A2AD fait accompli?

As I mentioned previously, Australian strategists are a good source of analysis on China-US defense issues in the western Pacific because they are caught in the middle and have to think realistically about the situation.

@3:30 min: A2AD by DF21 / DF26 ASBM a fait accompli? 9 dash line to become a reality? Is containment broken?

See earlier post The Pivot and American Statecraft in Asia.

I linked to the report below some time ago.

China’s Constellation of Yaogan Satellites & the Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile – An Update

Professor S. Chandrashekar and Professor Soma Perumal
International Strategic & Security Studies Programme (ISSSP)
National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS)
December 2013

With the recent launch of the Yaogan 19 satellite China has in place an advanced space capability to identify, locate and track an Aircraft Carrier Group (ACG) on the high seas. This space capability is an important component of an Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM) System that China has set up.

The current 19 satellite constellation consists of ELINT satellites, satellites carrying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors as well as satellites carrying optical imaging sensors. Based on the orbit characteristics, their local time of equatorial crossing and other related parameters, these satellites can be grouped into different categories that perform the various functions for identifying, locating and tracking the ACG.

Yaogan 9 (Yaogan 9A, 9B, 9C), Yaogan (16A, 16B, 16C) and Yaogan 17 (17A, 17B, 17C) are the three clusters that are equipped with ELINT sensors that provide broad area surveillance over the Oceans. With a coverage radius of about 3500 Km, they provide the first coarse fix for identifying and locating an ACG in the Pacific Ocean.

Yaogan 13, Yaogan 10, Yaogan 18 and Yaogan 14 are the satellites carrying a SAR sensor. With Local times of crossing of 02 00, 06 00, 10 00 and 14 00 hours and a resolution of 1 to 3 m , they provide all weather as well as day and night imaging capabilities over the regions of interest.

Yaogan 11, Yaogan 4, Yaogan 2 and Yaogan 7 constitute the high resolution optical satellites in the current constellation. The sensors they carry may have resolutions of between 1 to 3 m. ...

The three ELINT clusters typically make 18 contacts in a day with the moving target. The maximum period for which the target remains outside the reach of the ELINT satellites is about 90 minutes in a day. The SAR and the optical imaging satellites together typically provide 24 satellite passes over the target. About 16 targeting opportunities, during which the uncertainty in the target’s location is less than 10 km, are available in a day.

The analysis and the simulation results suggest that China has in place an operational ASBM system that can identify, locate, track and destroy an Aircraft Carrier in the Pacific Ocean.

This seems to be an important component of a larger Chinese Access and Area Denial Strategy focused around a conflict over Taiwan.

Over the summer I bumped into a micro-satellite startup guy at the Googleplex and we got onto the subject of imaging aircraft carriers from space. He thought a carrier group would be easy to image and couldn't possibly survive a serious conflict in the Pacific.

Geoffrey Miller on Virtue Signaling (audio + slides)

This talk was given at the meeting Effective Altruism Global 2016. Includes a good warning about IQ signaling and some advice on how to market a movement to neurotypicals. Slides.

More Geoffrey Miller :-)

GWAS: Multiple Loci Influencing Normal Human Facial Morphology

These are not surprising results, given that identical twins raised apart tend to have nearly identical facial morphology. It's implausible that most of this heritability is due to rare variants. If large GWASes would take photos and video of individuals in the study, genomic prediction of facial morphology could advance dramatically using face recognition algorithms.

See also HLI and genomic prediction of facial morphology  (source of image above of Craig Venter).

Genome-Wide Association Study Reveals Multiple Loci Influencing Normal Human Facial Morphology

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006149

Numerous lines of evidence point to a genetic basis for facial morphology in humans, yet little is known about how specific genetic variants relate to the phenotypic expression of many common facial features. We conducted genome-wide association meta-analyses of 20 quantitative facial measurements derived from the 3D surface images of 3118 healthy individuals of European ancestry belonging to two US cohorts. Analyses were performed on just under one million genotyped SNPs (Illumina OmniExpress+Exome v1.2 array) imputed to the 1000 Genomes reference panel (Phase 3). We observed genome-wide significant associations (p < 5 x 10−8) for cranial base width at 14q21.1 and 20q12, intercanthal width at 1p13.3 and Xq13.2, nasal width at 20p11.22, nasal ala length at 14q11.2, and upper facial depth at 11q22.1. Several genes in the associated regions are known to play roles in craniofacial development or in syndromes affecting the face: MAFB, PAX9, MIPOL1, ALX3, HDAC8, and PAX1. We also tested genotype-phenotype associations reported in two previous genome-wide studies and found evidence of replication for nasal ala length and SNPs in CACNA2D3 and PRDM16. These results provide further evidence that common variants in regions harboring genes of known craniofacial function contribute to normal variation in human facial features. Improved understanding of the genes associated with facial morphology in healthy individuals can provide insights into the pathways and mechanisms controlling normal and abnormal facial morphogenesis.

Tyler Cowen on Efficient Markets (video)

Tyler Cowen explains the basics of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. For a deeper exploration, see Tyler Cowen and rationality, which links to his paper How economists think about rationality.

Tyler Cowen and rationality [my comments]: ... The excerpt below deals with rationality in finance theory and strong and weak versions of efficient markets. I believe the weak version; the strong version is nonsense. (See, e.g, here for a discussion of limits to arbitrage that permit long lasting financial bubbles. In other words, capital markets are demonstrably far from perfect, as defined below by Cowen.)

Although you might think the strong version of EMH is only important to traders and finance specialists, it is also very much related to the idea that markets are good optimizers of resource allocation for society. Do markets accurately reflect the "fundamental value of corporations"? See related discussion here.

...

As you can tell from my comments, I do not believe there is any unique basis for "rationality" in economics. Humans are flawed information processing units produced by the random vagaries of evolution. Not only are we different from each other, but these differences arise both from genes and the individual paths taken through life. Can a complex system comprised of such creatures be modeled through simple equations describing a few coarse grained variables? In some rare cases, perhaps yes, but in most cases, I would guess no. Finance theory already adopts this perspective in insisting on a stochastic (random) component in any model of security prices. Over sufficiently long timescales even the properties of the random component are not constant! (Hence, stochastic volatility, etc.)

Bayesian large-scale multiple regression with summary statistics from genome-wide association studies

This is an interesting idea, which has also been advocated to me over the years by my collaborator Carson Chow (blog). I'm optimistic that we're entering an era of large data sets that can be analyzed in situ using more sophisticated algorithms than simple regression. However, it will always be useful to have a better method for combining multiple data sets using only aggregate statistics.

Xiang Zhu's slides.

Bayesian large-scale multiple regression with summary statistics from genome-wide association studies

Xiang Zhu, Matthew Stephens
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/042457

Bayesian methods for large-scale multiple regression provide attractive approaches to the analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). For example, they can estimate heritability of complex traits, allowing for both polygenic and sparse models; and by incorporating external genomic data into the priors they can increase power and yield new biological insights. However, these methods require access to individual genotypes and phenotypes, which are often not easily available. Here we provide a framework for performing these analyses without individual-level data. Specifically, we introduce a "Regression with Summary Statistics" (RSS) likelihood, which relates the multiple regression coefficients to univariate regression results that are often easily available. The RSS likelihood requires estimates of correlations among covariates (SNPs), which also can be obtained from public databases. We perform Bayesian multiple regression analysis by combining the RSS likelihood with previously-proposed prior distributions, sampling posteriors by Markov chain Monte Carlo. In a wide range of simulations RSS performs similarly to analyses using the individual data, both for estimating heritability and detecting associations. We apply RSS to a GWAS of human height that contains 253,288 individuals typed at 1.06 million SNPs, for which analyses of individual-level data are practically impossible. Estimates of heritability (52%) are consistent with, but more precise, than previous results using subsets of these data. We also identify many previously-unreported loci that show evidence for association with height in our analyses. Software implementing RSS is available at https://github.com/stephenslab/rss.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and an October(?) Surprise

In recent interviews Julian Assange more or less claims to have the goods on Hillary. If I had to guess, I suppose he might have email traffic showing that she lied to congress, for example in the exchange above with Rand Paul, or perhaps in some of her answers to questions about her private email server. The most impactful time to release this information is probably just before one of the debates.

Paul: "It’s been in news reports that ships have been leaving from Libya and that they may have weapons. And what I’d like to know is, that [CIA] annex that was close by [the State Department facility], were they involved with procuring, buying, selling, obtaining weapons, and were any of these weapons being transferred to other countries? Any countries, Turkey included?"

