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 ....
Main resource: .
What is Modular Arithmetic? Where \(A\) and \(B\) are integers, we can write:
$$ \frac{A}{B} = Q \text{ remainder } R $$
Using the same \(A, B, Q, \text{ and } R\) as above, we have:
$$ A \text{ mod } B = R $$
\(A \text{ mod } B\) can be visualized as taking \(A\) steps on a clock that runs from \(0\) to \(B-1\). If the number is positive we step clockwise, if it’s negative we step counterclockwise....
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....
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.
The value of stock trend forecasting is not unanimous, e....
WWW ‘21: The Web Conference 2021 User-oriented Fairness in Recommendation Showed that active users who only account for a small proportion enjoy much higher recommendation quality than the majority inactive users. They propose a re-ranking approach by adding constraints over the evaluation metrics.
There’s a subtlety here. Although the active users are the minority, the recommender considers them the majority as they are the ones providing a lot of the training data....
State Surveillance In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, FBI was contacting people whose cellphones pinged cell towers near the Capitol during the riots.
A powered mobile phone always sends signals to one of the closest base stations. Given multiple base stations, the angle and time of arrival, and location signatures of each cell location can be used to locate a mobile device. The higher the density of cell towers, the more precise the calculated location....
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....
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....
Environmentalism Over the last 70 years, less than 10% of plastic waste has been recycled - it’s uneconomical. Recycling shifts attention from the environmental impact of plastics and their overproduction to the consumer’s willingness to recycle. Reducing and reusing is a much better environmental strategy.
Betting (and Gambling) I’m seeing more prominent gambling sites and ads compared to when I was growing up. Based on my peers, SportPesa made lots of headway in Kenya (few companies can claim to sponsor English Premier League teams)....
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....
Startups tend to fail more often than they succeed. However, a lot of startup advice is given by those who made it, and therefore prone to survivorship bias. Hearing from founders that gave it their all but never succeeded should be enlightening.
I expect reasons like misunderstanding the customer, sunk costs, running out of money (especially with societal pressures like a family to fend for), wrong time, etc.
I’d categorize my flashcards web app as a project that never made it....
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....
Stories of Your Life and Others. Ted Chiang. 2010. ISBN: 9781931520898. Tower of Babylon Story focused on Hillalum, who lived during the construction of the Tower of Babel .
notes that the Hebrew school version was more elaborate than the Old Testament account, e.g. the tower is so tall that it takes a year to climb, and when a man falls to his death, no one mourns, but when a brick is dropped, the brick-layers weep because it will take a year to replace....
Saga. Brian Vaughan; Fiona Staples. imagecomics.com . www.hoopladigital.com . en.wikipedia.org . Saga (2012 - present) by Brian Vaughan. Image from imagecomics.com
Volumes 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9 have been nominated for the the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. A 6/9 nomination rate implies that the comic is pretty good!
Themes (Mostly War) Planet Landfall (Alana’s) and Wreath (its moon, Marko’s) have been in conflict as long as anyone can remember....
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....
Volume 9 was nominated for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic. However, not very stoked after Book One (Vol 1 and 2). Maybe it gets better? Only Volume 9 has been nominated for a Hugo Award, so maybe check that next time before committing?
The Wicked + The Divine. Image credits: wicdiv.com
The Recurrence. Every 90 years, 12 gods reincarnate on earth for 2 years....
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs Capitalism is meant to eliminate bullshit jobs, yet layoffs tend to fall on people making, moving, fixing and maintaining things, but not on the salaried paper pushers that effectively work 15 hours a week.
From a political standpoint, a happy productive population with free time on their hands is mortal to the ruling class. Moreover, work is considered a moral value in itself....
Bloom Filters In true fashion to Stigler’s Law of Eponymy (no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer ), Ross Ashby (1960) did a probabilistic analysis of Calvin Mooers’s Zatocoding (1947) (coding system for library cards). This predates Burton Bloom’s work (1970).
Motivation A Bloom filter for a set \(X: \{x_1, x_2, …, x_n\} \) from some universe \(\mathbb{U}\) allows one to test whether a given item \(x \in \mathbb{B}\) is an element of \(X\)....
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....
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....
Contact Tracing “Apps” in this context means contact tracing apps released by public health authorities to do contact tracing. The APIs are limited to them.
