In reflection, a little sunshine

Solarpunk, light and the end of the climate apocalypse tunnel

Adam Boffa, At the Very Least We Know the End of the World Will Have a Bright Side, Longreads, December 2018;

A new type of science fiction, solarpunk takes as its premise the idea that climate change is unavoidable and probably will be severe, but demands optimism of its writers. A 2015 essay on the genre’s political ideals and inspirations by Andrew Dana Hudson refers to solarpunk as a “speculative movement, a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.” In practice, so far this has meant a bunch of short fiction and visual art, numerous explanatory essays, and a lot of enthusiastic conversation on social media and in online communities. But those associated with it tend to hold out hope that solarpunk could be a starting point for something bigger, something that could help propel a shift away from our contemporary sense of defeatism.

Solarpunk cohered into an identifiable thing in the early 2010’s (though the term predates this by a couple of years), so it is still relatively new. A scroll through the solarpunk tag on Tumblr (where the movement gained some of its early momentum) or an image search reveals a distinct style in which nature has reclaimed space in futuristic cities and people incorporate organic material into the design of their buildings, clothing, and infrastructure. It’s a bright color palette: greens, blues, oranges. The aesthetic invites comparisons to predecessors like steampunk or cyberpunk, but solarpunk adds overgrowth and sunlight to its mix.

Is deep learning on the way out?

We analyzed 16,625 papers to figure out where AI is headed next https://t.co/zYPGEGUTcN

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) February 10, 2019

From the article:

Many of the techniques used in the last 25 years originated at around the same time, in the 1950s, and have fallen in and out of favor with the challenges and successes of each decade. Neural networks, for example, peaked in the ’60s and briefly in the ’80s but nearly died before regaining their current popularity through deep learning.

Every decade, in other words, has essentially seen the reign of a different technique: neural networks in the late ’50s and ’60s, various symbolic approaches in the ’70s, knowledge-based systems in the ’80s, Bayesian networks in the ’90s, support vector machines in the ’00s, and neural networks again in the ’10s.

The 2020s should be no different, says Domingos, meaning the era of deep learning may soon come to an end. But characteristically, the research community has competing ideas about what will come next—whether an older technique will regain favor or whether the field will create an entirely new paradigm.

Reconstructing speech from signals in auditory cortex

Hassan Akbari, Bahar Khalighinejad, Jose L. Herrero, Ashesh D. Mehta & Nima Mesgarani, Towards reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex, Scientific Reports, volume 9, Article number: 874 (2019).

Abstract: Auditory stimulus reconstruction is a technique that finds the best approximation of the acoustic stimulus from the population of evoked neural activity. Reconstructing speech from the human auditory cortex creates the possibility of a speech neuroprosthetic to establish a direct communication with the brain and has been shown to be possible in both overt and covert conditions. However, the low quality of the reconstructed speech has severely limited the utility of this method for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To advance the state-of-the-art in speech neuroprosthesis, we combined the recent advances in deep learning with the latest innovations in speech synthesis technologies to reconstruct closed-set intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. We investigated the dependence of reconstruction accuracy on linear and nonlinear (deep neural network) regression methods and the acoustic representation that is used as the target of reconstruction, including auditory spectrogram and speech synthesis parameters. In addition, we compared the reconstruction accuracy from low and high neural frequency ranges. Our results show that a deep neural network model that directly estimates the parameters of a speech synthesizer from all neural frequencies achieves the highest subjective and objective scores on a digit recognition task, improving the intelligibility by 65% over the baseline method which used linear regression to reconstruct the auditory spectrogram. These results demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning and speech synthesis algorithms for designing the next generation of speech BCI systems, which not only can restore communications for paralyzed patients but also have the potential to transform human-computer interaction technologies.

News article from the Zuckerman Institute at Colubmia U.

Vector space explorations of literary language [#DH]

van Cranenburgh, A., van Dalen-Oskam, K. & van Zundert, Vector space explorations of literary language, J. Lang Resources & Evaluation (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-018-09442-4.

