Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Future of CRISPR (base & prime) and epigenome editing (Interview with Prof David R. Liu)

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  Excellent interview with David Liu of Harvard, which gives an overview of key innovations in gene editing since the discovery of CRISPR.  ...
Friday, March 26, 2021

John von Neumann, 1966 Documentary

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  This 1966 documentary on von Neumann was produced by the Mathematical Association of America. It includes interviews with Wigner, Ulam, Ha...
Thursday, March 25, 2021

Meritocracy x 3

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Three videos:  1. Political philosopher Daniel Bell on PRC political meritocracy.  2. Documentary on the 2020 Gao Kao: college entrance exam...
Sunday, March 21, 2021

The Contribution of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills to Intergenerational Social Mobility (McGue et al. 2020)

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If you have the slightest pretension to expertise concerning social mobility, meritocracy, inequality, genetics, psychology, economics, educ...
Thursday, March 18, 2021

Council on Foreign Relations: The Rise and Fall of Great Powers? America, China, and the Global Order

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  Insights from Ray Dalio and Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1987) on the balance of power and future global order. I ...
Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Academic Freedom Alliance

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We live in an era of preference falsification.  Vocal, dishonest, irrational activists have cowed all but the most courageous of the few rem...
Monday, March 08, 2021

Psychology Is: interview with Nick Fortino

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  This is a recent interview. Enjoy! In episode 14 of the Psychology Is podcast, we have the special opportunity to talk to Dr. Steve Hsu, a...

Inside AI/ML: Mark Saroufim

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  Great discussion and insider views of AI/ML research.  Academics think of themselves as trailblazers, explorers — seekers of the truth.  ...
Friday, March 05, 2021

Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals

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Greg Clark (UC Davis and London School of Economics) deserves enormous credit for producing a large multi-generational dataset which is rele...
Saturday, February 27, 2021

Infinity and Solipsism, Physicists and Science Fiction

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The excerpt below is from Roger Zelazny 's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), an experimental novel which is somewhat obscure, eve...
Sunday, February 21, 2021

Othram: Appalachian hiker found dead in tent identified via DNA forensics

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  Othram helps solve another mystery: the identity of a dead Appalachian hiker.  There are ~50k unidentified deceased individuals in the US...
Thursday, February 18, 2021

David Reich: Prehistory of Europe and S. Asia from Ancient DNA

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  In case you have not followed the adventures of the Yamnaya (proto Indo-Europeans from the Steppe), I recommend this recent Harvard lectur...
Wednesday, February 17, 2021

The Post-American World: Crooke, Escobar, Blumenthal, and Marandi

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  Even if you disagree violently with the viewpoints expressed in this discussion, it will inform you as to how the rest of the world thinks...
Sunday, February 14, 2021

Physics and AI: some recent papers

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Three AI paper recommendations from a theoretical physicist (former collaborator) who now runs an AI lab in SV. Less than 5 years after leav...
Sunday, February 07, 2021

Gradient Descent Models Are Kernel Machines (Deep Learning)

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This paper shows that models which result from gradient descent training (e.g., deep neural nets) can be expressed as a weighted sum of simi...
Saturday, February 06, 2021

Enter the Finns: FinnGen and FINRISK polygenic prediction of cardiometabolic diseases, common cancers, alcohol use, and cognition

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In 2018 Dr. Aarno Palotie visited MSU ( video of talk ) to give an overview of the FinnGen research project. FinnGen aims to collect the gen...
Wednesday, February 03, 2021

Gerald Feinberg and The Prometheus Project

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Gerald Feinberg (1933-1992) was a theoretical physicist at Columbia, perhaps best known for positing the tachyon -- a particle that travel...
Tuesday, February 02, 2021

All Men Are Brothers -- 3 AM Edition

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Afu Thomas is a German internet personality, known for his fluent Chinese, who lives in Shanghai. His videos are extremely popular in China ...
Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Yuri Milner interviews Donaldson, Kontsevich, Lurie, Tao, and Taylor (2015 Breakthrough Prize)

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  I came across this panel discussion recently, with Yuri Milner (former theoretical physicist, internet billionaire, and sponsor of the Bre...
Sunday, January 24, 2021

Clinical Applications of Polygenic Risk Scores

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Last week we posted a new paper (see bottom), prepared for the book Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits , Springer Nature series Methods i...
Monday, January 18, 2021

From Genotype to Phenotype: polygenic prediction of complex human traits

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New paper, prepared for the book  Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits , Springer Nature series Methods in Molecular Biology . From Genotyp...
Saturday, January 16, 2021

Harvard CMSA talks (video)

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I recently came across this channel on YouTube, produced by CMSA at Harvard. The new Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications in ...