Spartan Ideas is a collection of thoughts, ideas, and opinions independently written by members of the MSU community and curated by MSU Libraries

# Minimizing a Median

$$\def\xorder#1{x_{\left(#1\right)}} \def\xset{\mathbb{X}} \def\xvec{\mathbf{x}}$$A somewhat odd (to me) question was asked on a forum recently. Assume that you have continuous variables $$x_{1},\dots,x_{N}$$ that are subject to some constraints. For simplicity, I’ll just write $$\xvec=(x_{1},\dots,x_{N})\in\xset$$. I’m going to assume that $$\xset$$ is compact, and so in particular the $$x_{i}$$ are bounded. The questioner wanted to …

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# Some thoughts on starting year 5 (and French comics)

The image below, from the French comic book Carnets de thèse (“thesis notes”), has been on my mind as I begin my fifth year of grad school. I bought Carnets de thèse as a present for myself for my last birthday, expecting it to be an educational glimpse into the French grad school experience and …

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# Accurate Genomic Prediction Of Human Height

I’ve been posting preprints on arXiv since its beginning ~25 years ago, and I like to share research results as soon as they are written up. Science functions best through open discussion of new results! After some internal discussion, my research group decided to post our new paper on genomic prediction of human height on …

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# Pragmatism and the Cultivation of Digital Democracies

As technology enables us to communicate with one another in unpredictable ways that allow for an unprecedented public exchange of diverse ideas, cultivating the philosophical habits of an engaged fallibilistic pluralism gains in urgency. The emergence of the World Wide calls us to consider how an ethics of philosophy might enable us to cultivate practices …

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# Phase Transitions and Genomic Prediction of Cognitive Ability

James Thompson (University College London) recently blogged about my prediction that with sample size of order a million genotypes|phenotypes, one could construct a good genomic predictor for cognitive ability and identify most of the associated common SNPs. The Hsu Boundary … The “Hsu boundary” is Steve Hsu’s estimate that a sample size of roughly 1 …

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# Comparing MPLUS and MCLUST output

Introduction At present, MPlus is a widely-used tool to carry out Latent Profile Analysis, and there does not seem to be a widely-accepted or used way to carry out Latent Profile Analysis in R. This compares output from MPlus to output from the R package MCLUST, which is accessed through the package tidymixmod which I …

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# “Helicopter parents produce bubble wrapped kids”

Heterodox Academy. In my opinion these are reasonable center-left (Haidt characterizes himself as “liberal left”) people whose views would have been completely acceptable on campus just 10 or 20 years ago. Today they are under attack for standing up for freedom of speech and diversity of thought. Tweet

# Public data and digital research ethics

The Verge recently posted an article that highlights some of the ethical dilemmas involved in collecting publicly-available data for research purposes. The article begins by describing the work of a researcher working on facial recognition of people before and after hormone replacement therapy: On YouTube, he found a treasure trove. Individuals undergoing HRT often document their progress …

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# Varieties of Snowflakes

I was pleasantly surprised that New Yorker editor David Remnick and Berkeley law professor Melissa Murray continue to support the First Amendment, even if some of her students do not. Remnick gives Historian Mark Bray (author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook) a tough time about the role of violence in political movements. After Charlottesville, the Limits …

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# How to be an effective acting director, chair or dean — Part II (essay)

Last week, Inside Higher Ed published an essay of mine describing my experience as an interim dean. It covered several practical, task-oriented topics: identifying one’s core mission for the interim period, allaying colleagues’ fears, acquiring reliable information and triaging the issues that land in your inbox. But leading a college that includes a department of theater helped me recognize …

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# BENEFICIAL AI 2017 (Asilomar meeting)

AI researcher Yoshua Bengio gives a nice overview of recent progress in Deep Learning, and provides some perspective on challenges that must be overcome to achieve AGI (i.e., human-level general intelligence). I agree with Bengio that the goal is farther than the recent wave of excitement might lead one to believe. There were many other …

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# Using notebooks for beginning-of-semester planning

One of the first posts I published to this blog was a lament that I just couldn’t get notebooks to work for me. About a year ago, though, I finally found a routine that got notebooks working for me. I started off working my way through two copies of a Self Journal before borrowing some …

