What Happens When the World is on Fire

John Valliant reports that dangerous blazes are occurring globally, from America to Algeria, signaling an age ablaze. Simultaneously, a technical experiment reveals that a small convolutional network outperforms a flatten-and-feed-it-forward network by 7.0 points on CIFAR-10. However, when image rows are shuffled using a fixed permutation, this margin drops to 0.3. This demonstrates that the advantage provided by convolutions, pooling, normalisation, and skip connections relies heavily on the spatial structure of data.