Let's Watch: 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution - Eörs Szathmáry

This post is supposed to be a prequel to my upcoming post on the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. Eörs Szathmáry is a good lecturer and the lecture gives a very clean overview of the origin of self-replication, evolvability, and the relation of evolution with learning theory. I am reading about this, because I think AI might cause another major transition in evolution in a similar way.

This post will give annotations, references, and comments, to read along the lecture.

The "10-on-10" comes from Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10, of which this lecture is a part:

These seminars would begin $10^{10}$ years ago with the origin of the universe, then move on to the beginnings of biological life $10^9$ years ago, and so on, up to the development of modern human society in the present time, or $10^1$ years.

Michal Kosinski's researches, and manipulation of human behavior

Michal Kosinski's research papers.

First gonna list the two papers of Kosinski in 2013 that generated lots of talking.

Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior (2013), by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel.

... Facebook Likes... predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender... dataset of over 58,000 volunteers... 

Manifestations of user personality in website choice and behaviour on online social networks (2013), Michal Kosinski et al.

... a sample of over 1/3 million users... their website choices and Facebook profile features, relates to their ... standard Five Factor Model personality questionnaire. 

Wait... DEVIANTART???

Let's watch: ColdFusion videos

Today we'll just watch a bunch of videos.

The Strange Story of the Mp3 Player (begins at 1:50)
Portable music players were invented in 1979 by Kane Kramer and the way it distributes music without the internet was basically transmitting over the telephone-net at terminal vending machines in bars and music stores and such. It went bankrupt though.
Saehan made MPMan in 1998. RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia in 1998 over its MP3 player but lost, and this very publicized case made MP3 players popular. iPod, 2001, made it super popular.
Kramer got acknowledged as original inventor of iPod by Apple for some legal reasons.