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:
Fixing Private Sector Capitalism? The popular solution in the United States is to fix capitalism. Proposals abound for what can be called adjectival capitalism: Progressive Capitalism, Breakthrough Capitalism, Caring Capitalism, Conscious Capitalism, Inclusive Capitalism, Regenerative Capitalism, Sustainable Capitalism, and best of all, Democratic Capitalism (capitalism being the noun, democracy the adjective). Methinks that capitalism doth propose too much. How in the world did this word capitalism, essentially about the funding of private enterprises, become the be all and end all of human existence? (Ask an economist.)
A society can stand tall when it is supported by the solid legs of respected governments in the public sector, responsible businesses in the private sector, and robust communities in the plural sector.
What is this plural sector? It is all those associations that are neither public nor private—owned neither by the state nor by private investors. Some are owned by their members, as in cooperatives; others are owned by no-one, such as NGOs, clubs, foundations, charities, religious orders, and not-for-profit hospitals, many of these community-based. Alexis de Tocqueville referred to them as associations in his 1830s volumes on Democracy in America, and recognized the key role they were playing in sustaining the new democracy.
We too are the plural sector, each of us and all of us, in our social lives. Many of us work in the private sector and most of us vote in the public sector but all of us live in the plural sector. (How many of its associations figured in your life last week—say, shopping in a co-op, working out at the Y, attending a “private” university, maybe even marching in a protest?)
Thus, the plural sector is huge, far larger than most people recognize.
Donald Trump is not the problem - REGAINING BALANCE
Our early use of symbols helped forge powerful bonds and rules of cooperation, as human societies grew increasingly complex and competitive. A recent study by Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia and Azim Shariff of the University of Oregon revealed that, across 186 societies, the larger the typical social group, the more likely it was the culture created a god who monitored and judged human morality—perhaps the ultimate symbol of rule enforcement.
Metaphors Are Us
In Rajasthan, there still exists the ‘cow dust hour’ to describe the melancholy of evenings when cattle return from a day’s grazing, awash in a film of dust; Michael Ondaatje describes it in a poem: ‘It is the hour we move small / in the last possibilities of light.’ For the traditional Japanese, the year was divided into 72 microseasons called ‘kō’ each of which lasts for five days (the days of 16 to 20 March are when ‘caterpillars become butterflies’). These are gradations of time long enough to be memorable but short enough to remind us how fleeting the present is – a time was born from intuitions, from regularities of nature, from injunctions in scripture, and from the needs of agriculture.
How time stopped circling and percolating and started running on tracks
Artists across Europe took note of the changed atmosphere. William Turner drew vivid red skyscapes that, in their coloristic abstraction, seem like an advertisement for the future of art. Meanwhile, from his studio on Greifswald Harbor in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted a sky with a chromic density that—one scientific study has found—corresponds to the “optical aerosol depth” of the colossal volcanic eruption that year.
For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the “Year Without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” Across the globe, harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on porcupine and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.
One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the cold, crop-killing days by the fire exchanging ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s storm-lashed novel Frankenstein bears the imprint of the Tambora summer of 1816, and her literary coterie—which included the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—serve as tour guides through the suffering worldscape of 1815–18.
The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster
Legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois once said that the job of a science fiction writer was to notice the car and the movie theater and anticipate the drive-in – and then go on to predict the sexual revolution. I love that quote, because it highlights the key role of SF in examining the social consequences of technology – and because it shows how limited our social imaginations are. Today, we might ask the SF writer to also predict how convincing the nation’s teenagers to carry a piece of government-issued photo ID (a driver’s license) as a precondition for participating in the sexual revolution set the stage for the database nation, the idea that people are the sort of thing that you count and account for, with the kind of precision that the NSA is now understood to bring to the problem.
The thing I treasure about science fiction is its utility as a toolkit for thinking about the relationship between technological change and human beings. This is why I value ‘‘design fiction’’ so much: an architect might make a visualization that flies you through her as-yet-unbuilt building, an engineer might build a prototype to show you what he’s thinking of inventing, but through design fiction, a writer can take you on a tour of how a person living with that technology might feel. That’s the kind of contribution to the discussion about which technology we should make, and how we should use it, that can make all the difference.
Cory Doctorow: Cold Equations and Moral Hazard
It is not growing throughput that is ultimately the problem: the problem is the growth imperative itself. To illustrate, one can imagine that in an economy where growth must happen despite a cap on throughput, and where all new value therefore has to be immaterial, capital would seek to enclose immaterial commons that are presently abundant and free (knowledge, songs, green spaces, maybe even parenting, physical touch, love, and perhaps even the air itself) and sell them back to people for money. Subject to these new waves of artificial scarcity, people would find themselves compelled to work and earn wages in the new immaterial industries simply in order to acquire immaterial goods that used to be freely available. This may be an ecological economy, but it is not an economy that makes any sense, or one that anyone would actually want to live in.
The point of this imaginary exercise is to illustrate that while capping throughput might create the conditions for an ecological economy and indeed cause material and energy throughput to decline, it does not neutralize the deeper violence of the juggernaut, which is the logic of growth itself. Such a move might be adequate in a pragmatic sense, but it is intellectually unsatisfying. The only way to resolve the Lauderdale Paradox is to reverse it: to reorganize the economy around generating an abundance of public wealth even if doing so comes at the expense of private riches. This would liberate humans from the pressures generated by artificial scarcity, thus neutralizing the juggernaut and releasing the living world from its grip.
Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance
This is a good article regarding the emerging population age pyramid shift.
“You need a lot of change to take advantage of the opportunities,” said Maurizio Bussolo, a World Bank economist and co-author of the report. But he added, “We can actually change demography itself.”
World Bank: Policy shifts can mitigate gray tsunami as population ages
As the planet's population gets older, there are fears that a gray tsunami may make the possibility of golden aging more remote. But a World Bank report released Tuesday says global aging isn't an unstoppable force and can be compensated for by policy initiatives.
By 2100, the world population is expected to increase from 7.3 billion to 10.9 billion and the share of older people is increasing, raising concerns about healthcare, sustainability of pension systems, inter-generational conflicts and a negative impact on economic growth and productivity.
While the report, Golden Aging, Prospects for Healthy, Active and Prosperous Aging in Europe and Central Asia, says there are challenges as populations get older, there are still opportunities for governments, individuals and the private sector to collectively forge a prosperous and healthy “Golden Age.”
There is a growing interest in the use of natural and synthetic psychedelics to explore ways to treat some mental and mood disorders. This is another significant signal of a change towards this.
“Psychedelics are a fascinating class of compounds,” said Roland Griffiths, the center’s director and a professor of behavioral biology in the Hopkins School of Medicine.
“They produce unique and profound change in consciousness," he said. “The center will allow us to expand on research to develop new treatments for a wide variety of psychiatric disorders. And it will allow us to extend on past research in healthy people to improve their sense of well being.”
Johns Hopkins opening a new psychedelic research center, studying use of ‘magic mushrooms’ and more
Johns Hopkins Medicine is launching a new psychedelic research center where scientists will test the potential of so-called magic mushrooms and other drugs to treat some of the toughest mental health and addiction challenges.
The center, announced Wednesday, is believed to be the first center in the United States and the largest in the world to focus on drugs still better known as symbols of 1960s counterculture than serious medicine.
The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine is being funded by a $17 million donation from a group of private donors. Since federal funding cannot be used for such research, the center needs private support.
The Hopkins center’s research will focus on applications of the drugs for treating opioid addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders and depression, among other diseases.
This is an interesting signal - part of domesticating DNA - but also a discovery that could accelerate the bio-economy and bio-manufacturing. Plants not only make many wonderful medicines - they are also powerful chemical-warfare producers.
Key enzyme found in plants could guide development of medicines and other products
Plants can do many amazing things. Among their talents, they can manufacture compounds that help them repel pests, attract pollinators, cure infections and protect themselves from excess temperatures, drought and other hazards in the environment.
Researchers from the Salk Institute studying how plants evolved the abilities to make these natural chemicals have uncovered how an enzyme called chalcone isomerase evolved to enable plants to make products vital to their own survival. The researchers' hope is that this knowledge will inform the manufacture of products that are beneficial to humans, including medications and improved crops. The study appeared in the print version of ACS Catalysis on September 6, 2019.
As an enzyme, chalcone isomerase acts as a catalyst to accelerate chemical reactions in plants. It also helps to ensure the chemicals that are made in the plant are the proper form, since molecules with the same chemical formula can take two different variations that are mirror images of each other (called isomers).
"By understanding chalcone isomerase, we can create a new toolset that chemists will be able to use for the reactions they're studying," Noel says. "It's absolutely vital to have this kind of foundational knowledge to be able to design molecular systems that can carry out a particular task even in the next generation of nutritionally dense crops capable of transforming the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into molecules essential for life."
This is an interesting research finding - which could signal that any more people could benefit from psychological help that one would expect.
"Given the cost of sleep disorders, including insomnia, to every economy and society in the world, it's another important step towards managing this endemic problem in the community,"
"This first study is important because we don't know exactly the childhood or early-life factors that potentially influence this outcome of insomnia and finding these connections could reduce sleep disorders in the future."
Disturbed childhood can lead to adult insomnia
Parents should help their children with better sleep patterns, along with any problem behavioural issues, because this can lead to severe insomnia in middle age, a groundbreaking new study shows.
Published in JAMA Network Open journal today, Australian researchers have used data from a long-running UK population study to find links between moderate to severe childhood behavioural problems and insomnia in adults by the age of 42 years old.
Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder in adults, estimated to affect almost one in three people. Chronic insomnia is associated with an increased risk of mental health and other health, wellbeing and economic consequences including working capacity.
The United Kingdom 1970 Birth Cohort Study is a large-scale study of more than 16,000 babies born in a single week. The current study includes people from the cohort aged 5 (8550 participants), 10 (9090 people) and 16 years (7653) followed up to age 42 years (2012). Statistical analysis was performed from February 1 to July 15, 2019.
This is on ‘killer drone’ that may help transform agriculture.
Meet The Army Of Chinese Crop-Protecting-Drones With A 98% Kill-Rate
The drone manufacturer, XAG, who is based in Guangzhou, has teamed up with Germany's Bayer Crop Science in a collaborative effort to rid China of the fall armyworm. The drone devices are sporting low-toxicity insecticide and have also successfully managed the pests in a government-led initiative in the southwest province of Yunnan. Drones have also "effectively controlled" the spread of pests in cornfields in Henan province.
XAG said of the armyworm:
"It is the ‘crop-devouring monster’ that attacks over 80 crop varieties. Most farmers resort to traditional insecticide sprayers, which not only fail to move fast enough against the ravenous, fast-moving fall armyworm that can fly up to 100 kilometers in one night, but also expose them to dangerous chemicals."
The drones can operate after sunset, which is beneficial since the armyworm feeds actively at night.
The armyworm, known for devouring crops, has spread from the Americas to Africa and Asia, eating corn, rice, vegetables and cotton along the way. Since its unceremonious arrival in China, it has affected 950,000 hectares of crops spanning 24 provinces, including Hebei, Shaanxi and Shandong. Outbreaks at 90% of the affected areas are now under control.
This is definitely a strong signal of change that should happen - and likely will.
“People put things in refrigerators with the best intentions, while letting them, the majority of time, live slow, miserable deaths,” says Brian Roe, professor at Ohio State University, who has studied matters of food for more than 20 years.
There’s a $218 billion design problem sitting in your fridge right now
We could save up to 30% of food waste by changing expiration dates. So why don’t we?
There’s a nice piece of fruit in your refrigerator right now. Perhaps it’s a veggie. Or a boneless skinless chicken breast. Whatever it is, you’re definitely going to eat it. You’re not a food waster! But here’s the truth: There’s only a 50% chance, or worse, that you’ll finish any of those things, in their entirety, a week later. The rest will only be partially eaten, or perhaps prepared and sitting in your fridge as leftovers. In any case, much of that remaining 50% will end up in the trash soon, representing lost money and one of the greatest contributors to carbon emissions and climate change.
In the U.S., we waste as much as $218 billion on uneaten food every year when analyzing the entire supply chain, including farming and processing. Globally, the carbon emitted by wasted food can be classified as its own country—the third worst carbon emitter in the world, behind the U.S. and China.
Sometimes things do just rot before we eat them! But often, food is tossed because of a more confounding culprit: the expiration label. According to Roe’s most recent paper, published in Resources, Conservation, & Recycling, those “best by” dates on packages are the third most-common reason we throw away food in our fridge.
Nature is stranger than fiction - and evolution is full of surprises.
during a small experimental fire, a wind change enveloped de Langer in thick smoke. With watering eyes, he realized that smoke might be the mysterious phoenix factor that would coax the seeds to life. By 1990 he had shown puffing smoke onto soil germinated his rare species in astonishing numbers.
What home gardeners can learn from nature's rebirth after fire
A startling phenomenon occurs after a bushfire tears through a landscape. From the blackened soil springs an extraordinary natural revival—synchronized germination that carpets the landscape in flowers and colour.
So what is it in bushfires that gives plants this kiss of life? The answer is smoke, and it is increasingly transforming everything from large-scale land regeneration to nurseries and home gardening.
Burnt plants survive bushfires in various ways. Some are protected by woody rootstocks and bark-coated stems; others resprout from underground buds. But most plants awaken their soil seed bank, which may have lain dormant for decades, or even a century.
However, this smoke-induced seed germination is not easily replicated by humans trying to grow the plants themselves. Traditionally, many native Australian flora species—from fringe-lilies to flannel flowers and trigger plants—could not be grown easily or at all from seed.
The technique is simple. Create a smoldering fire of dry and green leafy material and pass the smoke into an enclosed area where seed has been sown into seed trays or spread as a thin layer. Leave for one hour and water sparingly for ten days to prevent the smoke from washing out of the seed mix. The rest is up to nature.
I am still waiting for the ability to use stem cells to regrow teeth that was ten years away at least ten years ago. However, this is an important improvement for dealing with cavities than our current approach. Hopefully regrow teeth remains on the horizon of possible treatment.
Can we heal teeth? The quest to repair tooth enamel, nature's crystal coat
In a significant scientific breakthrough, researchers recently discovered a way to regrow human tooth enamel.
Scientists from China have invented a gel that contains mineral clusters naturally found in teeth. In partially acid-damaged teeth, the gel stimulates crystal regrowth to restore tooth enamel back to its original structure.
While the method is yet to be tested on people, one day this could mean saying goodbye to painful needles, the dreaded dentist drill, and even fillings.
While this technology is something to look forward to, the short answer for now is "not yet." This study has only been performed on extracted teeth. The researchers are hoping to test their method on mice, and then people soon after.
One of the significant limitations to moving towards animal and human trials is the toxicity of the essential ingredient, TEA. Another challenge is the enamel thickness they were able to repair was at a microscopic level.
This is definitely a weak signal - but an important one to watch. As Ray Kurzweil has noted we are living in an age whereby the longer one lives - the longer one may be able to live.
“I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” says geneticist Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the epigenetic analysis. “That felt kind of futuristic.”
First hint that body’s ‘biological age’ can be reversed
In a small trial, drugs seemed to rejuvenate the body’s ‘epigenetic clock’, which tracks a person’s biological age.
A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age.
For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs — growth hormone and two diabetes medications — and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person’s genomes. The participants’ immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation.
The results were a surprise even to the trial organizers — but researchers caution that the findings are preliminary because the trial was small and did not include a control arm.
The findings were published on 5 September in Aging Cell.
This is a strong signal of an inevitable approach to bring medical treatments to more people farther away from medical centers.
First long-distance heart surgery performed via robot
In a feat of networking, engineering, and medicine, a doctor performed a heart procedure while standing 20 miles from his patient.
A doctor in India has performed a series of five percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures on patients who were 20 miles away from him. The feat was pulled off using a precision vascular robot developed by Corindus. The results of the surgeries, which were successful, have just been published in EClinical Medicine, a spin-off of medical journal The Lancet.
The feat is an example of telemedicine, an emerging field that leverages advances in networking, robotics, mixed reality, and communications technologies to beam in medical experts to remote locations for everything from consultations to surgical procedures. Telemedicine, which could decentralize healthcare by distributing doctors into local communities virtually, could ease shortages of nurses and doctors and potentially cut healthcare costs. In France, people are already visiting Telehealth cabins for fast, convenient healthcare. During the recent Ebola crisis, the University of Virginia delivered care in parts of Africa via telemedicine.
One way to live longer and better is through repairing parts that no longer work. This is a good signal of progress toward that goal.
"Our SWIFT biomanufacturing method is highly effective at creating organ-specific tissues at scale from OBBs ranging from aggregates of primary cells to stem-cell-derived organoids," said corresponding author Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., who is a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute as well as the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at SEAS. "By integrating recent advances from stem-cell researchers with the bioprinting methods developed by my lab, we believe SWIFT will greatly advance the field of organ engineering around the world."