Literary novels are said to distinguish themselves from other novels through conventions associated with literariness. We investigate the task of predicting the literariness of novels as perceived by readers, based on a large reader survey of contemporary Dutch novels. Previous research showed that ratings of literariness are predictable from texts to a substantial extent using machine learning, suggesting that it may be possible to explain the consensus among readers on which novels are literary as a consensus on the kind of writing style that characterizes literature. Although we have not yet collected human judgments to establish the influence of writing style directly (we use a survey with judgments based on the titles of novels), we can try to analyze the behavior of machine learning models on particular text fragments as a proxy for human judgments. In order to explore aspects of the texts associated with literariness, we divide the texts of the novels in chunks of 2–3 pages and create vector space representations using topic models (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and neural document embeddings (Distributed Bag-of-Words Paragraph Vectors). We analyze the semantic complexity of the novels using distance measures, supporting the notion that literariness can be partly explained as a deviation from the norm. Furthermore, we build predictive models and identify specific keywords and stylistic markers related to literariness. While genre plays a role, we find that the greater part of factors affecting judgments of literariness are explicable in bag-of-words terms, even in short text fragments and among novels with higher literary ratings. The code and notebook used to produce the results in this paper are available at https://github.com/andreasvc/litvecspace.

Changizi's 7 secrets of success as a theorist

My Seven Secrets to Harnessing Your Creativity as a Theorist

(1) Turing Tape
(2) Open-Minded
(3) Proliferate and Select
(4) Aloof [heeyuge!]
(5) Be the Boss
(6) Data
(7) Slothhttps://t.co/htTAx6Q1L5

— Changiz Khan (@MarkChangizi) February 8, 2019

Indoor outdoor

The success of Fortnite, or: Into the Metaverse

While I know that video games are Big Business, I know relatively little about them. It seems that a relatively new game, Fortnite, released in 2017, has been ridiculously successful. Some excerpts from a recent article by Matthew Ball. The opening paragraph:

In 2018, there was a lot to read about Fortnite, and even more to learn from it. And to point, “the game” is indeed the future of entertainment (as well as the greatest threat to today’s media giants). But probably not in the way you think. Fortnite’s real opportunity is much bigger and more significant than the ways the game is notable today. In fact, most of the existing narratives around Fortnite success are overhyped – even if they’re critical to its long-term evolution.

Concerning its popularity:

The fourth major thread is Fortnite’s obsessive popularity. In November 2018, the game crossed 200MM registered accounts (though active users are unknown), up from 125MM five months earlier. To this end, Fortnite likely represents the largest persistent media event in human history. As of today, the game has likely had more than six consecutive months with at least one million concurrent active users – all of whom are participating in a largely shared and consistent experience that spanned multiple “seasons”, storylines, and events (contrast this to Candy Crush, in which gameplay is isolated and unique to the player). To point, season six’s live finale, which took place on November 4, 2018 at precisely 1:00p.m. Eastern Time and involved the explosion of a metaphysical cube that began to emerge in season four, saw 5MM+ active players watching live and close to 4MM other passive or non-player viewers watching via Twitch and YouTube.

These achievements are significant. And unprecedented. But they’re not entirely unexpected. Esports as a category has been ascendant for years – with Twitch regularly ranking among the top 30 TV channels in the United States in terms of hours watched.

But will it last? Ball notes that popular games constantly reinvent themselves. Young as it is, Fortnite has proven particularly good at this:

But over the past year, Fortnite has shown an ability to rebundle much of the gaming industry at large. Today, for example, Fortnite’s single map includes multiple terrain types (snow, ice, desert, forest, plains, etc.), each of which is typically a distinct map in shooting games. The game also routinely adds limited time modes, such as riffs on capture-the-flag, the ability to become The Avengers: Infinity War’s Thanos, and disco domination (in which you win points by dancing on disco floors spread across the map). There are also recurring evolutions related to the game’s seasonal narratives. During season six, which spanned Halloween, the map was overrun with zombie-like creatures generated by purple monoliths spun-off from season five. Every few weeks, Fortnite also adds (or removes) new interaction models (you can race go-karts and do vehicle-based assault, engage in airborne dogfights, use balloons and gliders to float across the map and engage in aerial assault, etc.) In addition, players benefit from individual challenges that earn experience points, awards and apparel – for example, asking a player to race across the map to visit various areas without getting killed. In addition, each of these changes benefit from rapid, data-based iteration. The Fortnite team is able to closely monitor how any change is adopted, its impact on total play time, game duration, performance, and so on. All to make sure it “works” – or alternatively, to keep the game from ever feeling “static” or “solved”. [...] While there will always be a new game format or hit game, Fortnite is uniquely capable of becoming that game, or expanding into it (and it’s worth highlighting that Epic’s Unreal business depends on its ability to build/support all types of gameplay).

Fortnite has become a combination village square and office water cooler:

Still, Fortnite’s most significant achievement may be the role it has come to play in the lives of millions. For these players, Fortnite has become a daily social square – a digital mall or virtual afterschool meetup that spans neighborhoods, cities, countries and continents. This role is powered by Fortnite’s free availability, robust voice chat, cross-platform functionality, and collaborative gameplay. Accordingly, examples abound of kids, adults and families simply hanging out or catching up on Fortnite while they play. Studies find that Fortnite’s players spend one to one and a half hours per day in the game, versus thirty minutes for active Snapchat or Instagram users. Fortnite wasn’t designed to be a Second Life-style experience, or even a digital “third place“; it became one organically. What’s more, it is drastically out-monetizing dedicated social squares such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram – even combined.

Put another way, Fortnite has yet to prove its ability to endure over time. But it has shown its ability to evolve, to become other games, and most importantly, to be a social square. Fortnite isn’t IP in the traditional sense. But it is a platform. And accordingly, the gameplay is less important than the engagement, and this engagement is a springboard for Epic Games’ broader ambitions. And to this end, we need to consider Epic well beyond just Fortnite.

And that takes us about half way through the article, which goes on to assess future prospects.

Jonathan Haidt on Facebook and the problem of large, diverse, secular democracies

Jonathan Haidt in Vox:

...large, diverse, secular democracies are inherently unstable, inherently prone to division unless there are sufficient “centripetal” forces pulling toward the center (such as having a shared language, shared rituals and values, and high trust in the basic political and economic institutions of the country).

Facebook and other social media platforms are powerful centrifugal forces, binding groups together to fight other groups within their own country, driven mad and propelled into battle by an eternal mudslide of outrage-inducing viral videos and conspiracy theories. We are already seeing these effects in many countries.

I predict that by 2030 we will see the spectacular political collapse or geographical division of more than one Western democracy that seemed rock solid on the day Facebook was founded, 15 years ago. My hope is that people, societies, and governments will find ways of adapting to or regulating social media that will render my prediction wrong.

H/t 3QD.

Louis Armstrong's philosophy of life

Cadence: Do you have a philosophy of life?
Louis: Stay happy, take good care of yourself, treat your fellow man right, can't expect no more than that.
-Louis to Bob Rusch, interviewed at home in Corona, Queens 50 years ago today for Cadence magazine. Full quote on our Facebook. pic.twitter.com/L7n2kYaDC1

— Louis Armstrong (@ArmstrongHouse) February 7, 2019

Lamp with board game

Dark matter of the brain?

Silent Neurons: The Dark Matter of the Brain? https://t.co/H2UYFxg4Fu New post! Is it true that "the great majority of nerve cells in the intact brain do not fire action potentials"?

— Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) February 6, 2019

Why is Switzerland so peaceful? – Good boundaries.

Alex Rutherford, Dion Harmon, Justin Werfel∗,Shlomiya Bar-Yam, Alexander Gard-Murray, Andreas Gros, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence, arXiv:1110.1409, October 7, 2011. [New England Complex Systems Institute]

Abstract: We consider the conditions of peace and violence among ethnic groups, testing a theory designed to predict the locations of violence and interventions that can promote peace. Characterizing the model’s success in predicting peace requires examples where peace prevails despite diversity. Switzerland is recognized as a country of peace, stability and prosperity. This is surprising because of its linguistic and religious diversity that in other parts of the world lead to conflict and violence. Here we analyze how peaceful stability is maintained. Our analysis shows that peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups. Mountains and lakes are an important part of the boundaries between sharply defined linguistic areas. Political canton and circle (sub-canton) boundaries often separate religious groups. Where such boundaries do not appear to be sufficient, we find that specific aspects of the population distribution either guarantee sufficient separation or sufficient mixing to inhibit intergroup violence according to the quantitative theory of conflict. In exactly one region, a porous mountain range does not adequately separate linguistic groups and violent conflict has led to the recent creation of the canton of Jura. Our analysis supports the hypothesis that violence between groups can be inhibited by physical and political boundaries. A similar analysis of the area of the former Yugoslavia shows that during widespread ethnic violence existing political boundaries did not coincide with the boundaries of distinct groups, but peace prevailed in specific areas where they did coincide. The success of peace in Switzerland may serve as a model to resolve conflict in other ethnically diverse countries and regions of the world.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

So this is deep learning, eh?

The model took the rest of the night to fit but somehow the next morning it worked really well.

— Jacqueline Nolis (@skyetetra) February 2, 2019

A chair in no man's land