Basic recommendations for book design.

Ulf Hermjakob et al., “Translating a Language You Don’t Know in the Chinese Room,” in Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations, 2018, 62–67.

Chad M. Topaz et al., “Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museums,” PLOS ONE 14, no. 3 (March 20, 2019): e0212852, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212852. Abstract: The U.S. art museum sector is grappling with diversity. While previous work has investigated the demographic diversity of museum staffs and visitors, the diversity of artists in their collections has remained unreported. We conduct the first large-scale study of artist diversity in museums. By scraping the public online catalogs of 18 major U.S. museums, deploying a sample of 10,000 artist records comprising over 9,000 unique artists to crowdsourcing, and analyzing 45,000 responses, we infer artist genders, ethnicities, geographic origins, and birth decades. Our results are threefold. First, we provide estimates of gender and ethnic diversity at each museum, and overall, we find that 85% of artists are white and 87% are men. Second, we identify museums that are outliers, having significantly higher or lower representation of certain demographic groups than the rest of the pool. Third, we find that the relationship between museum collection mission and artist diversity is weak, suggesting that a museum wishing to increase diversity might do so without changing its emphases on specific time periods and regions. Our methodology can be used to broadly and efficiently assess diversity in other fields.

Steps towards playing arbitrary text-based games. From the first paragraph: "Text-based games are complex, interactive simulations in which text describes the game state and players make progress by entering text actions. They can be seen as sequential decision making tasks where accomplishing certain goals earns rewards (points). Solving these games requires both Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques."

Interesting project. Seems to have a pay-to-access data download available.

Great reporting. Firm evidence that Apple is not genuinely committed to user privacy. Contradicts Apple's public-facing marketing and PR. Apple dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices at the request of the FBI. '“They decided they weren’t going to poke the bear anymore,” the person said, referring to Apple’s court battle with the FBI in 2016 over access to an iPhone ...'

"Less-educated Americans born in the 1960s fare much worse than those born 20 years earlier due to wage changes, shorter life expectancy, and higher medical costs"

Lewis estate refuses to license intellectual monopoly rights. Spufford prints 75 and gives them to friends.

"Recently, critics of world literature such as Alexander Beecroft, Eric Hayot, and Haun Saussy have argued that a multitude of possible literary worlds make up the world of world literature. Literary worlds theory provides a richer and more relativistic account of how literary production and analysis work than do similar models such as Franco Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s world literary systems. However, the theory runs into two difficulties: it downplays the socio-historical situation of the critic and the text; and it has difficulty accounting for the cross-world identity of characters and how logically inconsistent worlds access one another. To refine the theory, I modify G.E.R. Lloyd’s concept of the “multidimensionality” of reality and literature. Strengthening Lloyd’s concept through reference to recent work in comparative East-West philosophy, I contend that the addition of Lloyd’s theory resolves the problems presented above while still allowing for a relativistic critical approach to world literature."

Introduction to contemporary Chinese sci-fi writers (from January 2019).

"More to the point, world literature is a phenomenon of the southern United States. The 11 southern states contained only 14 percent of the nation’s population, but they accounted for half of our adopters."

"Stanley and Me" by Stephen Ramsay. Ramsey on Stanley Fish's "What's the Matter with Stylistics" articles. Preserved by the Internet Archive.

Abstract: """Ongoing innovations in recurrent neural network architectures have provided a steady influx of apparently state-of-the-art results on language modelling benchmarks. However, these have been evaluated using differing code bases and limited computational resources, which represent uncontrolled sources of experimental variation. We reevaluate several popular architectures and regularisation methods with large-scale automatic black-box hyperparameter tuning and arrive at the somewhat surprising conclusion that standard LSTM architectures, when properly regularised, outperform more recent models. We establish a new state of the art on the Penn Treebank and Wikitext-2 corpora, as well as strong baselines on the Hutter Prize dataset."""