Big Picture Release APIs to enable apps to interoperate between Android and iOS devices. Bluetooth-based contact tracing baked into Android and iOS, such that no app is needed for broadcasting/listening. This ensures broad adoption, but will be on an opt-in basis....
The Sandman (1989 - 1996) by Neil Gaiman. Image from dccomics.com
Path to comic: Lucifer (Netflix) -> Lucifer (Comic) -> The Sandman (Comic)
Netflix is also adapting the comic, so interested in how it deviates from the source. Ser Brienne of Tarth will be Lucifer. Hype!
Love Dream: Sister – you know how I felt for Nada one. What I feel for her still....
The Law of the Few From 1995 to 1996, the # of children born in Baltimore with syphillis increased 500%. CDC blamed it on cocaine and reduction in clinics.
In 100k+ Colorado Springs town, the gonorrhoea epidemic tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in 4 small neighbourhoods, frequenting the same 6 bars.
Gaëtan Dugas, an Air-Canada flight attendant, is [mis?]regarded as “Patient Zero” for AIDS in the US....
Introduction The Tipping Point is the biography of how little things had big effects.
From 1992 to 1997, murder rates dropped 64.3% to 770 and total crimes fell by \(\approx\) 50% to 355,893.
Geometric progressions are non-intuitive, e.g. if given a large paper and asked to fold it 50x, the stack’s height will be \(\approx\) the distance to the sun.
This is a popular illustration. The standard paper’s thickness, \(h_0\), is \(0....
Societal Preference for STEM Over the Liberal Arts Not everyone can [wants to?] take the sciences, but they were pushed out of their passions into applicable degrees like Business and Communications.
The initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50% in the first decade. People who major in LA don’t get first jobs that are as lucrative, but they do catch up.
Governments tend to claim a shortage of STEM workers (who are valued for innovation and national defense), and allocate funds for increasing the student pipeline....
Going to a talk is difficult for everyone because nobody understands the whole thing, but it’s especially difficult for undergraduates because they still expect to.
is a rich resource for understanding scholarly literature. Browse it. Some of the listed items are familiar, e.g. Google Scholar, SCImago, Sci-Hub, but it’d be informative to zoom out to the larger picture, e.g. good alternatives to Google Scholar.
How to Read a Paper The First Pass (5 - 10 min) Objectives: category, context, validity of assumptions, contributions and quality of writing....
Argument from Consequences If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.
Straw Man The essence of this technique is to caricature a position to make it easier to attack.
My opponent is trying to convince you that we evolved from chimpanzees who were swinging from trees, a truly ludicrous claim.
Environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people.
Appeal to Fear You should give me all your valuables before the police get here....
Timeline of Secure Multi-Party Communication In 1982, secure two-party computation (2PC) was introduced for problems that are boolean predicates, e.g. Yao’s Millionaires' Problem that asks whether \(a \ge b\) is true without revealing the actual values of \(a\) and \(b\).
Andrew Yao generalized 2PC for any feasible computation in 1986. Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson later generalized it to secure multiparty communication.
Yao-based protocols requires that the function to be securely evaluated be represented as a circuit, but an efficient transformation is not trivial....
Motivation: Why are politics so contentious? How can I relate better with people that hold opposing political beliefs?
Why People Are Irrational About Politics. Michael Huemer. Philosophy, Politics and Economics. 2015. Salient features of political disagreements: widespread (many people disagree on many issues), strong conviction/confidence, and persistent (difficult to resolve).
Political Disputes Are Not Explained by Miscalculation or Ignorance Miscalculation Theory: Political issues are difficult and partisans make mistakes in their reasoning....
Criticism/Defense Of Billionaire Philanthropy Taxes will probably not go to the same causes, e.g. reforming the bail system, grassroot efforts for migrants, etc.
Admittedly, these are things that the government should be doing, but it seems that the government doesn’t do enough. Furthermore, some of these issues so politicized, e.g. immigrants, that government support can be fickle.
Foundations are more effective than governments as they do their due diligence, e....
notes that , the primary source, glosses over nitty-gritties. e.g. the “message queue” server. Maybe reading through these will provide a larger perspective to design decisions made in Chromium regarding observers.
Rant: some of willchan’s thoughts on WeakPtr, for those who care to read criticizes the observer pattern for murking dependency chains. Investigate more in this regard.
