Information Processing

A colleague sent me this interesting Science paper on the effectiveness of groups at solving problems. The effectiveness of a particular gr...

Ronald Fisher on positive alleles for intelligence, in Mendelism and Biometry (1911). Suppose we knew, for example, 20 pairs of menta...

Some artwork by my 4 year old kids. It ain't Picasso, but I like it :-) Le sacre du printemps. Wolverine. Eat your Veggies.

After watching this commercial, read the excerpt below from The Rising Tide Of Color , a 1920 bestseller (publisher: Charles Scribner) by Lo...

Why am I in Shenzhen right now? Because I read an article a few months ago suggesting that BGI was going to attempt an IQ GWAS (genome wid...

I've been meaning to post about this report on high level math competitions which appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical ...

I was floored today when the director of BGI told me they would soon reach a sequencing rate of 1000 (human) genomes per day (so, 10^5 to 1...

It's been said for the last decade or more that most of the interesting architectural projects are happening in China. Here's an exa...

Below are some photos from my first day at BGI Shenzhen. They are actually located in Dameisha, a small beach town over the mountains from t...

I was amused to read the following in a recent Fareed Zakaria interview of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. *** Is there a book you've read...

It is always a pleasure to browse the library when visiting another research institute. Although some books are found in every physics libra...

Next week I'll be a visitor at BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute; see earlier posts here ). I'm involved in a GWAS (genome w...

Note Added   (2022) : Wikipedia has a  long entry  on this topic. The American intellectual elite are endlessly fascinated by the French G...

In an earlier post I discussed the advantages of attending an elite university. A related question is: what fraction of the total populatio...

We were invited to a reception by the Foreign Ministry to commemorate the 99th National Celebration Day . The red carpet! I was a bit underd...

Gondola ride. View of Taipei from a temple. The temple. Bodhidharma has come to the east.

Someone posted the first quote below as a comment and I thought I'd share it, as well as some others. Alvarez was one of the greatest e...

See previous discussion here . I grew up in a university town in the midwest. The population of the town was about 40-50K and that of the un...

I posted this as a comment on a GNXP thread about whether it is worthwhile to attend an elite university. I suppose you can get the main p...

Academic turned tech entrepreneur turned documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson takes on Larry Summers and academic economists' support...

Another dispatch from the long, hard road to AI :-) This is how I see it going: machine learning with corrective input from mechanical turk...

Dessert at the Sogo department store. An arts and design festival we attended. Performance art for kids -- yes, that's a ballerina insid...