trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Which questions about online classes would you ask Peter Norvig? 
by  — 2012-09-18T07:39:24.554Z

A week ago Google launched an open source project called Course Builder it packages the software and technology used to build their July Class Power Searching with Google. The discussion forum for it is here. Tomorrow is the first live hangout where he will be answering questions about MOOC design and technical aspects of using Course Builder. The live hangout will is scheduled for the 26th of September.

Helping the World to Teach

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

In July, Research at Google ran a large open online course, Power Searching with Google, taught by search expert, Dan Russell. The course was successful, with 155,000 registered students. Through this experiment, we learned that Google technologies can help bring education to a global audience. So we packaged up the technology we used to build Power Searching and are providing it as an open source project called Course Builder. We want to make this technology available so that others can experiment with online learning.

The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction. We hope to continue development along these lines, but we wanted to make this limited code base available now, to see what early adopters will do with it, and to explore the future of learning technology. We will be hosting a community building event in the upcoming months to help more people get started using this software. edX shares in the open source vision for online learning platforms, and Google and the edX team are in discussions about open standards and technology sharing for course platforms.

We are excited that Stanford University, Indiana University, UC San Diego, Saylor.org, LearningByGivingFoundation.org, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and a group of universities in Spain led by Universia, CRUE, and Banco Santander-Universidades are considering how this experimental technology might work for some of their online courses. Sebastian Thrun at Udacity welcomes this new option for instructors who would like to create an online class, while Daphne Koller at Coursera notes that the educational landscape is changing and it is exciting to see new avenues for teaching and learning emerge. We believe Google’s preliminary efforts her

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[LINK] "Junk" DNA revealed as information processing system?
by EphemeralNight — 2012-09-18T05:07:57.726Z

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurement/re-imagining-our-genes-encode-project-reveals-genome-as-an-information-processing-system/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_camp

Just a few years ago, the prevailing wisdom said that the genome comprises 3 percent or so genes and 97 percent “junk” (with 2 or 3 percent of that junk consisting of the fossilized remains of retroviruses that infected our ancestors somewhere along the line). After a decade of painstaking analysis by more than 200 scientists, the new ENCODE data show that indeed 2.94 percent of the genome is protein-coding genes, while 80.4 percent of sequences regulate how those genes get turned on, turned off, expressed, processed, and modified.

This fundamentally changes how most biologists understand the master instruction set of life: we are, in short, 3 percent input/output and 80 percent logic. (Though perhaps a surprise to biologists, the finding will hardly astound anyone who has designed a complex interactive system.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really big deal, right?
The Bayesian Agent
by royf — 2012-09-18T03:23:34.489Z

Followup to: Reinforcement Learning: A Non-Standard Introduction, Reinforcement, Preference and Utility

A reinforcement-learning agent interacts with its environment through the perception of observations and the performance of actions. A very abstract and non-standard description of such an agent is in two parts. The first part, the inference policy, tells us what states the agent can be in, and how these states change when the agent receives new input from its environment. The second part, the action policy, tells us what action the agent chooses to perform on the environment, in each of its internal states.

There are two special choices for the inference policy, marking two extremes. One extreme is for the agent to remain absolutely oblivious to the information coming its way. The transition from a past internal state to a current one is made independent of the observation, and no entanglement is formed between the agent and the environment. A rock, for example, comes close to being this little alive.

This post focuses on the other extreme, where the agent updates perfectly for the new information.

Keeping track of all the information is easy, on paper. All the agent has to do is maintain the sequence of past observations, the observable history O1, O2, ..., Ot. As each new observation is perceived, it can simply be appended to the list. Everything the agent can possibly know about the world, anything it can possibly hope to use in choosing actions, is in the observable history - there's no clairvoyance.

But this is far from practical, for many related reasons. Extracting the useful information from the raw observations can be a demanding task. The number of observations to remember grows indefinitely with time, putting a strain on the resources of an agent attempting longevity. The number of possible agent states grows exponentially with time, making it difficult to even specify (let alone decide) what action to take in each one.

