Content
Quotes:
Cory Doctorow: Inaction is a Form of Action
There should never be heroes in science
A Few Responses to Criticism of My SXSW-Edu Keynote on Media Literacy
Articles:
Networks of self-driving trucks are becoming a reality in the US
Nanotechnology applied to medicine: The first liquid retina prosthesis
German firm creates bionic birds
Coal reaching 'tipping point' vs renewables: analysis
Major new paleoclimatology study shows global warming has upended 6,500 years of cooling
Researchers find fans of apocalyptic movies may be coping with pandemic better
Animals Use Social Distancing to Avoid Disease
‘Unknown pneumonia’ deadlier than coronavirus sweeping Kazakhstan, Chinese embassy warns
the Big Tech platforms have pursued growth through classic monopoly tactics: buying their nascent competitors, merging with their biggest rivals, cornering entire vertical markets.
They cheated.
To see how this plays out in the real world, consider Facebook: it’s a company that has hostages, not users. In 2018, Facebook was rocked by the largest exodus of US customers in the company’s history: 15 million 13-34 year olds left Facebook. See, the market works!
Not so fast.
The vast majority of those users who left Facebook ended up on Instagram, which has been a Facebook division since 2012, when Zuckerberg and co paid $1 billion to acquire the company, explicitly to capture younger users who were abandoning Facebook.
Cory Doctorow: Inaction is a Form of Action
it’s an important reminder of what we often forget: scientists are human beings, and are subject to very human flaws. Most notably, they’re subject to bias, and a strong aversion to having their cherished theories proved wrong. The fact that Ioannidis, the world’s most famous sceptic of science, is himself subject to this bias is the strongest possible confirmation of its psychological power. The Eysenck and Ioannidis stories differ in very many ways, but they both tell us how contrarianism and iconoclasm — both crucial forces for the process of constant scepticism that science needs to progress — can go too far, leading researchers not to back down, but to double-down in the face of valid criticism.
Above, I should really have said that John Ioannidis was a hero of mine. Because this whole episode has reminded me that those self-critical, self-correcting principles of science simply don’t allow for hero-worship. Even the strongest critics of science need themselves to be criticised; those who raise the biggest questions about the way we do research need themselves to be questioned. Healthy science needs a whole community of sceptics, all constantly arguing with one another — and it helps if they’re willing to admit their own mistakes. Who watches the watchmen in science? The answer is, or at least should be: all of us.
There should never be heroes in science
Most of the criticism that I’ve received has come from those who are deeply invested in media literacy who were frustrated with my depiction of the field. I respect that I’m challenging a sacred cow, although I reject the criticism that I’m dismissing the values, goals, or ideals that are central to those who are working hard to find a way to education the next generation. I also stand by my finding that there are a lot of things that currently exist in everyday classrooms that are labeled “media literacy.” One if the weirdest parts of doing fieldwork across the country sampling for diverse communities and youth is that I’ve seen a lot of dynamics in schools that are unimaginable to my friends in education. I’ve seen kids smoking marijuana in class while the substitute teacher of the day desperately tries to gain control. I’ve walked in on kids having sex in the teacher’s lounge; they weren’t ashamed but mostly annoyed that I interrupted. I’ve watched a biology teacher integrate creationism into his lessons. And yes over and over and over again, I’ve heard teachers tell students not to use Wikipedia. Sadly, this isn’t an outdated finding. I truly wish it were. I also wish that I didn’t watch parents tell their kids that only Fox was a trustworthy news source. Or the inverse. This is part of the reality of this country, whether we like it or not. And I’m trying to grapple with the array of dynamics that happen in the over 125,000 schools in this country. Part of what is challenging about talking in an environment like SXSW-Edu is that it’s comprised of a self-selected group of educators.
Another critique that I’ve received stems from a misreading of my argument. I am not arguing that media literacy causes hatred. I’m arguing that it doesn’t solve it. And, more importantly, that a well-intended but ineffective intervention can actually do harm. I grew up with Nancy Reagan’s War on Drugs campaign, the one the involved the frying pan and the egg. When my peers started experimenting with marijuana and concluded that it was nothing like the message they heard, they assumed that there was no truth to the message that drugs mess with your brain. Coke and then meth flew through my community. I’ve long been angered by how these unnuanced messages failed to engage people with where they were. As a result, I want us to be cautious as we’re entering into a conversation about media literacy solutionism. Do we really know what the outcomes will be? Or do we just hope that it will be what we intend it to be? Facebook intended to create community. Netflix intended to inform people about the costs of bullying.
where we are in society isn’t just a product of any one vector. It’s an ecosystem. We could talk about how climate is destabilizing migration patterns, which is magnifying fear of other. We could talk about how the rise in perceived inequality is rooted in the debt culture and the implications this has for radicalizeable young people. We could talk about how the loss of news media is rooted in private equity and how not knowing anyone in the industry undermines trust in the journalistic project. There are many factors at play. But my goal with this talk wasn’t to talk about root causes; it was to challenge a common solution being put forward based on what I’m already seeing play out.
What surprised me the most is how few folks really grappled with my primary argument: if we’re not careful, media literacy and critical thinking will be deployed as an assertion of authority over epistemology.
