Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
J. Bradford DeLong
Last December, Republicans relied on the support of conservative economists who predicted that the party's corporate tax cuts would boost productivity and investment in the United States substantially. The forecasts were wrong, and the silence of those who made them suggests that they knew it all along.
Piketty and Saez (2003) found that income inequality rose
substantially between 1979 and 2002 because the top 10 percent of
the income distribution took 91 percent of the income growth during
that period. As the real incomes of the top 10 percent soared, the
incomes of the bottom 90 percent stagnated. Piketty and Saez's
findings garnered tremendous attention and were cited repeatedly.
But many researchers eventually found problems with Piketty and
Saez's approach and developed income inequality measures that
led to different findings.
...
All studies find that income inequality rose after 1979, but common
perceptions that all income gain went to the top 10 percent and
middle class incomes stagnated (or even declined) are wrong.
The story of how America evolved from 1945 to 2018.
By Morgan Housel, The Collaborative Fund
This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy
since the end of World War II.
That's a lot to unpack in 5,000 words, but the short story
of what happened over the last 73 years is simple:
Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad,
then really good, then really bad, and now here we are. And there is,
I think, a narrative that links all those events together.
Not a detailed account. But a story of how the details fit together.
... History is just one damn thing after another.
by Helen Andrews
No one has yet figured out what rules should govern the new frontiers of public shaming that the Internet has opened. New rules are obviously required. Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away. Getting a humiliating story into the papers used to require convincing an editor to run it, which meant passing their standards of newsworthiness and corroborating evidence. Those gatekeepers are now gone. Most attempts so far to devise new rules have taken ideology as their starting point: Shaming is okay as long as it's directed at men by women, the powerless against the powerful. But that doesn't address what to do afterward, if someone is found t have been wrongfully shamed, or when someone rightfully shamed wants to put his life back together.
Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis
So are DNNs the harbinger of superintelligent robots? Demis Hassabis doesn't believe so - and he would know. He's the cofounder of DeepMind, a London-based machine learning startup founded with the mission of applying insights from neuroscience and computer science toward the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) - in other words, systems that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can.
"There's still much further to go," he told VentureBeat at the NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal in early December. "Games or board games are quite easy in some ways because the transition model between states is very well-specified and easy to learn. Real-world 3D environments and the real world itself is much more tricky to figure out ... but it's important if you want to do planning."
AlphaZero, a general-purpose game-playing system, quickly taught itself to be the best player ever in Go, chess and Shogi
AlphaZero can crack any game that provides all the information that's relevant to decision-making; the new generation of games to which Campbell alludes do not. Poker furnishes a good example of such games of "imperfect" information: Players can hold their cards close to their chests. Other examples include many multiplayer games, such as StarCraft II, Dota, and Minecraft. But they may not pose a worthy challenge for long.
Online platform to radically change what news is about,
how it is made, and how it is funded.
To launch by mid-2019.
For decades, companies worked to cast doubt on whether sugar harms - until Cristin Kearns started digging up the dirt.
Neither the foundation's funding nor its role was disclosed in the
finished product, which was indeed favorable to sucrose: Hegsted's
team concluded that reducing cholesterol and saturated fats, not
sugar, was the way to reduce heart disease. But in her analysis
of their paper many years later, Kearns came to believe that they
dismissed and cherry-picked study data that raised questions
about sugar, citing reasons that, in her view, were biased and
inconsistent. It was a "smoking gun," Nestle wrote in a commentary
alongside Kearns' 2016 paper.
...
Even Taubes is unsure if the scientists deliberately skewed the science
to please their sugar overlords, or followed their own compass down
a path that just happened to match their funders' interests.
"That these Harvard researchers would then check it with the sugar
industry to make sure what they were writing was to its taste is a bit
troublesome, but, again, it might have been standard operating procedure
in the nutrition research world at the time," he said by email.
Inexpensive procedure shows whether patient has cancerous cells in the body, but does not reveal where or how serious it is.
The test has a sensitivity of about 90%, meaning it would detect about 90 in 100 cases of cancer. It would serve as an initial check for cancer, with doctors following up positive results with more focused investigations.
A new study published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine suggests that increased levels of a bone-produced hormone may prevent cognitive decline in older adults.
Previous
research
co-authored by Dr. Karsenty has shown that
osteocalcin - which is a hormone produced by osteoblasts, or bone
cells - fulfills a range of metabolic functions in the human body,
and that it influences spatial learning, memory, and the birth of
new neurons in mice.
...
After subjecting the rodents to memory tests, the researchers found
that blood infusions of the hormone improved the mice's memory. In
fact, osteocalcin seemed to boost the mice's memory to levels
equivalent to those of young mice.
Also see Bone-derived hormone reverses age-related memory loss in mice.
Weboob is a collection of applications able to interact with websites, without requiring the user to open them in a browser. It also provides well-defined APIs to talk to websites lacking one.
Check if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach.