BULLDOZE THE BUSINESS SCHOOL
Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.
Read moreTHE THEORY OF QUANTUM INFORMATION
To be published by Cambridge University Press in April 2018. Upon publication this book will be available for purchase through Cambridge University Press and other standard distribution channels. Please see the publisher’s web page to pre-order the book or to obtain further details on its publication date. A draft, pre-publication copy of the book can be found below. This draft copy is made available for personal use only and must not be sold or redistributed.
Read moreHUMAN NATURE MATTERS
A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science. This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt.
Read moreA CARTOGRAPHY NERD’S GUIDE TO CUSTOM MAP-MAKING
There was only one problem. I couldn’t find a decent tennis map of San Francisco. I wanted a map that was useful, of course, but also one that was well designed. So I decided to make one myself and give it to my wife as a birthday gift, with the goal of making it attractive enough that she would agree to hang it on our wall, but also useful enough that we would actually make it a centerpiece of our new Saturday hobby. And lastly, I wanted to visualize the MUNI bus routes to each court (since—oddly—riding the bus is another avocation that my wife enjoys).
Read moreHOW POETRY AND MATH INTERSECT
April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, so a few years ago science writer Stephen Ornes dubbed it Math Poetry Month. If the words “math” and “poetry” don’t intuitively make sense to you as a pair, poet and mathematician JoAnne Growney’s blog Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics is a perfect place to start expanding your math-poetic horizons. The blog includes a broad range of poems with mathematical themes or built using mathematical rules.
Read moreTHE EU IS TRYING TO DECIDE WHETHER TO GRANT ROBOTS PERSONHOOD.
In 2015, an A.I.-powered Twitter bot did something a little out there—avant-garde, one might say. It tweeted, “I seriously want to kill people,” and mentioned a fashion event in Amsterdam. Dutch police questioned the owner of the bot over the death threat,claiming he was legally responsible for its actions, because it was in his name and composed tweets based on his own Twitter account.
Read moreEINSTEIN’S ‘SPOOKY ACTION’ HAS JUST BEEN DEMONSTRATED ON A MASSIVE SCALE FOR THE FIRST TIME
Quantum entanglement linksparticles in a way that theyinstantly affect each other, even over vast distances. On the surface, this powerful bond defies classical physics and, generally, our understanding of reality, which is why Einstein found it so spooky. But the phenomenon has since become a cornerstone of modern technology. Source: sciencealert.com
LEARNING TO SPEAK SHRUB
A few months later, Karban, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies plant defense communication, returns to the sagebrush and examines its leaves, many of which now have damage from real grasshoppers or beetles. However, within about two feet of the branches he clipped, leaves have been spared the worst ravages of the hungry insects. That’s because Karban’s cuttings convinced those damaged leaves they were under insect attack, so they sent chemical alarms into the air.
Read moreMEASURING THE INTRINSIC DIMENSION OF OBJECTIVE LANDSCAPES
In our paper, Measuring the Intrinsic Dimension of Objective Landscapes, to be presented at ICLR 2018, we contribute to this ongoing effort by developing a simple way of measuring a fundamental network property known as intrinsic dimension. In the paper, we develop intrinsic dimension as a quantification of the complexity of a model in a manner decoupled from its raw parameter count, and we provide a simple way of measuring this dimension using random projections. We find that many problems have smaller intrinsic dimension than one might suspect.
Read moreDEEPMIND PAPERS AT ICLR 2018
Between 30 April and 03 May, hundreds of researchers will gather in Vancouver, Canada, for the Sixth International Conference on Learning Representations. Here you will find details of all DeepMind’s accepted papers. Source: deepmind.com