Information Processing

By constructing haplotypes using adjacent SNPs the authors arrive at a superior set of genetic variables with which to compute genetic simil...

Meetings with BGI, HKUST, and financiers. Will stop in SV and Seattle (Allen Institute) on the way back.

I saw this video at one of the Scifoo sessions on drones. Beautiful stuff! I find this much more pleasing than fireworks. The amount of ...

Editorial in the Lancet, reflecting on the Symposium on the Reproducibility and Reliability of Biomedical Research held April 2015 by the W...

Regular readers will know that I've been interested in the so-called Teller-Ulam mechanism used in thermonuclear bombs. Recently I read ...

A correspondent updates us on advances in genomic cattle breeding. See also Genomic Prediction: No Bull and It's all in the gene: co...

These slides are from one of the best sessions I attended at scifoo. Bill Janeway's perspective was both theoretical and historical, but...

"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate...

The tail of the (green) 2000 curve seems slightly off to me: ~10 million individuals with >$100k annual income? (~ $400k per annum for ...

This is v2 of a draft we posted earlier in the year. The new version has much more detail on whether rotation curve measurements of an isola...

This is a new AMC series, done in collaboration with Channel 4 in the UK. I just watched the first episode and it is really good.

Interesting results in this recent Nature article. The dominance effect is quite strong: the equivalent of first cousin inbreeding (homo...

I'm in Palo Alto for this annual meeting of scientists and entrepreneurs at Google. If you read this blog, come over and say hello! ...

Seventeen year old Julian Schwinger meets Columbia professor I. I. Rabi (Nobel Prize 1944) and explains the EPR paper to him. Climbing the...

"Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel." Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.   NYTimes...

Theoretical physicist John Hopfield , inventor of the Hopfield neural network , on the differences between physics and biology. Hopfield mig...

New paper! We hypothesize that rapid growth of entanglement entropy between modes in the central region and other scattering degrees of f...

This nice review gives a history of the last 100 years in statistical genetics as applied to animal breeding (via Andrew Gelman ). One Hund...

This is a talk from ESHG 2015 , which just happened in Glasgow. The abstract is old; at the talk the author reportedly described somethi...

Note the estimate of few to ten thousand causal SNP variants, consistent with my estimates for height and cognitive ability. Sparsity (nu...

See Ioannidis at MSU for video discussion of related topics with the leading researcher in this area, and also Medical Science? Is Science...

Alfred W. McCoy , Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes on global geopolitics. The brief excerpts below do ...

The three shows I've been following in recent years are Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, and Mad Men (now over). Some of the Amazon Pr...

A great interview with Jim Simons. From academic mathematics to code breaking to financial markets :-)

Featuring Evan Osnos, Kaiser Kuo, and Jeremey Goldkorn (of the Sinica podcast ).