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:
When Cheng looked at a drop of the cytoplasm more closely on a slide under the microscope, he watched the nuclei space themselves out in a lattice-like formation. Moreover, the cellular organs (organelles) and skeletal proteins arranged themselves around the nuclei, creating compartments that, to Cheng, resembled a sheet of skin cells.
Cheng tried again, this time without the sperm. But still, the cell-like compartments emerged. “I just thought, how could it be? We homogenized the living matter, the biological material. How could it return to some kind of structured organization?” Cheng said. “It’s like coming back to life.”
Striking as this activity was, it wasn’t without precedent. Self-organization occurs at many levels in living systems. String the right sequence of amino acids together and a long peptide chain will fold itself into a working protein. Cells within an early embryo arrange themselves to generate tissues to build a human.
“I think we haven’t completely learned our lesson yet about how powerfully biological systems are evolved and selected to not only function but to build themselves, to organize themselves,” Ferrell said.
Unscrambled Eggs: Self-Organization Restores Cells’ Order
In the closing paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin urged readers to “contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Those plants, birds, insects and worms, he continued, all evolved as they did because of the complex web of ecological factors in which they’d been embedded. Had the temperature been hotter, the water more acidic or a certain species of grass absent, a very different “tangled bank” might have evolved instead.
Researchers have typically tried to tease out the evolutionary effects of environmental factors one by one. But the full biodiversity of an environment — the entirety of the tangled bank itself — can also be a crucial influence on how a species evolves.
Biodiversity Alters Strategies of Bacterial Evolution
Complexity concept for the day: In a low dimensional system there are only a few possible deterministic behaviors: Static, constant change, convergence, divergence, oscillation/cycling, convergent and divergent oscillation, chaos. In high dimensional systems they can coexist.
Tweet – Yaneer Bar-Yam – New England Complex Systems Institute
This is an interesting signal of change in fundamental science - a challenge to math and away from classical Cartesian worldview.
To circumvent the impossibility that the finite contains the infinite, professor Gisin suggests going back to the source of classical physics and changing the mathematical language so that we no longer have to resort to real numbers. "There is another mathematical language, called intuitionistic, which doesn't believe in the existence of the infinite,"
Indeterminist physics for an open world
Classical physics is characterized by the precision of its equations describing the evolution of the world as determined by the initial conditions of the Big Bang—meaning there is no room for chance. Yet our day-to-day experience and intuition are struck by this deterministic vision of the world: has everything really been written in advance? Is randomness nothing more than an illusion? A physicist from UNIGE, Swizerland, has been analyzing the classical mathematical language used in modern physics. He has thrown light on a contradiction between the equations that are supposed to explain the phenomena that surround us and the finite world. He suggests making changes to the mathematical language to allow randomness and indeterminism to become part of classical physics, thereby bringing it closer to quantum physics. Thanks to these observations, which are published in the journal Nature Physics, a revolution is sweeping through classical physics and paving the way for potentially different futures.
...There is another difference between the two mathematical languages: the truth of propositions. "In classical maths, a proposition is always either true or false, according to the law of excluded middle. But in intuitionistic maths, a proposition is either true, false or indeterminate. So, there is an accepted part of indeterminacy," continues professor Gisin. This indeterminacy is much closer to our everyday experience than the most absolute determinism advocated by classical physics. In addition, randomness is also found in quantum physics. "Some people endeavor to avoid it at all costs by involving other variables based on real numbers. But in my opinion, we shouldn't try to bring quantum physics closer to classical physics by attempting to eliminate randomness. Quite the opposite: we must bring classical physics closer to quantum physics by finally incorporating indeterminacy," says the Geneva-based physicist.
This is a very important signal - the future of cash and the ambivalent privacy of anonymity.
We call banknotes and coins “cash,” but the term really refers to something more abstract: cash is essentially money that your government owes you. In the old days this was a literal debt. “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …” still appears on British banknotes, a notional guarantee that the Bank of England will hand over the same value in gold in exchange for your note. Today it represents the more abstract guarantee that you will always be able to use that note to pay for things.
An elegy for cash: the technology we might never replace
Cash is gradually dying out. Will we ever have a digital alternative that offers the same mix of convenience and freedom?
Without cash, there is “no chance for the kind of dignity-preserving privacy that undergirds an open society,” writes Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin Center, a policy advocacy group based in Washington, DC. In a recent report, Brito contends that we must “develop and foster electronic cash” that is as private as physical cash and doesn’t require permission to use.
The central question is who will develop and control the electronic payment systems of the future. Most of the existing ones, like Alipay, Zelle, PayPal, Venmo, and Kenya’s M-Pesa, are run by private firms. Afraid of leaving payments solely in their hands, many governments are looking to develop some sort of electronic stand-in for notes and coins. Meanwhile, advocates of stateless, ownerless cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin say they’re the only solution as surveillance-proof as cash—but can they be feasible at large scales?
We tend to take it for granted that new technologies work better than old ones—safer, faster, more accurate, more efficient, more convenient. Purists may extol the virtues of vinyl records, but nobody can dispute that a digital music collection is easier to carry and sounds almost exactly as good. Cash is a paradox—a technology thousands of years old that may just prove impossible to re-create in a more advanced form.
The digital environment is going to need a lot of energy - even as it both exponentially becomes more energy efficient and ever more massive and niche dense. The expanding universe of information will be our new horizons. One more reason to develop renewable energy sources and ever more efficient computational devices.
How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity
The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin.
Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there’s a chance they’ll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more. Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.
These huge buildings are the treasuries of the new industrial kings: the information traders. The five biggest global companies by market capitalization this year are currently Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, replacing titans such as Shell and ExxonMobil. Although information factories might not spew out black smoke or grind greasy cogs, they are not bereft of environmental impact. As demand for Internet and mobile-phone traffic skyrockets, the information industry could lead to an explosion in energy use (see ‘Energy forecast’).
For now, despite rising demand for data, ICT’s electricity consumption is staying nearly flat, as increased Internet traffic and data loads are countered by increased efficiencies — including shuttering older facilities in favour of ultra-efficient centres such as Prineville’s. But those easy wins could end within a decade. “The trend is good right now, but it’s questionable what it’s going to look like in 5–10 years,” says Dale Sartor, who oversees the Center of Expertise for Energy Efficiency in Data Centers at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
Data-centre electricity demand has remained roughly level over the past half-decade, in part because of the ‘hyperscale shift’ — the rise of super-efficient information factories that use an organized, uniform computing architecture that easily scales up to hundreds of thousands of servers.
The next few decades should see unprecedented advances in creating and harnessing energy - all part of the transformation of energy geopolitics.
"This approach not only favours high performance metrics and long cycle life, but is also simple and extremely low-cost to manufacture, using water-based processes, and can lead to significant reductions in environmentally hazardous waste," Associate Professor Hill said.
Supercharging tomorrow: Team develops world's most efficient lithium-sulfur battery
Imagine having access to a battery, which has the potential to power your phone for five continuous days, or enable an electric vehicle to drive more than 1000km without needing to "refuel".
Monash University researchers are on the brink of commercialising the world's most efficient lithium-sulphur (Li-S) battery, which could outperform current market leaders by more than four times, and power Australia and other global markets well into the future.
Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani from Monash University's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering led an international research team that developed an ultra-high capacity Li-S battery that has better performance and less environmental impact than current lithium-ion products.
The researchers have an approved filed patent (PCT/AU 2019/051239) for their manufacturing process, and prototype cells have been successfully fabricated by German R&D partners Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology.
The study was published in Science Advances on Friday, 3 January 2020.
Another interesting signal about the future of global energy geopolitics
Canada's oilpatch braces for more scrutiny after Mark Carney sees half of world’s reserves left in the ground
The Canadian oilpatch is concerned that a push led by former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney to demand further climate disclosures and climate risk assessments from global banks could increase scrutiny of investments in the Canadian oilsands and nascent liquefied natural gas sector.
Carney is set to leave his current job as Bank of England governor later this month to join the United Nations as a special envoy on climate change and finance, where he will be tasked with pushing financial institutions and banks for better disclosure on their investments in fossil fuels.
In an interview with the BBC this week, Carney described how “up to half of developed oil reserves” would likely be stranded in order to limit the effects of climate change. He said that banks and investors need better disclosure and stricter limits on oil, gas and coal investments in order to avoid significant global warming.
This is also a key signal of the evolving concepts of cryptocurrency and distributed ledger technology. This is a good analysis and summary of the current state of the art - well worth the read.