For what it’s worth, when I try to untangle the threads to actually address the so-called “fake news” problem, I always end in two places: 1) dismantle financialized capitalism (which is also the root cause of some of the most challenging dynamics of tech companies); 2) reknit the social fabric of society by strategically connecting people. But neither of those are recommendations for educators.
A Few Responses to Criticism of My SXSW-Edu Keynote on Media Literacy
This is a good signal of the emergence of automated transportation.
Networks of self-driving trucks are becoming a reality in the US
The self-driving truck company TuSimple is laying the groundwork for a futuristic autonomous freight industry.
Fully autonomous trucking may be one step closer to reality. On Wednesday, the San Diego-based self-driving startup TuSimple announced what it’s calling the world’s first autonomous freight network. That means that the company is laying the groundwork for delivering a lot more of our stuff with self-driving trucks.
TuSimple is hardly the only company working to making fully automated shipping a reality. Several companies, including Aurora, Daimler, and Embark Trucks, are competing for a slice of the future of self-driving freight trucks. Alphabet-owned Waymo confirmed on Tuesday that it will be expanding its own self-driving trucking routes throughout the American Southwest and Texas, following previous tests in Arizona, California, Michigan, and Georgia.
TuSimple’s expansion plans seem more concrete than some of its competitors. The company is expanding existing shipments with UPS, which has also invested in TuSimple, and the foodservice delivery giant McLane. The major shipping company US Xpress, one of the nation’s largest freight companies, will also start shipping goods through TuSimple, which now has 22 contracted customers. Those companies will ultimately have influence over which routes are digitally mapped out next for self-driving trucks.
This is a very interesting signal of the emergence of the post-human - new ways to restore lost sensory capacity and potentially enhance it.
Nanotechnology applied to medicine: The first liquid retina prosthesis
Research at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) has led to the revolutionary development of an artificial liquid retinal prosthesis to counteract the effects of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration that cause the progressive degeneration of photoreceptors of the retina, resulting in blindness. The study has been published in Nature Nanotechnology.
The study represents the state of the art in retinal prosthetics and is an evolution of the planar artificial retinal model developed by the same team in 2017 and based on organic semiconductor materials (Nature Materials 2017, 16: 681-689).
The 'second generation' artificial retina is biomimetic, offers high spatial resolution and consists of an aqueous component in which photoactive polymeric nanoparticles (whose size is 350 nanometres, thus about 1/100 of the diameter of a hair) are suspended, and will replace damaged photoreceptors.
The experimental results show that the natural light stimulation of nanoparticles, in fact, causes the activation of retinal neurons spared from degeneration, thus mimicking the functioning of photoreceptors in healthy subjects.
This is a great signal of the progress being made in autonomous flight - think flocks of drones. The 2 min video is spectacular.
German firm creates bionic birds
the latest creation from German robotics company Festo promises not only literal flights of fancy, but quite promising real-world applications down the road as well.
The company unveiled a video of a stunningly lifelike fleet of robo-birds that glide through the air with guidance from an ultra-sideband radio system.
Each of the five swallows weighs 42 grams. They each are powered by three tiny motors for direction, lift and descent. Their wingspan extends to 26 inches.
"The intelligent interaction of motors and mechanics allows the frequency of the wing beat and the elevator's angle of attack to be precisely adjusted for the various maneuvers," according to a report on the BionicSwift on Festo's web site.
The birds carry a 6 gram battery and they are guided by GPS sensors located throughout the enclosed flying area. The birds follow a preprogrammed flight path, but if an unexpected factor arises, such as a gust of air, radio communication enables instantaneous flight rerouting.
Another of the ever stronger signals of the emergence of a transformation of our energy paradigm.
"A faster transition from coal to clean energy is within our grasp, and we show how to engineer that transition in ways that will save money for electricity customers around the world while aiding a just transition for workers and communities,"
Coal reaching 'tipping point' vs renewables: analysis
Renewable energy such as wind and solar projects are already cheaper to build than it is to continue operating 40 percent of the world's existing coal fleet, according to analysis released Tuesday.
In a report outlining how the world can phase out the most polluting fuel while powering an economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, a group of experts said coal had reached a financial "tipping point" making it uncompetitive in most markets.
The authors estimate that a third of the global coal fleet is already more costly to run than it is to build new renewable power solutions, including battery storage.
That figure is set to rise to 73 percent of the fleet by 2025, said the analysis, which also found that replacing the entire coal fleet with clean energy could be done at a net saving to the global economy as soon as 2022.
This is definitely a strong signal of the effect of humans on Climate.
Major new paleoclimatology study shows global warming has upended 6,500 years of cooling
Comprehensive compilation of pre-historic temperature records shows that global warming is reaching levels not seen for at least 6,000 years
Over the past 150 years, global warming has more than undone the global cooling that occurred over the past six millennia, according to a major study published June 30 in Nature Research's Scientific Data, "Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach." The findings show that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago when the long-term average global temperature topped out at around 0.7°C warmer than the mid-19th century. Since then, accelerating greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to global average temperatures that are now surpassing 1°C above the mid-19th century.
