Merry New Year, Checkers! This week, Adam takes the night off while Darren and honorary TRC’er Dallas Card join the Toronto crew in the flesh for another fun and informative show. Darren kicks off the festivities by revisiting the sometimes misunderstood cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dallas delves into deep artificial neural networks and debunks some myths around machine learning. Finally, Cristina examines whether the British really deserve the rep of having bad teeth.
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Dunning-Kruger Effect
Wikipedia Dunning-Kruger Effect
Deep Learning
Deep Mind reinforcement learning (Atari video games) paper:
Image recognition challenge examples
History of Deep Learning (paywalled)
Additional discussion of the relevant background
Do The British Have Bad Teeth?
YouTube: Simpsons Big Book of British Smiles
British Medical Journal Podcast
Washington Post: American teeth are as bad as British teeth
The NHS doesn’t give free dental health care to most people.
An interesting thought on the British bad teeth segment and its possible origin during World War 2, due to American soldiers stationed in the United Kingdom comparing their teeth to the British population. I note the initial U.S. military physical screening rejected candidates with really bad dental problems (from Mobilization Requirements MR1-9 “A minimum of 3 serviceable natural masticating teeth above and three below opposing and three serviceable natural incisors above and three below opposing. (Therefore the minimum requirements consist of a total of 6 masticating teeth and 6 incisor teeth.) All of these teeth must be so opposed as to serve the purpose of incision and mastication.”). Thus U.S. troops shipped to England with relatively good teeth go to the pub and one of them says “Wow, the bar staff here have dentition like the cast of The Walking Dead” and the others chime in about how it seems their teeth look so much better than the average Brits. Overhearing this the publican says “Blimey guv’ you’ve committed the sin of unrepresentative sampling and anachronistic pop-culture referencing to boot”. It would be interesting to see how the dental health of the general populations of both nations at that time stacked up.