Or maybe not ... ;-) Note the absence of snail shel...
Saturday, 29 June 2013
Friday, 28 June 2013
In an earlier post (Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, and de Finetti) I linked to a historical article on the problem of induction. Here's an even better one, which gives a very clear introduction to Solomonoff Induction.A Philosophical Treatise of Universal InductionSamuel Rathmanner, Marcus HutterUnderstanding inductive reasoning is a problem that has engaged mankind for thousands of years. This problem is relevant to a wide range of fields and is integral to the philosophy of science. It has been tackled by many great minds ranging from philosophers to...
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
This is a nice historical article that connects a number of key figures in the history of probability and information theory. See also Frequentists and Bayesians, Jaynes and Bayes, and On the Origin of Probability in Quantum Mechanics.Induction: From Kolmogorov and Solomonoff to De Finetti and Back to KolmogorovJohn J. McCall DOI: 10.1111/j.0026-1386.2004.00190.xABSTRACT This paper compares the solutions to “the induction problem” by Kolmogorov, de Finetti, and Solomonoff. Brief sketches of the intellectual history of de Finetti and Kolmogorov...
Sunday, 23 June 2013
One of the advantages of whole genomes vs microarrays is that you can examine the impact of rare variants; in this study 25M variants (SNVs) were used as opposed to the usual 1M or so SNPs. The authors examine HDL-C level, which has heritability of 47-76%. They find that common variants account for almost all of the heritability, with rare variants (MAF < 1%) accounting for perhaps 10-20 percent as much as common variants.Whole-genome sequence–based analysis of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (Nature Genetics) (Supplement)We describe...
Saturday, 22 June 2013
These videos will be very interesting to Blade Runner fans. In the first, Dick talks about "... the problem of differentiating an authentic human being from the reflex-machine which I call an android... The word android is a metaphor for someone who is physiologically human but psychologically ... non-human. I got interested in this when I was doing research for Man in the High Castle [excellent alternative history novel in which the Japanese and Germans won WWII] and I was studying the Nazi mentality. I discovered that although these people were...
News from BGI Cognitive Genomics.31 May 2013: We have started the process of returning genetic data to our first round of volunteers. Everyone who was sequenced will be contacted within the next few weeks.We are also starting public testing of our new bioinformatics tool: WDIST, an increasingly complete rewrite of PLINK designed for tomorrow's large datasets, developed by Christopher Chang with support from the NIH-NIDDK's Laboratory of Biological Modeling and others. It uses a streaming strategy to reduce memory requirements,...
Friday, 21 June 2013
Wilson was a hero to many, many theoretical physicists, including me. Wilson's father did his PhD with Linus Pauling, Wilson with Murray Gell-Mann, both at Caltech (see Defining Merit). To Wilson we owe much of our modern understanding of renormalization, effective field theory, phase transitions, lattice quantum field theory, and, of course, the renormalization group.NYTimes: ... His colleagues hailed Dr. Wilson as a legend who had changed how theoretical physicists went about their work, especially in particle physics, the study of the elementary...
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Not only do these results implicate common causal variants as the source of heritability in disease susceptibility, but they also suggest that gene-gene (epistasis) and gene-environment interactions are of limited impact. Both the genetic and environmental backgrounds for a particular allele vary across Eurasia, so replicability puts an upper limit on their influence. See also Epistasis vs Additivty.High Trans-ethnic Replicability of GWAS Results...
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
I'm always looking for good podcasts to listen to in the car or when I'm exercising. Here's one I've been enjoying a lot in the last week:Sinica podcastFor some reason the podcasts are distributed along with language lessons on iTunes: Popup Chinese (iTunes).Here's the most recent (June 14) episode:This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn are delighted to host Matthew Niederhauser. A photographer focusing on urban development in China,...
Sunday, 16 June 2013
This report from the European Council on Foreign Relations aims to give Western readers a sense of the debate about China's future among its policy and intellectual elite. The funny thing about China is that even the elites have no idea where it's going. This is not unrelated to the mini-boom in real estate in large cities on the US west coast and in NYC. On the other hand, one of the economists in the survey writes confidently about continued 8%...
Paul Erdos and Terence Tao in 1985. Tao would have been 10 years old or so. (From Tao's G+ feed.) Tao is possibly SMPY's most famous alumnus, although I am not 100% sure.Erdos slang:Children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε))Women were "bosses"Men were "slaves"People who stopped doing mathematics had "died"People who...
Friday, 14 June 2013
You'd have to be very naive to think that national intelligence agencies don't have dedicated hacking and information security penetration operations. In fact, if the US lacked this capability our spymasters would be derelict in their duty. Most of the complaining about foreign hacking or signals intelligence is just playing to (the dumb or naive part of) the domestic audience.It was always amusing to play spot the Fed at Def Con ;-) The manpower...
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
I voted twice for Obama, and always despised Bush-Cheney. But I can't disagree with Cheney's remarks below. New Yorker: After Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President but before he took the oath of office, Vice-President Dick Cheney gave an exit interview to Rush Limbaugh. Under George W. Bush, Cheney was the architect, along with his legal counsel, David Addington, of a dramatic expansion of executive authority—a power grab that Obama criticized, fiercely, on the campaign trail, and promised to “reverse.” But when Limbaugh inquired...
Sunday, 9 June 2013
I'm putting these links and quotes here for my future reference. Sorry if this post seems disjointed and confusing. The first link below is a nice historical description of Paul Cohen and his work on the Continuum Hypothesis. Amusingly, Cohen once wrote[Cohen:] ... Even if the formalist position is adopted, in actual thinking about mathematics one can have no intuition unless one assumes that models exist and that the structures are real.So, let me say that I will ascribe to Skolem a view, not explicitly stated by him, that there is a reality to...
Friday, 7 June 2013
弱肉強食These characters mean "Weak Meat Strong Eat" -- the weak are meat for the strong. It's a Chinese (and Japanese) saying. Sometimes it is even translated as "Survival of the fittest"!One of the repeated themes in Cloud Atlas is: The weak are meat the strong do eat. David Mitchell, the author, lived in Japan for many years and has a Japanese wife. I suspect he learned this phrasing from the Japanese.My favorite sub-plot in Cloud Atlas is the Orison of Sonmi 451. Hmm... what is psychogenomics? (See also Dune.)Cloud Atlas: ... sourced his...
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Sunday, 2 June 2013
The FT's Asia editor has lunch with Japan scholar Donald Keene (shown above with Yukio Mishima and Hiroshi Akutagawa). Keene has a keen intelligence and fine literary and historical sensibilities. He recently became a Japanese citizen at the age of 89. I highly recommend his memoir Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. See also Japanese Diaries and Yukio Mishima. (Via Gwern.)Financial Times: ... I steer Keene back more than...
Saturday, 1 June 2013
Roughly speaking, modern humans differ from chimpanzees with probability 0.01 at a particular base in the genome, from neanderthals with probability 0.003, and from each other with probability 0.001 (this final number varies by about 15% depending on ancestral population). The neanderthal research is particularly interesting in that we will eventually be able to determine the specific genetic changes that make modern humans different (smarter?) than neanderthals. Certain regions in the genome, known as HARs (Human Accelerated Regions) are conserved...
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