Weekly Web Harvest for 2022-10-16

worth looking at

When we make a dataset, we operate within specific cultural, political, social, and economic contexts. How we frame a dataset is much the way we frame an image. We have a question we’d like to investigate. We find samples of the world that represent that question. We snap the photo when those samples come into specific alignments.

We record data this way, too. We have questions. We identify where the useful data for answering that question might be. We seek out ways to capture that data. Once captured, we allow machines to contemplate the result, or we work through it ourselves.

It’s only the scale of data that makes AI different. But the data works the same way.

Machines don’t have an unconscious, but they inscribe and communicate the unconscious assumptions that are reflected and embedded into human-assembled datasets.

BU Learning Blocks (BULB) is an innovative way for instructors to create open and iterative educational resources within WordPress using the Gutenberg editor. When installed, you can create lessons–either as stand-alone pages or as an ordered sequence of multiple lesson pages. You can order and arrange BULB question types within pages. You can insert questions directly into multimedia lessons alongside any combination of text, images, and video to test student’s comprehension synchronously while working their way through your lesson.

In this manuscript, we show that any feedforward neural network having piece-wise linear activation functions can be represented as a decision tree. The representation is equivalence and not an approximation, thus keeping the accuracy of the neural network exactly as is. We believe that this work paves the way to tackle the black-box nature of neural networks. We share equivalent trees of some neural networks and show that besides providing interpretability, tree representation can also achieve some computational advantages. The analysis holds both for fully connected and convolutional networks, which may or may not also include skip connections and/or normalizations.

Experts are warning: DO NOT DO THIS. “Being face to face with a bird w [sic] avian flu is a bad idea,” posted Boghuma Kabisen Titanij, a doctor and global health and infectious disease researcher at Emory University. “This is how zoonotic transmissions occur, this is why entire farms cull sick birds. We live with the threat of pandemic flu,” Titanij further explained in her tweet thread on the topic.