December 2015 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians", Mathieson et al 2015 (media)
• pervasive cross-correlations of polygenic scores for various traits: particularly Krapohl et al 2015
• "Genome-wide analysis of over 106,000 individuals identifies 9 neuroticism-associated loci", Smith et al 2015
• "Signaling and Productivity in the Private Financial Returns to Schooling", Bingley et al 2015 (highly unusual design)
• "Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating", Golden 2012

Politics/religion:

• "The American Robber Barons Who Stole Medieval Europe"
• "Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon"
• "Little to Show for Cash Flood by Big Donors"
• "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate"
• on mood affiliation
• Proper procedures for stoning an adulterer

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• converting all-cause mortality reductions to life-expectancy increases
• "How to visualize data with cartoonish faces a la Chernoff" (on Chernoff faces)

Psychology/biology:

• The girl who feels no pain
• "Insecticide Resistance and Malaria Control"
• "Cochrane findings that will help you"
• Rubber duck debugging
• "Species-characteristic Responses to Catnip by Undomesticated Felids" , Hill et al 1976
• "Meditation and Its Regulatory Role on Sleep", Nagendra et al 2012

Technology:

• "Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid for Tor-Breaking Research" (If the FBI is harvesting any de-anonymizing data security researchers collect using subpoenas, this seems like a serious attack on academic freedom and research integrity.)
• "DagCoin: a cryptocurrency without blocks"; in an entirely different direction, Bitcoin-NG splits blocks from mining (Bitcoin is just the first, not necessarily the universally ideal. We're in a Cambrian explosion of financial cryptography and should be open to new approaches.)
• "Air Force cadet sentenced to 3 years after buying modafinil, molly, & LSD on Silk Road 2"
• 'man sort': '--random-sort' misleading (use shuf if you need random sorts on the CLI)

Economics:

• "As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the Critics Ask Why"/"Should the Northeast Bury its Power Lines to Prevent Outages?"/"Having your cake and eating it too: The maturity structure of US debt"
• "Ricardo's Difficult Idea"/"The Real Winners and Losers of Globalization: Globalization has radically changed global income dynamics. So who has won and who has lost?"
• "Cosmic Commodities: How much is a new planet worth?"
• "The Goethe Auction"

Philosophy:

• "When Do Extraordinary Claims Give Extraordinary Evidence?", Hanson 2007
• Philosophy of humor
• "Fog-like sensations"
• A Softer World, #891
• Esotericism as a form of communication

the Plausibility of Dragons

Rationalist fiction in the sense of having a lot of respect for deduction from evidence. Also a pleasant enough story.

Extreme Self-Tracking

Man has himself MRIed twice a week for a year and a half, plus tracking a lot about his life. The data mining is still going on, but at least it's been shown that (probably) people's connectomes change pretty rapidly.

I'm also posting this to the open thread because I'm not sure where it's more likely to be seen.

If you only have time for one link. Check out STOP POINT RAIN (mindfulness techniques)

Radicalisation

• Can the complex nature and determinants of radicalisation be reduced to four simple psychosocial antecedents?

Addiction

100 day no sweet challenge

No chocolate challenge

Mindfulness of emotions

Rational thinking and anxiety

Complex PTSD

• Beat procrastination now!

• SOBER

Evidence-based education

• Propose a new subject

• Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement

Political marketing

Science

Social skills, Reddit

Cross examination fo expert witnessess 1 2 3 and 4

Visibility on Wikipedia Political candidates positioning

Political Candidates Positioning Based on Inter-Object Associative Affinity Index

Genetic psychiatry

• AA genotype reporting in - Genetic effect modification of abuse or this

• Silver lining gene

• Chad and the Gene-Env psychiatry centre

• Everybody has a brain

Cryptocurrency development

name check;

coinvertise on fb;

Mining with AWS

Can it be outsourced?

Cold calling

Budget

Remote staff and staff and upwork

Grow my team

YBF events

Mailouts

Grant writing

fiddy cent domains

Rationalists on a startup team. Good opportunity?