Intent A one-to-many dependency between object so that when one object (subject) changes, all its dependents (observers) are notified and update automatically....
Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest uses a captivating narrative style to elaborate on a complex question. The exposition makes the scientific parts memorable.
features a good anecdote of insight favoring the prepared. On a jog in London in January, probably primed by reading Nick Lane’s Oxygen, he noticed that there were some bar-headed geese. These geese migrate between India and Kazakhstan/Mongolia, necessitating a flight over the Himalayas, sometimes at 28,000 feet....
Browser Market Share Worldwide (2009 - 2020). Source: statcounter | GlobalStats
At the very least, Chrome is worth studying. Something worked out. I’m biased, I only plan to deeply explore Chromium-based browsers and Firefox.
Stability, Testing and the Multi-Process Architecture In a single-threaded browser, devs use asynchronous APIs - which may sometimes hold the browser up. Instead of multiple threads, Chromium chose multiple processes: isolation, independent crashes, better asymptotic memory management, identifying expensive sites, etc....
Premise: Orr can have “effective” dreams that retroactively change reality for everyone else, except those who are aware of him dreaming. See for a refresher on the plot.
Notable Plot Points Prodded by Haber to dream of the end of overpopulation, Orr dreamt of a plague that killed 6B people. But Orr tries to convince himself that the world that was was fiction in his head, so he didn’t really kill anyone....
Should Platforms Be Neutral? Facebook banned praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism, because the two concepts cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups. Furthermore, people that search for related terms will have “Life After Hate” suggested to them.
Part of me is uncomfortable. Sure, Facebook is trying to do the right thing here. What if Facebook was replaced by some tyrannical government that censors opposition?...
Incomplete List of Information Privacy Properties Control/consent, e.g. Cambridge Analytica exfiltrating FB users' data Discussion on Cambridge Analytica Anonymity, e.g. Snowden leaking NSA docs without revealing his identity
Limits on data collection, e.g. laws restricting government surveillance
Limits on data use, e.g. US Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008
Under GINA, health insurers must not use genetic information of the clients (or clients family) to inform their policy....
Luxottica - Queen of the Seven Kingdoms Luxottica owns and licenses Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.
Italy’s Luxottica also runs EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical. It also merged with the world’s leading maker of prescription eyeglass lenses and contact lenses, to form EssilorLuxottica....
Short Selling Say $A shares are selling at $100, but I think they’re overpriced. So I borrow 10 shares, pay my brokerage interest and post some collateral. I then sell the shares for $1,000.
Whoever buys my shares has no idea that I do not own them. In a naked short, I do not actually borrow or ensure that the security can be borrowed within the standard 3-day settlement period....
Money was a sore point in the Holmes household. Holmes’s grandparents had squandered away their share of the Fleischmann fortune. Richard Fuisz, a family friend, was a flashy successful businessman.
So in a way, Elizabeth didn’t grow up in wealth? This puts a spin on Chapter 01: A Purposeful Life .
Fuisz was offended that Elizabeth never consulted him. Fuisz made his money patenting medical inventions that he anticipated other companies would someday want....
\(X\) is a binomial random variable if it takes the values \(0, 1, 2, …, n\) and
$$ \mathbb{P}\{X = k\} = { n \choose k } \cdot p^k \cdot (1 - p)^{n-k} $$
Sanity Check: Do the probabilities sum to 1? $$ \sum_{k=0}^{n} \mathbb{P}\{X = k\} = \sum_{k=0}^{n} { n \choose k } p^k (1 - p)^{n-k} = \left( p + (1 - p) \right)^n = 1 $$
I totally didn’t understand how we got to \(\left( p + (1 - p) \right)^n\)....
The Principle Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
In Essence of Bullshit , Frankfurt posits that the essence of bullshit is lack of concern for the truth, which may explain why bullshit is easier to produce.
Jonathan Swift: Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…...
Version Control Systems track changes to a folder and its contents in a series of snapshots. Each snapshot encapsulates the entire state of files/folders within a top-level directory.
Git’s interface is a leaky abstraction. While the interface is at times ugly, its underlying design and ideas are beautiful. A bottom-up explanation of Git therefore makes more sense.
Snapshots A blob corresponds to a file, and it’s just a bunch of bytes....