Contriving

I mostly avoid discussions about privilege and social justice issues because I find the concepts confusing and I find the sureness with which people talk about them confusing.

However, I stumbled into this nice essay by the best selling author Marti Leimbach on the subject which I found well-written (unsurprisingly), moving, and thought-provoking.

The part that first grabbed me given my above-mentioned confusion on the subject:

Nonetheless, this whole notion of “privilege” vexes me. We talk about it as though we can all recognise what it is. I am not always so sure. I can tell one narrative of my life and it seems to describe someone who grew up without privilege, and I can tell another narrative and it seems almost as though my life was one of ease and privilege from the time I was born.

Lately, I've been keeping statistics on the behavior of people who have appointments to view an apartment or house for rent.

Out of 50 appointments, 32% of the appointments were no-shows, and 29% were 10+ minute late.

Thanks for wasting my time, jerks.

America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution has pointed out that of America’s 350 major metro areas, the cities with more than three million people have rebounded far better from the financial crisis. Meanwhile, smaller cities like Dayton, Ohio, already floundering, have been falling further behind, as have countless disconnected small towns across the country.

GiveDirectly is doing an experiement with basic income (see here for more explanation about what basic income is: https://goo.gl/LvOrop) wherein they're giving 6000 Kenyans a guaranteed cash flow for 10 years. The amount they're giving seems to basically match what the average income these people are already actually making…$250-$400 per year. 

Nice long form article exploring Laron syndrome which protects the few hundred people with it from cancer and diabetes, and how researchers are mimicking its disease-protection effects via caloric-restriction diets.

Reshared post from +gwern branwen

Man, how does that work…?

"In this paper we propose stochastic depth, a training procedure that enables the seemingly contradictory setup to train short networks and obtain deep networks. We start with very deep networks but during training, for each mini-batch, randomly drop a subset of layers and bypass them with the identity function. The resulting networks are short (in expectation) during training and deep during testing. Training Residual Networks with stochastic depth is compellingly simple to implement, yet effective. We show that this approach successfully addresses the training difficulties of deep networks and complements the recent success of Residual and Highway Networks. It reduces training time substantially and improves the test errors on almost all data sets significantly (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN). Intriguingly, with stochastic depth we can increase the depth of residual networks even beyond 1200 layers and still yield meaningful improvements in test error (4.91%) on CIFAR-10."

Way to go, Space X!

I can't remember if posted about it at the time, but early last year there was a big brouhaha about a big scientific fraud. Namely, Michael J. LaCour, a grad student, faked the data for a very promising paper that supposedly showed that a short conversation with a gay canvasser could really change people's minds about gay legislation. See more about that here: http://goo.gl/JcN6cZ

Well, the scientists who figured out it was all faked did so whilst preparing their own study to look into whether this sort of "deep canvassing" worked on transgender issues.

They went ahead with their study…and it turned out even more promising than the study they debunked!

It's a rare story in science, a rare story anywhere: Where young idealists not only uncover one of the greatest frauds in recent scientific history, but then manage to validate the very idea that the fraudulent study asserted.



Using your water heater as a 12kWh battery.