New Lines of Thought

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(Alexander Bell)’s primary investor (Gardiner Hubbard) was initially skeptical of Bell’s work on the telephone. It “could never be more than a scientific toy,” Hubbard told him. The initial inability of Hubbard, and everyone else to recognize the promise of the telephone represents a patter that recurs with a frequency embarrassing to the human race. “All knowledge and habit once acquired,” wrote Joseph Schumpeter, the great innovation theorist, “becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth.”  Schumpeter believed that our minds were, essentially, too lazy to seek out new lines of thought when old ones could serve. “The very nature of fixed habits of thinking, their energy-saving function, is founded upon the fact that they have become subconscious, that they yield their results automatically and are proof against criticism and even against contraction by individual facts.”

Tim Wu, The Master Switch

Dependent People

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Dependency is unconcerned with spiritual growth. Dependent people are interested in their own nourishment, but no more; they desire filling, they desire to be happy; they don’t desire to grow, nor are they willing to tolerate the unhappiness, the loneliness and suffering involved in growth. Neither do dependent people care about the spiritual growth of the other, the object of their dependency; they care only that the other is there to satisfy them. 

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Are you a self-objectifier?

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Are you a self-objectifier in your job or career? Ask yourself a few questions, and answer them honestly.

  • Is your job the biggest part of your identity? Is it the way you introduce yourself, or even understand yourself?

  • Do you find yourself sacrificing love relationships for work? Have you forgone romance, friendship, or starting a family because of your career?

  • Do you have trouble imagining being happy if you were to lose your job or career? Does the idea of losing it feel a little like death to you?

If you answered affirmatively to any or all of these, recognize that you will never be satisfied as long as you objectify yourself. Your career or job should be an extension of you, not vice versa.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Are we immune to manipulation?

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We like to think of ourselves as independently minded and immune to manipulation, and yet imagine others — particularly those of a different political persuasion — as being fantastically gullible. The reality is probably something in between. 

We do know that the posts we see on Facebook have the power to alter our emotions. A controversial experiment run by Facebook employees in 2013 manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users without their knowledge (or consent) in an attempt to control their emotions and influence their moods. The experimenters suppressed any friends’ posts that contained positive words, and then did the same with those containing negative words, and watched to see how the unsuspecting subjects would react in each case. Users who saw less negative content in their feeds went on to post more positive stuff themselves. Meanwhile, those who had positive posts hidden from their timeline went on to use more negative words themselves. Conclusive: we may think we’re immune to emotional manipulation, but we’re probably not.  

Hannah Fry, Hello World

Why organizations become stale and ineffective  

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Organizations are created by their founders to serve vibrant, living purposes. but all too often the founding purposes fade and what finally get served are the purposes of institutional self-enhancement. It happens in hospitals to the detriment of patients, in schools to the detriment of students, in businesses to the detriment of shareholders and customers, end in government to the detriment of taxpayers. It is rarely the result of evil intent: it happens because memes triumph over ends, form triumphs over spirit, and the turf syndrome conquers all. 

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

The I-Thou

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The ideal model of intimacy is what the philosopher Martin Buber has described as the ”I-Thou” relation. In an I-Thou experience, two people focus intensively and unswervingly on each other, sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings but remaining separate beings in the process. We do not “merge” or “unite”  with other people in intimacy. Rather, the ”I” confronts the “Thou,” and in the confrontation each becomes enriched through relation. 

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

So Much Straw

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It is said that on 6 December 1273, while he was celebrating mass, a great change came over Thomas Aquinas. At the age of 49, his Summa Theologica ("Summary of Theology" – nearly 1300 pages) unfinished, he stopped writing. To his faithful secretary and companion Reginald of Pipersno, he said, ‘Reginald, I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw. Now, I await the end of my life of my works.’ Aquinas died three months later.

All our talk about God is halting, partial, hopelessly inadequate. This does not mean we should not hold firm beliefs about God or do the best job we can as philosophers and theologians. It simply means that no matter how much skill or effort we bring to the job, God always remains in part a mystery. The gap between God and our ideas about God was, we believe, salvifically narrowed by God’s revelatory initiative, but not closed.

Like Aquinas, all Christians can see that human talk about God ultimately comes to an end. It’s best efforts are like straw.

Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God

Entrenching Ourselves

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The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions, the more it appears as if we have discovered the right course and the right deals ideals and principles of behavior. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should have been experienced lie in the lumber room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

How Numbers Can Lead to Biases

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To simplify the world enough that it can be captured with numbers means throwing away a lot of detail. The inevitable omissions can bias the data against certain groups. (Deborah Stone in her book Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters) describes an attempt by the United Nations to develop guidelines for measuring levels of violence against women.

Representatives from Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand put forward ideas about types of violence to be included, based on victim surveys in their own countries. These included hitting, kicking, biting, slapping, shoving, beating, and choking.

Meanwhile, some Bangladeshi women proposed counting other forms of violence—acts that are not uncommon on the Indian subcontinent—such as burning women, throwing acid on them, dropping them from high places, and forcing them to sleep in animal pens. None of these acts were included in the final list.

When surveys based on the U.N. guidelines are conducted, they’ll reveal little about the women who have experienced these forms of violence. As Stone observes, in order to count, one must first decide what should be counted.

 

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Data Science articles Nov 2021

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Top applications of convolutional neural networks

Understanding factor graphs 

Russia’s anti-satellite strike missile test could plague space domain for ‘decades’

Drexel University AI expert Matthew Stamm explains how technologists debunk deep fake videos

Researchers are launching an open-source machine-learning database of chemical synthesis procedures that they think will benefit artificial intelligence algorithms and spur development of predictive chemistry tools 

The algorithmic feedback loop

“The goal of a recommendation algorithm isn’t to surprise or shock but to affirm. The result is more of the same: a present that looks like the past and a future that isn’t one.”

User experience in Stan and TensorFlow Probability

What's the difference between data analysis and data science?

Simulation-based inference and approximate Bayesian computation in ecology and population genetics

5 mistakes you should avoid when writing SQL queries

“Predictive analytics tends to encode historic harms into our planning, limiting our sense of possibility...such technology will keep us bound to the past, stuck in our old patterns of oppression—unless we choose to imagine something better.”

All you need to know about text preprocessing for NLP and Machine Learning 

11 ML Algorithms you should know

Learning resources to accelerate your data science career

Data science used to be a very dry job. It was seen as nerdy but now it's creative. Communication matters because you have to sell what you uncover and that means telling stories around data.

US Air Force researchers want help developing artificial intelligence & machine learning for quick adaption to changing high-intensity aerial battle conditions

DoD IT agency gets chief data office to help shift toward automated cybersecurity