Information Processing

Reminds me of my years in Oregon :-) See also Off the Grid in British Columbia .

Unbeknownst to me I've been skyping with a collaborator who has been working from this location. SCMP : China opens first national ...

Over 50% of Americans, and 70% with household income over $100k, are Amazon Prime users. Amazon is killing malls, retailers, brands, and...

"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must...

Michael Anton is head of strategic communications for the National Security Council. See related Politico article . The Atlantic : Mich...

This is a recent Yann LeCun talk at CMU. Toward the end he discusses recent breakthroughs using GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks, see...

This talk gives the history of neural networks in the framework of Bayesian inference. Deep learning is (so far) quite empirical in nature...

British socialist Michael Young coined the term meritocracy in his 1958 dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy . He realized even t...

One of the difficulties in genomics is that when DNA donors are consented for a study, the agreements generally do not allow sharing (aggreg...

See also A Brief History of the Future, as told to the Masters of the Universe and Super-Intelligent Humans are Coming . National Geog...

Chomsky on the current media / left obsession with anti-Russia conspiracy theories. I guess he and Trump are both Putin puppets... Oops, e...

Male brains exhibit larger variance across all morphological measures. (Don't tell Larry Summers! ;-) Note, as far as I can tell the a...

I hope this scandal will focus additional attention on massive bulk collection and preservation of private communications of US citizens by ...

I love Joe Rogan -- he has an open, inquisitive mind and is a sharp observer of life and human society. See, for example, this interview w...

Musical intermission. Choose your favorite! For me it's not the same without that 80's synth...

For background on this subject, see How to beat online exam proctoring . It is easy for clever students to beat existing security systems...

... but in a good way! :-) Beijing-based economist and rapper Andrew Dougherty ("Big Daddy Dough") presents The Redprint : Rhyme...

We were together on a panel talking about AI. I challenged him to a quick game of blitz but he declined ;-)  The moderator is  Josh Wolfe...

I've made this separate entry from the update to my earlier discussion FISA, EO 12333, Bulk Collection, and All That . I believe the N...

Some basic questions for the experts: 1. To what extent does EO12333 allow surveillance of US individuals without FISA warrant? 2. To...

The figure above comes from the paper below. A quick glance shows that for pairs of individuals: 1. Increasing genetic similarity implies i...

Now that we have neural nets that are good at certain narrow tasks, such as image or speech recognition, playing specific games, translating...

Dalton Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is unique in having earned a second PhD in ...

John Etchemendy is a former Provost of Stanford University. The Threat From Within ... Over the years, I have watched a growing intol...

In an earlier post ( Perverse Incentives and Replication in Science ), I wrote: Here's a depressing but all too common pattern in scie...