Four short links: 23 January 2018
Facebook Detectron, Near Enemies, Computation for Social Scientists, and JavaScript Treasures
- Facebook Detectron — open source research platform for object detection research, implementing popular algorithms like Mask R-CNN and RetinaNet. … The goal of Detectron is to provide a high-quality, high-performance codebase for object detection research. It is designed to be flexible in order to support rapid implementation and evaluation of novel research.
- Near Enemies (Pam Fox) — For example: the near enemy of loving-kindness is conditional love—selfish, sentimental attachment—when you wish well for others only when they make you happy. It’s like when you say “I love ice cream.” You are not wishing well for the ice cream; you are wishing for the ice cream to bring your mouth pleasure. … Ideally, we could measure very specific metrics that truly capture usefulness. Or perhaps, when we come up with metrics, we can think very hard about what non-desirable outcomes they might accidentally measure (what ways that metric might mislead us), and then make sure we also measure those counter-metrics alongside them. Basically, each metric has near enemies, and those get recorded alongside it. This! Don’t just measure what you want to have happen—also measure what mustn’t be lost as you aim for the former.
- Introducing Computational Methods to Social Scientists (Benjamin Mako Hill) — we hope that the chapter provides an accessible introduction to computational social science and encourages more social scientists to incorporate computational methods in their work, either by gaining computational skills themselves or by partnering with more technical colleagues. The text and code are available CC BY-NC-SA and GPL v3 respectively.
- JavaScript Things I Never Knew Existed — labels, void, comma, with conditional, internationalization API, pipeline operator, …
