Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Over the past several years, some materials have proved to be a playground for physicists. These materials aren’t made of anything special — just normal particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons. But they are more than the sum of their parts. These materials boast a range of remarkable properties and phenomena and have even led physicists to new phases of matter — beyond the solid, gas and liquid phases we’re most familiar with.
A new theory proposes that the quantum properties of an object extend into an “atmosphere” that surrounds the material.
One class of material that especially excites physicists is the topological insulator — and, more broadly, topological phases, whose theoretical foundations earned their discoverers a Nobel Prize in 2016. On the surface of a topological insulator, electrons flow smoothly, while on the inside, electrons are immobile. Its surface is thus a metal-like conductor, yet its interior is a ceramic-like insulator.
This means a host of seemingly ordinary materials might harbor hidden — yet unusual and possibly useful — properties. In a paper recently posted online, Wilczek and Qing-Dong Jiang, a physicist at Stockholm University, propose a new way to discover such properties: by probing a thin aura that surrounds the material, something they’ve dubbed a quantum atmosphere.
‘Quantum Atmospheres’ May Reveal Secrets of Matter
Our big narratives were once capable of more nuance than the pendular swing from euphoria to dysphoria. For every 18th-century Enlightenment story of hope, there was a shadow of decline; in the 19th century, liberals had to joust with conservative and radical prophets of demise. Some even saw crisis as an opportunity. Influenced by Karl Marx, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 made a virtue out of ruin. There could be something creative about bringing down tired old institutions. The late German-born economist Albert O Hirschman thought of disequilibria as a potential source of new thinking. In 1981, he distinguished between two types of crisis: the kind that disintegrates societies and sends members scrambling for the exits, and what he called an ‘integrative crisis’, one in which people together imagine new ways forward.
Why we need to be wary of narratives of economic catastrophe
Self-deception is so curious a thing that it is a source of intrigue in the arts and sciences alike. Biologists such as Robert Trivers, for example, have begun to investigate self-deception’s evolutionary origins, probing its function and potential value.
On the one hand, evidence suggests that specific instances of self-deception can enhance wellbeing and even prolong life. For example, multiple studies have found that optimistic individuals have better survival rates when diagnosed with cancer and other chronic illnesses, whereas ‘realistic acceptance’ of one’s prognosis has been linked to decreased life expectancy. On the other hand, self-deception seems like the ultimate delusion. Simultaneous belief and disbelief in a proposition is surely symptomatic of irrationality, placing one’s mental health and capacity for reason in jeopardy.
the skeptic’s account of self-deception reduces the complexities of human psychology to what is possible at one single moment in time, under the assumption that no sane, cognitively competent person simultaneously believes p and not-p.
Buddhism and self-deception
“Life is movement and the constant morphing of the design of this movement. To be alive is to keep on flowing and morphing. When a system stops flowing and morphing, it is dead… The constructal law teaches us that nothing operates in isolation, every flow system is part of a bigger flow system, shaped by and in service to the world around it.”
“Emotion originally meant movement. This is why even in English when we get emotional we say, ‘I was moved,’ or ‘I was taken aback.’ Emotion, by the way, sends entire peoples to war. Emotion is why cars move out of the showroom… you fall in love with a particular model, and it moves! Movement begins with a decision or a trigger.”
...knowledge “is not possessing information alone, it is know-how, meaning to have the information, but also to put your hand on the handle and move it, that is knowledge.” So information is transformed into knowledge, and this know-how, combined with guts and an emotional trigger, becomes action which opens a valve (in the economy or culture) and therefore allows greater flow. Somehow the doer, or entrepreneur, has granted greater access to a current, whether that current is water, information, technology, money, etc.
At the Intersection of Physics and Emotion
Idle gossip or rumour is personified by the Ancient poets. In Homeric epic, rumour is said to be a messenger of Zeus, rushing along with the crowds of soldiers as they muster, conjuring an image of the way she speeds among people from mouth to mouth, spreading through crowds. Hesiod also portrays her as in some way divine, but equally something of which to be wary, ‘mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of’. The fourth-century Athenian orator Aeschines alludes to gossip about private matters being spread seemingly spontaneously through the city. Ancient people from all walks of life, men and women, free and slave, young and old, were thought to indulge in gossip, ensuring its swift passage to all corners of the city. The propensity for a huge range of members of society to gossip opened up conduits between the lowliest and the mightiest, the weakest and the most powerful.
While Aristotle suggests that gossiping was frequently a trivial, enjoyable pastime, he also makes clear that gossiping could have malicious intent when spoken by someone who has been wronged.
From the Ancient orators, we learn that public places such as shops and marketplaces were useful locations to spread false rumours aimed at discrediting an opponent because of the crowds that gathered there.
Gossip was a powerful tool for the powerless in Ancient Greece
This is a good signal for the future - especially in conjunction with the rise of renewable energy and other transformative technologies that can contribute toward a new political-economic paradigm.
“The brain is the most important reproductive organ,” Lutz asserts. “Once a woman is socialised to have an education and a career, she is socialised to have a smaller family. There’s no going back.”
What goes up: are predictions of a population crisis wrong?
Changing fertility rates challenge dystopian visions and UN projections about the future of our overcrowded planet
The United Nations Population Division projects that numbers will swell to more than 11 billion by the end of this century, almost 4 billion more than are alive today. Where will they live? How will we feed them? How many more of us can our fragile planet withstand?
But a growing body of opinion believes the UN is wrong. We will not reach 11 billion by 2100. Instead, the human population will top out at somewhere between 8 and 9 billion around the middle of the century, and then begin to decline.
Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian academic who decades ago warned of a potential global catastrophe caused by overpopulation, has changed his mind. “The world population will never reach nine billion people,” he now believes. “It will peak at 8 billion in 2040, and then decline.”
Similarly, Prof Wolfgang Lutz and his fellow demographers at Vienna’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict the human population will stabilise by mid-century and then start to go down.
A Deutsche Bank report has the planetary population peaking at 8.7 billion in 2055 and then declining to 8 billion by century’s end.
This is a good signal of the emerging digital environment that will be accessible to all - and also contribute to the article below. What’s amazing is the challenge they are solving can also contribute to self-driving cars.
“The opportunity is bigger than any one of us,” says Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth, who explains that Loon came to learn that the solutions to some of its biggest hurdles were not just about developing better technology, but also about finding the right partners. “During that learning process, we decided that we needed to seek collaboration.” While Loon has worked closely with telecoms to source internet access for its balloon networks in foreign countries, the company has never before licensed out proprietary technology as a packaged software service.
ALPHABET’S LOON SETS ITS SIGHTS ON THE SATELLITE INDUSTRY
Satellite company Telesat will use Loon’s networking software to manage low Earth orbit constellations
Since its secret beginning in 2011, Loon has been pursuing the seemingly quixotic task of bringing internet to the world’s most remote corners via stratospheric helium balloons. Now, after nearly a decade, the Alphabet-owned company is embarking on a new chapter, and it involves acknowledging it cannot accomplish the immense task of bringing billions of people online on its own.
Today, Loon is announcing a partnership with Canadian telecommunications company Telesat in a deal that will see Loon’s custom software service for managing its LTE balloon fleet be put to use controlling Telesat’s new constellation of low Earth orbit satellites. It’s part of Loon’s realization that no one solution will get internet everywhere across the globe and that its technology can benefit a major player in an industry it once viewed as a potential competitor.
As a result of its successful work around the globe, and in helping bring Puerto Rico back online after Hurricane Maria, Loon has become increasingly focused on becoming a proper business, too. Loon started life as one of Google’s moonshot projects, like the Waymo self-driving car program, but it was spun out into a standalone company under Alphabet last year, roughly a year and a half after Westgarth, a telecom industry veteran, took over as CEO.
Many people compare foresight with weather forecasting. And often have paradoxical expectations of total unpredictability (e.g. Chaos) and ever better predictions based on computational analysis. But the key to increased accuracy in weather forecasting is the expansion of real time observation of weather systems. This may be a good metaphor for what the digital environment is enabling to emerge.
