Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Deep-learning software defeats human professional for the first time.
To interpret Go boards and to learn the best possible moves, the AlphaGo program applied deep learning in neural networks -- brain-inspired programs in which connections between layers of simulated neurons are strengthened through examples and experience. It first studied 30 million positions from expert games, gleaning abstract information on the state of play from board data, much as other programmes categorize images from pixels. Then it played against itself across 50 computers, improving with each iteration, a technique known as reinforcement learning.
But also see Go, Marvin Minsky, and the Chasm that AI Hasn't Yet Crossed.
Work that describes harm from crops was cited in Italian Senate hearing.
Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically
modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation.
The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples
in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally
altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says
that there is no substance to this claim.
The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests
carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate
that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work
has been widely cited on anti-GM websites -- and results of the
experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian
Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation
of safety-approved GM crops.
FiveThirtyEight
Political science research has shown that the behavior of misinformed
citizens is different from those who are uninformed, and this difference
may explain Trump's unusual staying power.
...
Uninformed citizens don't have any information at all,
while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts
with the best evidence and expert opinion.
As Kuklinski and his colleagues established, in the U.S.,
the most misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident
in their views and are also the strongest partisans.
The problem with this story: Iran released the embassy hostages because of Carter's negotiations, not in spite of them
The boring and emotionally unsatisfying truth is that the Carter administration secured the Americans' release through protracted negotiations -- and by releasing millions of dollars to the Iranian government.
While fresh reports of digital assaults on critical infrastructure facilities have stirred the cyberwar saber rattlers, it's worth remembering that squirrels cause far more destruction to the grid than rogue nation hackers.
Yes, squirrels and other animals cause hundreds of power outages every year and yet the only confirmed infrastructure cyberattack that has resulted in physical damage that is publicly known is Stuxnet.
Imagine that as a court case drags on, witness after witness is called. Let us suppose thirteen witnesses have testified to having seen the defendant commit the crime. Witnesses may be notoriously unreliable, but the sheer magnitude of the testimony is apparently overwhelming. Anyone can make a misidentification but intuition tells us that, with each additional witness in agreement, the chance of them all being incorrect will approach zero. Thus one might naively believe that the weight of as many as thirteen unanimous confirmations leaves us beyond reasonable doubt.
However, this is not necessarily the case and more
confirmations can surprisingly disimprove our confidence
that the defendant has been correctly identified as the
perpetrator. This type of possibility was recognised
intuitively in ancient times. Under ancient Jewish law,
one could not be unanimously convicted of a capital
crime -- it was held that the absence of even one dissenting
opinion among the judges indicated that there must
remain some form of undiscovered exculpatory evidence.
...
We have analysed the behaviour of systems that are
subject to systematic failure, and demonstrated that with
relatively low failure rates, large sample sizes are not required
in order that unanimous results start to become indicative
of systematic failure. We have investigated
the effect of this phenomenon upon identity parades, and
shown that even with only a 1% rate of failure, confidence
begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications
failing to reach even 95%.
Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional. My senior thesis in college ended up replicating a bunch of existing ideas instead of introducing new ones. When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away. But when it's in limbo, it stays active in our minds.
This paper explores the role of cultural attitudes towards women in
determining math educational gender gaps using the epidemiological approach.
...
The transmission of culture is higher among those in schools with
a higher proportion of immigrants or in co-educational schools.
Our results suggest that policies aimed at changing beliefs can
prove effective in reducing the gender gap in mathematics.