May 2016 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

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.

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.

Short Online Texts Thread

I've been reading livetweets of the Oracle vs Google trial by jury, presided over by Judge Alsup, who learned to code. In a previous trial, Judge Alsup had declared that the software API in question was uncopyrightable. However, his decision was overturned by the federal court, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So now they are redoing the trial with a new jury, with the premise that an API is copyrightable, in order to decide whether Google's reimplementation of a Java API from Sun at the time (later bought by Oracle) was "fair use&q... (read more)

3polymathwannabe10y

On how whether grains vs. roots were eaten may have determined the success of ancient civilizations.

11gwern10y

Everything is heritable: * "Genome-wide association study of cognitive functions and educational attainment in UK Biobank (n=112151)", Davies et al 2016 * Continuation of the recent phenome theme of inter-correlations of negative traits and inter-correlation of positive traits: * "Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain", Anttila et al 2016 * "Genetic variants associated with subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism identified through genome-wide analyses", Okbay et al 2016 * "Physical and neurobehavioral determinants of reproductive onset and success", Day et al 2016 * "Association between stressful life events and psychotic experiences in adolescence: evidence for gene–environment correlations", Shakoor et al 2016 * "Introducing precise genetic modifications into human 3PN embryos by CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome editing", Kang et al 2016 (see also Liang et al 2015; both describe the CRISPR state of the art as of early 2014, 2+ years ago) * "Variants near CHRNA3/5 and APOE have age- and sex-related effects on human lifespan", Joshi et al 2016 * "National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A Cautious Exploration", Proto & Oswald 2015 * Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins (media) * "Monkey kingdom: China is positioning itself as a world leader in primate research" Politics/religion: * Book Review: Albion's Seed * "Peer review: Troubled from the start" * "My Year in San Francisco's \$2 Million Secret Society Startup" AI: * "Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth", Huang et al 2016 (dropout of random layers, which does not just work, but works better and enables >1200-layer residual networks. This might be related to Liao & Poggio 2016 claim that deep residual nets are effectively unrolled RNNs which apply slight variants of an algorithm to many timesteps.) * "Generating Large Images from Latent Vectors" * "Foveation-based Mechanisms Alleviate Adversarial Examples", Luo et al 2016