{"id":406,"date":"2013-05-28T12:05:43","date_gmt":"2013-05-28T17:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/?p=406"},"modified":"2013-10-02T12:57:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T16:57:03","slug":"reading-list-for-28-may-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/reading-list-for-28-may-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading List for 28 May 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Science!<\/a><\/p>\n

\"busy_sciencing\"<\/a>
This is me right now<\/span> seemingly all the time.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Patrick Morrison & Emerson Murphy-Hill :: Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age? An Exploration of Stack Overflow<\/a> [pdf]<\/p>\n

As a CS guy who's tip-toed into psychology here and there I would offer Morrison & Murphy-Hill this advice: tread very, very lightly when making claims regarding the words \"knowledge\" and especially \"intelligence.\"<\/p>\n

\"Playing_forever\"<\/a><\/p>\n

TetrisConcept.net :: Playing Forever<\/a><\/p>\n

I'm glad I didn't know about this in the winter of 2003, when I engaged in intense bouts of Tetris as a weird form of post-modern zazen. I still remember the guy who used to sit in front of me in Linear Algebra wore a tattersall shirt every single class, and I would see tetrominos cascading down his back.<\/p>\n

RWCG :: What Brown-Vitter are asking for<\/a><\/p>\n

This is why I want legislators & regulators who have played some strategy games. I want people making rules who have the habit of thinking, \"If I do this, what is the other guy going to do? Surely he won't simply keep doing the things he was doing before I changed the environment. And surely not the exact the thing that I hope he does. What if he responds by...?\"<\/p>\n

Stephen Landsburg :: Seven Trees in One<\/a><\/p>\n

We started with a weird pseudo-equation, manipulated it as if it were meaningful, transformed it into a series of statements that were either meaningless or clearly false, and out popped something that happened to be true. What Blass essentially proved (and Fiore and Leinster generalized) is, in effect, is that this is no coincidence. More specifically, they\u2019ve proved in a very broad context that if you manipulate this kind of equation, pretending that sets are numbers and not letting yourself get ruffled by the illegitimacy of everything you\u2019re doing, the end result is sure to be either a) obviously<\/em> false or b) true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scott Weingart :: Friends don\u2019t let friends calculate p-values (without fully understanding them)<\/a><\/p>\n

My (very briefly stated) problem with p<\/i>-values is that they combine size-of-effect and effort-in-experiment into one scalar. (This has been in the news a lot lately with the Oregon Medicaid study. Was the effect of Medicaid on blood pressure, glucose levels, etc. insignificant because Medicaid doesn't help much or because the sample size was too small? Unsurprising peoples' answers to this question are perfectly correlated with all of their prior political beliefs.)<\/p>\n

One of the pitfalls of computational modeling is that it allows researchers to just keeping churning out simulation runs until their results are \"significant.\" Processor cycles get shoveled into the model's maw until you have enough results to make even a tiny observed effect fit in under that magical p<\/i>=0.05 limit. In theory everyone knows this isn't kosher, but \"in theory\" only takes us so far.<\/p>\n

Colin Eatock :: A North American's Guide to the use and abuse of the modern PhD<\/a><\/p>\n

Eatock specifically means the use and abuse of the letters \"PhD\" as a postnominal, and the appellation \"Doctor,\" not uses\/abuses of doctoral programs eo ipso.<\/p>\n

I'm not big on titles (\"The rank is but the guinea's stamp \/ The Man's the gowd for a' that<\/a>\"<\/i>). Once I've defended I'll probably make one hotel reservation as \"Dr. Sylvester\" just so I've done it and gotten it out of my system.<\/p>\n

I am irked by people claiming that a non-medical doctorate is somehow \"not real\" though. \"Doctor,\" like most words, has several meanings. What kind of semiotic\/linguistic authority are they to declare which one is \"real\" and which isn't? Thanks, but they can leave their self-serving grammatical prescriptivism out of this.<\/p>\n

