Saturday, August 31, 2019

The Hive, Second Formic War, book 2 by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston


The plot, dialogue, characters, and story-telling are all fantastic (as usual).  There were some celestial mechanics issues that irked me a little but then again the tech includes the "ansible" as it is set the Ender universe. The ending is a little abrupt and book 3 is not out yet.  So now we wait. 5/5 Stars.

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Frost Kriminalhörspiel


Diese Geschichte war sehr gut. Das Schauspiel, Timing und die Postproduktion waren ebenfalls großartig.Die Zusammenfassung  war zu kurz. 4/5 Sterne.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Best SF Six by Edmund Crispin


All of these stories from 1964 - 1965 were "literary" and most of them are very dated with terrible science (even for their own era) and depressing themes / plot lines. 1/5 stars.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari


I did not like this one as much as his other books.  The Buddhist proselytism and weak scholarship are more glaring and grating.  And his ridiculous use of perceptive certainty right after describing how consciousness is illusory and manufactured emphasizes his lazy metaphysics.  But Harari is a great writer and has some original, fun ideas.  3/5 Stars.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Recursion by Blake Crouch


Great plot and story line with terrible science and a little deus est machina in the magic system. The discovery of key "spells" (pseudo-science technique) in the magic system is a mystery that enhances the story.  3/5 stars.  I prefer hard science and space opera.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Am Ende Aller Zeiten von Adrian Walker


Die Geschichte ist sehr deprimierend und die Wissenschaft ist schlecht. Aber die Handlungsgeschichte und die Ur-Soziologie sind ziemlich gut. 2/5 Sterne.

State of the Art of Automated Machine Learning

Here is a good survey paper of the current state of automated machine learning (AutoML).

Humans take too long to analyze, research, craft, iterate, and try out deep learning approaches to business and research problems.  So the machine learning community is creating "AutoML" methods to accelerate the process.

It takes forever to figure out our dirty data, bizarre distributions, what to do with insufficient learning data.  AutoML to the rescue:


"the distribution of web data can be extremely different from the target dataset, which would increase the difficulty of training the model. A common solution is to fine-tune these web data [66], [67]. Yang et al. [52] an iterative algorithm for model training and web data filtering. Additionally, dataset imbalance is also a common problem, because there probably are only a small number of web data for some special classes. To solve this problem, Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) [68] was proposed to synthesize new minority samples between existing real minority samples instead of up-sampling them or down-sampling the majority samples. Guo et al. [69] propose to combines boosting method with data generation to enhance the generalization and robustness of the model against imbalanced data sets."

And the algorithms can auto-tune themselves:


It gets better.  Genetic Algorithms are back!  You can automatically evolve your model for survival and "fitness."  Here is a simple method called "sequential model-based optimization (SMBO):


It is worth skimming the paper to catch up on what is happening.

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Fwd: Noumenon Infinity


I didn't like the characters or the universe (bad science) but the story was interesting. 2/5 stars.