Four short links: 24 July 2017
Productivity Growth, Tree-Based Learning, Google's TCP Improvement, and Computational Psychology
- Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? — The growth of difficult-to-automate service activities may explain some of the productivity slowdown. Britain’s flat productivity reflects a combination of rapid automation in some sectors and rapid growth of low-productivity, low-wage jobs – such as Deliveroo drivers riding around on plain old-fashioned bicycles. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that eight of the ten fastest-growing job categories are low-wage services such as personal care and home health aides.
- A Practical Guide to Tree-Based Learning Algorithms — These algorithms empower predictive models with high accuracy, stability and ease of interpretation. Unlike linear models, they map non-linear relationships quite well. Common examples of tree based models are: decision trees, random forest, and boosted trees.
- BBR Explainer — Short version: Google changed the TCP implementation (their network stack) and now your YouTube videos, Google websites, Google Cloud applications, etc. download a lot faster and smoother. Oh, and it doesn’t get in the way of other websites that haven’t made the switch. (Subtext: another feature of Google Cloud that doesn’t exist at AWS or Azure. Nothing to turn on, no extra charge.)
- Computational Psychiatry in Borderline Personality Disorder (arXiv) — growth in use of computational methods to diagnose disorders. (via the explainer in MIT TR)