All three elements of a public blockchain fit together as a single network that offers new security properties. The question is: Is it actually good for anything? It's all a matter of trust.
Trust is essential to society. As a species, humans are wired to trust one another. Society can't function without trust, and the fact that we mostly don't even think about it is a measure of how well trust works.
What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they're often single points of failure.
When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse.
Blockchain and Trust
In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: "We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust." He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it's just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin -- and everything about it.
Much has been written about blockchains and how they displace, reshape, or eliminate trust. But when you analyze both blockchain and trust, you quickly realize that there is much more hype than value. Blockchain solutions are often much worse than what they replace.
First, a caveat. By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements. The first is a distributed (as in multiple copies) but centralized (as in there's only one) ledger, which is a way of recording what happened and in what order. This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it, and immutable, meaning that no one can change what happened in the past.
The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining; a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It is also distributed, meaning that you don't have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It can also be extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by far.
Finally, the third element is the currency. This is some sort of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is a necessary element of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger.
To answer the question of whether the blockchain is needed, ask yourself: Does the blockchain change the system of trust in any meaningful way, or just shift it around? Does it just try to replace trust with verification? Does it strengthen existing trust relationships, or try to go against them? How can trust be abused in the new system, and is this better or worse than the potential abuses in the old system? And lastly: What would your system look like if you didn't use blockchain at all?
This is a good signal of the potential for addressing the ongoing challenges around pollution and climate.
China's inland surface water quality significantly improves
A new study shows that China's inland surface water quality improved significantly from 2003-2017, coinciding with major efforts beginning in 2001 to reduce water pollution in the country.
The research was conducted by a team led by Profs. Ma Ting and Zhou Chenghu from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their findings were published in Science Advances.
The researchers analyzed the nationwide variability of inland surface water quality across China during this 15-year period and the response to anthropogenic pollution. They found that annual mean concentrations of two important water quality parameters—chemical oxygen demand and ammonium nitrogen—declined at the national level by 63 percent and 78 percent, respectively, during the period.
There seems to be a ubiquitous observation of the transformation of war/conflict into a sort of video game experience. This article doesn’t signal the video part - but it does signal the introduction of ‘non-player’ characters that accompany a protagonist with autonomy. The image is worth the view.
Boeing’s Autonomous Fighter Jet Will Fly Over the Australian Outback
Robotic aircraft will accompany human-piloted planes, adding firepower and thwarting enemy attacks
No cockpit mars the clean lines of this unpiloted blue streak.
If you drive along the main northern road through South Australia with a good set of binoculars, you may soon be able to catch a glimpse of a strange, windowless jet, one that is about to embark on its maiden flight. It’s a prototype of the next big thing in aerial combat: a self-piloted warplane designed to work together with human-piloted aircraft.
The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and Boeing Australia are building this fighterlike plane for possible operational use in the mid-2020s. Trials are set to start this year, and although the RAAF won’t confirm the exact location, the quiet electromagnetic environment, size, and remoteness of the Woomera Prohibited Area make it a likely candidate. Named for ancient Aboriginal spear throwers, Woomera spans an area bigger than North Korea, making it the largest weapons-testing range on the planet.
The autonomous plane, formally called the Airpower Teaming System but often known as “Loyal Wingman,” is 11 meters (38 feet) long and clean cut, with sharp angles offset by soft curves. The look is quietly aggressive.
Three prototypes will be built under a project first revealed by Boeing and the RAAF in February 2019. Those prototypes are not meant to meet predetermined specifications but rather to help aviators and engineers work out the future of air combat. This may be the first experiment to truly portend the end of the era of crewed warplanes.
This is a sad sort of paranoid signal - but probably worthwhile for people who are concerned with their privacy.
This simple trick stops Google, Amazon and Facebook from listening to you all the time
Smart home devices from Google, Amazon and Facebook are engineered to listen for your commands and respond to them. Usually, they only engage when you say your "wake" word such as "OK, Google" or "Hey, Google."
But these devices are always listening.
If that makes you uneasy, there's a simple fix to stop your smart-home companion from listening in on you all the time.
Turn off the microphones on the devices when you are not using them or for short periods of time when you don't want them eavesdropping.
This is a strong signal of domesticating DNA and transforming our agricultural paradigm as well. The urban farm is emerging in a community near you soon enough.
