Unsorted links, April 2017: More AI misinformation, Tolkien, Google and Calculus Made Easy
A monthly collection of random links and commentary. Topics include: satellites, AI misinformation epidemic, Neal Stephenson, J.R.R. Tolkien on Disney, and much else.
Links
Aalto-2 Launched Into Space
[satellites, technology, space, things, space_things, spacecraft]
On April 18th, the first Finnish-built satellite Aalto-2 was successfully launched into space.
Construction of the Aalto-2 satellite began in 2012 as a doctoral project when the first students graduated as Masters of Science in Technology after working on the Aalto-1 project. Over six years, dozens of next-generation space industry experts have been trained in the projects. The impact is already visible in the growth of start-up companies in the space sector.
Curiously enough, the first satellite built in Otaniemi, Aalto-1, is still waiting for its turn. The latest plan (in English) is to launch Aalto-1 with the Indian PLSV sometime during this spring. (The original plan was to use the Tesla of modern rocketry, SpaceX Falcon 9, but the launch was delayed multiple times as SpaceX experienced …difficulties… so the Aalto-1 people decided to switch operators.)
More Space News, From Saturn
[technology, space_things, spacecraft, dives, saturn, solar_system, research]
Later in April, the Cassini spacecraft made a successful ‘dive’ through Saturn’s rings.
Meanwhile In Finland
[weird_stuff, things, cars, rooftops]
Image by Pekka Peura for Aamulehti.
Lipton and AI Misinformation Epidemic, vol 2
[AI, press, academia, communication_failures]
Remember that Z.C. Lipton promised us a series on AI misinformation epidemic? We have two episodes thus far:
Notes on Response to “The AI Misinformation Epidemic”
The important thing from this post is the juxtaposition between the singularity myth vs the true question of AI safety:
Some readers were peeved that I referred to Kurzweil’s Singularity prophesying as religion. It’s true that in scientific communities, calling something religious can function as a Bogeyman argument. But I feel comfortable using the term here. Kurzweil has a conclusion from the outset. Man and technology will merge – the technology will explode doubly-exponentially (whatever that means), this will result in him living forever, and it will happen at a date that only he can deduce by some opaque means. This has undeniable hallmarks of religiosity.
[..]
Broadly defined, I believe that developing a rigorous study of AI safety is of fundamental importance. Already we live in a world with autonomous drones, autonomous automobiles, and one in which the military is developing autonomous weapons. Unchecked applications of machine learning have the potential to cause physical, financial, and social harm (see above).
Or, as I would put it, the problems of “AI safety” that we will be dealing with in the next few decades to come will mostly probably be of the form “what can happen when you release ML algos driving heavy trucks / operating large machinery / armed with guns out into the wild” rather than “what the super-human AI wants to do when the singularity comes”.
Press Failure: The Guardian’s “Meet Erica”.
Despite exhibiting impressive aesthetics and animatronics, the robot possesses no greater sentience than a banana (or, more aptly, an iPhone). Nevertheless, the scientists anthropomorphize it in bizarre ways.
I didn’t read that particular article by the Guardian, I have not much to say on this.
Some Slightly More Responsible AI News Coverage
[ML, AI]
ML algorithms can be very good at predicting heart attack risk
The paper referenced is Weng, S. F., Reps, J., Kai, J., Garibaldi, J. M., & Qureshi, N., 2017. Can machine-learning improve cardiovascular risk prediction using routine clinical data? PloS one, 12(4), p.e0174944. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0174944
Deep Learning and Medical Imaging
[ML, deep_learning, AI, imaging, xrays, science]
All one-sentence summaries are wrong, but some are useful.
One way to summarize Inverse Problems group’s line of research could be something like this: How to extract a signal out of noisy observations of an object don’t know much about, or, how to produce pretty images from X ray images that may look like garbage.
However, what to do with the images after we have acquired them is a question of great interest, too:
MIT Tech Review: Deep learning might be very useful tool (and very lucrative business) in analysis of medical imaging.
Experts say medical images, like photographs, x-rays, and MRIs, are a nearly perfect match for the strengths of deep-learning software, which has in the past few years led to breakthroughs in recognizing faces and objects in pictures.
On Command Lines, Operating Systems, Car Analogies, and McCoy Air Force Base
[culture, operating_systems, open_source, literature, essays]
A remarkable older essay.
Neal Stephenson, 1999, In the beginning was the command line. via Gelman.
Starts with a splendid account of history of command line OS, emergence of GUIs, GNU/Linux 1, and but along the way, also about then-contemporary essay about Western culture. A most curious thing to read 18 years afterwards.2
BTW, Stephenson’s stance on his usage of social media is easy to sympathesize with.
Statistical Significance Is Overrated
[stats, statistical_significance, hypothesis_testings]
says Noah Smith on Bloomberg Review.