Clinton: “I don’t know. I don’t have any information on that.”

If we lived in a country where rule of law applied, there might be serious consequences for this sort of thing. In the 21st century USA, we'll be lucky if any mainstream media outlets cover the story ;-) The NYTimes will probably just blame the Russians.

Visualization of geometric intuitions underlying linear algebra (video)

The Pivot and American Statecraft in Asia

Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, critiques the Obama administration's so-called pivot to Asia. Australian strategists are a good source of analysis on this issue because they are caught in the middle and have to think realistically about the situation.

Whenever I see a book or article on this topic I quickly search for terms like DF-21, ASBM, ASCM, cruise missiles, satellite imaging, submarines, etc. The discussion cannot be serious or deep without an understanding of current military and technological capabilities of both sides. (See High V, Low M.)

Book review: 'The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia', by Kurt Campbell: As Assistant Secretary of State for Asia in Barack Obama's first term, Kurt Campbell has a respectable claim to being the principal architect of the president's Pivot to Asia. Not surprisingly, then, his new book The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia argues that the Pivot is the right policy for America in Asia over coming years, and explains how it should be elaborated and extended under the next president.

... Washington has never clearly identified or analysed the problem which the Pivot is supposed to solve, and The Pivot doesn't either. And yet there is no mystery here. America's problem in Asia today is that China seeks to take its place as the primary power in Asia, and the shift in relative power between the two countries over recent decades makes China's challenge very formidable indeed. This simple fact must be at the centre of any serious analysis of America's policy options in Asia.

The Pivot mentions China a lot, but does not plainly acknowledge the centrality of its challenge to America's predicament in Asia today, and nowhere seriously assesses the power and ambition that drive China's challenge. Nor is the book clear about America's objectives. In places it says America's aims include preventing Asia falling under someone else's hegemony, but elsewhere that the Pivot is all about preserving Asia's geopolitical 'operating system', by which it plainly means preserving the status quo based on US primacy.

Thus the book, like the policy itself, is based on evasions about both China's and America's aims, and therefore avoids acknowledging how directly those aims conflict, and how stark and serious the resulting confrontation between them has already become.

... The practical steps taken under the Pivot have always been far too modest to meet the challenge America faces in Asia. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that they were ever intended to have more than a symbolic effect. The Pivot's architects apparently assumed that a merely symbolic reassertion of US power and resolve would be enough to make China back off and abandon its challenge. China's assertive posture in the East and South China Seas today is strong evidence that they were wrong.

... In particular, The Pivot has nothing to say about the most important single question facing America in Asia today: is it willing to go to war with China to preserve US primacy? This question, more than anything else, will determine the shape of future Asian order and America's role in it. China's recent conduct strongly suggests that it will only abandon its challenge to American primacy if it is really convinced that the answer is 'yes'. But nothing Beijing has seen or heard from Washington in recent years has convinced it of that, which is why it has been acting so boldly. Unless that changes, the chances of facing down Beijing's challenge are very low.

That will not change until an American president is willing to stand up and explain to America's people why US primacy in Asia is so important to them that they should be willing to go to war with China to preserve it. The answer to that question must encompass the fact that China is a nuclear-armed power with the capacity to destroy US cities. This is an issue which The Pivot entirely avoids. I found no substantive reference to China's nuclear forces in the entire book, nor to extended nuclear deterrence as the foundation of America's key alliances, and hence to its position in Asia. No analysis that evades these hard questions can address the future of America's Asia strategy effectively.

So Kurt Campbell's new book reinforces the impression that important elements of America's foreign policy establishment still haven't begun either to take China's rise seriously or to consider the momentous choices America faces in response to it. Until that changes, America's response to China is unlikely to become much more effective than it has been for the five years since Barack Obama launched the Pivot in Canberra. And so it becomes more and more likely that American power in Asia will continue to dwindle.

See also Red Star over the Pacific and The Thucydides Trap.

I added the following in the comments. These questions of military/technological capability stand prior to the prattle of diplomats, policy analysts, or political scientists. Perhaps just as crucial is whether top US and Chinese leadership share the same beliefs on these issues.

It's hard to war game a US-China pacific conflict, even a conventional one. How long before the US surface fleet is destroyed by ASBM/ASCM? How long until forward bases are? How long until US has to strike at targets on the mainland? How long do satellites survive? How long before the conflict goes nuclear? I wonder whether anyone knows the answers to these questions with high confidence -- even very basic ones, like how well asymmetric threats like ASBM/ASCM will perform under realistic conditions. These systems have never been tested in battle.

