Four short links: 2 August 2019
Cognitive Biases, Conflict, Language Models, and Programmable Memristor Computer
- The Evolutionary Roots of Human Decision Making (NCBI) — paper showing that we share cognitive biases with other primates. In one study, monkeys had a choice between one experimenter (the gains experimenter) who started by showing the monkey one piece of apple and sometimes added an extra piece of apple, and a second experimenter (the losses experimenter) who started by showing the monkey two pieces of apple and sometimes removed one. Monkeys showed an overwhelming preference for the gains experimenter over the losses experimenter—even though they received the same payoff from both. In this way, capuchins appear to avoid options that are framed as a loss, just as humans do.
- 6 Must Reads for Cutting Through Conflict and Tough Conversations (First Round Capital) — a summary of good (?) advice from books. Some I agree with, but others … having worked for narcissists and bean counters, find a new job. Don’t stay any longer than you have to with those jerks.
- ERNIE — Baidu’s open source continual pre-training framework for language understanding. Baidu says: Integrating both phrase information and named entity information enables the model to obtain better language representation compared to BERT. ERNIE is trained on multi-source data and knowledge collected from encyclopedia articles, news, and forum dialogues, which improves its performance in context-based knowledge reasoning. See also the ERNIE paper.
- First Programmable Memristor Computer (IEEE) — The new chip combines an array of 5,832 memristors with an OpenRISC processor. 486 specially-designed digital-to-analog converters, 162 analog-to-digital converters, and two mixed-signal interfaces act as translators between the memristors’ analog computations and the main processor.
