Week 04/22 - 04/28

News

• He Jiankui - Chinese biophysics researcher claimed to create first gene editted human twin babies
  • CRISPR/Cas9 - technology used to create these babies (more layperson friendly video in this article)
  • He uploaded promo videos on his Youtube channel
  • Consequences (to He):
    • He’s announcement was met with widespread condemnation
    • Chinese authorities suspended all his research activities and he was fired from his university
    • Listed on Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2019; CRISP co-inventor wrote the profile: ”…He’s decision will likely be remembered as one of the most shocking misapplications of any scientific tool in our history.”
  • The twins, nicknamed Lulu and Nana, might have had their brains permanently enhanced… 😬

Big ideas

• Belief in meritocracy is bad for you

  • “believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways”
  • “in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value”

• How recommendation algorithms run the world

  • troubling consequences of one type of recomm. algo: showing items people “like” you have read/watched/shopped - perpetuate stereotypes (e.g. show boys coding books, girls fashion magazines)
  • interesting example of how ppl exploit trending algo on big social media platform: democracy activists during Arab Spring use new hashtags in coordination so their discussion can trend on Twitter

ML/Data Science

• Google’s intro series on Machine Learning
  • Episode on decision tree is particularly easy to follow

What I am working on

• Coursera: deeplearning.ai courses (5 courses)
  • Finished Week 3 in Course 1
  • Onto Week 4
• Technical blog post:
  • Finished Intro to ML post, Logistic regression explained and Deriving gradient for cross entropy loss posts 🙌
• Recreational reading: Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko
  • 90% read