The stakes are so high that China can just continue to establish "facts on the ground" (like building new island bases), with some confidence that the US will hesitate to escalate. If, for example, both sides secretly believe (at the highest levels; seems that Xi is behaving as if he might) that ASBM/ASCM are very effective, then sailing a carrier group through the South China Sea becomes an act of symbolism with meaning only to those that are not in the know.

This Aug 2016 RAND report delves into some of the relevant issues (see Appendix A, p.75). But it is not clear whether the 2025 or 2015 scenarios explored will be more realistic over the next few years. A weakness of the report is that it assumes US forces will undertake large scale conventional attack on the Chinese mainland (referred to as Air Sea Battle by US planners) relatively early in the conflict, without fear of nuclear retaliation. A real decision maker could not confidently make that assumption, PRC "no first use" declaration notwithstanding.

See also Future Warfare in the Western Pacific (International Security, Summer 2016) for a detailed analysis of A2AD capability, potentially practiced by both sides. I disagree with the authors' claim that the effectiveness of A2AD in 2040 will be limited to horizon distances (they assume all satellites have been destroyed). The authors neglect the possibility of large numbers of stealthy drone radar platforms (or micro-satellites) which are hard to detect until they activate to provide targeting data to incoming missiles.

This article by Peter Lee gives a realistic summary of the situation, including the role of nuclear weapons. As a journalist, Lee is not under the same political restrictions as RAND or others funded by the US military / defense industry. The survivability of the surface fleet (=aircraft carriers) and the escalatory nature of what is known as Air Sea Battle (=ASB) are both highly sensitive topics.

Cheng Li on elite Chinese politics (Sinica podcast)

Excellent podcast interview with Cheng Li of Brookings. Li has both a long historical perspective on Chinese politics (having lived through the Cultural Revolution) and a detailed understanding of current developments. He addresses topics such as technocracy, rule of law, Xi Jinping, corruption, princelings vs grassroots party members, etc.

Sinica podcast: One of the most prominent international scholars of elite Chinese politics speaks about the past, present and future of factionalism, reform and technocracy in China and the nation's direction under Xi Jinping.

Li grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985 he came to the United States, where he received a master's in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. From 1993 to 1995, he worked in China as a fellow sponsored by the Institute of Current World Affairs in the U.S., observing grassroots changes in his native country. Based on this experience, he published a nationally acclaimed book, "Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform" (1997).

Li is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including "China’s Leaders: The New Generation" (2001), "Bridging Minds Across the Pacific: The Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange 1978-2003" (2005), "China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy" (2008), "China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation" (2010), "The Road to Zhongnanhai: High-Level Leadership Groups on the Eve of the 18th Party Congress" (in Chinese, 2012), "The Political Mapping of China’s Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign" (2012), "China's Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives" (2014), "Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership" (2016), and "The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China" (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title "Middle Class Shanghai: Pioneering China’s Global Integration." He is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Half of all jobs (> $60k/y) coding related?

In the future there will be two kinds of jobs. Workers will either

Tell computers what to do    

or

Be told by computers what to do

See this jobs report, based on BLS statistics and analysis of 26 million job postings scraped from job boards, newspapers, and other online sources in 2015.

Coding jobs represent a large and growing part of the job market. There were nearly 7 million job openings in the U.S. last year for roles requiring coding skills. This represents 20% of the total market for career-track jobs that pay $15 an hour or more. Jobs with coding skills are projected to grow 12% faster than the job market overall in the next 10 years. IT jobs are expected to grow even more rapidly: 25% faster than the overall market.1

Programming skills are in demand across a range of industries. Half of all programming openings are in Finance, Manufacturing, Health Care, and other sectors outside of the technology industry.

...

Jobs valuing coding skills pay $22,000 per year more, on average, than jobs that don’t: $84,000 vs $62,000 per year. The value of these skills is striking and, for students looking to increase their potential income, few other skills open the door to as many well-paying careers. Slicing the data another way, 49% of the jobs in the top wage quartile (>$58,000/yr) value coding skills.

...

