Nonfiction Books Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Genome-wide association study identifies 74 [162] loci associated with educational attainment", Okbay et al 2016 (excerpts)

• Human evolution:

  • "Detection of human adaptation during the past 2,000 years", Field et al 2016 (commentary)
  • "Population structure of UK Biobank and ancient Eurasians reveals adaptation at genes influencing blood pressure", Galinsky et al 2016 (Biobank - the gift that keeps on giving. The genetic revolution continues.)
  • "Quantitative Genetics in the Postmodern Family of the Donor Sibling Registry", Lee 2013 (maternal selection of sperm donors for height increases offspring height as much as predicted by heritability estimates+breeder's equation)
  • "Genetic evidence for natural selection in humans in the contemporary United States", Beauchamp 2016
  • "Gene Flow by Selective Emigration as a Possible Cause for Personality Differences Between Small Islands and Mainland Populations", Ciani & Cialuppi 2011 (excerpts)

• pleiotropy:

  • "Genetic link between family socioeconomic status and children's educational achievement estimated from genome-wide SNPs", Krapohl & Plomin 2016 (excerpts)
  • "LD Hub: a centralized database and web interface to perform LD score regression that maximizes the potential of summary level GWAS data for SNP heritability and genetic correlation analysis", Zheng et al 2016 (Web interface to scores of GWAS results, allowing combined inference over them all: LD Hub. Gets around privacy & scaling problems by using, not GCTA, but LD regression which only needs summary statistics. LD score regression is definitely the wave of the future. GCTA was king for a few years, but the inability to use summary data is killing it; in the modern context of a thousand different funding sources, 'medical ethics', & empire building driving countless genetic silos, a method must be able to work on just summary statistics if it's to have any real uptake and get n into the hundreds of thousands.)
  • "Detection and interpretation of shared genetic influences on 40 human traits", Pickrell et al 2015
  • "An Atlas of Genetic Correlations across Human Diseases and Traits", Bulik-Sullivan et al 2015
  • "Genetic contributions to self-reported tiredness", Deary et al 2016 (GCTA estimate is not too impressive, but the pleiotropy is interesting. What do you get when you sum a lot of weakly correlated variables? A giant difference.) c- "Schizophrenia and subsequent neighborhood deprivation: revisiting the social drift hypothesis using population, twin and molecular genetic data", Sariaslan et al 2016 (good use of polygenic scores for confirmation)
• "The phenotypic legacy of admixture between modern humans and Neandertals", Simonti et al 2016
• "The MC1R Gene and Youthful Looks", Liu et al 2016
• "Molecular genetic contributions to self-rated health", Harris et al 2016 (I love how you can ask people something as super-vague as 'do you think you're in good health' and you still get noticeable heritabilities and disease-related hits with a big enough dataset like Biobank.)

Politics/religion:

• "Gods and Gamma" on "'God has sent me to you': Right temporal epilepsy, left prefrontal psychosis", Arzy & Schurr 2016 (an EEG recording of a messianic religious conversion experience!)
• "At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you're being fed fiction" (Qui vult decipi decipiatur.)

AI:

• "One-shot Learning with Memory-Augmented Neural Networks", Santoro et al 2016
• "Programming with a Differentiable Forth Interpreter", Riedel et al 2016
• "FractalNet: Ultra-Deep Neural Networks without Residuals", Larsson 2016
• "Artistic style transfer for videos", Ruder et al 2016 (video demonstration; I particularly like the inkwash-style footage at the end)
• "Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels"
• SSC book review: Robin Hanson's Age of Em

Statistics/meta-science:

• "What should we learn from past AI forecasts?"
• "Jeffreys' Substitution Posterior for the Median: A Nice Trick to Non-parametrically Estimate the Median"

Psychology/biology:

• "When Lightning Strikes Twice: Profoundly Gifted, Profoundly Accomplished", Makel et al 2016 (Intelligence increases success as high as it can be measured; diminishing returns!=zero returns... This replicates the SMPY results in a separate TIP sample.)
• "Dogs Test Drug [rapamycin] Aimed at Humans' Biggest Killer: Age"
• "Effect of Calorie Restriction on Mood, Quality of Life, Sleep, and Sexual Function in Healthy Nonobese Adults: The CALERIE 2 Randomized Clinical Trial", Martin et al 2016
• "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?", Jonas & Kording 2016 (Very amusing followup to "Can a biologist fix a radio?")
• "Continuous evolution of Bacillus thuringiensis toxins overcomes insect resistance", Badran et al 2016
• "Physical Activity, Sleep, and Nutrition Do Not Predict Cognitive Performance in Young and Middle-Aged Adults", Gijselaers et al 2016
• "A Second Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom"

