This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.
Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.
Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
"A Prospective Study of Sudden Cardiac Death among Children and Young Adults", Bagnall et al 2016 (Rare genetic mutations implicated in >13% of unexplained cardiac deaths. Makes one wonder how much of the long tail of deaths are due to rare variants, and how much of a benefit there would be to erasing the ~80k mutations everyone carries... (Population genetics rule: rare variants are more harmful than common variants; and 1 harmful mutation, 1 reproductive death to purge it from the population.) Very cool application of genetics.)
"Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police" (The back and forth secret war of the Okhrana with the myriads of Russian revolutionaries across Europe, documented by the complete archives of the Paris Okhrana office smuggled to America after the Russian Revolution. When you see how easily and thoroughly the Okhrana had infiltrated the Russian revolutionaries, you start to see why the Communist leadership would be extraordinarily paranoid about spies - but also that the revolutionaries were, well before the Revolution, generally highly nasty folks; many of the mentioned revolutionaries would be summarily executed by their comrades.)
"The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus's Wife", King's response (The Gospel of Jesus's Wife is probably a modern forgery. But it gets weirder. And kinkier. Forgeries like this always raise troubling issues about religious scriptures: if this forgery had been kept in private collections for another century before becoming known, in all likelihood, most of the damning evidence would either have disappeared or become inaccessible, and all that would be left is a few worries over the appearance. Most scriptures have even more vexed provenances than does the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, with blackouts of centuries not uncommon, and known destruction of variants (eg the well-known destruction of all variants of the Koran). Of course, you might think, who would dare counterfeit the Word of God Himself? Yet, humans are strange and inscrutable and can talk themselves into anything - why did Fritz do it? Probably even he doesn't really know. Who knows how many Fritzes there have been throughout history...)
"Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation", Bellemare et al 2016 (Video; big exploration improvement for DQN-like agents: where DQN can only get to two rooms in Montezuma's Revenge, because it takes actions mostly at random and it is unlikely that it will randomly do the 15 or 20 exact moves which will get it a reward, this version, with a way of measuring novelty and exploring novel states until a reward is found, can make it to 15 rooms!)
"Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think", Westfall & Yarkoni 2016 (This is part of why results in sociology/epidemiology/psychology are so unreliable: not only do they usually not control for genetics at all, they don't even control for the things they think they control for. You have not controlled for SES by throwing in a discretized income variable measured in one year plus a discretized college degree variable. Variables which correlate with or predict some outcome such as poverty, may be doing no more than correcting some measurement error (frequently, due to the heavy genetic loading of most outcomes, correcting the omission of genetic information). This is why within-family designs are desirable even without worries about genetics: they hold constant shared-environment factors so you don't need to measure or model them.)
"Ann Roe's scientists: original published papers" (One of the very few data sets, excluding TIP/SMPY, of extremely intelligent people. I am still reading through them but one impression I get is that the education system in America when most of them were growing up around 1910-1920 was grossly inadequate and unchallenging; many of them seem to only drift into their field when they happen to run into a challenging course in college. Quite a few mention incredibly little access to books and severe poverty (although interestingl
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: