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:
At first glance, neoclassical economics’ conflation of land with a broad notion of capital does seem to follow a certain logic. It is clear that both can be thought of as commodities: both can be bought and sold in a mature capitalist market. A firm can have a portfolio of assets that includes land (or property) and shares in a company (the equivalent of owning capital ‘stock’) and swap one for another using established market prices. Both land and capital goods can also be seen as store of value (consider the phrase ‘safe as houses’) and to some extent a source of liquidity, particularly given innovations in finance that have allowed people to engage in home equity withdrawal.
In reality, however, land and capital are fundamentally distinctive phenomena. Land is permanent, cannot be produced or reproduced, cannot be ‘used up’ and does not depreciate. None of these features apply to capital. Capital goods are produced by humans, depreciate over time due to physical wear and tear and innovations in technology (think of computers or mobile phones) and they can be replicated. In any set of national accounts, you will find a sizeable negative number detailing physical capital stock ‘depreciation’: net not gross capital investment is the preferred variable used in calculating a nations’s output. When it comes to land, net and gross values are equal.
The argument made by Bates Clark and his followers was that by removing the complexities of dynamics, the true or pure functioning of the economy will be more clearly revealed. As a result, microeconomic theory generally deals with relations of coexistence or ‘comparative statics’ (how are labour and capital combined in a single point in time to create outputs) rather than dynamic relations. This has led to a neglect of the continued creation and destruction of capital and the continued existence and non-depreciation of land.
Today’s economics textbooks – in particular microeconomics – slavishly follow the tenets of marginal productivity theory. ‘Income’ is understood narrowly as a reward for one’s contribution to production whilst wealth is understood as ‘savings’ due to one’s productive investment effort, not as unearned windfalls from being the owner of land or other naturally scarce sources of value. In many advanced economies land values – and capital gains made from increasing property prices – are not properly measured and tracked over time.
this huge growth in wealth relative to the rest of the economy originates not from the saving of income derived from people’s contribution to production (activity that would have created jobs and raised incomes), but rather from windfalls resulting from exclusive control of a scarce natural resource: land.
How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory
Numerous research topics are ripe for more study by theorists and empiricists. Within the following long list of topics (still a partial one) there are low-hanging fruits and more challenging problems that may require interdisciplinary reach and which tenured academics are in a particularly privileged position to take on: whistleblower policies, the impact of consumers, employees, and politicians on corporate actions, accounting rules for derivatives, the effectiveness of boards, audits and auditors regulation, the design of bankruptcy laws, money laundering, corporate fraud, the organization and pricing of deposit insurance, debt subsidies, the role of financial literacy and ideology in policy discussions, the structure and governance of regulatory agencies and central banks, lobbying of multinational corporations, the governance of international bodies such as Financial Stability Board, Basel Committee, and IMF, and the political economy of corporate enforcement.
The key takeaways if research is claimed to be relevant for the real world are:
- Just because a model claims to “explain” something in the real world does not give it logical or actual validity. Even if we may never have the data to be able to reject a model, there are ways to apply casual empiricism (“if this model was true, we would observe x and we don’t”), and we must be especially careful if a model contradicts other plausible explanations for what we see. (Consider: “cigarette smoking improves people’s health” as an “explanation” of why people smoke.)
- Just because a model can be “calibrated” does not give it logical or actual validity.
Applying inadequate economic models to policy in the real world is akin to building bridges using flawed engineering models. Serious harm may follow.
There is No Economics without Politics
The United States begins as an enlightenment project of creating law and legal institutions on a plan grounded in theory. When the French took up a similar project of constitutional creation a few years later, the UK’s conservative Member of Parliament Edmund Burke responded that law is not like that: it is system, not project; it grows immanently, it is not made.
The Burkean response came to the US at the end of the 19th century. By then, the dominant picture of American constitutionalism is that of system, not project. The real constitution is not the founders’ written text, but ‘unwritten’ practices that develop according to immanent principles of order. Those principles are no one’s project. They emerge naturally and spontaneously, the thinking then went, wherever the Anglo-American race has the freedom to develop through the pursuit of its own ideals and interests.
By the end of the century, constitutionalism, Christianity and civilisation coincide in the legal imaginary as the telos of history, that is, of the system realising itself. The task of jurisprudence, accordingly, is to discover those principles that structure a free society, not to create them. The role of legislation or of a written constitution, on the systemic view, is no more than that of removing pathologies that block the free actions of citizens. Projects of law, in other words, are now only remedial, just like a doctor’s interventions are designed to address pathologies that keep the body from realising its immanent principles of order – which we describe as ‘health’. Out of this systemic imagination comes a convergence of constitutionalism with laissez-faire capitalism.
Project and system
The post-industrial, creative and entrepreneurial society is emerging. Entrepreneurs are like artists and artists are like entrepreneurs. They both “turn nothings into somethings”. Artists give a form to ideas that for some other people might be nothing more than vague thoughts or passing emotions. Art is the most efficient way of creating novel associations, enriching connections and new, sometimes radical, openings. Art creates suggestions for fresh ways of defining the world we live in.
It is a world where you don’t work for a company, but you may work with a company. Incentive systems are also changing. The tokenized financial systems of the future are going to recognize and reward the creative majority and not mainly the executive minority.
Creativity is a social and political tool. As it is about expressing ourselves, it gives a voice and a form to democracy. As it is a platform of ideas, it is an agent of change. As it raises new questions, it is about the very thing that makes us human — imagination
What comes to entrepreneurship and creativity, failure is part of the very fabric of building something new. This essentially makes the whole concept of failure meaningless. But there may of course be a personal feeling of failure, which is often an unavoidable part of the creative process. Monet and Cezanne did not cease to paint when they were publicly rejected. They continued. Not because they were insensitive, but because they were so committed to their art. They had courage.
Fostering creativity is a genuine goal for absolutely all in the post-industrial society. A creative economy needs individuals with the courage and capacity to think, learn and live imaginatively. We need people who can conceive ideas and who can realize them.
Esko Kilpi - Art, entrepreneurship and the future of work
This is an amazing signal on par with social physics and machine learning to reveal previously unseeable patterns in data. When we can see data in new ways and reveal patterns - we can think new things.
Because pose-tracking software has simplified data collection, “now we can think about other problems,” said Benjamin de Bivort, a behavioral biologist at Harvard University. Starting with: How do we define the building blocks of behavior, and how do we interpret them?
“Their algorithms can pull out behaviors that we don’t have words for,” Whitlock said.
To Decode the Brain, Scientists Automate the Study of Behavior
Machine learning and deep neural networks can capture and analyze the “language” of animal behavior in ways that go beyond what’s humanly possible.
A key advantage of these methods is that they can pick up on patterns that humans can’t see. In a paper published last month in Nature Neuroscience, Calhoun, with the Princeton neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Jonathan Pillow, built a machine learning model that used behavioral observations alone to identify three internal states underlying the courtship behavior of fruit flies. By manipulating the flies’ brain activity, the researchers were then able to pinpoint a set of neurons that controlled those states.
The work on motion tracking and behavioral analysis that made these findings possible represents a technological revolution in the study of behavior. It also indicates that this success is just one of many to come. Scientists are now applying these methods to tackle questions in neuroscience, genetics, evolution and medicine that seemed unsolvable until now.
There are innumerable ways to store energy and more are emerging as we embrace a green economy.
Mix Mountains and Gravity for Long-Term Energy Storage
A team of European engineers says its mountain energy storage system for small grids would be inexpensive and environmentally-friendly
The intermittent nature of energy sources such as solar and wind has made it difficult to incorporate them into grids, which require a steady power supply. To provide uninterrupted power, grid operators must store extra energy harnessed when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, so that power can be distributed when there’s no sun or wind.
“One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage,” says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
Lithium-ion batteries currently dominate the energy storage market, but these are better suited for short-term storage, says Hunt, because the charge they hold dissipates over time. To store sufficient energy for months or years would require many batteries, which is too expensive to be a feasible option.
Hunt and his collaborators have devised a novel system to complement lithium-ion battery use for energy storage over the long run: Mountain Gravity Energy Storage, or MGES for short. Similar to hydroelectric power, MGES involves storing material at elevation to produce gravitational energy. The energy is recovered when the stored material falls and turns turbines to generate electricity. The group describes its system in a paper published 6 November in Energy.
This is another good signal of the progress being made regarding antibiotic resistance. The growing body of proteomics is arm in arm with our domestication of DNA
Researchers identify 'Achilles' heel' of drug-resistant superbug
"We know that bacteria have innate stress response systems, but we do not understand fully how these responses are triggered to cause antibiotic resistance," said Ayesha Khan, a doctoral student in the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the study's lead author.
The research, published in the December issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, revealed that a protein called LiaX is released by bacteria into the environment to sense the presence of antibiotics, causing restructuring of the bacterial cell that prevents the drug from destroying it. VRE is on the Centers for Disease Control's latest threat report and is most commonly associated with health care settings. It can lead to serious complications, causing nearly 5,400 deaths in 2017 in the U.S.
"We have uncovered the 'Achilles' heel' of an important hospital-associated and multidrug-resistant pathogen," said senior author Cesar Arias, MD, Ph.D., a professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth and Herbert L. and Margaret W. DuPont Chair in Infectious Diseases. "By identifying the main mediator of the response against antibiotics and the first line of defense of our immune system, this will open major therapeutic and diagnostic research avenues against these organisms which are associated with disease in critically ill patients."
One more signal of alternative ways to deal with the evolving challenges of antibiotic resistance.
Scientists discover a novel method to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Over the years, bacteria have evolved so many clever ways of protecting themselves against antibiotics that now the World Health Organization (WHO) fears that we may soon slip back into a situation similar to the pre-antibiotic era. The death toll caused by antimicrobial resistance is estimated to rise to 10 million deaths annually by 2050 with India carrying one of the largest burdens of drug-resistant pathogens worldwide. To compound this problem, the global antibiotic pipeline to develop next-generation antibiotics is precariously thin.
In the context of this alarming public health threat, scientists from the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) and Unilever joined forces to develop innovative strategies to deal with antimicrobial resistance. Together, the team probed the cellular mechanisms that regulate the release of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are natural antibiotics produced by skin cells to fight off bacteria. AMPs target and kill bacteria in such variable ways that few bacteria ever develop resistance to them, thus making AMPs uniquely suited to treating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. The scientists' work led to the discovery of a new signalling pathway in skin cells that controls the long-term release of AMPs from these cells. By tweaking this pathway, researchers can induce AMP release from skin cells without any exposure to bacteria! This has tremendous potential in preventing and treating infections for post-surgery wounds, and for diabetic patients and those with weakened immune systems.
Apart from their role as natural antibiotics, AMPs are also known to be involved in wound healing in the skin. This fact spurred Dr. Amitabha Majumdar (Unilever R&D) to hypothesise that the same machinery used to release AMPs during wound healing could be harnessed to control AMP release from skin cells for treating or preventing infections. To test this, Dr. Majumdar contacted Dr. Colin Jamora of the Joint IFOM-inStem Research Laboratory at inStem's Centre for Inflammation and Tissue Homeostasis (CITH) - a group that works extensively on the mechanisms of wound healing in the skin.
Here’s a weak signal - but also perhaps inevitable in the pursuit of Star Trek like medical technology.
DARPA Seeks Pathogen Detectors That Use CRISPR to Run 1,000 Tests at Once
DARPA is asking researchers to use gene-editing technologies for portable diagnostics that produce results in 15 minutes
The U.S. Department of Defense has put out a call to researchers to develop devices that detect pathogenic threats by performing up to 1,000 diagnostic tests in fewer than 15 minutes.
The devices ideally would determine the presence of a pathogen, and useful details about it, such as whether it’s a drug resistant variety, the severity of the infection, and any co-infections.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which makes investments in breakthrough technologies on the military’s behalf, will oversee the initiative.
Scientists have endeavored to make this sort of diagnose-anything, “Star Trek”-inspired device previously, without a lot of success. But DARPA is betting that new technology that leverages gene-editing techniques can achieve this goal.
While a lot of signal hunting focuses on existing/emerging technology trends - it is equally important to be open to breakthroughs in fundamental science. Sometimes these two ‘hunting grounds’ are entangled.
"The ability to create and control high-performance quantum bits in commercial electronics was a surprise," said lead investigator David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at UChicago and a pioneer in quantum technology. "These discoveries have changed the way we think about developing quantum technologies—perhaps we can find a way to use today's electronics to build quantum devices."