Those two words don’t necessarily mean that a finding is important or that an effect is big. It only means that the effect is clearly visible. It basically indicates how confident you can be that a result isn’t due to random noise. As a measure of that, statistical significance already has some major problems. In 2016, the American Statistical Association issued a statement cautioning against excessive reliance on p-values, a common measure of statistical significance. Researchers such as Andrew Gelman, John Ioannidis and many others have demonstrated how these measures can be misused and misinterpreted to make accidental results seem real.
But beyond these methodological problems, the idea of statistical significance has caused some problems in the way people read about and understand scientific findings.
First, statistical significance doesn’t tell you how strong an effect is. [..]
A second problem happens when people confuse statistical significance with explanatory power. [..]
Both are valid points that should enter the popular consciousness. The fun thing is that Smith advocates small, easy, very ‘classical’ updates, instead of major overhaul like switching the regime of doing statistics to a Bayesian framework..
(Read about measuring the model fit with something like R-squared in addition to doing mere significance tests.)
More About Hypothesis Testing vs Bayesian Statistics
[statistics, bayes, bayesian_statistics]
Blog post no 1 and no 2 by J. K. Kruschke, with a paper:
Kruschke, J.K. & Liddell, T.M. 2017. The Bayesian New Statistics: Hypothesis testing, estimation, meta-analysis, and power analysis from a Bayesian perspective. Psychon Bull Rev. doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1221-4
Facebook and The Cost of Monopoly and the Chicago Tribune
[facebook, social_media]
(via HN as usual)
by Ben Thompson blogging at Stratechery.com
Econ101-style supply-demand analysis of the consequences of FB social media monopoly.
Interesting, but I’m not convinced if the Econ101-like supply-demand graphs are the model one should use. It’s easy enough to observe for example the, erm, the harmful externalities to the free society caused by social media monopoly. One not terribly bad blog post outlining the some of the risks here.3
Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune noticed that Facebook disappears bulk of stuff of they post. Again via HN. 4
Worldcon 75 Membership Statistics Looking Good
[geekery, scifi, worldcon]
as noticed by File770. Progress Report #4 was published recently. (And the final voting round for Hugo awards started).
Umberto Eco’s Anti-Library
[culture, literature, books, libraries]
Umberto Eco has a magnificent private library. Most of the books there, he has not read. Maria Popova summarizes Taleb’s commentary on Eco’s library. But I wonder why it should be called anti-library? After all, Eco’s point is that his private library is a tool for active research, not a graveyard of read tomes. As a library should be. Nobody working in a public library claims to have read everything stored there, either.
Large Asteroid Passed Us on April 19th
[space.rocks]
Avaruus.fi (FI), NASA (EN), Warkaus Astronomical Society took some pics in Härkämäki (FI)
On Collatz Conjecture (FI)
[math, theorcompsci, daa, collatz_conjecture]
The Finnish maths magazine Solmu 2/2017 on Collatz Conjecture and Analysis of Algorithms, an article by Antti Laaksonen (in Finnish).
Fibonacci
[math, history]
Everyone has heard about Fibonacci’s sequence, but that arguably wasn’t his most important contribution. In 1202, he published was a little book by the name Liber Abaci which helped to popularize the number system today known as Arabic or Indo-Arabic numerals. Spotted this short popsci introduction by Dory Gascueña, via MIT Tech Review’s Twitter. Unnecessary amount of boldface and prone to sweeping generalizations (crusades were a slightly more complicated matter).
Earlier in April K. Devlin blogged about the many misconceptions on Fibonacci and the Golden Ratio.
Tolkien and C.S.Lewis on Disney
[culture, tolkien, fantasy, books]
TIL: J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t fan of Disney’s dwarves in Snow White, by Atlas Obscure, via File770.
According to Statistics, the Finnish Teenagers Are Increasingly Well-Behaving
[weird]
Researchers are puzzled by new findings: Drinking and smoking is not ‘cool’, internet piratism and skiving off school hours also greatly reduced. Reasons: unknown. The weekly magazine Suomen Kuvalehti reports (FI)
The r/place Atlas, + A Look Under the Hood
[internet, reddit, tech, software, april_fools]
Reddit’s April Fools Day social experiment this year: There was an empty canvas. Each Reddit user could change color of one pixel once in 5 minutes. The atlas of results 72 hours later. Timelapse.
Reddit’s r/place team blogged about their technological solutions, also illustrative.
Another April Fools
[april_fools]
On the Impossibility Of Supersized Machines.
This One Isn’t An April Fools Joke
[software, os, ubuntu]
Ubuntu abandons its phone efforts, will switch back to GNOME. (The Verge. 5 April 2017.)
Unity-haters rejoice?
However, I already made my choice:
i3 Tiling Window Manager
[software, os, linux, tiling_wm, i3]
Moved to i3 some months ago. Guide.
The Public Discussion Needs More Epistemology
[philosophy, culture, science]
New Scientist calls philosophers to participate and contribute to folk epistemology. (29 March 2017, Philosophers of knowledge, your time has come.)
