Everything is heritable:

• "Going global by adapting local: A review of recent human adaptation", Fan et al 2016
• "Association between polygenic risk scores for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and educational and cognitive outcomes in the general population", Stergiakouli et al 2016
• "Educational attainment and personality are genetically intertwined", Mottus et al 2016
• "Ultra-rare disruptive and damaging mutations influence educational attainment in the general population", Ganna et al 2016
• "Genome-wide analyses of empathy and systemizing: heritability and correlates with sex, education, and psychiatric risk", Warrier et al 2016a; "Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and brain anatomy", Warrier et al 2016b
• "Personality Polygenes, Positive Affect, and Life Satisfaction", Weiss et al 2016

Politics/religion:

• "The Long-Term Effects of Cash Assistance", Price & Song 2016 (A very unusually long-term followup to one of the old American basic income experiments. No large harmful effects... but no large benefits either, nothing remotely like we observe in the Third World BI/transfer experiments. And if money helps with social outcomes, it should've helped more in the 1970s than it does now, so I feel more pessimistic about Give Directly/YC's USA BI experiment.)
• "Men's status and reproductive success in 33 nonindustrial societies: Effects of subsistence, marriage system, and reproductive strategy", von Rueden & Jaeggi 2016
• "The illusion of the perfect alibi: Establishing the base rate of non-offenders' alibis", Nieuwkamp et al 2016

AI:

• "Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external memory", Graves et al 2016 (blog); scaling to extremely large external memories: "Scaling Memory-Augmented Neural Networks with Sparse Reads and Writes", Rae et al 2016
• "Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition", Xiong et al 2016
• "Video Pixel Networks", Kalchbrenner et al 2016
• "Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning (A3C)", Mnih et al 2016
• "Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation", Gu et al 2016 (video; blog)
• "Uncertainty in Deep Learning", Gal 2016 (using dropout to turn NNs into ensembles of Bayesian NNs, allowing extraction of posterior distributions and thus uncertainty of outputs, which helps active learning & reinforcement learning)
• "Sim-to-Real Robot Learning from Pixels with Progressive Nets", Rusu et al 2016
• Training A3C to solve Atari Pong in <4 minutes on a supercomputer through brute parallelism
• "Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw" (hilarious)
• Active learning demo: interactively drag and drop photos to train a CNN+random forest to binary classify along some trait

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• "Active Learning Literature Survey", Settles 2010
• A brief history by Andrew Gelman of the replication crisis in psychology, from the 1960s to now
• "We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results" (random error vs systematic error)
• "Close but no Nobel: the scientists who never won; Archives reveal the most-nominated researchers who missed out on a Nobel Prize" (Nobels have considerable measurement error)
• "Do scholars follow Betteridge's Law? The use of questions in journal article titles", Cook & Plourde 2016
• scatterplots work much better than several other forms of visualizing data for understanding correlations, Kay & Heer 2015 (also a nice demonstration of fitting progressively more complex & realistic Bayesian models)

Psychology/biology:

• "The negative Flynn Effect: A systematic literature review", Dutton et al 2016
• "Safe landing strategies during a fall: systemic review and meta-analysis", Moon & Sosnoff 2016
• "From Terman to Today: A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity", Lubinski 2016
• Some early rapamycin anti-aging results from the dog people: improvement in dog heart health after 10 weeks of use.
• "Stereotype (In)Accuracy in Perceptions of Groups and Individuals", Jussim et al 2015
• "CMV Is a Greater Threat to Infants Than Zika, but Far Less Often Discussed" (it would not surprise me if CMV was responsible for my own hearing-impairment)
• "Does brain creatine content rely on exogenous creatine in healthy youth? A proof-of-principle study", Merege-Filho et al 2016 (null)
• "Functional MRI in awake dogs predicts suitability for assistance work", Berns et al 2016
• Home steam distillation of 99% pure nepetalactone from catnip leaves (0.03% yield compared to theoretical max of 0.3%, so can convert 0.45kg of leaves to 143mg nepetalactone)

Technology:

• "Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny: Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley?"
• "The Joinery": animated explanations of traditional nail-less Japanese woodworking joints (background)
• "Uber's Ad-Toting Drones Are Heckling Drivers Stuck in Traffic: Forget billboards-motorists now have ads buzzing a few feet above their windshields" (possibly the most cyberpunk thing I've seen since VR headsets)
• "Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals", Ali et al 2015
• "APEX: Automatic Programming Assignment Error Explanation", Kim et al 2016

Economics:

• Abuse of 'arbitration' clauses in international trade treaties to escape criminal liability
• "The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics", Donaldson & Storeygard 2016
• "The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture"
• "Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution", Kelly & Grada 2016 (commentary)
• "My First Gulfstream"
• "Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy"
• "Young Rural Women in India Chase Big-City Dreams: Experiments like one in Bangalore, luring migrants to fill factory jobs, collide with an old way of life that keeps women and girls in seclusion until an arranged marriage"

Are We Not Men - an interesting short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle about CRISPR gene-editing in the latest (Nov. 7) New Yorker.

Join Leonardo DiCaprio as he explores the topic of climate change, and discovers what must be done today to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.

Before the Flood - Full Movie | National Geographic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90CkXVF-Q8M&feature=youtu.be

May be disabled, link said only good till Nov 6....

"The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" by Dr. Nick Lane.

This is a complicated book. The first third or so is a distillation of a particular current in origin-of-life research (one of two that are being productively extended recently, in my view) that focuses on energy and metabolism rather than replication or translation (the latter being the second main current which has also made amazing strides lately but I will not talk about here). By focusing on the shared fundamental core of energy metabolism, the author and his laboratory productively extend a hypothesis first put forward by the geologist Mike Russell tying the origins of life to geology rather than organic chemistry. Specifically, he notes that most aspects of the core energy metabolism of all life and the oldest known biomass-production mechanisms are recapitulated inorganically in a particular geological context, alkaline hydrothermal vents. These would have been much more common on the early Earth and in an anoxic environment would have spontaneously taken water, air, and mantle minerals and created concentrated deposits of organics alongside reactive iron sulfide minerals which strikingly resemble the iron-sulfur clusters in the reactive centers of the central metabolic enzymes of all life. This view of the origin of life puts metabolism and geochemistry first with genetics and heredity coming along as an afterthought that at first encouraged the reactions and then 'captured' them from the geosphere. This view also puts the origin of life as something almost chemically inevitable from the energy gradient present in this geological context, which would exist most anywhere in the universe you have the confluence of water, rock, and air.

The rest of the book deals with the author's thoughts on the origins of eukaryotes and complex life in general, mostly through the lens of the effects of having mitochondria on eukaryotic life. A few very important points about eukaryotes are made here, pointing out their origin was a very strange event given the huge constellation of weird traits that all eukaryotes share. He persuasively argues that the population genetic and energetic constrains presented by mitochondria explain a number of these odd traits. But he is very wedded to a particular model of the origin event, to an extent and degree of exclusivity that I do not think is warranted given several other strands of research about the origins of eukaryotic life and the biochemistry of mitochondria I am aware of. He is a bioenergetics type so he tends to see everything in terms of energy. Still makes some very important points but I would treat his conclusions (that the origin of eukaryotes is a freakish horribly unlikely one-off event in which a bacterium got inside an archaean and navigated a bizarre bioenergetic evolutionary gauntlet) as a hypothesis rather than anything resembling settled science.

I think I will probably stop contributing to the media threads. They're not being read by many people, and it's redundant with my existing newsletter - additional work for me to post and update. If people want to see my link collection, they can simply subscribe to my newsletter or read them on my website.