Technology:

• "Beaver: A Decentralized Anonymous Marketplace with Secure Reputation", Soska et al 2016 (discussion)
• "The Mastermind" (In depth series about international criminal mastermind Paul Le Roux who ran his group online while ordering hits on employees using mercenaries and smuggling drug until he is captured and becomes a USG asset to entrap his employees and assist who knows what covert operations. Oh, and he created TrueCrypt. His story is even wilder than Ross Ulbricht's.)
• "How Harry Brearley's Stubborn Insistence Gave Us Knives That Don't Rust" (see also multiple discovery)
• "Have I Been Pwned?" (service for looking up whether email addresses are linked to past hacks, and subscribing to alerts)

Economics:

• "Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics", Baade & Matheson 2016 (The case against the Olympics. Too late for Brazil, though, but others can learn from that debacle.)
• "Results of an international drug testing service for cryptomarket users", Caudevilla et al 2016 (excerpts)
• "Railway Paradise: How a Fine-Dining Empire Made the Southwest Palatable to Outsiders" (statistical discrimination vs taste discrimination: profiting from sexism)

Fiction:

• "Spring and Fall", by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mainstream discussion of existential risk is becoming more of a thing, A recent example is this article in The Atlantic. They do mention a variety of risks but focus on nuclear war and worst case global warming.

A week or two ago I linked to a new orbital dynamics paper indicating that there is strong evidence that the inner moons and rings of Saturn are only ~100 megayears old rather than being primordial to the solar system.

Here is a talk at the SETI institute by the scientist who did the research. Fascinating stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHZZK8smWFo

the disaster did happen despite warnings (I'd argue climate change fits into this category, for example).

<looks around>

Disaster did happen?

I totally concur. 10mg/kg/day is a gram a day. If I took that amount of thyroid hormone, which I believe to be one of the safest drugs ever used, and of huge benefit to a large subset of the population, I would confidently expect to give myself an immediate heart attack. At the very least it would make me spectacularly ill.

No toxicologically meaningful differences were observed between the control and AP-treated groups with respect to survival, clinical observations, body weights, food consumption, water consumption, ophthalmology, hematology, clinical chemistry, estrous cycling, sperm parameters, or bone marrow micronucleus formation.

So it's not buggered them up too badly.

For comparison, if you took the poor wee things' thyroids out, then you'd expect them to display horrible symptoms and die off in droves.

A study that saw statistically significant hormone effects

First, 10 mg/kg/day is a LOT (that's mg, not mcg).

Second, while there were morphological changes ("significantly increased thyroid weights and thyroid histopathology") and some changes in the TSH/T3/T4, the study notes that "No toxicologically meaningful differences were observed between the control and AP-treated groups" which means there were no clinical symptoms whatsoever.

I'm afraid I don't have the faintest idea. It certainly fits in the general 'pathogen, immune defense, recent environmental' bag, and if it interferes with iodine chemistry then it sounds more likely than 'randomly chosen thing in that bag'.

If it's true, it should be a simple experiment to inflict the stuff on rats and cause thyroid problems. If it doesn't sod up the rats (even in small amounts) then there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to believe that it would do anything nasty to us. It all works pretty much the same way. Do you know of any relevant experiments?

The central problem seems to be to get medicine to pay attention to the existence of thyroid problems with 'normal' TSH. At the moment they seem to be being run ragged by witch-doctors, but I'm not sure I trust the witch-doctors to do the job properly either. They seem to have convinced themselves that it's mercury fillings or PCBs or fluoride in the water, or anything else they can think of.

If medicine can be persuaded to find out whether there's a real problem, rather than just a weird information cascade from Broda Barnes that's somehow hoodwinking thousands of people into believing they've got better by trying things that should harm them, then I kind of semi-trust it to investigate the possible causes. But perhaps I am being naive.

What do you think about the notion that rising perchlorate levels in food in North America in recent decades could be contributing to thyroid problems in the population? It inhibits iodide pumps throughout the body, not just the thyroid, and has a particular effect on babies getting iodine through these iodide pumps in breast tissue making milk.

Got my first citations for my first first-author molecular biology publication, and arranged random in person scientific meeting with scientists in another country on a week's notice upon realizing I would be traveling for personal reasons to the same city as some of the people who cited me.