July 2016 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Assortative mating and differential fertility by phenotype and genotype across the 20th century", Conley et al 2016 (Dysgenics found in the USA, 1920-1955.)
• "The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development", Belsky et al 2016 (excerpts)
• "The Genome Project-Write", Boeke et al 2016 (media; commentary)
• "Why We're Different: A Conversation with Robert Plomin" (Plomin takes a victory lap: "It might be hard for people to believe this, but forty years ago it was dangerous to talk about genetic influence in psychology.")
• "Demonstrating the validity of twin research in criminology", Barnes et al 2014
• "Pleiotropy across academic subjects at the end of compulsory education", Rimfeld et al 2015
• "Genetics affects choice of academic subjects as well as achievement", Rimfeld et al 2016
• "The Genetic Basis of Mendelian Phenotypes: Discoveries, Challenges, and Opportunities"00245-1), Chong et al 2015 (But enough about common variants & complex traits - how have we been doing in finding the causes of genetic diseases like severe Mendelian diseases? Very well.)
• "A Prospective Study of Sudden Cardiac Death among Children and Young Adults", Bagnall et al 2016 (Rare genetic mutations implicated in >13% of unexplained cardiac deaths. Makes one wonder how much of the long tail of deaths are due to rare variants, and how much of a benefit there would be to erasing the ~80k mutations everyone carries... (Population genetics rule: rare variants are more harmful than common variants; and 1 harmful mutation, 1 reproductive death to purge it from the population.) Very cool application of genetics.)

• genetics of breast size (commentary):

  • Wade et al 2010 "Body mass index and breast size in women: same or different genes?"
  • "Genetic variants associated with breast size also influence breast cancer risk", Eriksson et al 2012
  • "Large-scale genotyping identifies a new locus at 22q13.2 associated with female breast size", Li et al 2013

Politics/religion:

• "Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players", Cesarini et al 2016
• "Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police" (The back and forth secret war of the Okhrana with the myriads of Russian revolutionaries across Europe, documented by the complete archives of the Paris Okhrana office smuggled to America after the Russian Revolution. When you see how easily and thoroughly the Okhrana had infiltrated the Russian revolutionaries, you start to see why the Communist leadership would be extraordinarily paranoid about spies - but also that the revolutionaries were, well before the Revolution, generally highly nasty folks; many of the mentioned revolutionaries would be summarily executed by their comrades.)
• "The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus's Wife", King's response (The Gospel of Jesus's Wife is probably a modern forgery. But it gets weirder. And kinkier. Forgeries like this always raise troubling issues about religious scriptures: if this forgery had been kept in private collections for another century before becoming known, in all likelihood, most of the damning evidence would either have disappeared or become inaccessible, and all that would be left is a few worries over the appearance. Most scriptures have even more vexed provenances than does the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, with blackouts of centuries not uncommon, and known destruction of variants (eg the well-known destruction of all variants of the Koran). Of course, you might think, who would dare counterfeit the Word of God Himself? Yet, humans are strange and inscrutable and can talk themselves into anything - why did Fritz do it? Probably even he doesn't really know. Who knows how many Fritzes there have been throughout history...)
• "My Four Months as a Prison Guard"

AI:

• "Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation", Bellemare et al 2016 (Video; big exploration improvement for DQN-like agents: where DQN can only get to two rooms in Montezuma's Revenge, because it takes actions mostly at random and it is unlikely that it will randomly do the 15 or 20 exact moves which will get it a reward, this version, with a way of measuring novelty and exploring novel states until a reward is found, can make it to 15 rooms!)
• "Improved Techniques for Training GANs", Salimans et al 2016 (Even better image generation at 128px now. Synthesizing art can't be far off.)
• "InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets", Chen et al 2016 (are GANs and VAEs giving us a breakthrough in unsupervised learning?)
• "Early Visual Concept Learning with Unsupervised Deep Learning", Higgins et al 2016:
• "Progressive Neural Networks", Rusu et al 2016 (NN factored to build different sub-nets for different tasks while allowing later learned tasks to draw on earlier-trained subnets. See also "Actor-Mimic: Deep Multitask and Transfer Reinforcement Learning", Parisotto et al 2015.)
• "Towards an integration of deep learning and neuroscience", Marblestone et al 2016
• "DeepMath - Deep Sequence Models for Premise Selection", Alemi et al 2016
• "Convolutional Sketch Inversion", G. et al 2016 (facial sketch->illustration)
• "Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent", Andrychowicz et al 2016 (Replacing simple SGD, Adadelta, RMSprop etc by a very small RNN. Probably never practical but still amusing.)