New Tomato Ideal for Urban Gardens and Even Outer Space Created Through Genetic Editing
Genetic editing is moving tomato crops from the field to the city skyline, or even outer space. Researchers used CRISPR gene editing to optimize tomatoes for urban agriculture.
Farmers could soon be growing tomatoes bunched like grapes in a storage unit, on the roof of a skyscraper, or even in space. That’s if a clutch of new gene-edited crops prove as fruitful as the first batch.
The primary goal of this new research is to engineer a wider variety of crops that can be grown in urban environments or other places not suitable for plant growth, said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor and HHMI Investigator Zach Lippman, who leads the lab that designed the ‘urban agriculture tomatoes.’
These new gene-edited tomato plants look nothing like the long vines you might find growing in a backyard garden or in agricultural fields. The most notable feature is their bunched, compact fruit. They resemble a bouquet whose roses have been replaced by ripe cherry tomatoes. They also mature quickly, producing ripe fruit that’s ready for harvest in under 40 days. And you can eat them.
I love the concept of an internet-in-soil entangling ecologies of other plants. This is a great signal of biological entanglement.
Genes controlling mycorrhizal colonization discovered in soybean
Like most plants, soybeans pair up with soil fungi in a symbiotic mycorrhizal relationship. In exchange for a bit of sugar, the fungus acts as an extension of the root system to pull in more phosphorus, nitrogen, micronutrients, and water than the plant could on its own.
Mycorrhizal fungi occur naturally in soil and are commercially available as soil inoculants, but new research from the University of Illinois suggests not all soybean genotypes respond the same way to their mycorrhizal relationships.
"In our study, root colonization by one mycorrhizal species differed significantly among genotypes and ranged from 11 to 70%," says Michelle Pawlowski, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Crop Sciences at Illinois and co-author on a new study in Theoretical and Applied Genetics.
The process of root colonization starts before fungal spores even germinate in the soil. Roots exude chemicals, triggering spores to germinate and grow toward the root. Once the fungus makes contact, there's a complex cascade of reactions in the plant that prevents the usual defensive attack against invading pathogens. Instead, the plant allows the fungus to enter and set up shop inside the root, where it creates tiny tree-like structures known as arbuscules; these are where the fungus and plant trade sugar and nutrients.
This is an interesting signal for one way to adapt to and meet the challenge of survival as some environments are transformed by climate change - and also perhaps transform air conditioning.
Engineers design on-skin electronic device providing a personal air conditioner without needing electricity
One day, soldiers could cool down on the military battlefield—preventing heat stroke or exhaustion—by using "wearable air conditioning," an on-skin device designed by engineers at the University of Missouri. The device includes numerous human health care applications such as the ability to monitor blood pressure, electrical activity of the heart and the level of skin hydration.
The findings are detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Unlike similar products in use today or other related concepts, this breathable and waterproof device can deliver personal air conditioning to a human body through a process called passive cooling. Passive cooling does not utilize electricity, such as a fan or pump, which researchers believe allows for minimal discomfort to the user.
"Our device can reflect sunlight away from the human body to minimize heat absorption, while simultaneously allowing the body to dissipate body heat, thereby allowing us to achieve around 11 degrees Fahrenheit of cooling to the human body during the daytime hours," said corresponding author Zheng Yan, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering. "We believe this is one of the first demonstrations of this capability in the emerging field of on-skin electronics."
Currently, the device is a small wired patch, and researchers say it will take one to two years to design a wireless version. They also hope to one day take their technology and apply it to 'smart' clothing.
Hmm it has been said that music is a universal language - this is a signal supporting that possibility. Of course - this may well be a case of science formalizing the obvious.
"Imagine organizing a massively eclectic music library by emotion and capturing the combination of feelings associated with each track. That's essentially what our study has done," said study lead author Alan Cowen, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in neuroscience.
Music evokes 13 key emotions. Scientists have mapped them
The "Star-Spangled Banner" stirs pride. Ed Sheeran's "The Shape of You" sparks joy. And "ooh là là!" best sums up the seductive power of George Michael's "Careless Whispers."
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have surveyed more than 2,500 people in the United States and China about their emotional responses to these and thousands of other songs from genres including rock, folk, jazz, classical, marching band, experimental and heavy metal.
The upshot? The subjective experience of music across cultures can be mapped within at least 13 overarching feelings: Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up.
The findings are set to appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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