Links for May 2015

All these amateurs and celebrities have been talking about the long risk of recursively self-improving artificial intelligence, but don’t the actual AI researchers think this is a bunch of hooey? Only if you cherry pick, notes Scott A. In particular, if you’re willing to trust the survey skills of people with skin in the game, then

…a survey of AI researchers (Muller & Bostrom, 2014) finds that on average they expect a 50% chance of human-level AI by 2040 and 90% chance of human-level AI by 2075.

I have some comments on this critique of the PhD Thesis that’s been making the rounds.

He would much prefer to see theses’ introductory sections “written along the lines of a good review article, where the student does a critical appraisal of the state of the field”

Yes! A well-written thesis continues to be a very valuable contribution to the literature, but it is the parts that are *not* original work that are most useful. The reason is that older researchers in a field have almost no incentives to write good and truly introductory review papers, and the introductory sections of a thesis are often the best point of entry.

However, most theses are not well written because student don’t have much incentive either.

Hence, theses become bloated with “page after page of methods”, along the lines of: “I pipetted 2.5ml of this enzyme into that tube.”

Yea, it’s boring for professor on the thesis committee to read, but this sort of stuff is very valuable for students and postdocs, who often struggle to reproduce poorly-documented results from other labs.

“Communication within the science world and with the public is becoming shorter and snappier, yet our PhDs still seem to be stuck in the 1960s.”

Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet…

…the weird thing about the tortoise/turtle skeleton is those struts near the front, the scapula/shoulder blade is INSIDE the ribcage….How the hell did it get in there when most shoulder blades are on the outside of the ribcage?..Pretty cool development from embryo show us that the close ribs move backwards and reduce first to allow for the scapula to sneak inside.

The depictions of Tortoise vs. Chicken embryo development are highly recommended.

Luckily, there are highly useful and reasonably priced technological spin-offs.

Original underpowered study: 40 subjects. Meta-analysis of follow-on studies inspired by its publication and promotion, which showed the effect was a false positive: 7000+ subjects, 16 more studies. A striking example of how publishing underpowered and p-hacked studies waste far more resources than it would cost for the original authors to use adequately powered pre-registered designs.

P-hacking is not a victimless crime.

Horgan: Will further research help dispel the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, or might reality in some sense always be unintelligible?

Weinberg: I think our best hope is to find some successor theory, to which quantum mechanics as we now know it is only a good approximation.

Packages could soon be delivered to the boot of your Audi as part of a trial involving the car maker, Amazon and DHL…the system aims to end the frustration of missing the arrival of a package being delivered to home or work. Instead, Audi owners will be able to use their car as a shipping address for items ordered online….Using Audi’s in-car communications system, Connect, DHL delivery drivers would track a customer’s vehicle over a specified period of time and then use a digital access code to unlock the boot, the car maker said. This code would then expire as soon as the boot was shut.

And what would follow a nuclear conflict? Well, countries wanted back-up power in case their electricity systems failed as a consequence of an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear bomb. The Soviet Union kept and serviced a fleet of steam-powered trains — the strategic steam reserve — that could run on coal. The strategic steam reserve still exists today, but it has been decaying since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Eugene Wigner even suggested explicitly the possibility of an active influence of consciousness on the physical world [E.P. Wigner, in The Scientist Speculates, L.G. Good, edt. (Heinemann, London 1962), p. 284], but dropped this proposal when he learned about the concept of what was later called decoherence [E.P. Wigner, private communication (1970)].

I sure would like to see that private communication…

It would have been a lot more useful to also know how a percentile increase on the review score translated into a percentile increase on the citation distribution. We already the citations are highly skewed from a winner-take-all dynamic, so even if you just barely increase your chance of funding the top paper as opposed to the second-to-top paper, your expected number of citations might jump a lot.

Of course, if you think citations are roughly proportional to scientific value, then this doesn’t matter. The absolute number of citations is the important thing, and it really is worth it to eek out a slightly higher chance of funding the top paper. But if you believed that, you’d think from the exponential explosion in citations that science today is vastly more valuable than even a few years ago, and that physics hadn’t stopped making much progress back around 1970….

The SI prefixes for very large numbers are E (10¹⁸; exa), Z (10²¹; zetta),
and Y (10²⁴; yotta). No larger SI prefixes have been decreed, but I adopt symbols that continue in reverse alphabetical order: X (10²⁷), W (10³⁰), and V (10³³), as proposed (sometimes in jest) by Jeff Aronson, Jim Blower, and Sbiis Saiban.

The interesting part is that there is a small hole through the middle pane, so that the gap between the outer pane and the middle pane is at cabin pressure. Apparently this cuts down on frost and fog that would otherwise form on the middle pane. If the outer pane fails, this gap drops to exterior pressure and the middle pane must suddenly bear the full pressure differential. The cabin air does leak through the hole in the middle pane, but only at a relatively slow rate that can be compensated by the plane’s pressurization system.

…we have here the most abrupt evolutionary transition known, a jump from mammal to one-celled organism in a single step. For this transmissible tumor, also called canine venereal sarcoma, is in every sense an independent infectious organism, just as much so as Salmonella typhi or Plasmodium falciparum. It reproduces and metabolizes. Although descended from dogs, it is genetically different from dogs, with a different chromosome number (57 rather than 78), due to extensive chromosomal rearrangements. Since it cannot, as far as we know, exchange genetic material with dogs, it is a new species….Although its phenotype differs considerably from dogs (no brain, no bones, no eyes, no fur, asexual) classification by descent clearly implies that it is a canid and mammal – certainly the most unusual mammal ever discovered.

If cell line infections are reasonably common, it might be that immunological rejection of foreign tissue, which so complicates organ transplants, is a necessary function rather than a side-effect.

A number of parasitic organisms have lost so many nonessential functions that it is almost impossible to tell what they once were by any methods other than molecular biology. For example, the organism that causes ‘whirling disease’ in trout is a degenerate jellyfish.

(H/t Slate Star Codex.) I was reading this and thinking “man, this guy thinks like a physicist” and…yep.