5 questions every manager needs to ask their direct reports
https://hbr.org/2022/01/5-questions-every-manager-needs-to-ask-their-direct-reports If you’re worried that your employees are eyeing the door, it’s time to start having some important career-defining conversations. In this piece, executive coach Susan Peppercorn outlines five questions to start asking your direct reports so that you can get a better sense of how they’re feeling about their...
Fast response times signal social connection in conversation
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116915119 Maybe this is a reason why a clunky video chat over an unreliable connection feels hard. Clicking is one of the most robust metaphors for social connection. But how do we know when two people “click”? We asked pairs of friends and strangers to talk with each other and...
What is causal inference? An intro for data scientists
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/what-is-causal-inference/ Whenever we consider the potential downstream effects of our decisions, whether consciously or otherwise, we are thinking about cause. We’re imagining what the world would be like under different sets of circumstances: what would happen if we do X? What would happen if we do Y instead? Judea Pearl,...
My personal history with NLP or side-effects of good API design
https://www.peterbaumgartner.com/blog/personal-history-and-api-design/ The hard problem in data science isn’t training the best model, but rather a collection of difficult sub-problems: it’s understanding what the problem is having a set of tools you know how to use having an organizational framework (conceptual model) that those tools can fit into being able to...
How gamification of everything is manipulating you (and how to recognize it)
https://lifehacker.com/how-gamification-of-everything-is-manipulating-you-and-1848352808 Variable rewards and suspense Behaviorists’ studies of rats and humans prove that both species are more motivated by intermittent, unpredictable rewards than anticipated ones. Rats will pull the lever more often if they sometimes get a food pellet than if they always get a food pellet, and gamblers would...
Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106028118 https://github.com/deepmind/spurious_normativity How do societies learn and maintain social norms? Here we use multiagent reinforcement learning to investigate the learning dynamics of enforcement and compliance behaviors. Artificial agents populate a foraging environment and need to learn to avoid a poisonous berry. Agents learn to avoid eating poisonous berries better when...
MineRL: Towards AI in Minecraft
https://minerl.io/ Welcome to MineRL. We want to build agents that play Minecraft using state-of-the-art Machine Learning! To do so, we have created one of the largest imitation learning datasets with over 60 million frames of recorded human player data. Our dataset includes a set of tasks which highlights many of...
Why do some people succeed when others fail? Outliers provide clues
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/success-fail-why-outliers-people-communities-nudges By zeroing in on a few villages that have defied the odds and maintained healthy rangelands, an international team is asking if those rare successes might hold the secret to restoring rangelands elsewhere. Answering this question requires turning traditional data processing on its head. Statistically speaking, success stories like...
School closures led to more sleep and better quality of life for adolescents
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220105111355.htm The school closures in spring 2020 had a negative effect on the health and well-being of many young people. But homeschooling also had a positive flipside: Thanks to sleeping longer in the morning, many teenagers reported improved health and health-related quality of life. The study authors from the University...
The power of rank information
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000289 People, organizations, and products are continuously ranked. The explosion of data has made it easy to rank everything, and, increasingly, outlets for information try to reduce information loads by providing rankings. In the present research, we find that rank information exerts a strong effect on decision making over and...
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a collection of excerpts from interesting research, blogs, events, etc...