Clearly we need some sort of compression when producing the agent's memory state from the observable history. Two requirements for the compression process: one, as per the premise of this post, is that it preserves all information about the world; the other is that it can be computed sequentially - when computing Mt the agent only has access to the new observation Ot and the previous compression...
[SEQ RERUN] Make an Extraordinary Effort
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-18T02:56:32.930Z

Today's post, Make an Extraordinary Effort was originally published on 07 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It takes an extraordinary amount of rationality before you stop making stupid mistakes. Doing better requires making extraordinary efforts.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was On Doing the Impossible, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[LINK] 'Blue Brain' Project Accurately Predicts Connections Between Neurons
by olalonde — 2012-09-18T00:50:26.952Z

From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120917152043.htm

Could this be a tiny step towards an AGI?

'Blue Brain' Project Accurately Predicts Connections Between Neurons

One of the greatest challenges in neuroscience is to identify the map of synaptic connections between neurons. Called the "connectome," it is the holy grail that will explain how information flows in the brain. In a landmark paper, published the week of 17th of September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the EPFL's Blue Brain Project (BBP) has identified key principles that determine synapse-scale connectivity by virtually reconstructing a cortical microcircuit and comparing it to a mammalian sample. These principles now make it possible to predict the locations of synapses in the neocortex.

"This is a major breakthrough, because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain and it also makes it so much easier now to build accurate models," says Henry Markram, head of the BBP.

A longstanding neuroscientific mystery has been whether all the neurons grow independently and just take what they get as their branches bump into each other, or are the branches of each neuron specifically guided by chemical signals to find all its target. To solve the mystery, researchers looked in a virtual reconstruction of a cortical microcircuit to see where the branches bumped into each other. To their great surprise, they found that the locations on the model matched that of synapses found in the equivalent real-brain circuit with an accuracy ranging from 75 percent to 95 percent.

This means that neurons grow as independently of each other as physically possible and mostly form synapses at the locations where they randomly bump into each other. A few exceptions were also discovered pointing out special cases where signals are used by neurons to change the statistical connectivity. By taking these exceptions into account, the Blue Brain team can now make a near perfect prediction of the locations of all the synapses formed inside the circuit.

Virtual Reconstruction

The goal of the BBP is to integrate knowledge from all the specialized branches of neuroscience, to derive from it the fundamental principles that govern brain structure and function, and ultimately, to reconstruct the brains of different species -- including the

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Meetup : Berlin Meetup
by blob — 2012-09-17T13:42:22.966Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup

WHEN:
28 September 2012 07:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Spreegold, Hufelandstraße 20, 10407 Berlin

Plans from last meetup:

discuss http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/

WingedViper wanted to look at and maybe prepare something from the LW meetup booklet (http://lesswrong.com/lw/crs/how_to_run_a_successful_less_wrong_meetup/)

another round of spuckblase's prediction game

The scheduling poll indicated that there should be at least 3-5 people. I'll bring a sign to point us out to anyone dropping by spontaneously.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] On Doing the Impossible
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-17T04:08:50.510Z

Today's post, On Doing the Impossible was originally published on 06 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A lot of projects seem impossible, meaning that we don't immediately see a way to do them. But after working on them for a long time, they start to look merely extremely difficult.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was My Bayesian Enlightenment, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Recommendations for good audio books?
by jsteinhardt — 2012-09-16T23:43:31.596Z

Audio books have been discussed a bit before, but I never saw a list of recommendations. What books are good in an audio format (especially ones that can be listened to while driving)? I commute 45 minutes a day and would like to put that time to good use.

ETA: I'm mostly interested in non-fiction (goal here is to learn useful stuff, as opposed to entertainment).
The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem
by metaphysicist — 2012-09-16T19:15:13.794Z

[Cross-posted.]

1. Defining the problem: The inverted spectrum

Philosophy has been called a preoccupation with the questions entertained by adolescents, and one adolescent favorite concerns our knowledge of other persons’ “private experience” (raw experience or qualia). A philosophers’ version is the “inverted spectrum”: how do I know you see “red” rather than “blue” when you see this red print? How could we tell when we each link the same terms to the same outward descriptions? We each will say “red” when we see the print, even if you really see “blue.”

The intuition that allows us to be different this way is the intuition of raw experience (or of qualia). Philosophers of mind have devoted considerable attention to reconciling the intuition that raw experience exists with the intuition that inverted-spectrum indeterminacy has unacceptable dualist implications making the mental realm publicly unobservable, but it’s time for nihilism about qualia, whose claim to exist rests solely on the strength of a prejudice.

A. Attempted solutions to the inverted spectrum.

One account would have us examine which parts of the brain are activated by each perception, but then we rely on an unverifiable correlation between brain structures and “private experience.” With only a single example of private experience—our own—we have no basis for knowing what makes private experience the same or different between persons.

A subtler response to the inverted spectrum is that red and blue as experiences are distinct because red looks “red” due to its being constituted by certain responses, such as affect. Red makes you alert and tense; blue, tranquil or maybe sad. What we call the experience of red, on this account, just is the sense of alertness, and other manifestations. The hope is that identical observable responses to appropriate wavelengths might explain qualitative redness. Then, we could discover we experience blue when others experience red by finding that we idiosyncratically become tranquil instead of alert when exposed to the long wavelengths constituting physical red. This complication doesn’t remove the radical uncertainty about experiential descriptions. Emotion only seems more capable than cognition of explaining raw experience becau

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Meta: What tool turns rich text into clean HTML?
by lukeprog — 2012-09-16T18:17:30.291Z

If you write an article in Word, Writer, Scrivener, Google Docs, or another rich text editor, and then copy+paste that rich text into an online WYSIWYG editor like the one on Less Wrong or WordPress, the HTML generated by LW or WordPress is incredibly messy and does tons of weird stuff to your text.

Because of this, I've taken to composing all my posts in Markdown, which is plain text (like HTML) but easier to read, and can be easily converted to clean HTML.

Ideally, though, authors would be able to compose articles in whatever editor they want, and then paste their rich text into a simple web tool that strips all formatting from the HTML except the formatting they want to keep.

HTML Purifier, TIDY, and HTML Tidy aren't quite what we need. Word2CleanHTML, Word HTML Cleaner and WordOff, along with CKEditor's and TinyMCE's 'Paste from Word' features, kinda work, but not really: they still make mistakes pretty often when I try them.

What I was hoping to find was something like Word2CleanHTML but with three changes:

Does a good job when pasting from just about any rich text editor, not just Word.

Allows the user to choose which formatting to keep, using a list of checkboxes for bold, italic, strikethrough, headings, text coloring, blockquotes, etc.

Does this exist, and I couldn't find it?

Or, is this relatively easy for a coder to create?
Problems with forensics, including bias affecting DNA testimony
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-09-16T15:44:43.116Z

Forensic Science and the Innocence Project

What’s more, some types of DNA technology have shortcomings, as Boise State University geneticist Greg Hampikian cautioned Philadelphia meeting attendees. Sample collection methods haven’t changed since DNA’s courtroom debut in the 1980s, even though assay sensitivity has increased dramatically, he said. His group has shown that detectable amounts of DNA can transfer between specimens if a handler forgets to change gloves. Hampikian, director of an Innocence Project affiliate in Idaho, also showed that if exposed to extraneous details about a case, experts can give very different interpretations when analyzing DNA mixtures, as can appear in cases of gang rape Sci. Justice, DOI: 10.1016/j.scijus.2011.08.004. Despite these caveats, DNA testing is the gold standard among forensic disciplines, because it has undergone thorough scientific vetting.

Unfortunately, Sci.Justice study is behind a pay wall.
[SEQ RERUN] My Bayesian Enlightenment
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-16T05:47:37.835Z

Today's post, My Bayesian Enlightenment was originally published on 05 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The story of how Eliezer Yudkowsky became a Bayesian.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Beyond the Reach of God, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[LINK] Motivational Versus Metabolic Effects of Carbohydrates on Self-Control
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-09-16T04:57:27.354Z

Self-control is critical for achievement and well-being. However, people’s capacity for self-control is limited and becomes depleted through use. One prominent explanation for this depletion posits that self-control consumes energy through carbohydrate metabolization, which further suggests that ingesting carbohydrates improves self-control. Some evidence has supported this energy model, but because of its broad implications for efforts to improve self-control, we reevaluated the role of carbohydrates in self-control processes. In four experiments, we found that (a) exerting self-control did not increase carbohydrate metabolization, as assessed with highly precise measurements of blood glucose levels under carefully standardized conditions; (b) rinsing one’s mouth with, but not ingesting, carbohydrate solutions immediately bolstered self-control; and (c) carbohydrate rinsing did not increase blood glucose. These findings challenge metabolic explanations for the role of carbohydrates in self-control depletion; we therefore propose an alternative motivational model for these and other previously observed effects of carbohydrates on self-control.

Link.
Scientists make monkeys smarter using brain implants [link]
by Dreaded_Anomaly — 2012-09-15T18:48:16.242Z

Article at io9. The paper is available here.

The researchers showed monkeys specific images and then trained them to select those images out of a larger set after a time delay. They recorded the monkeys' brain function to determine which signals were important. The experiment tests the monkey's performance on this task in different cases, as described by io9:

Once they were satisfied that the correct mapping had been done, they administered cocaine to the monkeys to impair their performance on the match-to-sample task (seems like a rather severe drug to administer, but there you have it). Immediately, the monkeys' performance fell by a factor of 20%.

It was at this point that the researchers engaged the neural device. Specifically, they deployed a "multi-input multi-output nonlinear" (MIMO) model to stimulate the neurons that the monkeys needed to complete the task. The inputs of this device monitored such things as blood flow, temperature, and the electrical activity of other neurons, while the outputs triggered the individual neurons required for decision making. Taken together, the i/o model was able to predict the output of the cortical neurons — and in turn deliver electrical stimulation to the right neurons at the right time.

And incredibly, it worked. The researchers successfully restored the monkeys' decision-making skills even though they were still dealing with the effects of the cocaine. Moreover, when duplicating the experiment under normal conditions, the monkeys' performance improved beyond the 75% proficiency level shown earlier. In other words, a kind of cognitive enhancement had happened.

This research is a remarkable followup to research that was done in rodents last year.
Using LW-style Multi-Worlds as source of technobabble
by DataPacRat — 2012-09-15T17:20:12.893Z

In my latest chapter of my ongoing My Little Pony crossover fanfic, "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", my protagonist has had a thought. She has discovered that she lives in a universe containing cross-universe travel (which brought her from Earth to Equestria), time travel (which has at least some limits, but can be used for tactical purposes) and magic (of the mana/spell variety). Before arriving there, she read many of the Sequences, even if she hasn't fully absorbed all of their implications, and has been rather busy to think on them very much. I've tried combining all of that by having her posit that the local form of magic is actually a way of implementing outcome pumps, and that the mysterious 'mana' is closely tied to the self-consistency of any given blob of amplitude of quantum wave-functions. My readership seems to generally approve of the technobabble I used

Since this is fiction, I could just as easily have had her posit angels pushing on every electron, and had that be so; but I'm trying to write rationalist fanfiction, and have her strength be in coming up with ideas my readers can use. I haven't made a concrete decision whether or not to have this set of technobabble be the truth for the setting; but I'm at least going to try to use it as the basis for her to try running some experiments to test it. And, in doing so, cover a bit of ground about such things as the difference between Bayesianism and the social organization of the Scientific Method - particularly given that she feels she is under very heavy time pressure to not just get accurate results, but get them quickly.

Might anyone reading this have any suggestions for improvements to the technobabble I've used so far, particular experiments she could try, bits of the Sequences that are worth covering in the process, or anything similarly related?
[study] Ego depletion might disappear with age
by  — 2012-09-15T13:32:04.978Z

Age Shall Not Weary Us: Deleterious Effects of Self-Regulation Depletion Are Specific to Younger Adults

Brain areas associated with self-regulation don't mature until the mid-twenties. And apparently, if you compare older and younger people in a standard set-up for detecting ego-depletion, older people are not affected. WEIRD, indeed.

In 2010, there was a study indicating that ego depletion doesn't affect people who don't expect it to (and that one was run on college students). I wonder if part of the effect might be coming from differences in attitudes about effort between older and younger people.