Archive for December, 2015

Do Critical Topics always bring Abrasive Conversations?

Friday, December 18th, 2015

The first rule of Improvisional Comedy the Yes, And rule, compels one to

accept what the other person has created (“Yes”) and then add something to it (“And”)

This is something that a skilled conversationist is good at. It poses trouble for the discussion of critical analyses however, because such discussions involve acts of disagreement (“No” – the negation of something the other person said) and of refocusing the discussion are to reduce incidental and nonessential complexity.

Being able to disagree productively and reach consensus regarding topic definitions is difficult, and something I’ve only managed to achieve with a handful of people who are all much more emotionally mature than I am. That’s really mostly other people figuring that I care much more about the topic than they do, however, and hardly an ideal resolution to the issue.

Ideally, in the face of disagreement, you would simply go up one layer in the abstraction stack, agree on the approach, and then figure out the specific bit of disagreement. By social convention, you start with the premise that both parties are rational, after which the search for the mistaken logic (which will be clear when identified) or for the differing premise can commence.

Hardly ever happens that way. Usually there’s too much ego involved, and enough entanglement with social status happens that it’s difficult to talk about the topic in isolation.

Where does Taiwanese air pollution come from?

Wednesday, December 16th, 2015

Conclusion: The pollution now (December) is from China, the pollution in November was locally generated.

Earlier this year, there was a bout of posts about whether the air pollution in Taiwan came from China. The air is apparently pretty bad right now, and this time I think it’s clear that it’s from China. I just pulled this screenshot from waqi.info:

 

Screen Shot 2015-12-16 at 2.02.24 PM

Observe that the pollution in Yilan Country, southeast of Taipei, is not that different from Taipei itself. This is what you would expect if the pollution came from far away. Compare this to the map from November (http://www.thenewslens.com/post/243421/):

12196275_470529339793806_1767217779170776576_n

 

Notice the huge disparity in homogeneity. Also, if I remember correctly, back then the wind was also unusually still. I think based on these facts, I would conclude that the pollution in November was locally generated and the pollution now is from a far away source, probably China. (Disregard the low pollution directly to the West, the wind doesn’t come from there. Also, there could be a time lag, so even the pollution levels in the direction of the wind source at the same point in time are not immediately relevant.)

If I had all the historical data in a csv, could probably do a better analysis than two snapshots, if anyone could point me to a source I’d be happy to do that.

What parts of Deep Learning are modern?

Monday, December 14th, 2015

Conclusion: outside of a very brief period in which pre-training with Unsupervised Learning was shown to be helpful, Deep Learning has largely been about hardware brute force, and learning how to use brute force to solve problems.

Terms I need to learn more about

  • Pattern Deformations

  • Hessian-free learning

  • Batch Normalisation (Thanks A Breitman)

  • Competing Units

(more…)

Deep Learning with Small Data

Saturday, December 12th, 2015

I looked into the topic a bit more, and found this exchange, which I think makes sense to me.

The essence of the argument is that because Google etc. have a lot of data, they develop techniques that can make use of that data. However, if you do not have a lot of data, there are other, maybe less developed, techniques to use.
https://medium.com/@ShaliniAnanda1/an-open-letter-to-yann-lecun-22b244fc0a5a