In surprise breakthrough, scientists create quantum states in everyday electronics
After decades of miniaturization, the electronic components we've relied on for computers and modern technologies are now starting to reach fundamental limits. Faced with this challenge, engineers and scientists around the world are turning toward a radically new paradigm: quantum information technologies.
In two papers published in Science and Science Advances, Awschalom's group demonstrated they could electrically control quantum states embedded in silicon carbide. The breakthrough could offer a means to more easily design and build quantum electronics—in contrast to using exotic materials scientists usually need to use for quantum experiments, such as superconducting metals, levitated atoms or diamonds.
These quantum states in silicon carbide have the added benefit of emitting single particles of light with a wavelength near the telecommunications band. "This makes them well suited to long-distance transmission through the same fiber-optic network that already transports 90 percent of all international data worldwide," said Awschalom, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange.
A wonderful signal of the advance of our understanding of the living world, biology and the biosphere. Quantum science is everywhere.
"The persistence of quantum wavelike behavior in biomolecular systems opens up a new paradigm for explaining some of the fundamental processes in biology,"
Surfing on quantum waves: Protein folding revisited
Two physicists from the University of Luxembourg have now unambiguously shown that quantum-mechanical wavelike interactions are indeed crucial even at the scale of natural biological processes.
Quantum wavelike behaviour plays a key role in modern science and technology, with applications of quantum mechanics ranging from lasers and high-speed fiber communications, to quantum computers and photosynthesis in plants. A natural question is whether quantum wave phenomena could also be relevant for structure formation and dynamical processes in biological systems in living cells. This question has not been addressed convincingly up to now due to the lack of efficient quantum methods that are applicable to systems as large as whole proteins under physiological conditions (i.e. solvated in water and at room temperature).
Now writing in Science Advances, Prof. Alexandre Tkatchenko and doctoral researcher Martin Stöhr from the Department of Physics and Materials Science at the University of Luxembourg have investigated the folding process of proteins in water using a fully quantum-mechanical treatment for the first time. Protein folding is the physical process by which a chain of amino acids acquires its native biologically functional structure due to interactions between amino acids and the influence of surrounding water. A key novel finding of the present study is that the interaction between the protein and the surrounding water has to be described by quantum-mechanical wavelike behavior, which also turns out to be critical in the dynamics of the protein folding process.
This is an important signal of emerging new construction methods and the advance of 3D-printing technologies.
Dubai is now home to world's largest 3D-printed building
A Boston-based technology company has completed what it says is the largest 3D-printed building in the world in 21 days.
3D printing equipment manufacturer Apis Cor recently built a two-story administrative office building for a Dubai government agency using one mobile printer. Standing at 31 feet tall with an area of 6,889 square feet, the building's walls were printed while the insulation, roof, foundation and windows were installed using traditional building methods, Apis Cor CEO Nikita Cheniuntai told Construction Dive.
The walls were printed on-site by moving the car-sized printer around the construction site via crane. The cost of the project, a research and development initiative, was not released.
Printing of buildings is feasible in all types of climates, he said, as long as the project team can create the right blend of materials and the mixing equipment can work properly. Possible applications of the Apis Cor technology include residential, commercial and industrial construction, he said.
Apis Cor, which has been mainly 3D printing houses, plans to offer its technology in the U.S. next year, once it clears building code regulations. In 2017, the company printed a 400-square-foot demonstration house in 24 hours for about $10,000.
This is an important signal of tectonic-like change - the implications of a shifting magnetic north and an eventual shifting of north-south are more than significant.
The north magnetic pole has traveled 1,400 miles since it was first discovered—and has changed speed, as well. As recently as 2000, the speed was clocked at 10 km/year. The latest readings show it moving at a brisk 50 km/year.
Updated World Magnetic Model shows magnetic north pole continuing to push toward Siberia
The team of researchers that maintain the World Magnetic Model (WMM) has updated it and released it a year ahead of schedule due to the speed with which the pole is moving. The newly updated model shows the magnetic north pole moving away from Canada and toward Siberia.
The magnetic north pole is the point on the Earth that compasses designate as true north. It is the result of geological processes deep within the planet—molten iron flow creates a magnetic field with poles near the geographic North and South Poles. But unlike the geographic poles, the magnetic poles can move—and the magnetic north pole has been moving faster in recent years, which made necessary the early update of the WMM.
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