Over on twitter, Kyle Card posted a photo of Halloween in the Lenski lab. That prompted Morgan Feeney to reply: “You mean you don’t all dress up as different generations of the LTEE? I am SHOCKED.” And that got me thinking about Jonathan Swift’s rhapsody on fleas: So nat’ralists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have …
I recently stumbled upon a post on R-bloggers entitled “Qualitative Research in R.” This title got me pretty excited, since I’m generally excited about most things R and since I recently helped teach a qualitative methods course, which has had me thinking about adding more ethnographic and other qualitative elements to my work. I’d also heard of …
This is video of an excellent talk on the human connectome by neuroscientist Bobby Kasthuri of Argonne National Lab and the University of Chicago. (You can see me sitting on the floor in the corner :-) The story below is for entertainment purposes only. No triggering of biologists is intended. The Physicist and the Neuroscientist: A …
Because of interest and the need for better examples (for teaching and for use in tools under development, such as prcr and tidyLPA, I worked to create two data packages, data easily available through an R package. A benefit of the data being in an R package is that it is even easier to access than other formats (in R): …
AlphaGo Zero was trained entirely through self-play — no data from human play was used. The resulting program is the strongest Go player ever by a large margin, and is extremely efficient in its use of compute (running on only 4 TPUs). Previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games …
Last weekend was homecoming on the Michigan State University campus, and I found myself reflecting on the meaning and significance of gratitude. So many alumni returned to campus to give thanks for all the ways MSU set them on a meaningful path. In the College of Arts & Letters, we celebrated the generous gifts we received from …
The use of whiteboard presentations, especially for short presentations seems very useful in getting the gyst of a speaker’s intent. Even more so than Powerpoint presentations. I first stumbled on one a few years ago when Sir Kenneth Robinson condense a longer speech into an 11 minute whiteboard presentation that was just brilliant!! When I …
Sometimes we forget … forget to take a break, forget to get outside, and forget to reflect on our individual and collective pasts. After an intense three days of talks at EMBO—hearing about exciting work by diverse and superb biologists in 13-minute chunks (plus Q&A); seeing dear friends Santiago Elena, Sebastian Bonhoeffer, and Roy Kishony; …
In this public lecture Weinberg explains the problems with the two predominant interpretations of quantum mechanics, which he refers to as Instrumentalist (e.g., Copenhagen) and Realist (e.g., Many Worlds). The term “interpretation” may be misleading because what is ultimately at stake is the nature of physical reality. Both interpretations have serious problems, but the problem …
Glenn Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University. John McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. Loury (@19min): “He’s a good writer but not a deep thinker, and he’s being taken seriously …
Most textbooks tell you that the evolutionary process is really quite simple: three rules are all that’s necessary: inheritance, variation, and selection. It is indeed true that these three rules are all that’s needed for evolution to occur, but that does not mean that the evolutionary process is simple. In fact, quite the opposite. Real systems evolve in …
We were away in Britain when news of the horrific massacre in Las Vegas occurred. We were actually approached on the street in the small Cornish town of Fowey by an older fellow who overheard us chatting and noted our North American accent. He wanted us to try and explain to him how it is …
Hassabis refers to AI in the original Blade Runner, but it is apparent from the sequel that replicants are merely genetically engineered humans. AI appears in Blade Runner 2049 in the form of Joi. There seems to be widespread confusion, including in the movie itself, about whether to think about replicants as robots (i.e., hardware) …
This talk discusses, in terms of information theory, how the hidden layers of a deep neural net (thought of as a Markov chain) create a compressed (coarse grained) representation of the input information. To date the success of neural networks has been a mainly empirical phenomenon, lacking a theoretical framework that explains how and why …
Problems Summit Held For Ending Campus Sexual Assault(link is external) IPPSR affiliate Rebecca Campbell explains common trauma-responses in sexual assault victims. ‘Fake News’ Course Aims To Improve Media Consumption And Production(link is external) IPPSR affiliate William Dutton comments on the impact of ‘fake news.’ Cooking Books: DOD, HUD Defrauded Taxpayers Of $21 Trillion From 1998 to 2015(link …
Last year, I wrote a post about a series of YouTube videos that I used to give a guest lecture on copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons. It went well enough that I was asked to come back this year and guest lecture again. I made some tweaks to the presentation this time around, switching the order …
My dissertation research is focused on Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags (RETHs), which are teacher-focused hashtags that are associated with particular geographic regions, such as American states or Canadian provinces or territories. This isn’t the first time that I’ve done a project on this phenomenon, and it’s rewarding to come back to RETHs to answer some questions that …
Nelson Mandela would have been proud of Colin Kaepernick and the black (as well as a few white) U.S. athletes involved in the national anthem demonstrations against police violence and systemic racism. “Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela believed. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that …
In March 2017, the Michigan House of Representatives narrowly voted down a proposal to reduce the income tax. But the issue of tax cuts continues to be discussed, both at the state and federal level. To gauge citizen opinions about tax cuts, MSU’s State of the State Survey asked Michigan residents questions about the proposed tax cut …
“A gentle introduction to the principles behind neural networks, including backpropagation. Rated G for general audiences.” This very well done. If you have a quantitative background you can watch it at 1.5x or 2x speed, I think :-) A bit more on the history of backpropagation and convexity: why is the error function convex, or nearly …
Through a few different projects and people (such as SIPS and rOpenSci and conversations with friends / colleagues both online and offline), I have been exposed to the idea of open science. I’m actually going to punt for the moment. Here’s a definition that sounds about right to me: Open science is the movement to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible …