Oldest Papers
𝜆ₛ: computable semantics for differentiable programming with higher-order functions and datatypes
Benjamin Sherman, Jesse Michel, Michael Carbin
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages·2021·7 citations
<jats:p>Deep learning is moving towards increasingly sophisticated optimization objectives that employ higher-order functions, such as integration, continuous optimization, and root-finding. Since differentiable programming frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow do not have first-class representations of these functions, developers must reason about the semantics of such objectives and manually translate them to differentiable code.</jats:p>
<jats:p>
We present a differentiable programming language, λ
<jats:sub>
<jats:italic>S</jats:italic>
</jats:sub>
, that is the first to deliver a semantics for higher-order functions, higher-order derivatives, and Lipschitz but nondifferentiable functions. Together, these features enableλ
<jats:sub>
<jats:italic>S</jats:italic>
</jats:sub>
to expose differentiable, higher-order functions for integration, optimization, and root-finding as first-class functions with automatically computed derivatives. λ
<jats:sub>
<jats:italic>S</jats:italic>
</jats:sub>
’s semantics is computable, meaning that values can be computed to arbitrary precision, and we implement λ
<jats:sub>
<jats:italic>S</jats:italic>
</jats:sub>
as an embedded language in Haskell.
</jats:p>
<jats:p>
We use λ
<jats:sub>
<jats:italic>S</jats:italic>
</jats:sub>
to construct novel differentiable libraries for representing probability distributions, implicit surfaces, and generalized parametric surfaces – all as instances of higher-order datatypes – and present case studies that rely on computing the derivatives of these higher-order functions and datatypes. In addition to modeling existing differentiable algorithms, such as a differentiable ray tracer for implicit surfaces, without requiring any user-level differentiation code, we demonstrate new differentiable algorithms, such as the Hausdorff distance of generalized parametric surfaces.
</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →“Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated”: Behavior Genetics in the Postgenomic Era
K. Paige Harden
Annual Review of Psychology·2021·64 citations
<jats:p>Behavior genetics studies how genetic differences among people contribute to differences in their psychology and behavior. Here, I describe how the conclusions and methods of behavior genetics have evolved in the postgenomic era in which the human genome can be directly measured. First, I revisit the first law of behavioral genetics stating that everything is heritable, and I describe results from large-scale meta-analyses of twin data and new methods for estimating heritability using measured DNA. Second, I describe new methods in statistical genetics, including genome-wide association studies and polygenic score analyses. Third, I describe the next generation of work on gene × environment interaction, with a particular focus on how genetic influences vary across sociopolitical contexts and exogenous environments. Genomic technology has ushered in a golden age of new tools to address enduring questions about how genes and environments combine to create unique human lives.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →Care in practice: negotiations regarding care for the elderly in multigenerational Arab Muslim families in Denmark
Abir Mohamad Ismail
Contemporary Islam·2021·21 citations
Recent studies conclude that ethnic minority families in Denmark tend to be dismissive of senior housing and municipal homecare services for elderly family members. A large proportion of Muslim minority families in Denmark attach great importance to caring for the elderly as a tradition and prefer to take care of their own elderly family members at home. Nevertheless, the fact that morality, incentives, and obligations in relation to care for the elderly may be legitimized and/or contested with reference to cultural traditions and Islam has not received much attention in current research. In this article, drawing on material from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among Arab Muslim families in Denmark, I discuss how cultural and religious backgrounds may determine and influence perceptions and behavior regarding care for the elderly. By observing and engaging in the everyday life of an Arab Muslim family, I explore how caring for elderly people with health problems at home raises specific questions about obligations and triggers negotiations across genders and generations. I argue that besides kinship and ethnicity, it is equally important to consider religiosity in an attempt to learn more about how Arab Muslims care for their elderly family members.