Development

crisis communication

Volunteer with Indigenous people

stand-alone smart watches

Tensor flow machine learning, portable digitalisers for smart watches?

Blocks

Omata

positive psychology

Positive psychology checklist Culture and positive psychology

I wrote a review of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It's also of an essay about the nature of the halo effect on how ideas are perceived.

• Do No Harm, Marsh (elegantly written and moving neurosurgeon memoir on the theme of iatrogenics; I did disagree with his comments on the cost-benefit of operating in one case, though)
• Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, Popper (review)
• The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, MacGregor
• Drop Dead Healthy, Jacob (review)

M. Atwater, The avalanche hunters. Philadelphia, Macrea Smith Co., 1968. (Russian translation: М. Отуотер, Охотники за лавинами. Изд. 2-е. - М., "Мир". - 1980). A wonderful memoir, reminds a bit (in spirit, not style) Kipling's The Head of the District and The Bridge-Builders. Contains examples of real-life problems - risking many lives to save one - with a consequentialist moral.

• A Perfect Vacuum, Lem (review)

I have read half of Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series. The protagonist reminds me of myself as a child/young adult, and I really admire the depth of Pratchett's female characters. He actually writes femininity the way I experience it: not an obstacle to doing anything, but present and possibly important. Sometimes.

The Department of Useless Things by Yuri Dombrovski (a novel in two parts). Alma-Ata, just before WWII... I'd say it combines a detective story (a bit), a love story (a smaller bit), and a story. Also, try his Three novellas about Shakespeare.

Here nice loner song, feels like the audio version of Me, Earl and the Dying Girl

Black skin head primal pump up music

I still get through the day really positive, empathetic, gentle rap

Nostic the poet

Touhou:

• "Night Sakura of Dead Spirits" (彩音 〜xi-on〜; Quartet -カルテット- {C88}) [classical]
• "Desire Drive" (あかみ／彩音 〜xi-on〜; Quartet -カルテット- {C88}) [classical]
• "敢闘 -little bravery-" (漉餡; 水古譚 -suikotan- {C88}) [orchestral]
• "蒼月夜 (Instrumental ver)" (漉餡; 水古譚 -suikotan- {C88}) [orchestral]
• "夕暮れ色のカップ" (夕暮れ色のカップ; 喫茶白玉楼 {C88}) [classical]

Doujin:

• "City Cycle" (tigerlily; AD:PIANO VIVACE {C88}) [classical/instrumental]
• "'Love'" (en;Dolphin Records; 夏と原稿用紙 {C88}) [acoustic]
• "You again my love" (CYO Style feat. henohenomoheji; CY {2013}) [pop]
• "Shoulda Known Better" (DJ Noriken; HARDCORE SYNDROME 9 {C88}) [hardcore]

Vocaloid:

• "NEW YEARS[Long Version]" (Miku; ATOLS; ATOLS/MIKU 0 {VM28}) [trance]
• "YUMEGIWA LAST BOY" (Ia; FLARE; VOCALO COVERS {2013}) [electronica/Jpop]

Talking Machines

Human conversations about machine learning on a beautifully designed ultra-minimalist website

Do you think it could raise statistical literacy and interest?

Some nice quotes:

K-nearest neighbor shouldn't outperform any other method unless you have duplicates in your data

-Claudia Perlich

If you find some data in your basement (as a marketing company) and analyse that it's not necessarily going to be actionable. It's better to ask: What are the actions you think you could be doing better if you had some piece of information, then we look for that information

-Claudia Perlich

Where else are you going to here that kind of stuff?!

Take head graduate students trying to decide what kind of research question to choose. Naive, descriptive analytics can be really dumb!

(Kaggle competitions lead to) overfitting to the noise

Take head prospective Kaggle competition hosters. You're engineering publication bias!

https://www.facebook.com/buzzfeedzach/videos/1532007597123301/?fref=nf

Unsexy guy gets coaching from very conventionally sexy guy on how to make a good video for OKCupid. It works.