A library of books, articles, and essays that Iโve read, want to read, or heard are important. I try to prioritize high-value, recent and open-access information.
The categories are kind of a mess, sorry!
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Data: library.csv
Key: Green=direct access, Blue=meta access, ๐=book, ๐=article, โ๏ธ=essay, ๐=notes.
Shelves:
Due to their mobility, their reliance on multiple habitats, and their dependence on connectivity between different sites, migratory species are exposed to a diverse range of threats caused by human activity. Most migratory species are affected by a combination of threats, which often interact to exacerbate one another. Habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation (primarily driven by agriculture), and overexploitation (hunting and fishing, both targeted and incidental) represent the two most pervasive threats to migratory species and their habitats according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Pollution, including pesticides, plastics, heavy metals and excess nutrients, as well as underwater noise and light pollution, represents a further source of pressure facing many species.
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but itโs not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didnโt do in advance, and what weโre failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build.
Today the defense of the natural and normative character of the heterosexually organized family, linked with the insistence that reproduction requires heterosexuality and the privileged power of the father within the family, becomes an especially intense political issue where state-funded social services to families have been decimated and dependency on Churches has increased for basic services to those abandoned by the state. Significantly, the radical changes in economic life, including the loss of basic structures of social welfare produce a heightened sense of precarity and fear among populations who are then told that it is โgender ideologyโ that is breaking apart the family, destroying heterosexuality as a natural law, threatening both Godโs creative powers and civilization itself.
Millions of years ago, humans just happened. Accidents of environment and genetics contributed to the creation of sentient beings like us. Today, however, people no longer just happen; they are created by the voluntary acts of other people. Is it ethical to keep making new humans, now that reproduction is under our control? And given that a person exists (through no fault or choice of his own), is it immoral or irrational for him to refuse to live out his natural lifespan? All these questions are answered in the negative - not out of misanthropy, but rather out of empathy for human suffering and respect for human autonomy.
Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?
[As a field of cultural play, gender is an innovative affair, although there are punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations.] Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.
The philosophy of multiscale, multi-physics modeling [โฆ] is based on the viewpoint that: 1. Any system of interest can always be described by a hierarchy of models of different complexity. This allows us to think about more detailed models when a coarse-grained model is no longer adequate. It also gives us a basis for understanding coarse-grained models from more detailed ones. In particular, when empirical coarse-grained models are inadequate, one might still be able to capture the macroscale behavior of the system with the help of the microscale models. (2) In many situations, the system of interest can be described adequately by a coarse-grained model, except in some small regions where more detailed models are needed. These small regions may contain singularities, defects, chemical reactions, or some other interesting events. In such cases, by coupling models of different complexity in different regions, we may be able develop modeling strategies that have an efficiency that is comparable to the coarse-grained models, as well as an accuracy that is comparable to that of the more detailed models.
The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. [โฆ] One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.
Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.
The notion of the biological individual is inextricably bound up with the notion of fitness. Fitness is used for describing evolutionary changeโthe relative change in gene frequencies, or frequencies of types, across generations. It is used for predicting the outcome of an evolutionary process, as well as for explaining such outcomes. It is used to explain the prevalence of traits, as well as the fit between phenotype and environment. Note that all these conceptsโgeneration, trait, and phenotypeโonly have meaning in relation to the more primitive concept โindividual.โ Biologists implicitly invoke a particular characterization of the individual any time they use these notions, and their choice of one concept over another will have consequences, acknowledged or otherwise, for their theories and explanations.
The integration on forms concept is of fundamental importance in differential topology, geometry, and physics, and also yields one of the most important examples of cohomology, namely de Rham cohomology, which (roughly speaking) measures precisely the extent to which the fundamental theorem of calculus fails in higher dimensions and on general manifolds.
The algebraic path problem provides a general setting for shortest path algorithms in optimization and computer science. This work extends the algebraic path problem to networks equipped with input and output boundaries.
A topological quantum field theory is a โsymmetric monoidal functorโ Z: nCob โ Vect. To know what this means, we need some definitions from category theory.
In conversation, speakers and addressees work together in the making of a definite reference. In the model we propose, the speaker initiates the process by presenting or inviting a noun phrase. Before going on to the next contribution, the participants, if necessary, repair, expand on, or replace the noun phrase in an iterative process until they reach a version they mutually accept. In doing so they try to minimize their joint effort. The preferred procedure is for the speaker to present a simple noun phrase and for the addressee to accept it by allowing the next contribution to begin.
Natural language processing tasks, such as question answering, machine translation, reading comprehension, and summarization, are typically approached with supervised learning on task-specific datasets. We demonstrate that language models begin to learn these tasks without any explicit supervision when trained on a new dataset of millions of webpages called WebText.
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Dissipative solitons in reaction-diffusion systems are self-organized localized structures with particle-like properties: They are generated or annihilated as entities, propagate with a well-defined stabilized velocity and are able to form bound states with qualitative different properties compared to their constituents.
Significantly, there is no bibliography.
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, it not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear.