Every month I read tons of articles online and save the science ones for my monthly features. I happen to have found too many cool articles this month and since some of these aren’t science-article, I thought I’d throw in an assorted links posts for them. Here goes:
- Google gets involved in a lot of odd projects that on the face of it have little to do with their primary online search business. Well, this one may just be the oddest of them all. This article from The New York Times talks about how a Google laboratory cobbled together a machine-learning neural network from 16,000 processors and set it to the task of watching cat videos on YouTube. Result: a neural network that is really, really good at recognizing cats no matter what their size, shape or color and no matter what the cats are doing. Cue jokes about why Skynet wants to kill all humans.
- The next article is notably mostly because of how well it lends itself to jokes. It’s America’s hottest new export and it’s man-made! Talk about gross national product! Erect a new future today! America is in good hands! Follow the link to this The Daily article to find out what it is.
- Okay, so everyone know the Japanese are crazy about giant mecha but this post on the Anime News Network shows just how crazy that can be. Some quarters in the Japanese government are looking into the feasibility of building piloted walking combat robots and two members of the Liberal Democratic Party claim that they working to include realization of a Gundam Development Project into their manifesto.
- This last one isn’t a joke and will likely be of interest only to Malaysians. The listing of Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd. (FGVH), effectively the third largest oil palm company in the world, has hit headlines due to being the second biggest IPO this year, after Facebook. This investor’s report from a Netherlands-based analyst makes for an eye-opening read since it goes far beyond FGVH’s financials into the history of the Felda project, its links with key government officials and why the settlers are so opposed to the IPO. It basically tells global investors to stay away because it’s a gigantic scam due to poor expected returns and undisclosed political risks and further argues that investing in it would be unethical as the IPO directly undermines Malaysia’s fledgling democracy.
If you’re Chinese, you can’t help but be inundated by posts about how innumerable Facebook friends were moved by You Are The Apple of My Eye and how it left them teary-eyed. Clearly it does something right. It’s been a chart-topper in every Chinese-language market it has been released in and made instant stars of its two leads. So my wife was understandably insistent that we watch it, which we did this weekend.
I think it’s won’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that I don’t think very highly of this film. Teen love movies are a well-worn genre after all and unfortunately this film does nothing to break new ground. In fact, all too often director Giddens Ko falls back on familiar, overworn tropes. In fact, he explicitly lampshades it, ‘this is the fat friend, this is the joker friend, this is the plain girl who is the heroine’s constant companion’ because, you know, every teen love movie needs one of each.
Continue reading You Are The Apple of My Eye →
Midnight Riot is a book that I picked up as light reading from book recommendation threads on QT3 and Broken Forum. I had some trouble finding information about it on the net and later discovered that this is because it was originally published as Rivers of London is the UK but its US publishers chose the title Midnight Riot, probably because the original name sounded like a boring treatise on British geography. The Americans also changed its cover, creating controversy by choosing to depict the lead character in silhouette. The critics claimed that this was to hide the fact that the protagonist is of mixed race, which would supposedly turn off would-be buyers.
Anyway the book’s back blurb describes it accurately as what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and became a policeman in the UK. Peter Grant, a young constable who has just completed his probation, seems set on a boring career of pushing paper at the Case Progression Unit, when a chance event alters the course of his life. He is standing guard at the scene of a seemingly random act of murder when an eyewitness comes up to him with critical information. The witness turns out to be a ghost, the uncanny nature of the case gets it referred to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is the sole member of the London’s Metropolitan Police to specialize in magical crimes, and Grant becomes the first officially sanctioned wizard’s apprentice in Britain in 50 years.
Continue reading Midnight Riot →
I’m getting an early start on this month’s installment of this regular feature. I’m really digging how this new abbreviated format allows me to burn through more articles in a succinct fashion. Here goes:
- The first article is actually a post on Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias who points out that stories, both the telling and enjoyment of them, has interesting and unexpected effects on a person’s outlook on life. In particular, enjoying fiction seems to, in a sense, cause us to buy into the fictional world with its sense of poetic justice and ethical norms. So we believe the world to be more just and less impersonal than it actually is and behave accordingly. Hanson further speculate that this is a benefit that religions also share, regardless of the underlying truth of that belief.
- Next we have a real-life, honest-to-goodness version of Robocop. This Phys.org article talks about how South Korea is testing robotic guards in one of its prisons. The robots are equipped with a wide variety of sensor devices and software that helps determine the behavioral characteristics of inmates. They are capable of autonomously patrolling the halls of the prison and are supposed to alert human operators if they detect anything out of the ordinary. They’re not armed yet but it seems the next plan would be to get the robots to perform body searches, looking for hidden and improvised weapons in particular.
- Next we have an article about a study confirming something that all dog owners already suspect to be true: just as people yawn when they see and hear other people yawn, so do dogs. This article from The Washington Post covers research which shows that not only do dogs yawn when they hear humans yawning, they are more likely to do it when they hear a person whose voice they recognize yawning.
- Online learning is all the rage these days and I’m currently taking free courses for fun from coursera.org myself but the effectiveness of such computer assisted learning is understandably a big point of contention within educational circles. This article from Inside Higher Ed looks at an experiment that compared the results of students who studied in the traditional way with lectures from a live instructor and students who studied using a hybrid format devised by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. This involved a mere one hour of live instruction per week with the rest of the time spent on an artificially intelligent learning platform working through lessons and exercises. The results were pretty shocking: the students using the hybrid format needed only about one quarter of the time to obtain the same results as those using the traditional format.
- Modern animal researchers are very careful about anthropomorphism, that is explaining animal behaviors through the lens of human experience but as this article from the BBC indicates, for some animals this is actually warranted because they really are so alike to humans. Chimpanzees and orangutans it seems are so similar to humans, due to our shared evolutionary history, that not only can each animal be said to have a distinct personality but their personality types are similar to those of humans. This is after carefully controlling that human observers aren’t projecting human biases into their observations.
The unexamined life is a life not worth living