Statistics/meta-science:

• "Generalized Network Psychometrics: Combining Network and Latent Variable Models", Epskamp et al 2016
• "Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think", Westfall & Yarkoni 2016 (This is part of why results in sociology/epidemiology/psychology are so unreliable: not only do they usually not control for genetics at all, they don't even control for the things they think they control for. You have not controlled for SES by throwing in a discretized income variable measured in one year plus a discretized college degree variable. Variables which correlate with or predict some outcome such as poverty, may be doing no more than correcting some measurement error (frequently, due to the heavy genetic loading of most outcomes, correcting the omission of genetic information). This is why within-family designs are desirable even without worries about genetics: they hold constant shared-environment factors so you don't need to measure or model them.)
• "Linear Programming: How Does It Work?"

Following insects around: tools and techniques of eighteenth-century natural history - how a Postmaster General of France promoted the shipping of live insects, a retired military man scoured countryside for cicadas, and M. Reaumur and M. Bazin kept in touch (for science! and chocolate).

• The Sports Gene, Epstein (very good; I really need to write up a review of this one at some point)
• Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up, Subotnik et al 1993 (review)

• Basilisk) (review)
• Tonari no Seki-kun (Situational comedy: the straight (wo)man tries to avoid the distraction of her seat-mate but often winds up in trouble or missing lesson information, although other times she becomes drawn in and scores moral victories. Simple yet entertaining - the gags are varied and it's a fun light watch, especially since each episode is like 8 minutes so the premises don't wear themselves out. An excellent and well worth watching summary is the AMV "My Neighbor Figaro Kun" which, in the great foot-steps of Bugs Bunny, demonstrates why The Barber of Seville is the best opera. To the extent there is any larger meaning of Tonari no Seki-kun, it struck me around episode 20 that the mute Seki-kun is something of a gifted child, trapped in a worthless conventional classroom learning stuff which no one cares about and all the students will forget as soon as possible, and that only Seki-kun is awake, as he works on his self-directed projects and learns far more than any school would teach him. Notes: whoever animated the cat episode clearly is not a cat owner; Seki-kun pulled off the magic trick by having another ace and crumpling a spare card to replace the original crumpled ace.)
• Michiko to Hatchin (review)

• Bridge of Spies) (overly earnest - painfully and ironically so given the War on Terror - Cold War Spielberg film about a lawyer defending a spy; becomes much better and tense when the primary plot begins and Donovan must carefully play off the East Germans and Soviets while not blowing the whole deal. Standard Hollywood polish, perhaps a bit too heavy on the deliberate symbolism like the cold passed from Abel to Donovan onwards or the train/fence pairings and the contrast between the film implying Abel would be treated as a traitor by the USSR compared to Powers, which was the departure from history I found most objectionable.)

I've been playing the 3rd release in the Zero Escape series, Zero Time Dilemma (3DS release June 28, PC release June 29). It's a mix of VN and "escape the room" in terms of genres.

In Zero Time Dilemma, 9 people are stuck in a simulated space ship, to test the effects of people flying to mars. Because the projected flight path puts the sun between the earth and mars, there will have to be radio silence for a few days. Several hours before the radio silence is lifted, the group is forced to participate in a game by an entity called 'Zero'. Each player has to wear (or rather, wakes up wearing) a bracelet, which functions as a watch and as an injector of sleeping & amnesia drugs.

Zero has a fascination with branching of time - near the start of the game he tells a story about a runner. She runs through the park every morning. At a particular branch, she usually always goes right. However, one day, she goes left. On the left path, she comes across an old man who she sees often when running in the mornings. The old man asks her "hey, this is different from your usual route. Why did you go left?" The woman answers "because there was a snail." Later that day, police finds the woman dead in the bushes of the left path. "Isn't it curious, how one snail can affect a life so much?"

Zero forces the players to participate in "Decision Games". The players are told that...

