Links - Mar & Apr 2024

Published May 2024

Paul Ganguin, Fleurs dan une coupe, 1901

Here are some interesting links I found in March & April:

1. Exposure to poor people weakens support for redistribution among the rich.
2. Kolmogorov-Arnold networks.
   While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes (“neurons”), KANs have learnable activation functions on edges (“weights”). KANs have no linear weights at all – every weight parameter is replaced by a univariate function parametrized as a spline. We show that this seemingly simple change makes KANs outperform MLPs in terms of accuracy and interpretability. For accuracy, much smaller KANs can achieve comparable or better accuracy than much larger MLPs in data fitting and PDE solving.
3. Do ten times as much.
4. Notes on El Salvador.
5. Notes on Azerbaijan.
6. A strong US dollar weighs on the world.
   
   High Fed rates, a response to stubborn inflation, mean that American assets offer better returns than much of the world, and investors need dollars to buy them.
7. What if the Fed rate hikes are actually sparking US economic boom?
   This is, the contrarians argue, because the jump in benchmark rates from 0% to over 5% is providing Americans with a significant stream of income from their bond investments and savings accounts for the first time in two decades. These people and companies are in turn spending a big enough chunk of that new-found cash, the theory goes, to drive up demand and goose growth.
8. Fertility roundup #3
   Fertility rate drops from 2015-2023:
   - France: 1.96 -> 1.68
   - Sweden: 1.85 -> 1.42
   - America: 1.84 -> 1.64
   - UK: 1.78 -> 1.45
   - Russia: 1.78 -> 1.41
   - China: 1.75 -> 1.05
   - Germany: 1.50 -> 1.42
   - South Korea: 1.24 -> .73
   - Netherlands: 1.55 -> 1.45
   - Canada: 1.60 -> 1.25
   - Japan: 1.45 -> 1.21
   - Poland: 1.44 -> 1.28
   - Taiwan: 1.18 -> 0.86
   
9. Singapore airlines concorde.
   
10. Video: The scale of black holes.
11. Reddit IPO's winners and losers.
    
12. The academic performance and mental wellbeing of World Cup babies.
    South Korean students born approximately ten months after the World Cup tend to perform significantly worse in school. Moreover, our results uncover a hitherto overlooked aspect: the same students exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental wellbeing.
13. Memories are made by breaking DNA and fixing it.
14. Rootclaim's $100,000 COVID lab leak debate.
    It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech.
15. Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.
    During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
    Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
    In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
16. LMSYS chatbot arena leaderboard.
    
17. As caste vanishes only genes remain.
    Beginning about twenty-five years ago, geneticists finally began to look at the variation within the Indian subcontinent, and were shocked by what they found. In small villages in India, Dalits, formerly called “outcastes,” were as genetically distinct from their Brahmin neighbors as Swedes were from Sicilians. In fact, a Brahmin from the far southern state of Tamil Nadu was genetically closer to a Brahmin from the northern state of Punjab then they were to their fellow non-Brahmin Tamils.
18. How NPR lost America's trust.
19. Honeytraps do not work on French spies because their wives are used to them having affairs.
20. Minicircle follistatin gene therapy: how legit is it?
    
    An AAV gene therapy containing the follistatin 344 isotype injected into macaque monkeys resulted in durable increases in muscle size (25% increase in quadriceps diameter at 20 weeks) along with thicker muscle fibers and greater force generation. Over the next 15 months, the animals showed no abnormal blood work, tissue morphology, or changes in sperm quality or menstruation.
21. Value capture.
22. King Hochschild’s hoax.
    Most memorably for readers, Hochschild reprints staged photographs taken by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris and supplied to the anti-Léopold campaign through the English missionary John Weeks. The missionaries knew that showing these fake photos at “lantern shows” in community halls in Britain won more attention and donations than their detailed accounts of cannibalism and sleeping sickness ravaging their areas. Hochschild does not tell the reader that the photographs are staged, nor does he explain that the photographs of people with severed hands were victims of gangrene, tribal vendettas, or cannibalism having nothing to do with rubber.