We define coding jobs as those in any occupation where knowing how to write computer code makes someone a stronger candidate and where employers commonly request coding skills in job postings. In some cases, coding is a prerequisite skill for the role, such as for Database Administrators. In other cases, such as Graphic Designers, knowing how to code may not be required in all cases, but job seekers with relevant programming skills will typically have an advantage.

See also The Butlerian Jihad and Darwin among the Machines.

Greg Cochran on James Miller's Future Strategist podcast

James Miller interviews Greg Cochran on a variety of topics.

Some comments on the early part of the interview (you might need to listen to it to make sense of what I write below):

1. The prediction I've made about the consequences of additive genetic variance in intelligence is not that we'll be able to realize +30 SDs of cognitive ability. That would only be true if we could ignore pleiotropy, nonlinear corrections to the additive approximation, etc. What I claim is that because there are +30 SDs up for grabs in the first order approximation, it seems likely that at least a chunk of this will be realizable, leading to geniuses beyond those that have existed so far in human history (this is the actual claim). To doubt this conclusion one would have to argue that even, say, +8 or +10 SDs out of 30 are unrealizable, which is hard to believe since we have examples of healthy and robust individuals who are in the +6 or +7 range. (These numbers are poorly defined since the normal distribution fails to apply in the tails.)

### I could make further, more technical, arguments that originate from the fact that the genomic space is very high dimensional. These suggest that, given healthy/robust examples at +X, it is very unlikely that there is NO path in the high dimensional space to a phenotype value greater than X while holding "robustness" relatively fixed. ###

2. Greg comments on whether super smart people can have "normal" personalities. This is obviously not necessary for them to be viable contributors to civilization (and even less of an issue in a future civilization where everyone is quite a bit smarter on average). He posits that von Neumann might have been radically strange, but able to emulate an ordinary person when necessary. (The joke is that he was actually a Martian pretending to be human.) My impression from reading Ulam's autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician (see also here), is that von Neumann was actually not that strange by the standards of mathematicians -- he was sociable, had a good sense of humor, enjoyed interactions with others and with his family. He and Ulam were close and spent a lot of time together. I suspect Ulam's portrait of vN is reasonably accurate.

3. The University of Chicago conference on genetics and behavior Greg mentions, which was hosted in James Heckman's institute, is described here, here, and here (videos).


### A masochist in the comments asked for the actual argument, so here it is: ###

Here's a simple example which I think conveys the basic idea.

Suppose you have 10k variants and that individuals with 5.5k or more + variants are at the limit of cognitive ability yet seen in history (i.e., at the one in a million or billion or whatever level). Now suppose that each of the 10k + variants comes with some deleterious effect on some other trait(s) like general health, mental stability, etc. (This is actually too pessimistic -- some will actually come with positive effects!) These deleterious effects are not uniform over the 10k variants -- for some fixed number of + variants (i.e., 5.5k) there are many different individuals with different levels of overall health/robustness.

Let the number of distinct genotypes that lead to (nearly) "maximal historical" cognitive ability be n = (number of ways to distribute 5.5k +'s over 10k variants); this is a huge number. Now, we know of many actual examples of historical geniuses who were relatively healthy and robust. The probability that these specific individuals achieved the *minimum* level of negative or deleterious effects over all n possibilities is vanishingly small. But that means that there are genotypes with *more* than 5.5k + variants at the same level of general robustness. These correspond to individuals who are healthy/robust but have greater cognitive ability than any historical genius.

You can make this argument fully realistic by dropping the assumption that + effect sizes on cognitive ability are uniform, that effects on different traits are completely additive, etc. The point is that there are so many genotypes that realize [cognitive ability ~ historical max], that the ones produced so far are unlikely to maximize overall health/robustness given that constraint. But that means there are other genotypes (off the surface of constraint) with even higher cognitive ability, yet still healthy and robust.

We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance (Nautilus Magazine)

This is in the special Sports issue -- just in time for Rio :-)

We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance

For many years I lived in Eugene, Oregon, also known as “track-town USA” for its long tradition in track and field. Each summer high-profile meets like the United States National Championships or Olympic Trials would bring world-class competitors to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. It was exciting to bump into great athletes at the local cafe or ice cream shop, or even find myself lifting weights or running on a track next to them. One morning I was shocked to be passed as if standing still by a woman running 400-meter repeats. Her training pace was as fast as I could run a flat out sprint over a much shorter distance.

