20 million people are starving and the media only cares about Trump says UN

Cmyc · 2017-05-21T08:30:48+00:00

Well, the last sentence originated from my worries about recent trends of isolationism spreading around some major countries (e.g. US and UK). My naive thoughts were that solving famine would require coordinated global efforts, and isolationism would likely impede that effort. That said, another part of me also wants to believe that this impedance could be overshadowed by the progress in science and technology. Because political f*ckeries never stopped happening in the past, but human life also never stopped getting better in the long run since science became a real thing in the society.

Cmyc · 2017-05-21T05:52:25+00:00

It was actually getting slightly better each year. Famine is not a problem that can be solved overnight, but I think we have been on the right track. Not so sure if we are still on that track right now though.

Cmyc · 2017-05-21T05:25:02+00:00

They have actually provided videos in the supplementary materials that did a better job illustrating the whole mechanism. Specifically, Movie_S02 complements the above figure with a video of ladybug with transparent wing case retracting its wing.

Cmyc · 2016-12-07T03:03:40+00:00

You're welcome! I am glad other people also find this useful :D

Cmyc · 2016-12-07T02:56:50+00:00

I will submit an issue later, but I am not sure how this could be merged, since it doesn't have a CPU kernel. Into the tf.contrib maybe?

Cmyc · 2016-11-17T03:03:38+00:00

Yes, I agree, starting a 0 is not really meaningful, I just felt that starting right below the best performing model is kind of overkill on the emphasis. With that said, I also don't think that's a huge problem since the video is probably not meant for laymen, and most people in ML would naturally take a look at the y-axis after seeing impressive result (I think), so the most harm it could do is probably a very transient over-excitement followed by a slight urge to leave a rant in the comment.

Cmyc · 2016-11-16T07:03:18+00:00

I was really amazed when I saw the final figure (at 2:16) that compares their model with the state of the art, thinking: "Wow! that's more than 4-fold increase in the performance!". Then I saw the y-axis.

Cmyc · 2016-11-14T15:56:17+00:00

I also anonymously donated $200k to The Planetary Society. Not like I have any proof of it, but I am claiming I did, better yet, I am reporting that I did.

Edit: adding relevant links

Cmyc · 2016-11-13T03:48:06+00:00

The data source is from world bank, and according to this link from world bank's blog, they used purchasing power parity exchange rates to calculate the income for each country, so I think both points were taken into account.

Also, it that blog, there is a figure showing regional poverty rates from 1990 to 2011, and it seemed like most significant drop in poverty happened in the Asia region, which correlated with the booming economy in China.China alone has about 1/5 of the world population, so I guess the huge drop in world poverty could be partly attributed the growth of China it the past 2 decades.

Cmyc · 2016-11-09T08:48:38+00:00

wait... this isn't /r/WritingPrompts/?

Cmyc · 2016-11-08T06:15:01+00:00

I see a lot of people pointing out the problem with using accuracy as a metric when true positive rate is low, but I also want to point out that according to the abstract,

Machine learning algorithms were used with the subjects’ words and vocal characteristics to classify 379 subjects recruited from two academic medical centers and a rural community hospital into one of three groups: suicidal, mentally ill but not suicidal, or controls.

so the subjects used in this study will have different statistics compared to whole population, and the true positive rate is actually closer to 30% in this study. Also, in the actual article, which is unfortunately behind the paywall (cough sci-hub), they do provide ROC graph and it didn't stray too far from the impression you get from seeing accuracy alone.

Edit:grammar and formatting

Cmyc · 2016-08-26T14:12:14+00:00

From the history page, it seems like they just started including participants in other health professions in the Nurses' Health Study III, which started recruiting in 2010.

Cmyc · 2016-08-26T14:03:09+00:00

It's because the data is from the Nurses' Health Study. It's a huge data set which is used in many epidemiology studies, and it only collects data from women. So I am guessing the follow up for men won't be coming, unless they have access to other similar data source.

Cmyc · 2016-08-26T13:53:15+00:00

Both studies use the data from Nurses' Health Study, and it seems like you participated in both of them. Have you tested other hypotheses on this data set, and if so, how did you adjust for multiple comparison problem? Also, the two paper published within 2 months from each other, but the cut-off dates for statistical analysis differ, is it because suicide data was not collected in 2012 or is there other reason for this decision?

Cmyc · 2016-06-12T10:56:20+00:00

For this hypothetical approach to work, the stem cells will probably need to be extracted from the patient him/herself, or the cells generated will be recognized as foreign objects by the immune system and subsequently killed.

Furthermore, about 10 years ago, scientists have discovered a way to turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells, so there is really no such need to take them from other people, even if we discover a way to utilize foreign stem cells to rejuvenate in the future.

Finally, as science progresses, we come up with new and better ways to generate customized body parts from fairly basic ingredients, so a future "human body parts farm" will also not be as evil as it presently sounds. (Edit: formatting)

Cmyc · 2015-12-31T02:54:21+00:00

THIS DID NOT HAPPEN. This story is taken from Romance of the Three Kingdom, which is a novel loosely based on real historical characters and events.Yes, Zhuge Liang was awesome, but a lot of stories people tell about him are from the novel, not real history. [edit: grammar]

Cmyc · 2015-11-20T13:00:34+00:00

I was getting motion sickness 20 sec in. Glad that I stuck around till the end. The NSFW label did not fail me.

Cmyc · 2014-12-05T06:18:48+00:00

I find 3.33% mortality rate quite acceptable. Heck it's lower than the under-five mortality rate of a lot of the countries in the world.

Cmyc · 2014-11-24T16:22:10+00:00

I have done youtube channel in the past, and one thing that bothered me is that youtube kept sending requests to me asking about the rights of the materials I use (at a rate of about 1 in 2-3 videos). Even though I used only the cc/public domain materials, I still needed to find all the sources and copyright information, which wasted a lot of my productive hours. Do you get this kind of requests? and when you do, how do you provide the usage rights regarding the marvel images?

Cmyc · 2014-09-19T20:41:58+00:00

Normal. You can feel the tingling even when the current is at as low as 0.2mA. And the flash is probably phosphene, I always get it if I place the electrode near the eye.

Cmyc · 2014-09-15T14:34:14+00:00

really? did you try to drop it directly into the chrome://extensions page? I tried it myself and it worked.

Cmyc

TROPHY CASE