She Screams, He Kidnaps (by Silly Rabbit)


Proximity of verbs to gender

Sometimes biases embedded within language are subtle, counter-intuitive things which you have to tease out with many layered neural nets. Other times, they are just bluntly and painfully predictable: Data scientist David Robinson tracked the proximity of verbs to gender across 100,000 stories. She screams, cries and rejects. He kidnaps, rescues and beats.


Previously I shared some research on how recollections of successive events physically entangle each other when brain cells store them. As a fascinating and different approach to studying memory, in this paper a group of European researchers used Wikipedia page views of aircraft crashes to study memory.

Fool me once, fool me twice

Sooner or later, someone is probably going to put a visually compelling 2D ‘map’ of data reduced from hundreds or thousands of dimensions via t-SNE in front of you and make some bold assertions about it. This beautiful and interactive paper provides a handy guide on what to watch out for.

A veritable zoo of machine learning techniques

A couple of months old, but still useful: Two Sigma researchers Vinod Valsalam and Firdaus Janoos write up the notable advances in machine learning presented at NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation) 2016. Headline: The dominating theme at NIPS 2016 was deep learning, sometimes combined with other machine learning methods such as reinforcement learning and Bayesian techniques.

The NIPS conference has, improbably, found itself at the center of the universe as it is the most important event for people sharing cutting edge machine learning work. It’s in LA this year in December and promises to be very interesting, although quite technical:

Silicon Valley: a reality check

And, finally, this one is a little inside baseball but, if you can push through that, there is a very useful and accurate parsing of the types of technology companies being started and funded in the Valley and the simultaneous parallel dimensions that exist here. (You can skip the Valley defense bit and jump to the smart parsing bit by hitting ‘CRTL + F’ , typing ‘Y Combinator’ and start reading from there).

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