When we train machine learning models, we measure the loss that occurs between the true outcome and the model predictions. We focus on minimizing the loss by trying different models, by tuning hyperparameters, by engineering the features, by transforming the data. During this model training phase of…

The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I. How hyping A.I. enriched investors, fooled the media, and confused the hell out of the rest of us Mike Mallazzo Jun 12 Photo: Laura Ockel/Unsplash W hen news broke that McDonalds was buying Israeli “Artificial Intelligence company” Dynamic Yield for $300…

Music Streaming Services Are Gaslighting Us 8 min read · Apr 27, 2019 -- I feel that in recent weeks I have had something of a “road to Damascus” moment around my consumption of music. Let me start wi

The stereotype of the visionary male founder dominates Silicon Valley. The “move fast and break things” culture rewards those who announce promising new directions with confidence, often neglecting ex

Issue #17 October 2018 What Laughs at What? Mary Douglas on Humour Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen (possibly) — “Laughing Fool” — (ca. 1500) M ost recent philosophical investigations of humour take the

geometry Math Duo Maps the Infinite Terrain of Minimal Surfaces March 12, 2019 A pair of mathematicians has built on an obscure, 30-year-old mathematical theory to show that soap-filmlike minimal surf

Martha, a caucasian woman in her mid-thirties, bursts into a run-down office. Her Boss, a balding caucasian man in his fifties, sits behind his desk in despair. There’s a dead cactus by his elbow, an

The tyranny of the explicit - Cognitive Edge Welcome, Visitor | Login Search Categories: Polemic July 28, 2018 The tyranny of the explicit One of the phrases I coined many moons ago is that of ‘ necessary ambiguity’ ; or, if I am feeling less assertive, ‘ requisite ambiguity ’. The basic idea is…

There’s a state of mind that’s been increasingly common for me lately, which I can only describe as a sense of being outdoors in time during inclement temporal weather. I’ve been searching for the rig

Technology companies have long had a simple answer to anyone who did not like what was happening on, in, or through them: Services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were platforms, which merely prov

Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk Harvard University Press, 393 pp.,

8 min read · Feb 26, 2019 -- Update: We’re live on Ethereum mainnet at ideamarket.io Media corporations are the central banks of narrative. In the same way that fiat currencies are valuable only becau

Home » Reviews » ON THE ROAD ON THE ROAD Earphones Award Winner by |Read by Matt Dillon Classics • 11 hrs. • Unabridged •© 1955 The classic memoir of the Beat Generation chronicles Kerouac’s years tra

Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Sign In Search News Books & Culture Fiction & Poetry Humor & Cartoons Magazine Puzzles & Games Video Podcasts Goings On F

For several years now, I’ve been watching the creeping, unheralded growth of what I call the cozyweb, and for which others have lots of creative names . Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler called it

The Computer Lab's Beyond Cyberpunk Hypercard stack Beyond Cyberpunk! Update : It's Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and the Ars staff has a long weekend accordingly. Many will spend that time rel

Photo by Radu Marcusu 🌻The Best and Most Current of Modern Natural Language Processing Published in HuggingFace · 7 min read · May 22, 2019 -- O ver the last two years, the Natural Language Processing

sphere packing May 13, 2019 Mathematicians used “magic functions” to prove that two highly symmetric lattices solve a myriad of problems in eight- and 24-dimensional space. Read Later DVDP for Quanta

Karl Popper famously defended the view, known as falsificationism, that what distinguishes science from non-science is falsifiability. On this view, a theory is scientific if and only if it’s falsifia

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it se

Brad and GwYneth, circa 1997 Published in The Year of the Looking Glass · 7 min read · Oct 22, 2013 -- Ah, Data. And of course, Data’s best friend, A/B Test. They’re like the the It couple of many a y

Mountain climbing is a beloved metaphor for mathematical research. The comparison is almost inevitable: The frozen world, the cold thin air and the implacable harshness of mountaineering reflect the u

“Be wary of SaaS and Internet-connected appliances, and it’s a good thing if the legal innovation never catches up with technological innovation.” That would serve as a rough summary of the thesis Jon

On September 16, 2011, an anime fan posted a math question to the online bulletin board 4chan about the cult classic television series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya . Season one of the show, which

Published in UX Collective · 6 min read · May 11, 2019 -- On May 17, 2017, Sundar Pichai stood onstage at Google I/O and told everyone that Google was moving from being mobile-first to AI-first . Mean

I think this is one of my favourite all-time tweets: While I wouldn’t change a single word of the tweet itself, because it’s perfect, I’d still extend it a whole lot further: I honestly think that thi

Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is an explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful. And how you can make pretty

Published in Data & Society: Points · 8 min read · Apr 26, 2019 -- On April 17, 2019, Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd gave a talk at the Digital Public Library of America conference (D

Why You Should Start Binge-Reading Right Now Ditch Netflix for a novel. And not just because a novelist is telling you to. May 4, 2019 Credit... Gabriel Alcala By Mr. Dolnick is a novelist. One night

5 min read · May 6, 2019 -- The current landscape within New York tech is diverse and lively. We are thriving because founders hail from different backgrounds and industries. The types of companies th

Summary: Finally there are tools that let us transcend ‘correlation is not causation’ and identify true causal factors and their relative strengths in our models. This is what prescriptive analytics w

23 Nov, 2016 at 10:27 | Posted in Economics | 2 Comments Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and t

What struck John Learned about the blinking of KIC 5520878, a bluish-white star 16,000 light-years away, was how artificial it seemed. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, Mānoa,

Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians invented multiplication. Last month, mathematicians perfected it. On March 18, two researchers described the fastest method ever discovered for multiplying two