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# DeepMind and StarCraft II Learning Environment

This Learning Environment will enable researchers to attack the problem of building an AI that plays StarCraft II at a high level. As observed in the video, this infrastructure development required significant investment of resources by DeepMind / Alphabet. Now, researchers in academia and elsewhere have a platform from which to explore an important class …

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# Using MPlus from R with MPlusAutomation

According to the MPlus website, the R package MPlusAutomation serves three purposes: Creating related groups of models Running batches Extracting and tabulating model parameters and test statistics. Because modeling involves comparing related models, (partially) automating these is compelling. It can make it easier to use model results in subsequent analyses and can cut down on copy and pasting …

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# Presentation – Food Fraud Prevention Strategy for 24th HACCP Australia Conference, Sydney

Attached you will find my presentation for August 30, 2017. This is at the 24th HACCP Australia Conference in Sydney and hosted by SAI Global. The objective of the conference is to provide food safety-related topics, which now include Food Fraud prevention. I will also be leading a Food Fraud Prevention Strategy Workshop on …

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# How to be an effective acting director, chair or dean — part I (essay)

Several years ago, I served as the acting dean of Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters — one of our institution’s three core colleges with 20 departments, programs and centers, 250 faculty members, and a mix of graduate and undergraduate offerings. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know another part of …

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# Normies Lament

Ezra Klein talks to Angela Nagle. It’s still normie normative, but Nagle has at least done some homework. Click the link below to hear the podcast. From 4Chan to Charlottesville: where the alt-right came from, and where it’s going Angela Nagle spent the better part of the past decade in the darkest corners of the …

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# Collaboration for Conservation

I pick up the story of my PhD from Nanchong, China, where I have traveled to take a brief break from lab work to have meetings and an interview with representatives from the China Science and Technology Exchange Center (CSTEC). This summer I am here in China on an East Asia and Pacific Institute Summer …

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# In Other Words (Week of August 21)

On the Left Lack Of Support With Child Care Costs Leaves Families Struggling(link is external) From the Michigan League for Public Policy blog Factually Speaking, a look at the high costs of child care. U.S. Court Of Appeals Rules To Keep Michigan Wolves On Endangered Species List(link is external) From the blog Up North Progressive, Michigan wolves kept on endangered species …

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# Independent Streams (week of August 14)

Problems Are We Thinking About Teacher Pay All Wrong?(link is external) IPPSR Affiliate Joshua Cowen discusses teacher pay. Using Science To Combat Illegal Wildlife Trade(link is external) IPPSR Affiliate Meredith Gore joins scientists in the fight against illegal wildlife trade. Are You Overestimating How Happy Your Customers Are?(link is external) IPPSR Affiliate Tomas Hult co-authors study on customer …

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# A couple of podcasts on screencasting

I’ve posted before about teaching CEP 813, a class on electronic assessment that features a unit on game-based assessment in Minecraft. This unit is by far the most intense in terms of technical support, and we had a major hiccup earlier this month that caused some frustration for the whole class (and instructional team). After …

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# A first pass at Latent Profile Analysis using MCLUST (in R)

Along with starting to use MPlus, I’ve become (more) interested in trying to find out how to carry out Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) in R, focused on two options: OpenMx and MCLUST. The two are very different: OpenMx is an option for general latent variable modeling (i.e., it can be used to specify a wide range of latent …

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# A Farewell to Arms? Surely You Jest!

As I arrived home last night after a meeting and having been serenaded on the way first, by the end of Mr. Trump’s Afghanistan speech, and then by NPR’s commentators, I realized that I was more disheartened by the phalanx of commentators than by Trump’s final words. An additional irony for me was the reflection that here …

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# Lessons from the field

As glamorous and thrilling as fieldwork might sound, no field season is complete without a few tales, typically funnier after the fact. Here’s my attempt to impart some humor and share lessons learned after the emotional trauma subsided. Lesson #1: Try new things but acknowledge your limits The second day of our trip, I was …