The simple fact was that she was an extreme outlier, and I wasn’t. Athletic performance follows a normal distribution, like many other quantities in nature. That means that the number of people capable of exceptional performance falls off exponentially as performance levels increase. While an 11-second 100-meter can win a high school student the league or district championship, a good state champion runs sub-11, and among 100 state champions only a few have any hope of running near 10 seconds.

... Freeman Dyson speculated that, one day, humans would use genetic technologies to modify themselves for space exploration—making themselves more resistant to radiation, vacuum, and zero gravity, perhaps even able to extract energy directly from sunlight. Insertion of genes from entirely different species, like photosynthetic plant genes, brings a whole new meaning to the term GMO: Speciation seems a definite possibility.

Human athletic ability might follow a similar trajectory. The nature of athletes, and the sports they compete in, are going to change due to new genomic technology. Will ordinary people lose interest? History suggests that they won’t: We love to marvel at exceptional, unimaginable ability. Lebron and Kobe and Shaq and Bolt all stimulated interest in their sports. The most popular spectator sport of 2100 might be cage fights between 8-foot-tall titans capable of balletic spinning head kicks and intricate jiu-jitsu moves. Or, just a really, really fast 100m sprint. No doping required.

Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever (video)

This video is one of the best introductions to the coming genomic revolution that I have seen.

It emphasizes breakthroughs like CRISPR that will make gene editing simple, safe, and effective. However, it spends little time explaining how scientists will decipher genetic architectures (i.e., using big data sets and machine learning) in order understand which edits to make.

I might also quibble with the claim that a DNA edit is a permanent change to the human gene pool. If we don't like it we can always edit back to the original...

Podcast: Clay Shirky on tech and the internet in China

Highly recommended. Unfortunately I can't embed the podcast here so you'll have to click through.

In this episode of Sinica, Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody who has written about the internet and its effects on society since the 1990s, joins Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of China’s tech industry and the extraordinary advances the nation has made in the online world.

The hour-long conversation delves into the details and big-picture phenomena driving the globe’s largest internet market, and includes an analysis of Xiaomi’s innovation, the struggles that successful Chinese companies face when taking their brands abroad and the nation’s robust ecommerce offerings.

Clay has written numerous books, including Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream in addition to the aforementioned Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He is also a Shanghai-based associate professor with New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the school’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Related: NYTimes video explaining WeChat. (The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.)

The ACME Fortune Cookie Factory

See also Isabel and the Dwarf King.

When we eat at a Chinese restaurant we usually get fortune cookies. Each cookie comes with its own mysterious message. Dad says that the messages are all written by people working at the ACME Fortune Cookie Factory. He says that he was once a fortune writer there. His masterpiece was a two-part message. The first message said WHEN YOU ARE HUNGRY EVERYTHING IS DELICIOUS. The second message said IF YOU ARE NOT HUNGRY, DON'T EAT. Millions of kids have pondered these messages. Dad says there is a life secret in these messages that most people miss -- including mom.

Dad just wrote the messages. Other workers had to make the cookies. The best worker was a little alien robot -- no one knew where he came from. Dad felt sorry for the robot, and thought he was destined for better things. Dad helped him send out the message HELP! I AM A PRISONER AT THE ACME FORTUNE COOKIE FACTORY. Dad says he doesn't know what happened to the robot.

Off the Grid in British Columbia

Who wouldn't trade their stressful modern lifestyle for an off grid homestead in British Columbia? Lovely family, beautiful locale.

Solar + Li batteries + old school technologies allow sustainable living without discomfort.

Machine Learning for Personalized Medicine: Heritability-based models for prediction of complex traits (David Balding)

Highly recommended talk by David Balding on modern approaches to heritability, relatedness, etc. in statistical genetics. (I listened at 1.5x normal speed, which worked for me.)

