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A random process is ergodic if all of its statistics can be determined from a sample function of the process. That is, the ensemble averages equal the corresponding time averages with probability one.

Role of Ergodicity in Human Inference

A newspaper has previously printed some inaccurate information, therefore, the newspaper is going to publish inaccurate information in the future. Fair; ensemble of published articles is more or less ergodic.

More crimes are committed by black persons than by white persons, therefore each individual black person is not to be trusted? The ensemble of black people is not at all ergodic!

Measuring Productivity

Devs’ Diverging Perceptions of Productivity

Growing Up in Segregated America

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. My parents knew it would be dangerous to make any waves. “Stay out of trouble. Don’t get in white people’s way.”

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. During the inference phase, they efficiently compute a sifted representation which is sent to the service provider.

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.

Link Prediction

Given network-structured data, predict whether a link exists between two nodes.

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.

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!

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. Seeks out evidence that will make your map more accurate.

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.

Superior Perception

Athletes outperformed novices when asked if there was a ball in a rapidly flashed slide. Some athletes could even tell the slide’s game!

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

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.

Norms for Scientific Activity and the Sources of Error

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.
• Craftsmanship standards in the design of experiments and hypothesis testing.
• Distinguished theorizing is elegant and simple.
• Searching for a theory that is closer to the truth than the currently accepted theory.

External norms govern motives for participating in and using the results of scientific activity, e.g.

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. The reported match statistic for whether the match was coincidental varied over 100 trillion-fold.

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.

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. They reported 280 issues, and almost all of the fixes have adopted HERO’s fixing suggestions.

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

#utilitarianism

As the Last I May Know. Shi Lian Huang. www.tor.com . Accessed Dec 4, 2021.

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

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.

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

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. found similar patterns: political & religious polarization on stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution; political polarization on climate change; little evidence of political or religious polarization on nanotechnology and genetically modified foods.