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# The Bannon Channel

Rumor has it that Bannon will start a Breitbart TV channel to rival Fox News. Given the success of YouTube- / pod-casters like Joe Rogan (5 million downloads per episode), it’s plausible this could be done with very modest capex (the channel could start out as pure streaming and only go to cable later). Billionaire …

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# Updated Stepwise Regression Function

Back in 2011, when I was still teaching, I cobbled together some R code to demonstrate stepwise regression using F-tests for variable significance. It was a bit unrefined, not intended for production work, and a few recent comments on that post raised some issues with it. So I’ve worked up a new and (slightly) improved …

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# Ninety-nine genetic loci influencing general cognitive function

The paper below has something like 200 authors from over 100 institutions worldwide. Many people claimed just a few years ago (or more recently!) that results like this were impossible. Will they admit their mistake? In Scientific Consensus on Cognitive Ability? I described the current consensus among experts as follows. 0. Intelligence is (at least …

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# Chinese Social Media Notices US Cultural Revolution

The joke below is making the rounds on Chinese social media. See Struggles at Yale and Baizuo = Libtard. Also circulating on Chinese social media: A Report on the Cultural Revolution in the United States. Yes, an entire country can go crazy for a decade… Cultural Revolution (Wikipedia): The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a …

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# In what months are educational psychology jobs posted?

Division 15 of the American Psychological Association sponsors the Ed Psych Jobs website, which is an excellent resource for Ed Psych job seekers. I thought it would possibly be helpful to see when jobs were posted in the past in order to have a better idea about when jobs may be posted this year. Ed Psych Jobs, Robots …

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# Comparing estimates and their standard errors from mixed effects and linear models

Some background One reason to use mixed effects models is that they help to account for data with a complex structure, such as multiple responses (to questions, for example) from the same people, students grouped into classes, and measures collected over time. Often, the way they account for these complex structures is in terms of …

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# Swiss accents and using the Internet as a French teacher

Last week, on August 1st, I popped over to Radio Télévision Suisse to spend a couple of minutes celebrating the Swiss national holiday. While I was there, I spotted an article containing five “spoken portraits” of Swiss Francophones from different regions. Each portrait highlighted a different accent (or two) from Francophone Switzerland, and it was …

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# Meanwhile, down on the Farm

The Spring 2017 issue of the Stanford Medical School magazine has a special theme: Sex, Gender, and Medicine. I recommend the article excerpted below to journalists covering the Google Manifesto / James Damore firing. After reading it, they can decide for themselves whether his memo is based on established neuroscience or bro-pseudoscience. Perhaps top Google …

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# Behold the Brogrammer: James Damore (Bloomberg video)

Watch a few minutes of this Bloomberg interview and I think you’ll agree he’s both sincere and well-meaning, if a bit naive about the buzzsaw he has stepped into. Definitely not a brogrammer. He reminds me of Richard Hendricks of the HBO show Silicon Valley. See also Damore vs Google: Trial of the Century? and …

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# Damore vs Google: Trial of the Century?

In his memo, James Damore asserts that Google is engaged in illegal discriminatory practices as part of its efforts to increase diversity. (See earlier post, In the matter of James Damore, ex-Googler.) The image below is from the actual memo. Does Damore sound like a sexist brogrammer Neanderthal? OKRs = Objectives and Key Results. Damore …

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# In the matter of James Damore, ex-Googler

James Damore, Harvard PhD* in Systems Biology, and (until last week) an engineer at Google, was fired for writing this memo: Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber, which dares to display the figure above. Here is Damore’s brief summary of his memo (which contains many citations to original scientific research), and the conclusion: Google’s political bias has …

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# What’s in a banana?

Or: A sack of chemicals by any other name would smell as sweet (1). ​ [Andy writes… ] Do you want safe food? Do you eat chemicals? How do you decide what’s natural, and is “natural” a good indicator of safety? What’s a chemical anyway? Is a banana still natural if it contains 2-hydroxy-3-methylethyl? There’s …

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# Rolling Horizons

I keep seeing questions posted by people looking for help as they struggle to optimize linear programs (or, worse, integer linear programs) with tens of millions of variables. In my conscious mind, I know that commercial optimizers such as CPLEX allow models that large (at least if you have enough memory) and can often solve …

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# Using characteristics of rail-trails to predict how they are rated

Catching up I wrote a blog post (one that, to be honest, I liked a lot) on what the best rail-trails are in Michigan (here). A friend and colleague at MSU, Andy, noticed that paved trails seemed to be rated higher, and this as well as my cfriend and colleague Kristy’s comment about how we …

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# Food Fraud Prevention Compliance – What is Really Required?

