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Growing Up in Segregated America Enlightening to see the struggles addressed by the civil rights movement through a child’s viewpoint. I can relate to John Lewis more at a young age because we have shared experiences, but his were in a segregated environment whereas mine weren’t. The thing is, when I was young, there wasn’t much of a civil rights movement. I wanted to work at something, but I grew up in rural Alabama....

was written in a period when NLP practitioners are producing bigger (# of parameters; size of training data) language models (LMs), and pushing the top scores on benchmarks. The paper itself was controversial because it led to Gebru being fired from Google, following disagreements with her managers on conditions (withdraw, or remove Google-affiliated authors) for publishing the paper. A lot changed since mid-2021, when I initially wrote this page....

Mental Attitude While Learning Distinguish Mere Facts From Conclusions or Opinions Discriminate between mere statements of facts, necessary conclusions which follow therefrom, and mere opinions which they seem to render reasonable. There’s no need to perform an experiment to verify that the atomic weight of oxygen is 16. That the sum of the angles of a plane triangle equals two right angles is not a mere fact, but an inevitable truth....

Journals note that prediction services can still make accurate predictions using a fraction of the data collected from a user device. They propose Cloak, which suppresses non-pertinent features (i.e. those features which can consistently tolerate addition of noise without degrading utility) to the prediction task. Cloak has a provable degree of privacy, and unlike cryptographic techniques, does not degrade prediction latency. Using the training data, labels, a pre-trained model and a privacy-utility knob, they (1) find the pertinent features through perturbation training, and (2) learn utility-preserving constant values for suppressing the non-pertinent data....

Objective: Learn to read the game and make smart predictions. Reaction times are overrated; perception and prediction rule . Offensive Playmaking and Scoring tracks the following play types: transition, isolation, pick & roll ball handler, pick & roll roll man, post up, spot up, handoff, cut, off screen and put-backs. At least these categories provide a baseline for what search terms to use. also has a miscellaneous play type section, so it’ll be interesting to see if a new play-type pops up in the future....

Meta 📑 Instead of changing the data or learners in multiple ways and then see if fairness improves, postulate that the root causes of bias are the prior decisions that generated the training data. These affect (a) what data was selected, and (b) the labels assigned to the examples. They propose the \(\text{Fair-SMOTE}\) (Fair Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique) algorithm which (1) removes biased labels (via situation testing: if the model’s prediction for a data point changes once all of the data points' protected attributes are flipped, then that label is biased and the data point is discarded), and (2) rebalances internal distributions such that based on a protected attribute, examples are equal in both positive and negative classes....

Link Prediction Given network-structured data, predict whether a link exists between two nodes. General types of prediction tasks on graphs: graph-level (e.g. will a molecule bind to a receptor implicated in a disease?), node-level (e.g. what is the identity of each node?), and edge-level (e.g. does this edge exist; what value does it have?). Applications include: predicting drug-drug interactions (common in treating patients with complex/co-existing diseases) as they may cause changes in the drugs' pharmacological activity ....

Formal Software Design Alloy is an open-source language and analyzer for software modeling. An Alloy model is a collection of constraints that describe a set of structures, e.g. all possible security configurations of a web application. Alloy’s tool, the Alloy Analyzer is a solver that takes the constraints of a model and finds structures that satisfy them. 📑 The Alloy Analyzer leverages a SAT solver, and this precludes Alloy from analyzing optimization problems....

Measuring Productivity Devs' Diverging Perceptions of Productivity Got interested in measuring it two years into my SWE career. Initially rated myself based on % of completed daily objectives. The objectives didn’t necessarily correspond to work items. Stopped because the numbers were high even on days when I didn’t feel productive. Switched to “stuff that affects others” (later came to know these are “function points”). More intuitively captures non-code objectives, e.g., aligning folks on feature specs....

Strange Loops A Strange Loop occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. The 3-voice Canon Per Tonos from Musikalisches Opfer BWV 1079 exhibits a strange loop. Successive modulations make one expect to hopelessly far from the starting key, but after six modulations, the original key of C minor is restored! I can’t quite perceive the rising canon....

Two Types of Thinking Soldier Mindset Reasoning is like defensive combat. Finding out you’re wrong means suffering a defeat. Seeks out evidence to fortify and defend your beliefs. Directionally motivated reasoning. When we want something to be true, we ask, “Can I believe this?” When we don’t want something to be true, we ask, “Must I believe this?” Scout Mindset Reasoning is like mapmaking. Finding out you’re wrong means revising your map....

Reaction Times are Overrated Elite athletes do not display superior reaction times to those of average people; most hover at 200ms. However, games are played at speeds where 200ms is too slow, e.g. 100-mph baseballs, 130-mph tennis serves, etc. A reaction time of less than 100ms is deemed a false start in track and field sprints. Superior Perception Athletes outperformed novices when asked if there was a ball in a rapidly flashed slide....

32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ‘21) Reconstructing Ireland’s Lost History through the Beyond 2022 Project Aims to create a virtual 3-D reconstruction of the “Record Treasury” of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin. The original one was destroyed in Ireland’s Civil War of 1922. Reassembling will use copies, transcripts and records scattered among archival partners. #digital-humanities The full text of discusses challenges presented by the Beyond 2022 project....