A swifter way towards 3-D-printed organs
Twenty people die every day waiting for an organ transplant in the United States, and while more than 30,000 transplants are now performed annually, there are over 113,000 patients currently on organ waitlists. Artificially grown human organs are seen by many as the "holy grail" for resolving this organ shortage, and advances in 3-D printing have led to a boom in using that technique to build living tissue constructs in the shape of human organs. However, all 3-D-printed human tissues to date lack the cellular density and organ-level functions required for them to be used in organ repair and replacement.
Now, a new technique called SWIFT (sacrificial writing into functional tissue) created by researchers from Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), overcomes that major hurdle by 3-D printing vascular channels into living matrices composed of stem-cell-derived organ building blocks (OBBs), yielding viable, organ-specific tissues with high cell density and function. The research is reported in Science Advances.
"This is an entirely new paradigm for tissue fabrication," said co-first author Mark Skylar-Scott, Ph.D., a Research Associate at the Wyss Institute. "Rather than trying to 3-D-print an entire organ's worth of cells, SWIFT focuses on only printing the vessels necessary to support a living tissue construct that contains large quantities of OBBs, which may ultimately be used therapeutically to repair and replace human organs with lab-grown versions containing patients' own cells."
Another signal of the importance of our microbial ecology for maintaining a robust immune capacity.
Individual response to flu vaccine influenced by gut microbes
A new study in healthy adults suggests that antibiotics may reduce the effectiveness of the flu vaccine.
The depletion of gut bacteria by antibiotics appears to leave the immune system less able to respond to new challenges, such as exposure to previously unencountered germs or vaccines, said Bali Pulendran, Ph.D., professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
"To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the effects of broad-spectrum antibiotics on the immune response in human—in this case, our response to vaccination—directly induced through the disturbance of our gut bacteria," he said.
The study will be published Sept. 5 in Cell. Pulendran, who holds the Violetta L. Horton Professorship, is the senior author. Lead authorship is shared by Stanford postdoctoral scholars Thomas Hagan, Ph.D., and Mario Cortese, Ph.D.; and Nadine Rouphael, MD, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and infectious disease at Emory University.
This article is over a month old - but for those who may not have read about it.
The whistleblower said: “There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.”
Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings
Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblower
Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.
Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was appropriate.
Apple says the data “is used to help Siri and dictation … understand you better and recognise what you say”.
But the company does not explicitly state that that work is undertaken by humans who listen to the pseudonymised recordings.
And another signal of a very possible future.
the level of data consumption needed for microphone surveillance would make the technique not only improbable to execute, but also virtually impossible to hide.
“There were no audio leaks at all – not a single app activated the microphone,” says Christo Wilson, a computer scientist working on the project. “Then we started seeing things we didn’t expect. Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.”
Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third party sources.
Facebook isn’t secretly listening to your conversations, but the truth is much more disturbing
How does Facebook occasionally deliver such disconcertingly timed advertisements? Is it really listening to users through their smartphone microphones? Or is the truth much more unsettling?
Perhaps one of the most pervasive longstanding technology conspiracy theories is that your smartphone is constantly listening in on your private conversations. Almost everyone at some point has felt the eerie synchronicity of seeing an ad served up on Facebook that exactly corresponds to a recent conversation. It’s certainly unnerving, and the most simple explanation is one of direct surveillance. Of course Facebook is listening in on your private conversation with friends, catching key words, and then serving you tailored advertisements. And of course Facebook would deny this is happening.
The problem is, outside of anecdotal cases, no one has ever been able to find clear evidence that this is actually happening. Mobile cybersecurity company Wandera recently conducted a series of experiments which again prove your smartphone is not consistently listening in to your private conversations. So, while this urban myth has again been debunked, the truth about how companies like Facebook sometimes serve up such disturbingly accurate advertisements turns out to be much more complex, and unsettling.
“The harsh truth is that Facebook doesn’t need to perform technical miracles to target you via weak signals. It’s got much better ways to do so already,” writes Garcia-Martinez. “Not every spookily accurate ad you see is a pure figment of your cognitive biases. Remember, Facebook can find you on whatever device you’ve ever checked Facebook on. It can exploit everything that retailers know about you, and even sometimes track your in-store, cash-only purchases; that loyalty discount card is tied to a phone number or email for a reason.”
As light as the clouds? A 3 min video.
How much does a cloud weigh?
Imagine 300 midsize cars floating above your head—that's how much your average fluffy cloud weighs.
So why doesn't it come crashing down on you?
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