minkowski's comments

Have a look at the join calculus and the "chemical abstract machine" as implemented in JoCaml, e.g., https://sites.google.com/site/winitzki/tutorial-on-join-calc...

Some of the theoretical work is available with keywords like 'multi-object tracking' or 'multi-object detection' and also applied to tasks such as pedestrian tracking for autonomous vehicles, but there was also a bunch of applied work building and evaluating such CCTV systems which I can't find any links to now, sorry.

I didn't check if this research is still pursued or abandoned due to the rise of face recognition and other metric learning/re-identification technologies, but a few years ago a number of faculty at ETH Zurich were quite heavily involved in researching CCTV-based person tracking, which would work even against people taking measures against face or gait recognition algorithms if they weren't able to leave the CCTV-covered area. It was insinuated that various external state agencies, not all Switzerland-based, were specifically funding this research.

So, while the citizens might not want it, faculty seem perfectly happy to keep developing such technology for other clients.

The logic of this study is typical of many modern statistical studies:

1. the authors fit a certain model, adjusted for certain covariates, and observe that a certain effect of interest is statistically significant.

2. therefore, if (a) the model is "correct" i.e. sufficiently well approximates the observed data distribution, and (b) the regression coefficient and structural coefficient coincide i.e. the true generative DAG is compatible with the chosen set of covariates, then a causal association from the predictor to the outcome exists with high probability.

3. the authors simply assume (2) and therefore imply that a causal relation likely exists.

Direct action is an anarchist/autonomist idea of changing things directly rather than petitioning the government (see Graeber, Direct Action: an ethnography). It has literally nothing to do with fascist (particularly Nazi -- see Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperii) ideals of anti-intellectualism or action for action's sake beyond the word "action".

Identifying degrowth with ecofascism isn't accurate.

Setting aside the obvious questions about how wild vs farmed animals are raised, wolves don't have a choice about what to eat, while humans do. Even if we wanted to improve the status of wild animals, murdering wolves isn't obviously the best way.

Note that 'notRobot's "valuing all lives" is not saying "valuing all lives precisely equally" but rather opposing "humans are far more morally important" as per the abstract.

Conversely, at some point I decided to watch Sapolsky lectures based on human recommenders, but this caused YouTube to recommend not only other science lectures but also sensational videos purporting to be about quantum mechanics, medicine, etc. but which were obviously total pseudoscience.

Not answering your question, but just to point out to readers that this article is about graphical models, not Bayesian neural networks.

The interesting part of this letter isn't any novel or lucid argument but what it's arguing against, which in the context of the mentioned earlier Ontario Hospital Assocation statement almost comes across as a straw man. The letter spends most of its time arguing against near-total lockdowns such as Ontario experienced from March through June even though almost nobody is currently proposing this - even the OHA statement only advocates a temporary closure of indoor venues such as restaurants and banquet halls in affected areas (albeit including large cities such as Toronto and Ottawa) - with a parenthetical warning about the harms of "rotating" school closures to childrens' health, even though this wasn't really proposed. In fact, the earlier statement explicitly proposed closing food service venues in order to prevent school closures and elective surgery cancellations. Likewise, they mention overdose deaths and social and economic determinants of health as if the broader health sector were oblivious to these or hadn't proposed any solutions. (The current government is quite conservative and broadly opposes overdose prevention, basic income experiments, social housing, etc., so these are unlikely to be realized, so perhaps this is a resigned ultra-realist approach, but in that case, why write it in the first place?)

A cynical part of me wonders whether this letter being circulated by CTV (as opposed to the motivations of those signing it, about which I have no idea) isn't just to give political cover on talk radio and TV news for the government's current wait-and-see approach, which health workers (and progressives generally) are against.

[Slightly unrelated, but potentially relevant given the "doctors say" headline: the government was recently playing radio advertisements explaining how much it "consulted" with the health sector on safely reopening schools but not mentioning the fact that it ignored the main recommendation of reducing class sizes.]

This is rather uncharitable.

Category theory is an essential part of the vocabulary of 20th-century mathematics. Large swaths of algebra, topology, geometry, and logic are fairly inextricably formulated in this language. Similarly, it seems irreplaceable for certain parts of programming language theory (arguably due to its connection to mathematical logic).

There's certainly a community trying to bring a category-theoretic approach into other fields such as statistics, economics, or other areas of computer science, but it's too early to say it's been "quite a few years".

This rather reminds me (very inexactly) of Behavioural Activation Therapy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_activation] although in that case the task intended isn't necessarily inherently disagreeable, simply overwhelming to a person with depression.

A friend has recommended Coecke and Kissinger's book, Picturing Quantum Processes, which takes an alternative conceptual approach to quantum computation based on string diagrams (not-so-secretly a formalism for working with various flavours of monoidal category, as explained in the optional sections) instead of linear algebra.

In my (admittedly PL-influenced) view the primary concepts in programming are:

1) Compositionality - primarily via functions which implement substitution, but also composition of larger program units, e.g. via (ML-style) modules.

2) Recursion and induction -- sure, imperative languages make recursive solutions impractical, but ultimately most data structures (including programs) are defined inductively and algorithms on them are most clearly defined recursively.

3) Abstraction vs. representation (e.g. via existentials/modules, not necessarily or even primarily via OO).

I don't think these things are particularly complicated (although the proper semantics for modules is) but can't be learned overnight.