A Book of Tricks
[stats, references, todo]
A. Gelman and D. Nolan have a new book. Table of Contents looks like fun, but not ‘pre-order it immediately’ level of fun. Might pick it up in a library.
Yet Another Neural Networks Library
[applied, neural_networks, deep_learning, todo]
Deepmind introduced Sonnet, library based on TensorFlow. (One wonders how anyone gets any work done if they are supposed to learn new libraries every other day?)
In the spring 2017 ACML course we’ve been using Keras in top of of TensorFlow.
Yet Another Calculus Textbook
[calculus, old_books, education, resources]
S. P. Thompson, 1914. Calculus Made Easy, via HN
Being a very-simplest introduction to those beautiful methods which are generally called by the terrifying names of the Differential Calculus and the Integral Calculus
Not exactly your rigorous treatment, but reading this I wondered if there has really been much progress on pre-rigorous calculus textbooks during the past century: I liked this one quite much more than what I recall of the books I remember reading in HS. (Except for the weird currencies.)
Weird Maths Problem
[maths, education, exams, school]
Speaking of high school education,
Simo Kivelä points out a weird maths problem in this year’s matriculation examinations (FI). 5
Problematic part: the examiners have …weird ideas…. how relevant derivative is to discrete, numerical observations, and devised a silly question. Might elaborate on this later.
Remember When Google Aspired To Scan All the Books In the World?
[internet, books, culture, google, libraries]
What came of it?
J. Somers. Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. (The Atlantic, 20 April 2017).
Replacing School Textbooks With Scattered Collections of E-Materials and Other Texts Is Not Positive Development
[school, textbooks]
So argues Tiina Raevaara in her blog (FI).
Yet Another Fun Way to Implement Comments Without Disqus
[software, internet, blogging, github]
D. Williams presents via HN: Comments with Github comments.
Mark Koyama Reviews The End of The Past
[history, economics, ancient_rome, economic_history]
I [Koayama] read Aldo Schiavone’s The End of the Past. Scholarly and elegantly written, it provides one of the best imaginative reconstructions of the ancient Roman economy.
Mere review is fascinating read. On the role of slavery in Roman economy:
Suffice to say that after much discussion, and many fascinating interludes, Schiavone suggests that ultimately the economic stagnation of the ancient world was due to a peculiar equilibrium that centered around slavery.
[..] Here Schiavone note that the ancient reliance on slaves as human automatons — machines with souls — removed or at least weakened, the incentive to develop machines for productive purposes. [..] The relevance of slavery colored ancient attitudes towards almost all forms of manual work or craftsmanship. The dominant cultural meme was as follows: since such work was usually done by the unfree, it must be lowly, dirty and demeaning.
In addition to work, also the trade was not considered worthy profession for a gentleman, so the successful merchants eventually abandoned trading profession and sought entry into landed gentry. The ‘despised traders’ cultural institution is not nothing new, and sounds somewhat similar to what I’ve heard of Edo-era Japan; but according to Schiavone (as mediated by Koyama), the possibility of social mobility upwards to the nobility in Rome seems to have prevented the birth of stable merchant class and institutions necessary for sustained growth? And as a result, Rome fell after it stopped expanding and the slave economy it was running on ceased to grow.
Schiavone, Aldo. The end of the past : ancient Rome and the modern West. Harvard University Press. 2000. (Rev. ed. 2002.)
Letter to The Guardian: ‘Learning Styles’ Is Bollocks
[education, psychology]
I thought it was bollocks when I first heard about it (idea was popular and often repeated to us when I was in middle school6), and finally several professors agree with me:
No evidence to back idea of learning styles (The Guardian, 12 March 2017).
And Now For Something Completely Different
[theorcompsci, turing_machine, powerpoint]
On the Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (5 min 33 sec video), by Tom Wildenhain. (pdf quality a bit annoying but readable.)
tl;dr: one can construct a Turing tape machine with AutoShapes and On-Click Animations.
Footnotes
1 :
Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”
Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”
Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”
Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”
Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”
Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”
Bullhorn: “But…”
Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”
I’ve seen that many times over the years in various corners of internet; so this Stephenson’s essay is the place where it comes from.
By the way, why it’s less freakish if the volunteers are not volunteers, but paid employees who (while fixing your car at your home) also spy around your house and then according to what they see, show you tailored adverts by their customers?
2:
Contrary to the predictions, Apple and Microsoft are still doing strong, Linux is still a minority outside servers and Android-packages, instead of ‘saccharine’ Disneyesque tales, one of the most popular titles in written and visual entertainment is the HBO grimdarkness of Game of Thrones, and looks like that academic post-modernism has not made us to less likely to nuke each other or even non-judgmental of others.
3: not sure if I agree with truthhawk’s presentation, but the issue is real.
4: “Oh, dear A., why you still are not on FB?” I swear, people ask the stupidest questions.
5: Matriculation examination: National Upper Secondary Finals.
Upper secondary: Fancy way of saying high school.
6: Local equivalent, Finnish ‘yläkoulu’.