Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Monday, August 15, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Data Mining Reveals How Conspiracy Theories Emerge on Facebook
Quattrociocchi and co then studied how the people who engage in these debates also engage in debates on posts that are known to be untrue, like the one about the fictitious law. And they found that some people are more likely to engage with false content than others.
In particular, people who engage with debates on alternative news posts are much more likely to engage in the debate about false news posted by trolls. “We find that a dominant fraction of the users interacting with the troll memes is the one composed of users preeminently interacting with alternative information sources–and thus more exposed to unsubstantiated claims,” they say.
That’s an interesting result. Quattrociocchi and co point out that many people are attracted to alternative news media because of a distrust of conventional news sources, which, in Italy, are strongly influenced by politicians of one persuasion or another.
But this search for other sources of news seems to be fraught with danger. “Surprisingly, consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the mainstream media ‘mass-manipulation’, are the most responsive to the injection of false claims,” they conclude.
- More Here
In particular, people who engage with debates on alternative news posts are much more likely to engage in the debate about false news posted by trolls. “We find that a dominant fraction of the users interacting with the troll memes is the one composed of users preeminently interacting with alternative information sources–and thus more exposed to unsubstantiated claims,” they say.
That’s an interesting result. Quattrociocchi and co point out that many people are attracted to alternative news media because of a distrust of conventional news sources, which, in Italy, are strongly influenced by politicians of one persuasion or another.
But this search for other sources of news seems to be fraught with danger. “Surprisingly, consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the mainstream media ‘mass-manipulation’, are the most responsive to the injection of false claims,” they conclude.
- More Here
Quote of the Day
You fight to win; you argue to achieve agreement.
- Jay Heinrichs, Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, And Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
- Jay Heinrichs, Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, And Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Wisdom Of The Week
I have been reading Nick Lane's fascinating book The Vital Question; each page is power packed with so much new (to me) information that I am reading it very slowly.
Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: given the requirement for carbon chemistry that we discussed in the last chapter, thermodynamics dictates a continuous flow of carbon and energy over natural catalysts. Discounting special pleading, that rules out almost all environments that have been touted as possible settings for the origin of life: warm ponds (sadly Darwin was wrong on that), primordial soup, microporous pumice stones, beaches, panspermia, you name it. But it does not rule out hydrothermal vents; on the contrary, it rules them in. Hydrothermal vents are exactly the kind of dissipative structures that we seek – continuous flow, far-from-equilibrium electrochemical reactors.
[---]
We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!
Quote of the Day
Energy and life go hand in hand. If you stop breathing, you will not be able to generate the energy you need for staying alive and you’ll be dead in a few minutes. Keep breathing. Now the oxygen in your breath is being transported to virtually every one of the 15 trillion cells in your body, where it is used to burn glucose in cellular respiration. You are a fantastically energetic machine. Gram per gram, even when sitting comfortably, you are converting 10,000 times more energy than the sun every second.
- Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life
- Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life
Friday, August 12, 2016
What I've Been Reading
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz. I listen to the audio book... each chapter examines some examined and some unexamined self's of ourselves. It's disturbing in someways and it's enlightening in other.
At one time or another, most of us have felt trapped by things we find ourselves thinking or doing, caught by our own impulses or foolish choices; ensnared in some unhappiness or fear; imprisoned by our own history. We feel unable to go forward and yet we believe that there must be a way.
Deep Feature Synthesis - Towards Automating Data Science Endeavors
Abstract:
In this paper, we develop the Data Science Ma- chine, which is able to derive predictive models from raw data automatically. To achieve this automation, we first propose and develop the Deep Feature Synthesis algorithm for automatically generating features for relational datasets. The algorithm follows relationships in the data to a base field, and then sequentially applies mathematical functions along that path to create the final feature. Second, we implement a generalizable machine learning pipeline and tune it using a novel Gaussian Copula process based approach. We entered the Data Science Machine in 3 data science competitions that featured 906 other data science teams. Our approach beats 615 teams in these data science competitions. In 2 of the 3 competitions we beat a majority of competitors, and in the third, we achieved 94% of the best competitor’s score. In the best case, with an ongoing competition, we beat 85.6% of the teams and achieved 95.7% of the top submissions score.
- Full Paper Here
In this paper, we develop the Data Science Ma- chine, which is able to derive predictive models from raw data automatically. To achieve this automation, we first propose and develop the Deep Feature Synthesis algorithm for automatically generating features for relational datasets. The algorithm follows relationships in the data to a base field, and then sequentially applies mathematical functions along that path to create the final feature. Second, we implement a generalizable machine learning pipeline and tune it using a novel Gaussian Copula process based approach. We entered the Data Science Machine in 3 data science competitions that featured 906 other data science teams. Our approach beats 615 teams in these data science competitions. In 2 of the 3 competitions we beat a majority of competitors, and in the third, we achieved 94% of the best competitor’s score. In the best case, with an ongoing competition, we beat 85.6% of the teams and achieved 95.7% of the top submissions score.
- Full Paper Here
Quote of the Day
Rational, it can be shown, is what makes things that are supposed to survive, survive.
- Nassim Taleb
- Nassim Taleb
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Design Better Data Tables
Not all numbers were created equal. I’m not talking about Ï€ and ∞ (though I often do, at parties); I’m talking about numbers that are either tabular or oldstyle, either lining or proportional.
Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between oldstyle and lining figures.
Oldstyle figures look nice in sentences, where they better match the size and spacing of lower-case letters; lining figures are more uniform, and reinforce the grid-like structure of the table.
The difference between proportional and tabular figures is not quite so obvious:
- More Here
Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between oldstyle and lining figures.
The difference between proportional and tabular figures is not quite so obvious:
Proportional figures are designed to match the color — that is, the general sizing and spacing — of the typeface. Tabularfigures, on the other hand, are all identically-sized, so that columns of numbers line up properly. While the difference may not seem great on the scale of one or two lines, using lining figures makes scanning large tables significantly easier and less error-prone.
- More Here
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