Links of the week

Morning mist rolling through beech forest in Monte Amiata, Val d’Orcia, Tuscany, Italy.

Conscious exotica: From algorithms to aliens, could humans ever understand minds that are radically unlike our own? – Aeon
A philosophical attempt to map minds other than human, with implications to what it means to be conscious. Is consciousness an intrinsic, inscrutable subjective phenomenon or a fact of matter that can be known? Read on.

Crash Space – Scott Bakker
What would happen if we engineered our brains to be able to tweak our personality and emotional responses as we experience life? What would life look like? Scott Bakker gives us a glimpse in this short story.

AlphaGo, in context – Andrej Karpathy
A short, but comprehensive explanation of why the recent AlphaGo victories do not represent a big breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and how real-world problems differ, from an algorithmic point of view, from the game of Go.

Multiply or Add? – Scott Young
In many business and personal projects, factors multiply, meaning that the performance you get is heavily influenced by the performance of weakest factor. In some other cases, e.g., learning a language, factors add. The strategy to take in developing factors/skills depends by which context, add or multiply, you’re in. For more insights, read the original article.

Human Resources Isn’t About Humans – BackChannel
Often, HR is not there to help us or solve people’s problems, it is just another corporate division with its own strict rules. But it can be changed for the better. Read on.

Links of the week

Arches onto high cliff over the Mediterranean. Portovenere, Italy.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day – Study Hacks
How to increase your productivity by taking control of your time via time blocking.

Chaos, Ignorance and Newton’s Great Puzzle – Scott Young
Luck, chaos or ignorance? Understanding this mixture for your projects may help to better allocate resources.

Garry Kasparov on AI, Chess, and the Future of Creativity – Mercatus Center
A very interesting conversation with Garry Kasparov on chess, AI, Russian politics, education and creativity.

If everything is measured, can we still see one another as equals? – Justice Everywhere
The dangers of measuring everything and ranking ourselves on different scales, neglecting those human skills and experiences that cannot and should not quantified.

Links of the week

Close-up of a gall on oak leaf.

The Attention Paradox: Winning By Slowing Down – Unlimited
Time and attention are limited resources that most cognitive workers waste in unnecessary behaviour. Some useful advice on how to think about cognitive resources and plan your working day accordingly.

The Problem of Happiness – Scott Young
Have we evolved to be unhappy? What are the pros and cons of some of the proposed solutions to be happier? Read this concise summary to know more.

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI – MIT Technology Review
Machine learning and, in particular deep learning, are notoriously inscrutable. This may be an issue in deploying them to mission critical applications, such as health care and military. But are humans much more transparent? Or are they just capable of providing ad-hoc a-posteriori explanations?

Academia to Data Science – Airbnb
Some insights on how to shift from academia to industry from the perspective of Airbnb.

Scaling Knowledge at Airbnb – Airbnb
How does a company effectively disseminate new knowledge across their teams. Airbnb proposes and open-sources the Knowledge Repository to facilitate this process across their data teams.

 

Links of the week

Ski-mountaineers climbing the last steep meters to the summit of the Bishorn (4153m) in Valais, Switzerland

Time And Tide Wait For No Economist – UNLIMITED
The changing market of time and how the leisure time gap is widening between skilled and unskilled labour.

The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence – Harvard Business Review
AI-based prediction tasks will get cheaper and cheaper, but the value of still-to-be-automatized complementary tasks, such as judgement will increase. A simple, but effective, economic perspective on the impact of AI.

Do you need a Data Engineer before you need a Data Scientist? – Michael Young
How Data Engineer and Data Architects can make your Data Science team more effective and satisfied.

The Art of the Finish: How to Go From Busy to Accomplished – Cal Newport
How task-based planning makes you productive, but not accomplished. A simple strategy to change that.

Data Science jargon buster – for Data Scientists – Guerrilla Analytics
Do your data scientists confuse your customers. Here’s a useful translating table.

 

Links of the week

Sunday morning in Brick Lane – March 24th, 2012

Flow doesn’t lead to mastery – Scott Young
While many seek a state of flow as way to deliver one’s best, research on deliberate practice shows that one has to go beyond flow, to a state of high and uncomfortable intensity in order to achieve mastery.

What do Hiring Managers Look For in a Data Scientist’s CV? – Ben Dias
The title explains it all. A great post to read if you are applying for a data scientist position, or are hiring data scientists.

The Obvious Value of Communication is Perhaps Not So Obvious – Study Hacks
Hyperconnected offices (email, slack, smartphone) may just be a very poorly designed distributed system. How can we improve that?

Book Review: The Wisdom of Insecurity – Scott Young
Scott writes a wonderful, if not a tad too long, review of The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, expounding Watts’s view of Zen philosophy. I particularly enjoyed how Scotts blends summary with his own opinions. To learn from for improving my own reviews.

Links of the week

To Become A Data Scientist, Focus On Competencies before Skills – Guerrilla Analytics
A good short blog post about the core competencies of a data scientist.

Reprogramming the Human Genome with AI featuring Brendan Frey – This Week In Machine Learning and AI
Very interesting podcast about Frey’s research on using machine learning to model molecular biology process for understanding genetic diseases.

The Man Who Wants To Kill Your Desk Job – Unlimited
Have you ever heard of Roam, the co-working and living spaces startup?

The DIY Cyborg Who Thinks Tech Can Help Us Cheat Death – Unlimited
If you could live up to 150, would you still stress out about your career? And other views for a leading biohacker.

Yuval Harari Works Less Than You – Study Hacks
The bestselling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus meditates one to two hours of meditation per day. Each year he goes to one-two month retreats, completely offline. And still manages to be a best-selling author and tenured professor at 41.

Links of the week

• The Rise of the Monk Mode Morning – Study Hacks
  How a fully offline and deep work morning is enhancing productivity for more and more people.
• ‘AI brain scans’ reveal what happens inside machine learning – Wired
  Complex deep learning architectures visualized in action.
• Lecture slides and course description for the Deep Natural Language Processing course offered in Hilary Term 2017 at the University of Oxford
• Attacking machine learning with adversarial examples – OpenAI
  How adversarial examples can fool your machine learning algorithm and what you can do about it.