This blog was created after several separate conversations with several senior industry leaders who are in charge of Food Fraud prevention for their Fortune 1000 Corporations. “Wait, what? What is required for GFSI compliance?” The answer was simple but a bit of a revelation. Also, by focusing on the specific requirements – and resources available …

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# A day in the field

3:00 a.m. My alarm goes off. I open my eyes and see the Heilongjiang sun starting to rise. I close my eyes just for a minute more… (Editor’s note – China, while geographically spanning five time zones, follows only one for unity. That means far eastern locales like Heilongjiang see daybreak early.) 3:15 a.m. My …

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# Helpful resources for principal components analysis in R

I’m currently working on my dissertation proposal, which has meant exploring principal components analysis. I’ve worked with PCA before, but it’s been a couple of years, so I’m trying to refresh my memory, improve my understanding, and get this proposal moving! Along the way, I’ve found (and been recommended) some helpful resources that I thought …

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# In Other Words (Week of July 31)

Inviting you to review our newest regular feature, In Other Words, of biweekly policy-related readings from divergent voices across Michigan. On the Left Why Your Religion Shouldn’t Be My Problem (link is external) From the blog Ramona’s Voices, a discussion on religious freedom. Governor Snyder, Please, It’s Time To Show Leadership In The Debate Over Trumpcare (link …

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# China’s rise in Science and Engineering indicators (NSF)

Data from the 2016 NSF report on global Science & Engineering Indicators shows the rapid rise of China in both academic science and applied technology. Rapid growth in number of Chinese S&E articles, reaching parity with US in 2013, and well ahead of Japan and India. Fraction of high impact (top 1% most cited) papers highest for …

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# Robots taking our jobs

The figures below are from the recent paper Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, by Acemoglu and Restrepo. VoxEU discussion: … Estimates suggest that an extra robot per 1000 workers reduces the employment to population ratio by 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5%. This effect is distinct from the impacts of imports, …

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# Like little monkeys: How the brain does face recognition

This is a Caltech TEDx talk from 2013, in which Doris Tsao discusses her work on the neuroscience of human face recognition. Recently I blogged about her breakthrough in identifying the face recognition algorithm used by monkey (and presumably human) brains. The algorithm seems similar to those used in machine face recognition: individual neurons perform …

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# “Sault Tribe’s trust land application denied for Lansing casino”

Here. If anyone has the denial letter, please send it along. Here it is. And here: 2017-07-24 DOI Cason ltr to Sault Ste. Marie denying mandatory trust acqn Tweet

# Pan-African Sports Studies

The University of Zambia will host the 12th Sports Africa conference on March 26-28, 2018. The theme of the conference is: “Pan-African Sports Studies: Beyond Physical Education.” The conference in Lusaka will bring together sports scholars and practitioners from African, North American, and European Universities working on a diversity of topics in a wide range …

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# First Human Embryos Edited in U.S. (MIT Technology Review)

It’s only a matter of time… Note this kind of work can be done very secretly and with very modest resources — it does not require banks of centrifuges, big reactors, or ICBM test launches. First Human Embryos Edited in U.S. (MIT Technology Review) Researchers have demonstrated they can efficiently improve the DNA of human …

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# Open letter to President Trump

Dear Donald Trump. You are a great president. Probably one of the greatest this country has ever seen. You have the best mind for it, and the fake news media just don’t give you enough credit, which I think is really sad. But we are many, probably more than anybody realizes, that admire you and …

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# Natural Selection and Body Shape in Eurasia

Prior to the modern era of genomics, it was claimed (without good evidence) that divergences between isolated human populations were almost entirely due to founder effects or genetic drift, and not due to differential selection caused by disparate local conditions. There is strong evidence now against this claim. Many of the differences between modern populations …

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