Product Differentiation and Price Discrimination Product differentiation seeks to distinguish a product from a competing product to make it more attractive to a specific target market. Price discrimination occurs when the same goods/services are sold at different prices from the same company. The Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socio-economic unfairness: the rich man who bought the high quality $50 pair of boots would still be using them in 10 years, while the poor man who buys the $10 pair would have spent $100 on boots in the same time, and still be worse off....

Medical care is like the opposite of moving fast and breaking things. If it’s so taboo to admit error, then that could make errors more common because fewer people are learning from past errors. Norms for Scientific Activity and the Sources of Error “Science” is taken to mean “Natural Science”. Internal norms derive from a cognitive pursuit of science. They are: Focus on the central rather than the peripheral problems of the science in in question....

The human genome has sequences of nucleotide base pairs that are repeated over and over again. At each locus of interest, a person has two sets of repeats inherited from each parent. Each possible difference at a locus is an allele. The combinations of the possible differences at multiple loci form a DNA profile that can be used to tie suspects to a crime scene. The Accuracy of DNA Testing is Wanting 74/108 crime labs erroneously incriminated a suspect during a mock study....

Political Ads Cambridge Analytica (CA) paid people to take in-app survey; mined FB profile data including friends' data; crafted tailored sensitive ads to sway-able voters. Elections are about emotions, not facts. Data science and social media can help us make sense of and manipulate the chaos. An alternative argument. Political misinformation is: Weak in high profile partisan races because pre-existing beliefs hardly change Strong when people don’t have string pre-existing opinions, e....

Dependency Management Golang introduced a new library referencing mode to overcome limitations of the old one. While the two library modes are supported by Golang, they are incompatible, e.g. dependency management (DM) issues, reference inconsistencies, build failures, etc. did an empirical study that resulted in HERO, an automated technique to detect DM issues and suggest fixes. Applied to 19k Golang projects, HERO detected 98.5% on a DM issue benchmark, and found 2,422 new DM issues in 2,356 Golang projects....

WWW ‘21: The Web Conference 2021 REST: Relational Event-Driven Stock Trend Forecasting REST, an event-driven stock trend forecasting framework, that overcomes two limitations of existing event-driven models. Models the stock context, and learns the effect of event information on the stocks under different contexts. Constructs a stock graph and designs a new propagation layer to propagate the effect of event information from related stocks. #stock-trend-forecasting #computational-finance #graph-based-learning The value of stock trend forecasting is not unanimous, e....

When it comes to STEM diversity goals, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) tends to be excluded from the URMs under discussion, e.g. . However, AAPI as a blanket term obscures the struggles of member groups, e.g. \(62\%\) of AAPI adults aged 24 and older have an associate’s degree or higher, compared to 28% of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders of the same age. AA comprises \(\approx 50\) ethnic groups, while PI has \(\approx 20\)....

#utilitarianism As the Last I May Know. Shi Lian Huang. www.tor.com . Accessed Dec 4, 2021. won the “Best Short Story” Hugo Award in 2020. Memorable Points Background: Sere missiles can wipe out a city completely. Nyma’s nation has been the only recipient of a seres strike. They’ve since acquired their own seres stockpile. They’re engaged in war with an state that lacks seres weapons....

Debugging 101 Definition? Debugging involves inspecting a program’s internal state. printf Debugging and Logging In printf debugging, one adds print statements and keeps iterating until enough information has been extracted. Using logging has several advantages over printf debugging: varying logging destinations (e.g. standard output, files, sockets, remote servers, etc.); severity levels (e.g. INFO, DEBUG, WARN, ERROR, &c) that support filtering of output; color-coding for readability. Terminals have varying levels of color support: plain color; ANSI escape codes (16 color codes with bold/italic and background); 256 color palette; 24-bit truecolor (“888” colors, aka 16 million, e....

How to Be Wrong found that experts were barely able to forecast better than random chance. However, a small subset of people (coined “superforecasters” ) were better. In a competition, they beat teams of top professors and CIA professional analysts. These superforecasters were not smarter than everyone else nor did they have more knowledge/experience, they were great at being wrong. Change your mind a little at a time. Seeing the world in shades of grey is less stressful, as the experience of encountering evidence against one of your beliefs is not high stakes....

Coping with Reality This chapter felt a bit vacuous with its use of anecdotes to advance points. Criticism of studies that argue that self-deception makes us happier: conflation of positive illusions and positive beliefs; unfounded definitions of what counts as self-deception; results that can be equally well-explained by something else. There are alternative coping strategies that don’t involve self-deception: making a hypothetical plan about some unpleasant and unavoidable thing; noticing silver linings but not to the point of sweet lemons; admitting that things could be worse....

Signs of a Scout These Don’t Make You a Scout Feeling objective. The more objective you feel, the more you trust your own intuitions and opinions as accurate representations of reality, and the less inclined you are to question them. Being smart and knowledgeable. It’s not a case of “if people were smarter and well-informed, they’d realize their errors”. For example, found that polarization (on political fronts) on anthropogenic climate change increases as scientific intelligence increases....