Earlier this year, an international group of 93 paleoclimate scientists from 23 countries -- also led by Kaufman, McKay, Routson and Erb -- published the most comprehensive set of paleoclimate data ever compiled for the past 12,000 years, compressing 1,319 data records based on samples taken from 679 sites globally. At each site, researchers analyzed ecological, geochemical and biophysical evidence from both marine and terrestrial archives, such as lake deposits, marine sediments, peat and glacier ice, to infer past temperature changes. Countless scientists working around the world over many decades conducted the basic research contributing to the global database.
"The rate of cooling that followed the peak warmth was subtle, only around 0.1°C per 1,000 years. This cooling seems to be driven by slow cycles in the Earth's orbit, which reduced the amount of summer sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, culminating in the 'Little Ice Age' of recent centuries," said Erb, who analyzed the temperature reconstructions.
Since the mid-19th century, global warming has climbed to about 1°C, suggesting that the global average temperature of the last decade (2010-2019) was warmer than anytime during the present post-glacial period.
As a fan of zombie apocalypse movies (I think I’ve seen about 80% of every zombie movie ever made) - I had to share this.
Researchers find fans of apocalyptic movies may be coping with pandemic better
A small team of researchers from the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, and Aarhus University has found that people who are exposed to end-of-the-world movies may be more resilient when dealing with the real-life ongoing pandemic. They have written a paper describing questioning volunteers about movies they had seen and their real pandemic experiences. Their paper is available on the PsyArXiv preprint server.
The researchers found that people who had recently watched what they describe as "prepper" movies showed signs of higher levels of resilience to the real-world pandemic. They suggest exposure to certain scenes in a movie psychologically prepared viewers for some of the events that unfolded as the real pandemic got underway. They further note that people watching generic horror movies also reported higher levels of coping abilities during the early days of the real pandemic. The researchers suggest such movies allow viewers to practice coping skills, which they apparently put to use if a real need arises.
I prefer to use the term ‘physical distancing’ rather than ‘social distancing’ - because to enact the physical distancing necessary to meet the challenge of this pandemic (and perhaps those in the future) we need strong, flexible, ever present social fabric that is all inclusive - we must pull together more (as a society and as social beings) in order to make physical distancing effective.
Animals Use Social Distancing to Avoid Disease
Lobsters, birds and some primates use quarantine to ward off infections
Despite how unnatural social distancing may feel to people, it is very much a part of the natural world, practiced by mammals, fishes, insects and birds.
Social animals stay apart, changing behaviors such as grooming to stop the spread of diseases that could kill them.
Strategies vary from shunning a sick animal to maintaining interactions with only the closest relatives.
On a shallow reef in the Florida Keys, a young Caribbean spiny lobster returns from a night of foraging for tasty mollusks and enters its narrow den. Lobsters usually share these rocky crevices, and tonight a new one has wandered in. Something about the newcomer is not right, though. Chemicals in its urine smell different. These substances are produced when a lobster is infected with a contagious virus called Panulirus argus virus 1, and the healthy returning lobster seems alarmed. As hard as it is to find a den like this one, protected from predators, the young animal backs out, into open waters and away from the deadly virus.
The lobster’s response to disease—seen in both field and laboratory experiments—is one we have become all too familiar with this year: social distancing. People’s close interactions with family and friends have been cut off to reduce the spread of COVID-19. It has been extremely hard. And many have questioned the necessity. Yet despite how unnatural it may feel to us, social distancing is very much a part of the natural world. In addition to lobsters, animals as diverse as monkeys, fishes, insects and birds detect and distance themselves from sick members of their species.
Immunity through behavior does come with costs, though. Social distancing from other members of your species, even temporarily, means missing out on the numerous benefits that favored social living in the first place. For this reason, researchers have learned that complete shunning is just one approach animals take. Some social species stay together when members are infected but change certain grooming interactions, for example, whereas others, such as ants, limit encounters between individuals that play particular roles in the colony, all to lower the risk of infection.
This may be a weak signal of another ‘demic’ of some sort or of some sort of complication arising from our current pandemic.
‘Unknown pneumonia’ deadlier than coronavirus sweeping Kazakhstan, Chinese embassy warns
Statement from embassy warns that death rate is ‘much higher’ than coronavirus and says local authorities have yet to identify cause
Kazakh authorities have reimposed Covid-19 lockdown in some parts of the country amid a spike in pneumonia cases last month
The country as a whole saw 1,772 pneumonia deaths in the first part of the year, 628 of which happened in June, including some Chinese nationals, the embassy continued.
Late last month officials warned about the rise in pneumonia cases. Kisikova said that doctors were finding 600 people a day with pneumonia symptoms, compared with 80 a day before the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, the Singapore-based website CNA reported.
“Every day, 350 to 400 patients are hospitalised in the city with either Covid-19 or pneumonia,”
Some shameless self-promoting creative musings
#Micropoems
We love nature -
the nature we experience in our domesticated parks and gardens -
until the noxious plant-bug-animal strikes us -
poison ivy really sucks
Our itches -
make us move -
make us enact our response-ability -
even when it’s irresponsible
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