Scientists must publish less, says Daniel Sarewitz, or good research will be swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work.

Source: The pressure to publish pushes down quality : Nature News & Comment

Deep Gate Recurrent Neural Network

This paper introduces two recurrent neural network structures called Simple Gated Unit (SGU) and Deep Simple Gated Unit (DSGU), which are general structures for learning long term dependencies. Compared to traditional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), both structures require fewer parameters and less computation time in sequence classification tasks. Unlike GRU and LSTM, which require more than one gates to control information flow in the network, SGU and DSGU only use one multiplicative gate to control the flow of information. We show that this difference can accelerate the learning speed in tasks that require long dependency information. We also show that DSGU is more numerically stable than SGU. In addition, we also propose a standard way of representing inner structure of RNN called RNN Conventional Graph (RCG), which helps analyzing the relationship between input units and hidden units of RNN.

Source: [1604.02910v3] Deep Gate Recurrent Neural Network

We, as an industry, are going to a dangerous place when we don’t just expect, but require people to keep working after work.

Neglecting candidates for a position because they don’t contribute to open-source projects; choosing who to fire on the basis of who has a pet project and who doesn’t; expecting employees to keep up with new technologies, frameworks and languages entirely on their own; etc.

The problem

This happens because somehow the belief that only people who code (for free) after work are passionate and/or good developers has become a “truth”.

Here are more realistic truths, however:

• Only a very specific demographic can afford to work for free after work.
• It’s in the interest of companies that their employees keep learning and are up-to-date. Companies should provide resources for this to happen.
• There are excellent developers who have a life outside work.
• There are excellent developers who have responsibilites outside work.
• There are excellent developers who didn’t teach themselves programming when they were 12 years old.

Life happens. People meet other people who become partners. People have kids. People build families. Developers are people.

One could think that having kids or building a family is a choice. Even assuming this is true (it really isn’t), life still happens. A parent grows old and needs daily care. You might develop a mental illness, like depression, and have zero energy after a long day at work to do more work. You might suffer a traffic accident and must spend 2 hours a day on rehab for a year.

Who can afford to keep coding after an 8-hour work day of coding? Who doesn’t get harassed in the open-source community? 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to “buy” more free time (i.e: nannies, cleaners, good healthcare, a car to commute, etc.).

And this leads to the question…

How can I be a good developer without coding 24/7?

Source: Top developers can have a life outside coding

Bill Gates reviews the book “The Vital Question” by author Nick Lane

Source: This Biology Book Blew Me Away | Bill Gates

In this short article I share with you some of the experiences, challenges and achievements of this PhD journey. I’m hoping this article will somehow help, motivate or inspire you or someone out there to do a part-time MSc or PhD besides all your/their other commitments. It’s not easy and the journey is not without difficulties, but if you have the passion about what you are going to research, then it’s doable and fun.

Source: How I Satisfied My Passion for Software Development and Open-Source by Doing a Part-Time PhD | IT with Passion

Thoughts on the future of Python and graphical interfaces

Source: A Python Ate My GUI — Medium

Parlez-vous francais? If you answered yes, then you’re well on your way to enjoying the many benefits of bilingualism. Speaking both English and French, for example, can enrich your cultural experiences in multilingual destinations like Belgium, Morocco, or Egypt, and broaden your access to books, music, and films.

But the benefits of speaking another language aren’t limited to just cultural perks. “Studies have shown that bilingual individuals consistently outperform their monolingual counterparts on tasks involving executive control,” says Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive psychologist at York University. In other words, speaking more than one language can improve your ability to pay attention, plan, solve problems, or switch between tasks (like making sure you don’t miss your freeway exit while attending to your kids in the back seat). You may think it’s just higher intelligence that underlies these benefits, but evidence suggests otherwise. A 2014 study, for example, showed that those who learned a second language, in youth or adulthood, had better executive functions than those who didn’t, even after accounting for childhood IQ.

But the benefits don’t end there. Being bilingual, or multilingual, could lead to a longer, higher quality life. In a paper published in March, Bialystok and colleagues report that older individuals who speak more than one language have better cognitive performance and a later onset—around 4 to 5 years—of dementia than their monolingual peers. These striking cognitive benefits have profound public health implications. Delaying the onset of dementia by just a few years would drastically reduce rates of Alzheimer’s disease, which currently affects over 5 million Americans, and could cut healthcare costs by a third. “At present, the best defense against dementia is the set of stimulating cognitive activities that are considered to supply ‘cognitive reserve,’ things such as social groups, crossword puzzles, etc,” Bialystok says. “Bilingualism is another such activity but has the unique bonus of also enabling someone to speak another language—something that is certainly a net benefit in life.”
Source: Speaking Multiple Languages Staves Off Dementia – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus

sudo snap install telegram-sergiusens

Source: A Telegram Snap Package Is Available on Ubuntu 16.04 – OMG! Ubuntu!