Scott Aaronson :: D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge<\/a><\/p>\n

Suppose that... it eventually becomes clear that quantum annealing can be made to work on thousands of qubits, but that it\u2019s a dead end as far as getting a quantum speedup is concerned. Suppose the evidence piles up that simulated annealing on a conventional computer will continue to beat quantum annealing, if even the slightest effort is put into optimizing the classical annealing code. If that happens, then I predict that the very same people now hyping D-Wave will turn around and\u2014without the slightest acknowledgment of error on their part\u2014declare that the entire field of quantum computing has now been unmasked as a mirage, a scam, and a chimera<\/em>. The same pointy-haired bosses who now flock toward quantum computing, will flock away from it just as quickly and as uncomprehendingly. Academic QC programs will be decimated, despite the slow but genuine progress that they\u2019d been making the entire time in a \u201cparallel universe\u201d from D-Wave.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think Aaronson is right to worry about that possibility. That's essentially what caused the \"AI Winter<\/a>.\" I'd hate to see that happen to QC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Science! Patrick Morrison & Emerson Murphy-Hill :: Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age? An Exploration of Stack Overflow [pdf] As a CS guy who's tip-toed into psychology here and there I would offer Morrison & Murphy-Hill this advice: tread … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[17,3],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-lists","tag-academia","tag-computer-science","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3sddF-6y","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1098,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/hume-on-knowledge\/","url_meta":{"origin":406,"position":0},"title":"Hume on Knowledge","author":"jsylvest","date":"1 July 2018","format":"aside","excerpt":"All knowledge degenerates into probability. \u2014 David Hume, \"A Treatise on Human Nature,\" \u00a7IV.1","rel":"","context":"In "Quotes"","block_context":{"text":"Quotes","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/quotes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":278,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/reading-list-for-26-april-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":406,"position":1},"title":"Reading List for 26 April 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"26 April 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Tom Murphy :: learnfun & playfun: A general technique for automating NES games Wow. Here's the conference paper [pdf]. This suggested to me that it may be time to automate the playing of NES games, in order to save time. (Rather, to replace it with time spent programming.) Ha! I've\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reading Lists"","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":703,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/reading-list-for-23-september-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":406,"position":2},"title":"Reading List for 23 September 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"23 September 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Arnold Kling :: Big Gods Here is a question to think about. If religions help to create social capital by allowing people to signal conscientiousness, conformity, and trustworthiness [as Norenzayan claims], how does this relate to Bryan Caplan\u2019s view that obtaining a college degree performs that function? That might explain\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reading Lists"","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Some sample pilcrows from the H&FJ foundry.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/h%2Bfj_pilcrows.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1335,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/book-list-2019q1\/","url_meta":{"origin":406,"position":3},"title":"Book List: 2019Q1","author":"jsylvest","date":"25 April 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I think I did less reading this quarter than at any point since I beat dyslexia. Certainly less than any point since I started keeping track in 2011, and that includes the period when I finished my dissertation and had two kids. I'm teaching a course at a local college\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Book List"","block_context":{"text":"Book List","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/book-list\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Cover of \"The Relaxed Mind\" by Dza Kilung","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/cover-relaxed-mind-194x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":403,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/pi\/","url_meta":{"origin":406,"position":4},"title":"Pi","author":"jsylvest","date":"9 May 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Economist :: Babbage Blog :: Humble Pi The Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of a couple of computer scientists at Cambridge University. Back in 2006, they lamented the decline in programming skills among applicants for computer-science courses. ... Over the past ten years, computer-science students have gone from arriving\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding"","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/hello-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":406,"position":5},"title":"Hello world!","author":"jsylvest","date":"24 January 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"This is my new blog. I noticed that the book reviews and other notes on my personal webpage were getting longer and unwieldy, so I've decided to migrate some of that content over here. I plan on posting notes on what I've been reading, as well as thoughts about science,\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/hello-world\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}