Sensitivity to initial conditions limits long-term forecast skill: Details of weather cannot be predicted accurately, even in principle, much beyond 2 weeks. But weather forecasts are not yet strongly constrained by this limit, and the increase in forecast skill has shown no sign of ending. Sensitivity to initial conditions varies greatly in space and time, and an important but largely unsung advance in weather prediction is the growing ability to quantify the forecast uncertainty by using large ensembles of numerical forecasts that each start from slightly different but equally plausible initial states, together with perturbations in model physics.
Advances in weather prediction
Weather forecasts from leading numerical weather prediction centers such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) have also been improving rapidly: A modern 5-day forecast is as accurate as a 1-day forecast was in 1980, and useful forecasts now reach 9 to 10 days into the future (1). Predictions have improved for a wide range of hazardous weather conditions, including hurricanes, blizzards, flash floods, hail, and tornadoes, with skill emerging in predictions of seasonal conditions.
Key developments in observation, numerical modeling, and data assimilation have enabled these advances in forecast skill. Improved observations, particularly by satellite remote sensing of the atmosphere and surface, provide valuable global information many times per day. Much faster and more powerful computers, in conjunction with improved understanding of atmospheric physics and dynamics, allow more-accurate numerical prediction models. Finally, improved techniques for putting data and models together have been developed.
Because data are unavoidably spatially incomplete and uncertain, the state of the atmosphere at any time cannot be known exactly, producing forecast uncertainties that grow into the future. This sensitivity to initial conditions can never be overcome completely. But, by running a model over time and continually adjusting it to maintain consistency with incoming data, the resulting physically consistent predictions greatly improve on simpler techniques. Such data assimilation, often done using four-dimensional variational minimization, ensemble Kalman filters, or hybridized techniques, has revolutionized forecasting.
This is an excellent signal from the Micromobility Conference (An event focused on unbundling the car with lightweight electric vehicles) of one aspect of the emerging transformation of transportation.
Part 2: Disruption
Disruption, with a capital D, is a term of art defined by Clayton Christensen. He said that if a new technology enables a new business model that is sufficiently asymmetric to the incumbent, the incumbent will not attempt to do anything with it. But this new emerging business model will evolve rapidly.
Eventually this new model will overcome the performance limitations and take more and more share from the incumbent and the incumbent will abandon markets and choose to go up market. They will go to a more comfortable location where they can still make continuous profits.
When you look at the segmentation that I put forward from very short distances to very long distances, the automaker will gravitate towards long distances because and bigger vehicles and heavy vehicles and more long-range vehicles are the more profitable vehicles. They will abandon the short distances because they're not profitable. [As evidence consider that in the US Ford and GM have essentially abandoned cars in order to focus on SUVs and pick-up trucks—vehicles associated with rural and suburban travel and disassociated from urban travel.] So this is the classic Disruption where “from below” the scooter becomes a vehicle that is ready to expand its range and its capabilities. Eventually, the entrant takes on more and more kilometers. It begins with one kilometer then goes to 10, then to 15, then to 20.
The interesting thing about the distribution of trips however is that the vast majority are very short and, in fact, the distribution of trips is such that [I've done this calculation for the United States] if you were to take all the trips less than 12 miles they equal, in quantity, in value, in terms of dollars spent, all the miles above 12 miles. That is called the point of parity: at what distance does the value of transportation balance.
This is a weak signal of the possible emergence of new forms of crypto-currencies and the possible motivations for doing so.
The biggest blow to Iran's economy came in November, when some of its banks were barred from SWIFT, the Belgian-based global messaging system that facilitates cross-border payments.
Countries excluded from SWIFT cannot pay for imports or receive payments for exports, leaving them crippled financially, and having to rely on alternative methods of moving money.
Iran inches closer to unveiling state-backed cryptocurrency
Islamic Republic's embrace of virtual currency could provide workaround as its economy takes a hit from US sanctions.
Shut out of the global financial system, Iran is inching closer to a workaround to US sanctions with the possible unveiling of its first state-backed cryptocurrency in the near future.
The virtual currency is anticipated to be announced at the annual two-day Electronic Banking and Payment Systems conference, which kicks off on January 29 in the capital, Tehran. The theme of this year's gathering is "blockchain revolution".
The blockchain is a fixed distributed ledger technology that allows a network of computers to verify transactions between two parties, as opposed to validating them through a trusted, third-party entity.
Details of Iran's new cryptocurrency were revealed last summer, after the Trump administration started reimposing sanctions over alleged "malign activities".
This is a weak but significant signal about advances in the emerging manufacturing paradigm of 3D printing - the 2 min video provides a very good illustration.
Forget everything you know about 3D printing — the ‘replicator’ is here
Rather than building objects layer by layer, the printer creates whole structures by projecting light into a resin that solidifies.
They nicknamed it ‘the replicator’ — in homage to the machines in the Star Trek saga that can materialize virtually any inanimate object.
Researchers have unveiled a 3D printer that creates an entire object at once, rather than building it layer by layer as typical additive-manufacturing devices do — bringing science-fiction a step closer to reality.
The device, described on 31 January in Science, works like a computed tomography (CT) scan in reverse, explains Hayden Taylor, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.
This is a good signal of the continuing transformation of global energy geopolitics - if we thought that solar energy was nearing cost floor - well perhaps the next decade will see an even faster transformation.
'Inkjet' solar panels poised to revolutionise green energy
What if one day all buildings could be equipped with windows and facades that satisfy the structure's every energy need, whether rain or shine?
That sustainability dream is today one step closer to becoming a reality thanks to Polish physicist and businesswoman Olga Malinkiewicz.
The 36-year-old has developed a novel inkjet processing method for perovskites—a new generation of cheaper solar cells—that makes it possible to produce solar panels under lower temperatures, thus sharply reducing costs.
Solar panels coated with the mineral are light, flexible, efficient, inexpensive and come in varying hues and degrees of transparency.
They can easily be fixed to almost any surface—be it laptop, car, drone, spacecraft or building—to produce electricity, including in the shade or indoors.
This is a strong signal of new forms of drugs arising from new technologies.
5 Major Drug Breakthroughs That Happened in 2018
The pharmaceutical industry churns out dozens of new drugs and biological products every year. Most are small tweaks to something previously approved by the FDA—so called “me-too” alternatives, which are different formulations of a drug, or the exact same molecule used for another medical condition.
But 2018 saw the birth of a select few players that completely changed the game: first-of-their-kind treatments that have never before been used in clinics, or previously untameable disorders that finally met their chemical matches.
We’ve previously reported on the highlights: for example, patisiran, a drug for inherited nerve damage, is the first gene silencing therapy based on RNA interference.
But there are plenty more. Here are the top five novel treatments approved by the FDA this year—and what they herald for the road ahead.
This is still a weak signal with great promise - for solving the emerging threat to antibiotic resistant bacteria and fungi.
Microbes hitched to insects provide a rich source of new antibiotics
the same class of bacteria that gave us many of our antibiotics, known as Streptomyces, makes a home not just in the soil but all over, including on insects. Cameron Currie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of bacteriology, has shown that some of these insect-associated microbes provide their hosts with protection against infections, suggesting that insects and their microbiomes may be a rich new source of antibiotics for use in human medicine.
So with a team of collaborators, Currie set out to test that idea, thousands of times over. In an exhaustive search of microbes from more than 1,400 insects collected from diverse environments across North and South America, Currie's team found that insect-borne microbes often outperformed soil bacteria in stopping some of the most common and dangerous antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
In their work, the scientists discovered a new antibiotic from a Brazilian fungus-farming ant, naming it cyphomycin. Cyphomycin was effective in lab tests against fungi resistant to most other antibiotics and combatted fungal infections without causing toxic side effects in a mouse model. The researchers have submitted a patent based on cyphomycin because of its effectiveness in these early tests, setting up the team to begin to do the significant additional work required before cyphomycin could be developed into a new drug used in the clinic.
The study is the largest and most thorough to assess insect-associated microbes for antibiotic activity to date.
The work was published Jan. 31 in the journal Nature Communications. The study was led by Currie lab graduate student Marc Chevrette with collaborators in the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy, the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and several other institutions in North and South America.
And one more signal bringing hope against the emerging threat of antibacterial resistance.
Lysin therapy offers new hope for fighting drug-resistant bacteria
for almost 20 years Rockefeller's Vincent A. Fischetti has been developing a novel form of antimicrobial ammunition known as lysins. Now, these bacteria-killing enzymes have been studied in a phase II human clinical trial, becoming the first antibiotic alternatives to achieve successful outcomes in this stage of clinical development.
Natural born killer
Some viruses are very good at killing bacteria. Known as bacteriophages, or simply phages, these viruses infect a microbe, replicate inside of it, and then produce lysin enzymes, which cleave the bacterium's cell wall. As a result, progeny phages are released from within the bacterium, and the bacterium itself perishes.
Following a phase I clinical trial showing that exebacase did not lead to any serious side effects in humans, ContraFect advanced the research into a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II study of hospitalized patients with S. aureus bacteremia, approximately one third of whom had MRSA. 116 of these patients were randomly assigned to receive either exebacase or placebo, in addition to antibiotic therapy, and were followed for fourteen days. The researchers found that the rate of treatment response was more than 40 percent higher for MRSA patients receiving exebacase than for those treated with antibiotics alone—a result Fischetti views as very encouraging not only for exebacase, but for lysins at large.
"This is the first time a lysin-based drug has gone this far in clinical development. In fact, there is no antibiotic alternative that has ever successfully completed phase II trials," he says. "More work needs to be done, but this study is very promising."
Another signal of the emerging potential of transdisciplinary assemblages of technology and concepts to mitigate wellbeing and enhance humans. There’s a 1 min video demonstration.
Tiny microbots fold like origami to travel through the human body
Tiny robots modeled after bacteria could be used to deliver drugs to hard to reach areas of the human body. Scientists at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have developed what they call elastic microbots that can change shape depending on their environment.
When a patient needs medication, traditionally it is given orally or intravenously and the body’s systems will carry the medicine to the part of the body where it is needed. But recent developments in the field of targeted drug delivery have helped to ensure that medication is delivered to the specific area where it is required, with a higher concentration of the medication in some places. The development of elastic robots could potentially revolutionize targeted drug delivery by making it possible to deliver medication to any area of the body, even those that are difficult to access.
This is a good signal of the possibilities of real-time assistance that our mobile platforms will continue to enable.
Google is launching two new apps for Android phones that will help deaf people
Google has launched two new features for Android phones aimed at helping people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
First up: Live Transcribe is an app that uses a smartphone’s microphone to transcribe speech in real time, letting people with hearing loss read a text version of what was said. It works in 70 different languages. If you want to try it, you’ll need to sign up via the Google Play Store to be notified when it launches to the public.
Secondly: The Sound Amplifier app is designed to improve the clarity of speech around you by filtering out ambient and unwanted noise. Cleverly, it won’t increase the volume of sounds that are already loud. It basically turns your smartphone (and headphones) into a hearing aid. It was first announced in May at Google’s annual developer conference but is available now. It works without an internet connection, unlike Live Transcribe.
Privacy promise: Google says that it is not saving transcripts of conversations, and it isn’t storing any of the audio or text data on its servers.
Language services: The announcement is another indication of Google’s ambitions within the field of natural-language processing and machine learning. It launched a live translation add-on to Google Assistant called Interpreter Mode last month, for example.
This is an interesting weak signal - we should all be familiar with the importance of our own microbial profile as well as those of productive soil. But this could signal a whole new way to build our roads, cars and buildings.
To protect concrete from road salt, Drexel engineers have an odd idea: bacteria
That is where the Drexel research on bacteria comes in. Farnam and his colleagues knew that microbially treated “bio-cement” had been studied as a way to repair cracks in concrete. They decided to try making concrete with bacteria to prevent the cracks from occurring in the first place.
The bacteria they used, called S. pasteurii, alters the conditions inside concrete in such a way that when calcium chloride is applied as road salt, the byproduct is not harmful calcium oxychloride, but calcium carbonate — the scientific term for limestone. The bacteria accomplish this feat in part by producing an enzyme that raises the pH of the surrounding material, said Drexel’s Sales, an environmental engineer.
Compared with the regular variety, concrete made with microbially enhanced cement did not crack when treated with calcium chloride, said Farnam, an assistant professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at Drexel. The team envisions using the bacteria and nutrients in new roadways, not for treating existing ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment