How is the media covering the death of George Floyd and the resulting protests? While we are still in the midst of the protests which are continuing across the U.S. and around the world we thought it would be of interest to examine how several media organizations are covering the event and how they compare […]
This is an archive of an old pseudonymously written post from the 90s from someone whose former pseudonym seems to have disappeared from the internet. I see that Star Trek: Voyager has added a new character, a Borg. (From the photos, I also see that they're still breeding women for breast size in the 24th century.) What ticked me off was the producer's comment (I'm paraphrasing), "The addition of Seven of Nine will give us limitless story possibilities." Uh
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, <a href="https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status
We spent one day 1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and over any period of time (since inception), so we've called it LongTermMetrics (LTM) internally since
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup. YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea
We trust that you are well and staying safe during these challenging times. Our team in Montreal is working from home as mandated by the government until at least May 4. We are working together providing regular services to all our customers including support, developing new features of the software, doing demos for prospective customers, […]
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by James Bickerton of the Daily Express. We discussed transhumanism, the Singularity, AI, and the threats to democracy, among other things. Here is the description from James Bickerton’s YouTube channel: I interview Nikola Danaylov (@singularityblog), founder of the Singularity Weblog and author of Conversations with the Future: […]
In this Blog we are highlighting papers authored with the use of our qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and our content analysis and text mining software WordStat. This post features a paper where the authors use visual content analysis by employing QDA Miner to code images of sculpture taken by tourists and posted on […]
Dr Uwe Ewald Director of the International Justice Analysis Forum Uwe Ewald is the director of the International Justice Analysis Forum. IJA-Forum offers support in evidentiary analysis required for complex (international) crime cases, based on its expert network and roster of analysts and researchers. He started using qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner and the […]
How to tune hyperparameters for your machine learning model using Bayesian optimization.
I have previously interviewed a few fantastic scientists and philosophers but rare are those strange birds who manage to combine together both deep academic training and the living ethos of those separate disciplines. Prof. Massimo Pigliucci is one of those very rare and strange people. He has 3 Ph.D.’s – Genetics, Evolutionary Biology, and Philosophy, […]
To paraphrase the theme song of a 1960s U.S. TV show Mr. Ed, A horse is a horse of course, of course, and no one can find so many horses unless, of course, you are using WordStat! (inspired by original lyrics by Jay Livingston). See Video on YouTube. WordStat and QDA Miner software have […]
In this Blog we will be introducing you to different people who use Provalis Research software in their work. We hope this will give users and potential users of the software an idea of the type of work people are doing and the capabilities of the software. Our first profile is of Lara Gautier who […]
Framing is an active, evolving process to construct meaning and the evolution of frames reflects change in social movement or among activists. (Benford and Snow (2000)). Framing allows people to make sense of their world or events by putting it into context. In their paper Opposition to Abortion Then and Now: How Amicus Briefs […]
The media and the Democrats have never been popular with Fox News which many would argue is a large part of its appeal. Even with a global pandemic threatening the country not much has changed. Of course, this is something the mainstream media writes about and comments on with regularity. Lee Moran from Huffington Post […]
The 2020 Democratic primary elections are underway, and ‘Super Tuesday’ has put Biden in the lead following endorsements by withdrawn candidates Buttigieg and Klobuchar. You may have seen our tweet, showcasing the potential of text analytics to describe the debates and the candidates, in this case via a deviation table and correspondence analysis plot. We […]
Blackcurrent, blueberry, pancetta, chestnut, spicey, crisp, complex, oxidized. What do all these words have in common? They were used by “civilians” and experts to describe wines in three regions of Australia and Bordeau, France. In their paper Using Content Analysis to Characterise the Sensory Typicity and Quality Judgements of Australian Cabernet Sauvignon Wines, Lira Souza […]
Over the past 18 months or so, a number of new neural network achitectures were proposed specifically for use on mobile and edge devices. It seems that pretty much everyone has figured out now that large models such as VGG16 or ResNet-50 aren’t a good idea on small devices. 😉 I have previously written about MobileNet v1 and v2 , and hav
A Google interview candidate recently asked me: "What are three big science questions that keep you up at night?" This was a great question because one's answer reveals so much about one's intellectual interests - here are mine: Q1: Can we imitate "thinking" from only observing behavior? Suppose you have a large fleet of autonomous vehicles with human operators driving them around diverse r
An overview of all the neurons in the first five layers of InceptionV1, organized into a taxonomy of 'neuron groups.'
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation. I wish that the federal government were doing much more—it would be great to see even a few percent of the recent stimulus bill go to fun
By focusing on linear dimensionality reduction, we show how to visualize many dynamic phenomena in neural networks.
I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like to start funding more startups working on: Producing a lot of ventilators or masks/gowns very quickly. This will require a lot of repurposing and creativity but thankfully is an engineering problem not a scientific ones. Screening existing drugs for effectiveness. Novel approaches to vaccines (i.e., not
I have been using the qualitative data analysis software QDA Miner since 2015. I used it multiple times for my doctoral research in global public health. It was very useful for coding my interview transcriptions and a variety of policy documents related to my PhD research topic. In addition, thanks to the handy “Code […]
I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic. I think this is odd because tech companies in that class often have hundreds to thousands of employees. They're overwhelmingly likely to be better equipp
What can we learn if we invest heavily in reverse engineering a single neural network?
By studying the connections between neurons, we can find meaningful algorithms in the weights of neural networks.
Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19. I hope that society views this as a warning for the future. Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up. I think it’s unlikely that this is the worst new pandemic (human-created or otherwise) we’ll see in our lifetimes. We need to be ready to deal with it much better next time. In the meantime, young healthy people should try to avoid ge
My hobby : opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other. The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features.'" McIlroy's
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!). I remember when Instagram started to get really popular—it felt like you couldn’t go a day without hearing about another photo sharing startup. That year, probab
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As of mid-2019, Dropbox announced that they no longer support symlinks that point outside of the main Dropbox folder. In this tutorial, we show a workaround on Linux that enables us to store in Dropbox any file, even if it is not located within the main Dropbox folder. What is the limitation and why it’s […]
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire worthless , allowing the buyer to (probably) take a loss. One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was
Written by Jeff Chang & John Egan Growth teams need to be organized bottom-up to scale well The Pinterest Growth team has over 100 members, and we’ve run thousands of experiments over the years. It’s difficult to run that many experiments and still maintain a high success rate over time. We’ve found the traditional growth […] The post How Pinterest Supercharged its Growth Team With Experiment Idea Review appeared first on John Egan .
Training an end-to-end differentiable, self-organising cellular automata model of morphogenesis, able to both grow and regenerate specific patterns.
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things. Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-
Resizing feature maps is a common operation in many neural networks, especially those that perform some kind of image segmentation task. One issue I ran into recently while converting a neura
As some listeners may know, UST co-host Grace Lindsay is writing a book. That book---a popular science take on the science, history, and philosophy of many different topics in computational neuroscience---is very nearly due to the publisher. As a result, time for podcasting (or really anything other than book writing...) is rapidly disappearing! So until further notice, there will be no new episodes of Unsupervised Thi