• There is only one way out, and that's through the big door with the X
• You need at least 6 X-passes to open the big door
• When the door is opened, it opens for 30 seconds - afterwards, it doesn't open anymore, EVER
• An X-pass will be revealed to the group if a person dies.

In other words... 6 people must die.

The players are split up into 3 teams of 3 members each (for maximum tribalism?) and then are told of their first decision game - a screen turns on, showing the names of the other teams. Each team is to vote which other team should be executed. If a team has 2 or more votes, it is executed. If a team does not vote, it gains 2 votes against it.

So the game starts off with a version of prisoners dilemma. Through plot an option (A votes for B, B votes for C, C votes for A) is suggested and passed along a side channel, turning it into a true problem rather than a random guess.

Pretty much every "Decision Game" is a cruel game of ethics - where failure is met with death, and success with continued survival.

The game is cut up into 90 minute segments - after these 90 minutes are up, players are put to sleep and have their memory wiped. It's sad that none of the players seems to try and game this gimmick (not that I've seen yet, but I'm only at 20% completion or so) by writing stuff on their hands or something. But what makes this interesting is that the game plays out in time-fragments, some on one timeline, some on another.

I've pretty much been on an adrenaline high whilst playing this game - whilst you should play the earlier releases in the series if you want to connect all the plot threads (and there are a LOT), you could get away without playing them. There's enough exposition to explain plot points covered in the earlier releases, although it sometimes feels like a noodle incident ("I've seen this before, it's just like that one time with the rabbits").

If you're still unsure, I'd recommend downloading an DS emulator and a rom for 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors - it's the first release in the series and has similar gameplay, although without the traveling to story fragments.

To me, it's an interesting game where my ethics are put to the test - it's easy to say "shut up and multiply", it's another to be faced with the choice for real.

Recently I've caught myself delving more into games that are basically programming puzzles.
This means games that have acceptable but not overtly superb graphics, and they all happen in stages, each a different and more difficult puzzle than the previous, all to be solved by programming the interactions of some basic components.
Here's the ones I like the most.

Windows / Steam:

• SpaceChem (about producing chemical components in space)
• TIS-1000 (computation to be done on a parallel grid, highly textual)
• Infinifactory (constructing things for your alien overlords)

Android:

• The sequence (just put the thing at point A in point B five times, with only these tiny simple robots).

I'm happy to have found minimal music. It reflects perfectly the way my head sounds on the inside. Main examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAzhzEjkdcI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbBkdYCViLs

Touhou:

• "C.Experiment" (Syrufit/OCR; C.Experiment {R13}) [post-rock]
• "Prison Sign 'Restless Confination'" (RD-Sounds; 掲 {R13}) [orchestral]
• "契符「狐憑顕現の祭祀」" (RD-Sounds; 掲 {R13}) [orchestral]
• "夢へと揺られながら" (mameya; 多幸涙雨 {R13}) [classical]
• "目をさませば幻想郷" (mameya; 多幸涙雨 {R13}) [classical]
• "雨垂れ拍子は誰が為に" (Foxtail-Grass Studio; Kazegatari. {R13}) [folk/traditional]
• "眠れぬ浮世の月明り" (Foxtail-Grass Studio; Kazegatari. {R13}) [folk/traditional]
• "signification" (m@rk feat. 灯下はこ、; レタレイト {R13}) [trance]
• "by your side" (Syrufit feat. Cathy; C.Experiment {R13}) [electronic]
• "Lunatic Princess" (Syrufit feat. Cathy; C.Experiment {R13}) [electronic]
• "Lævateinn" (denshūto; Sungrazer {2013}) [metal]
• "Shrimp and avocado salad" (Baguettes Ensemble; Toho Jazz Sessions type SPB2 {R13}) [jazz]

Vocaloid:

• "Reincarnation" (Rin; JevanniP {2009}) [trance]

A cappella:

• "Thomas Gemma Cantuarie" (Hilliard Ensemble; Medieval English Music) [Renaissance]

I did interviews with three people last month on my podcast Future Strategist:

Steve Hsu, an expert on the genetic architecture of human intelligence,
Max More, the CEO of cryonics provider Alcor, and
James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: AI and the end of the human era.

If you like my podcast please consider writing a review on iTunes.

Perhaps we could post here about book exchange (and other items we can offer others)? I am not sure if the idea will be interesting to other people, but why not try.