mini-Game; Galcon)
• Well Played vol 4 no 1, ed Davison 2015 (good: Cause No Trouble: The Experience of “Serious Fun in Papers, Please")

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Kedi, 2016 (cat; documentary about Turkish street cats in Istanbul. Thoroughly enjoyable, stuffed with beautiful shots of Istanbul and cats, with particularly clever ankle-level tracking shots following the semi-feral cats around. In connection to Cat Sense, it’s interesting to see how well cats seem to live in the traditional walkable urban parts of Istanbul, taking handouts but still following their nature while living long enough, often, to die of cancer. The need to get along with other cats and humans seems to keep them domesticated.)

Music

MLP:

• Wandering Eyes (4everfreebrony; {2018}) [acoustic]
• Rainbow Drum Guitar Violins Cover (Koron Korak; {2018}) [instrumental rock]
• Onward (Jyc Row feat. Aloma Steele {2017}) [rock]
• A Kirin Tale (Daniel Ingram feat. Rachel Bloom; S8E23 {2018}) [musical]
• Synthwave Lullaby (Lorris {2018}) [synthwave/trance]