1. Understanding the Brain with the Help of Artificial Intelligence by Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology with Nautilus. Understanding the connections between the 100 billion neurons in the human brain with traditional methods is an impossible feat. Now researchers at Max Planck Institute use Convolutional Neural Networks to recognize cell extensions, cell components, and synapses, and to distinguish them from each other. 
  2. Study: Bigger Cities Boost ‘Social Crimes’ at Santa Fe Institute. While some crimes grow linearly with population size, others are social in nature and grow much faster. To test this hypothesis, researchers modelled  the volume of crime as a function of social interactions.
  3. Neural Plasticity in Human Brain Connectivity: The Effects of Deep Brain Stimulation by Van Hartevelt et al. (2017) in The Rewiring Brain: A Computational Approach to Structural Plasticity in the Adult Brain. 
  4. Google May Have Taken a Step Towards Quantum Computing ‘Supremacy’ by Igor Bonifacic for Engadget. And more background via Scott Aaronson’s Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ! blog post.
  5. Populism is Growing Because More People Than You Think Want Chaos by Matthew Taylor for The RSA. Recent studies suggest that a large percentage of the population support anti-establishment political forces not despite, but rather for the chaos they introduce.
  6. Uncovering the Truth by Janice Fraser, write-up by James Gadspy Peet. Three hands-on approaches to overcome challenges and being more effective at work.
  7. Humans Who are not Concentrating are not General Intelligences by Sarah Constantin. Lack of attention and focus, low-level correlations in conversation – they all lead to results that may seem intelligent at first, but fail to deliver any deeper meaning. Constantin raises the question whether the ability to tell OpenAI’s GPT2-generated text from human-generated text correlates with alpha waves vs. beta waves.
  8. This Machine Read 3.5 Million Books Then Told Us What It Thought About Men and Women by Maria Hornbek for The World Economic Forum. An analysis of 11 billion words from over 3.5 million English language books show how men and women are typified in text. The results – well, they’ll surprise no-one. 
  9. ‘Soft Tactile Logic’ Tech Distributes Decision-Making Throughout Stretchable Material Summary of Research by Yang et al. (2019) for Science Daily. Yang and his colleagues used the distributed decision-making processes of octopuses as a model for materials-based, distributed logic prototypes. 
  10. Managing Humans – Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp. Lopp’s experience spans economic cycles, startups, and large tech companies. In an easy-to-read manner he translates the lessons he’s learnt into actionable advice.