★ 4.0 (1)
View paper →Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity
William Fedus, Barret Zoph, Noam Shazeer
arXiv·2021
In deep learning, models typically reuse the same parameters for all inputs. Mixture of Experts (MoE) defies this and instead selects different parameters for each incoming example. The result is a sparsely-activated model -- with outrageous numbers of parameters -- but a constant computational cost. However, despite several notable successes of MoE, widespread adoption has been hindered by complexity, communication costs and training instability -- we address these with the Switch Transformer. We simplify the MoE routing algorithm and design intuitive improved models with reduced communication and computational costs. Our proposed training techniques help wrangle the instabilities and we show large sparse models may be trained, for the first time, with lower precision (bfloat16) formats. We design models based off T5-Base and T5-Large to obtain up to 7x increases in pre-training speed with the same computational resources. These improvements extend into multilingual settings where we measure gains over the mT5-Base version across all 101 languages. Finally, we advance the current scale of language models by pre-training up to trillion parameter models on the "Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus" and achieve a 4x speedup over the T5-XXL model.
No ratings yet
View paper →Infant temperament prospectively predicts general psychopathology in childhood
Santiago Morales, Alva Tang, Maureen E. Bowers, Natalie V. Miller, George A. Buzzell, Elizabeth Smith, Kaylee Seddio, Heather A. Henderson, Nathan A. Fox
Development and Psychopathology·2021·26 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Recent models of psychopathology suggest the presence of a general factor capturing the shared variance among all symptoms along with specific psychopathology factors (e.g., internalizing and externalizing). However, few studies have examined predictors that may serve as transdiagnostic risk factors for general psychopathology from early development. In the current study we examine, for the first time, whether observed and parent-reported infant temperament dimensions prospectively predict general psychopathology as well as specific psychopathology dimensions (e.g., internalizing and externalizing) across childhood. In a longitudinal cohort (<jats:italic>N</jats:italic>= 291), temperament dimensions were assessed at 4 months of age. Psychopathology symptoms were assessed at 7, 9, and 12 years of age. A bifactor model was used to estimate general, internalizing, and externalizing psychopathology factors. Across behavioral observations and parent-reports, higher motor activity in infancy significantly predicted greater general psychopathology in mid to late childhood. Moreover, low positive affect was predictive of the internalizing-specific factor. Other temperament dimensions were not related with any of the psychopathology factors after accounting for the general psychopathology factor. The results of this study suggest that infant motor activity may act as an early indicator of transdiagnostic risk. Our findings inform the etiology of general psychopathology and have implications for the early identification for children at risk for psychopathology.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →A silent public health threat: emergence of Mayaro virus and co-infection with Dengue in Peru
Miguel Angel Aguilar-Luis, Juana del Valle-Mendoza, Isabel Sandoval, Wilmer Silva-Caso, Fernando Mazulis, Hugo Carrillo-Ng, Yordi Tarazona-Castro, Johanna Martins-Luna, Ronald Aquino-Ortega, Isaac Peña-Tuesta, Angela Cornejo-Tapia, Luis J. del Valle
BMC Research Notes·2021·23 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:sec>
<jats:title>Objective</jats:title>
<jats:p>To describe frequency and clinical characteristics of MAYV infection in Piura, as well as the association of this pathogen with DENV.</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
<jats:sec>
<jats:title>Results</jats:title>
<jats:p>A total of 86/496 (17.3%) cases of MAYV were detected, of which 54 were MAYV mono-infection and 32 were co-infection with DENV, accounting for 10.9% and 6.4%, respectively. When evaluating monoinfection by MAYV the main groups were 18–39 and 40–59 years old, with 25.9% and 20.4% respectively. Co-infections were more common in the age group 18–39 and those > 60 years old, with 34.4% and 21.9%, respectively. The most frequent clinical presentation were headaches (94.4%, 51/54) followed by arthralgias (77.8%, 42/54). During the 8-month study period the most cases were identified in the months of May (29.1%) and June (50.0%).</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
No ratings yet
View paper →The Seductions of Clarity
C. Thi Nguyen
2021
The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early — before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies.
No ratings yet
View paper →The Universal Value of Teacher Education for Inclusive Education
Lani Florian
Handbuch Inklusion international / International Handbook of Inclusive Education·2021·16 citations
No abstract available
No ratings yet
View paper →The Evolution of “Sinicisation” | Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
FANGYI CHENG
Cambridge Core·2021
This paper traces the history and usage of the theory of Sinicisation in western and Chinese scholarship, and discusses the intellectual trends underlying the different discourses in which the theory has been adopted. Since early 20th Century, the theory of “Sinicisation” has evolved and was adopted into three distinct historiographical discourses to construct different arguments. The first discourse is about the historical acculturation of border peoples and assimilation of domestic peoples to Chinese language, culture and economic life; the second one argues an inherent superiority in Chinese culture specifically produced cultural change across eastern Eurasia to promote nationalism; the third discourse emphasizes the diversity and mixture of the people living inside historical and contemporary China to construct and stabilise the polity. Every discourse rooted in its own intellectual trend, and also faces different criticism. Followed with examining criticisms of Sinicisation since the 1950s, this paper concludes by discussing the relationships of the three discourses of Sinicisation.
★ 3.0 (1)
View paper →A lethal imitation game? Exploring links among psychoactive substance use, self-harming behaviors and celebrity worship
Unknown Author
sciencedirect.com·2021
No abstract available
★ 4.0 (1)
View paper →Making sense of teacher agency for change with social and epistemic network analysis
Nataša Pantić, Sarah Galey, Lani Florian, Srećko Joksimović, Gil Viry, Dragan Gašević, Helén Knutes Nyqvist, Krystallia Kyritsi
Journal of Educational Change·2021·42 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Reference to teachers as agents of change has become commonplace in the education literature, including change toward more inclusive practice in response to the changing demographic of schooling. Yet, little is known about how teacher agency relates to (1) their understanding of, and commitment to any given change agenda and (2) the institutional and social structures through which they are able to access knowledge and resources within and beyond their schools. This study combined social and epistemic network analysis to examine teachers’ understanding of change and their sense of agency as they use their social networks to mobilise support for furthering change that matters to them. Our study is the first to apply this learning analytic approach in a real setting context. We used theories of teacher agency and inclusive pedagogy to interpret teachers’ social interactions in light of the extent to which they seek to make a difference toward greater inclusion. We collected data with an online log completed by teachers and other staff in two schools in Sweden over 6 months. The findings suggest that teachers understanding of change is embedded in their day-to-day activities such as student support, lesson planning, improvement of programs, and working conditions. Teachers tend to exercise agency toward inclusion when they seek to support student learning and well-being. When teachers act as agents of change, their social networks are bigger, more diverse and more collaborative than in situations in which they act as role implementers. We discuss substantive and methodological implications of these findings.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →Gender, Widowhood and Female Solidarity: A Study on Female Friendships of later-life widows
Sayendri Panchadhyayi
Research on Ageing and Social Policy·2021·3 citations
<jats:p>Friendship is an intrinsic aspect of living across generations. However, the significance of friendship for the silver generation has received limited attention from gerontological studies in India. Considering that widowhood is accompanied by loneliness, bereavement and stigma, I am interested to understand the implications of widowhood for elderly women and to what extent friendship has the potential in countering and negotiating with ageing and widowhood. This is further important in demystifying the myth of transient nature of female friendship and illuminate on the spaces of female solidarity. The study has incorporated qualitative interviewing and oral narratives administered through semi-structured questionnaire conducted in the setting of the respective residence of the respondents. It was found that the social context of ageing and the structural context shape the experiences of friendship. Friendship can be low maintenance for these women; however a friend is one through interaction with whom one derives equanimity contentment and meaning for leading life without the presence of spouse. They challenged the notion of normative understanding of friendship by identifying kin members sometimes across generations as friends. Female friendship is not fragile and they feel that it is more intense and laden with emotions compared to male friendship.</jats:p>
No ratings yet
View paper →