MLPM (Machine Learning for Personalized Medicine) Summer School 2015
Monday 21st of September

Heritability-based models for prediction of complex traits
by David Balding

Complex trait genetics has been revolutionised over the past 5 years by developments related to the concept of heritability. Heritability is the fraction of phenotypic variation that can be attributed to genetic mechanisms (mostly we focus on narrow-sense heritability, which considers only additive genetic effects). Since we cannot identify and measure the causal genetic mechanisms, a traditional approach has been to use pedigree relatedness as a proxy for the sharing of causal alleles between individuals. Pedigree relatedness even came to be seen as central to the concept of heritability, which perhaps explains why it was not until 2010 that it became widely appreciated that genome-wide genetic markers (SNPs) offered at least a "noisy" way to directly measure causal alleles, and hence a new approach to assessing heritability. This approach is "noisy" because SNPs generally only tag causal variants imperfectly, depending on SNP density and linkage disequilibrium, and many SNPs may tag little or no causal variation. So genome-wide SNP-based heritability estimates are difficult to interpret, but they can provide a lower bound which was enough to show that SNPs usually tag much more causal variation than can be attributed to genome-wide significant SNPs. Another big step forward has been that heritability can be attributed to different genes, genomic regions or functional classes, and for many phenotypes it is found to be widely dispersed across the genome, with relatively little concentration in coding regions. Further, heritability has become a unit of common currency for gene-based tests and meta-analysis. I will review the ideas and the underlying mathematical models, and present some recent results.

Some comments:

1. He notes that after a few hundred years, it's highly likely that a given descendant carries no actual DNA from a specific ancestor (e.g., most descendants of Shakespeare alive today have none of his DNA).

2. @18min or so: a request to Chris Chang to add a modified definition of SNP relatedness to PLINK (i.e., new flag), with a different weighting for the heterozygous (1,1) case  ;-)

3. @29min or so: finally, a discussion of systematic errors in GCTA due to LD characteristics of causal variants. As I said here:

I've always felt that the real weakness of GCTA is the assumption of random effects. A consequence of this assumption is that if the true causal variants are atypical (e.g., in terms of linkage disequilibrium) among common SNPs, the results could be biased. It is impossible to evaluate this uncertainty at the moment because we do not yet know the (full) genetic architectures of any complex traits.

See also Heritability Estimates from Summary Statistics, No Genomic Dark Matter, and HaploSNPs and missing heritability.

4. @35min: again T1D stands out in terms of genetic architecture

5. @47min: predictive correlations of almost 0.6 for T1D

Slides for this talk. Slides for another Balding lecture: Introduction to Genomic Prediction.

Trump: Give Peace a Chance

Thanks to a commenter for pointing me to the article below.

See also Trump, Putin, Stephen Cohen, Brawndo, and Electrolytes, Bear Baiting is Dangerous, and Obama: "Don't do stupid sh*t".

Is Trump the Peace Candidate? (Pat Buchanan)

With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton’s lost emails.

Not funny, and close to “treasonous,” came the shocked cry.

Trump then told The New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need not trigger a U.S. military response.

Even more shocking. By suggesting the U.S. might not honor its NATO commitment, under Article 5, to fight Russia for Estonia, our foreign policy elites declaimed, Trump has undermined the security architecture that has kept the peace for 65 years.

More interesting, however, was the reaction of Middle America. Or, to be more exact, the nonreaction. Americans seem neither shocked nor horrified. What does this suggest?

Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled.

We got a hint of this in 2013. Barack Obama, claiming his “red line” against any use of poison gas in Syria had been crossed, found he had no public backing for air and missile strikes on the Assad regime.

The country rose up as one and told him to forget it. He did.

We have been at war since 2001. And as one looks on the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and adds up the thousands dead and wounded and trillions sunk and lost, can anyone say our War Party has served us well?

On bringing Estonia into NATO, no Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing so insane a war guarantee.

Eisenhower refused to intervene to save the Hungarian rebels. JFK refused to halt the building of the Berlin Wall. LBJ did nothing to impede the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of the Prague Spring. Reagan never considered moving militarily to halt the smashing of Solidarity.

Were all these presidents cringing isolationists?

Rather, they were realists who recognized that, though we prayed the captive nations would one day be free, we were not going to risk a world war, or a nuclear war, to achieve it. Period.

In 1991, President Bush told Ukrainians that any declaration of independence from Moscow would be an act of “suicidal nationalism.”

Today, Beltway hawks want to bring Ukraine into NATO. This would mean that America would go to war with Russia, if necessary, to preserve an independence Bush I regarded as “suicidal.”

Have we lost our minds? ...

NATO Article 5 (armed force response is optional, not required):

Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Trinity College Dublin iGEMS Interview

My interview with Thomas O'Reilly of Trinity College Dublin, covering topics such as genomics, CRISPR, genetic engineering, computational genomics, technology startups.