Making difficulty curves in games
http://www.davetech.co.uk/difficultycurves Tricks for Keeping Everyone on the Right Part of the Curve: DO: Put in optional collectables Provide tricky alternate routes that skips easy parts Have areas that give you a better high score Achievements that reward people playing with a disadvantage Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well...
Leveraging metacognitive ability to improve crowd accuracy via impossible questions.
https://webfiles.uci.edu/msteyver/publications/ImpossibleQuestions.pdf https://osf.io/8r3t9/?view_only=c5a9694d4900431ab00566e124a10b1d The aggregate of judgments across individuals can be quite accurate, especially when individuals with expert judgment can be identified. A number of procedures have been developed to identify expert judgments using historical performance or questionnaire data. Here we measure expertise with the participant’s tendency to skip impossible questions....
Visualizing the $94 trillion world economy in one chart
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-94-trillion-world-economy-in-one-chart/
Redesigning Etsy's machine learning platform
https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/redesigning-etsys-machine-learning-platform/ Above all in this iteration, we wanted to avoid building in-house tooling if possible. Our customers were already starting to experiment with open-source and managed technologies to work around the limitations of the V1 platform, and we wanted to collaborate with them. Leveraging managed solutions from Google Cloud and...
Why ex post peer review encourages high-risk research while ex ante review discourages it
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2111615118 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13282 Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from forecasting assessment to examine how two modes of peer review—ex ante...
Antibody response and variant cross-neutralization after SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infection
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787447 Results of this study showed substantial boosting of humoral immunity after breakthrough infection, despite predominantly mild disease. Boosting was most notable for IgA, possibly due to the differences in route of exposure between vaccination and natural infection. In addition, breakthrough sera demonstrated improved variant cross-neutralization, and Delta breakthrough infections...
Using AI to bring children’s drawings to life
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-ai-to-bring-childrens-drawings-to-life We’re excited to announce a first-of-its-kind method for automatically animating children’s hand-drawn figures of people and humanlike characters (i.e., a character with two arms, two legs, a head, etc.) that bring these drawings to life in a matter of minutes using AI. By uploading them to our prototype system,...
Preventing extreme polarization of political attitudes
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/50/e2102139118 https://github.com/jdaymude/AttractionRepulsionModel Democracies require compromise. But compromise becomes almost impossible when voters are divided into diametrically opposed camps. The danger is that intolerance will grow, democratic norms will be undermined, and winners will be reluctant to let the losers ever regain power. To better understand how polarization can be prevented,...
Empathy-based counterspeech can reduce racist hate speech in a social media field experiment
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/50/e2116310118 Despite heightened awareness of the detrimental impact of hate speech on social media platforms on affected communities and public discourse, there is little consensus on approaches to mitigate it. While content moderation—either by governments or social media companies—can curb online hostility, such policies may suppress valuable as well as...
Build habits, not streaks
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/forte-4 I created Forte² because I was unhappy with the state of habit trackers on the App Store. Typical habit trackers focus on streaks as the primary metric to track habit building. The problem with this is that users can build up this streak for weeks or months just to...
About
a collection of excerpts from interesting research, blogs, events, etc...