Four short links: 16 August 2017
IoT Hacking, Virtual School Fails, Neural Network NLP, and Using Logical Fallacies
- Reverse-Engineering IoT Devices — nice step-by-step of how the author figures out the protocol used by a Bluetooth lightbulb (oh to live in such times) and thus how to control it without the Approved Software.
- Of Course Virtual Schools Don’t Work — that graph. The horror. Once seen, cannot unsee (or ever claim virtual schools are a good idea).
- A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing — This tutorial surveys neural network models from the perspective of natural language processing research, in an attempt to bring natural-language researchers up to speed with the neural techniques. The tutorial covers input encoding for natural language tasks, feed-forward networks, convolutional networks, recurrent networks and recursive networks, as well as the computation graph abstraction for automatic gradient computation.
- Effective Presentations Using Applied Logical Fallacies — what I also got out of this Informal Logic course was that here were a huge list of classically tested brain shortcuts that are surprisingly effective. Sure, they only work if you’ve turned off some of your critical thinking skills […] but we’re predisposed to do this all the time! Why? Because critical thinking takes effort and time, and you’re presented with probably hundreds of arguments or bits of reasoning every day, and it would be expensive to evaluate them all deeply. So, we brain shortcut when it’s mostly safe to do so. This is really good!
