Links for 2022-01-12
Video series on trying to reverse engineer neural networks https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoyGOS2WIonajhAVqKUgEMNmeq3nEeM51
Eric Jang (@ericjang11) points out a new and possibly very important machine learning phenomenon called "grokking". In summary, if you just keep training neural networks well past the point of overfitting, a sudden "phase change" can occur improving generalization performance from random chance level to perfect generalization. More data accelerates the speed at which this phase change occurs. https://mathai-iclr.github.io/papers/papers/MATHAI_29_paper.pdf
This thread shows that all the usual theories trying to explain the globally collapsing fertility rates are probably wrong. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1480910649282736131.html
Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie — “Throughout evolutionary history, parasites have been trying to manipulate host behavior and hosts have been trying to avoid manipulation, resulting in an eons-long arms race.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stopped-working-because-a-liver-fluke-tried-to-turn-your-nth-great-grandmother-into-a-zombie/
Photos Go In, Reality Comes Out…And Fast! Creating a video from a collection of photos previously took 1.6 days now down to 8.8 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yptwRRpPEBM
Astronomers Discover a Strange Galaxy Without Dark Matter https://www.wired.com/story/astronomers-discover-a-strange-galaxy-without-dark-matter/
A single molecule protein sequencer https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212868
Real-time dynamic single-molecule protein sequencing on an integrated semiconductor device https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.475002v1
A naturally inspired antibiotic to target multidrug-resistant pathogens https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04264-x
"What is good mathematics?" by Terence Tao https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0702396
Americans now watch as much user-generated video content than they do traditional TV https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/cta-user-generated-content-study-1235146175/
"While the probability of an asteroid hitting the planet is very low, its effect would be disastrous for all of us. So, who should pay for asteroid protection? A good like asteroid defense — a public good, meaning it’s nonexcludable and nonrival — has some unusual properties that challenge markets. We explore the curious case of public goods in this video and others in this section." https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/public-goods-example-asteroid-defense
Dinosaurs were baking in the heat. During the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, the global temperature might have been about 15°C hotter than it is now! https://www.science.org/content/article/500-million-year-survey-earths-climate-reveals-dire-warning-humanity