Two papers on clustered networks

We just put pre-prints of two new papers dealing with the analysis of clustered networks onto arXiv.

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First outing of “Epidemic modelling”

My lockdown project is now ready for its first outing.

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You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place

Janelle Shane (2019)

It’s a brave thing to try to make AI accessible. This is a valiant attempt that doesn’t (in my opinion) carry it off.

The problem with any discussion of AI is in the language, the inevitable tendency that the work “intelligence” brings to anthropomorphise the software. AI doesn’t get “confused”, doesn’t acquire “experience” – at least, not as these words suggest.

I think the biggest omission, however, is in what isn’t said: that AI is built on the assumption that the future will be like the past. While there are ways to avoid this – known as “lifelong learning”, which replace the initial training phase with an on-going re-learning from new examples – these remain in their infancy and haven’t yet translated into practice. Until they do, AI techniques are very much at the mercy of both their training set and the rate of evolution of their inputs.

2/5. Finished Wednesday 17 June, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

Laura Spinney (2017)

One of the only overview accounts of the 1918 pandemic, now fiercely relevant in the era of covid-19. This is a book that combines a fairly deep dive into the science with more speculative looks at the effects the pandemic had on art, psychology, and the emergence of worldwide disease surveillance structures. Some of the speculations are just that, and not especially convincing – the increased number of births isn’t necessarily a sign of increased “conception potential” because of w winnowing of the weaker individuals – but this is a minor complaint about a deeply researche, well-written, and timely work.

4/5. Finished Sunday 7 June, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism (American Beginnings, 1500-1900)

Emma Hart

4/5. Finished Sunday 7 June, 2020.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)