bob retweeted
I’m slowly cleaning up the suburbs with Muse.
Saw this mess of wires on a pole. Took a picture and asked Muse to contact Verizon to get them cleaned up.
It went to their website and got to work.
There is a 0% chance I would’ve sat in a Verizon support chat over this. I would’ve just been mildly annoyed every time I walked past it for the next five years.
“Someone should do something about that” is now a prompt.
🤝 @alexandr_wang
bob retweeted
Understanding graph theory will seriously enhance your engineering skills; you must absolutely be familiar with them.
Here's a graph theory quickstart, in collaboration with @alepiad.
Read on:
bob retweeted
There is a law - FERPA - that is supposed to protect the privacy of student data. But there are ways that companies can get around it.
My interview this week with @ConnectEdProf about the booming biz of trafficking in student data.
getrevue.co/profile/themarku…
bob retweeted
1/ How can you tell whether something is an electrical insulator?
The obvious answer is "check whether it conducts electricity." But here's a short thread about why that measurement doesn't tell you what people usually think it does.
bob retweeted
Dolphins, chimpanzees, and crows all use tools to help accomplish tasks. In 2019, pigs joined the club. #ScienceMagArchives fcld.ly/5tg9bqs
bob retweeted
Sticking my neck out here, but.....
I don't understand why people think machines could possibly learn common sense from language alone.
Still more trouble in GPT-3 paradise: the "impressive zero-shot performance of large language models is mostly due to existence of dataset bias in ... benchmarks."
– @xiang_lorraine et al, new Arxiv: "A Systematic Investigation of Commonsense Understanding [in LLMS]"
bob retweeted
Question for students (please RT for wider reach).
Many of you may prefer on campus teaching. But say a course has to be online, what features DO make you like it better?
Answers based on concrete experiences welcome!
bob retweeted
"we do not want to set a precedent or encourage submission of articles that only critique the methods used by others."
Corrected link:
statmodeling.stat.columbia.e…
Andrew Gelman posts on my latest encounter with physics education research, in which it seems that even the most seriously incorrect work is left unchallenged if it's all part of the club.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.e…
bob retweeted
Now watching: "I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It." About Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars when she was a PhD student and how Prof. Anthony Hewish received the Nobel prize for her discovery (h/t @asdhominem) youtube.com/watch?v=NDW9zKqv…
bob retweeted
"So the good news is that deep learning provides enormous flexibility. The bad news is that this flexibility comes at an enormous computational cost." spectrum.ieee.org/deep-learn…
bob retweeted
Since physics twitter is discussing units today, let me advertise these notes by Jaffe stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/cou… I found them very enlightening.
bob retweeted
IQ often gets used to promote racism on the internet but it's also highly mathematical so people don't really understand it.
In this thread, I will explain:
1. How the math of IQ works at a high level (don't worry no formulas!)
2. Why IQ is partly socially construct... 🧵👇
bob retweeted
I'm a sucker for a beautiful descriptive graph. Here is a nice one produced and published by @UpshotNYT today showing the average tip amount during the pandemic in NYC using data from the Square and Toast apps:
bob retweeted
The concept of ‘abduction’ came up in twitter discussion and people asked what it means. This may be a good occasion for a short thread on a recent paper about the challenges in characterising ‘abduction proper’. docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/view… 1/n
bob retweeted
If you’re a Startup trying to compete with a Megacorp—the 800-pound Gorilla in the space—you need to understand the tax inherent to being a Gorilla
And then you need to make that tax work against the Gorilla—with your product's positioning & features
A thread on Gorilla taxes👇🏾
bob retweeted
📢 New preprint: "How hard is cognitive science?" - by Patricia Rich, Ronald de Haan, Todd Wareham & myself.
This version is accepted for #cogsci2021, but we're revising based on the reviews (until May 11). Any comments, questions, or feedback welcome! psyarxiv.com/k79nv/