Hello all – 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
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
When it comes to where you work, to the organization or team you’re a part of, do you feel you matter, that you’re valued, that you’re seen as someone with a vital to the group?
If so, you’re fortunate. When this is the case, you can be more creative, which means you will be happier, healthier, and more successful. For true creativity to emerge, you must feel seen, safe, and valued enough to allow out the nascent ideas wanting to take form and be implemented.
If not, if there is a critical, judgmental cultural voice, or many people with vocal dysfunctional judgment and criticism, then your own voice of judgment will keep those ideas tucked away.
In the context of work, when people are disconnected, when they don’t feel they belong, when there is no community, there is little psychological safety, and to truly ignite their personal creativity and everything that can come from that — innovation, powerful leadership qualities, compassion — people need to feel psychologically safe.
People need to feel they matter, they need to feel they have something valuable they bring to the organization, and they need the tools and support structure to actually contribute that which only they can — that which makes them truly of value to the whole.
Growing People — a Vital Imperative for Organizations
A new study, conducted by MIT in conjunction with the U.S. Census Bureau, analyzed 2.7 million people who started companies between 2007 and 2014 and found that among the fastest growing tech companies, the average founder was 45-years-old at the time of founding. The researchers also found that a 50-year-old is twice as likely to have a massive success—defined as a company that performs in the top 0.1 percent—than a 30-year-old. “These findings strongly reject common hypotheses that emphasize youth as a key trait of successful entrepreneurs,” write the authors of the study. “The view that young people produce the highest-growth companies is in part a rejection of the role of experience.”
In other words: Success in business, even in the fast-paced start-up world, isn’t just about age-related smarts. Wisdom, a deeper kind of knowing that can only be gained through experience, matters too. And apparently, it matters quite a bit.
An Ode to Being Old
So much of what we think is rehearsed knowledge. When we think things for the first time, they change who we are, evolving us as individuals and ultimately as a species, and they have enormous power as a result.
“It is a general principle of ecology that an ecosystem is stable not because it is secure and protected, but because it contains such diversity that some of its many types of organisms are bound to survive despite drastic changes in the environment or other adverse conditions. Herbert adds, however, that the effort of civilization to create and maintain security for its individual members, “necessarily creates the conditions of crisis because it fails to deal with change.”
It is commonly portrayed as a contest between theories that is based on a common stock of observations. First we see and then we theorize. Theories that do the best job of explaining the observations are accepted, only to be challenged by another round of theories, and so on, bringing our knowledge of the world closer to reality.
The problem with this view of science is that the common stock of observations is nearly infinite. We cannot possibly attend to everything so a theory—broadly defined as a way of interpreting the world around us—is required to tell us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. We must theorize to see. A new theory doesn’t just posit a new interpretation of old observations. It opens doors to new observations to which the old theories were blind.
Evolving the New Economy: Tim O’Reilly and David Sloan Wilson
To quote Dorsey (emphasis mine): “Today we’re committing to the people and this committee to do that work and do it openly. We’re here to contribute to a healthy public square, not compete to have the only one. We know that’s the only way our business thrives and helps us all defend against these new threats.”
Ben points out that during yesterday’s hearings, Dorsey was willing to tie the problems of public discourse on Twitter directly to the company’s core business model, that of advertising. Sandberg? She ducked the issue and failed to make the link.
You may recall my piece back in January, Facebook Can’t Be Fixed. In it I argue that the only way to address Facebook’s failings as a public square would be to totally rethink its core advertising model, a golden goose which has driven the company’s stock on an six-year march to the stratosphere. From the post:
“[Facebook’s ad model is] the honeypot which drives the economics of spambots and fake news, it’s the at-scale algorithmic enabler which attracts information warriors from competing nation states, and it’s the reason the platform has become a dopamine-driven engagement trap where time is often not well spent.
It’s the business model, folks. If we’re going to “fix” anything, we have to start there.
Why Facebook Calls It An Arms Race
The astronomer Fang Lizhi published with his wife, Li Shuxian, a popular book,Creation of the Universe (1989), which includes the best explanation that I have seen of the paradox of order and disorder.1 The explanation lies in the peculiar behavior of gravity in the physical world. On the balance sheet of energy accounting, gravitational energy is a deficit. When you are close to a massive object, your gravitational energy is minus the amount of energy it would take to get away from the mass all the way to infinity. When you walk up a hill on the earth, your gravitational energy is becoming less negative, but never gets up to zero. Any object whose motions are dominated by gravity will have energy decreasing as temperature increases and energy increasing as temperature decreases.
As a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, when energy flows from one such object to another, the hot object will grow hotter and the cold object will grow colder. That is why the sun grew hotter and the planets grew cooler as the solar system evolved. In every situation where gravity is dominant, the second law causes local contrasts to increase together with entropy. This is true for astronomical objects like the sun, and also for large terrestrial objects such as thunderstorms and hurricanes. The diversity of astronomical and terrestrial objects, including living creatures, tends to increase with time, in spite of the second law. The evolution of natural ecologies and of human societies is a part of this pattern.
Freeman Dyson - The Key to Everything
The movement to transform science publication continues to develop alternative approaches.
“Paywalls are not only hindering the scientific enterprise itself but also they are an obstacle [to] the uptake of research results by the wider public,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, a Brussels-based advocacy group that represents European research agencies and which officially launched the policy.
Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions
Eleven research funders in Europe announce ‘Plan S’ to make all scientific works free to read as soon as they are published.
Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years — and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers.
The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication (see ‘Plan S players’). The papers would have a liberal publishing licence that would allow anyone else to download, translate or otherwise reuse the work. “No science should be locked behind paywalls!” says a preamble document that accompanies the pledge, called Plan S, released on 4 September.
“It is a very powerful declaration. It will be contentious and stir up strong feelings,” says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist and open-access advocate at Imperial College London. The policy, he says, appears to mark a “significant shift” in the open-access publishing movement, which has seen slow progress in its bid to make scientific literature freely available online.
Speaking of open access - this is an interesting paper on the implication of the emerging digital environment. The implications definitely hold for humans as we are - but also may provide ways to augment what it is to be human.
Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time
Society's techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more computer-orientated. However, far from simply generating faster versions of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time. Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world's largest and most powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover an abrupt transition to a new all-machine phase characterized by large numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the system-wide financial collapse in 2008. Our findings are consistent with an emerging ecology of competitive machines featuring ‘crowds’ of predatory algorithms, and highlight the need for a new scientific theory of subsecond financial phenomena.
This is an interesting signal - from a well know analyst of disruption.
"If you're asking whether the providers get disrupted within a decade — I might bet that it takes nine years rather than 10."
Harvard Business School professor: Half of American colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years
This fall, 19.9 million college students will be traveling to college campuses across the United States to start a new school year. There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, but Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says that half are bound for bankruptcy in the next few decades.
Christensen is known for coining the theory of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book, "The Innovator's Dilemma." Since then, he has applied his theory of disruption to a wide range of industries, including education.
In his recent book, "The Innovative University," Christensen and co-author Henry Eyring analyze the future of traditional universities, and conclude that online education will become a more cost-effective way for students to receive an education, effectively undermining the business models of traditional institutions and running them out of business.
This is a good signal of emerging technology that can mitigate some of our food fears for the future.
Tech Can Sustainably Feed Developing World Cities of the Future. Here’s How
In the next 30 years, virtually all net population growth will occur in urban regions of developing countries. At the same time, worldwide food production will become increasingly limited by the availability of land, water, and energy. These constraints will be further worsened by climate change and the expected addition of two billion people to today’s four billion now living in urban regions. Meanwhile, current urban food ecosystems in the developing world are inefficient and critically inadequate to meet the challenges of the future.
Combined, these trends could have catastrophic economic and political consequences. A new path forward for urban food ecosystems needs to be found. But what is that path?
New technologies, coupled with new business models and supportive government policies, can create more resilient urban food ecosystems in the coming decades. These tech-enabled systems can sustainably link rural, peri-urban (areas just outside cities), and urban producers and consumers, increase overall food production, and generate opportunities for new businesses and jobs
In a viable ecology all outputs are inputs to other processes - this is the nature of ecological metabolism - the world needs an economic paradigm consistent with a ‘metabolic economy’. Given the rate at which we are domesticating DNA - there are many examples from which a biomimicry approach can enable such an economy. Imagine developing plants that replace mining?
The tree that bleeds... metal?
Heavy metals like nickel and zinc are usually the last thing that plants want to grow next to in high concentrations.
But a specialised group, known as hyperaccumulators, have evolved to take up the normally toxic metals into their stems, leaves and even seeds.
Researchers have been studying Pycnandra acuminata in particular - a tree that grows on the island of New Caledonia in the south Pacific.
They think it may use the nickel to defend against insects.
Its latex has an unusual blue-green colour as it contains up to 25% nickel.
"Pycnandra acuminata is a large (up to 20m tall) rare rainforest tree, restricted to remaining patches of rainforest in New Caledonia," says Dr Antony van der Ent, a researcher at the University of Queensland who has been studying the tree.
And another breakthrough for the harvesting of lithium.
Yes, There Will Be Plenty Of Lithium For Energy Storage
The energy storage sector has been growing robustly, despite some concerns about the global supply chain for one key material, lithium. Well, that question could soon be moot. The California-based startup Lilac Solutions has just received a major financial boost for an innovative, low-impact method for extracting lithium from abundant brines around the globe.
Last week, Lilac Solutions was among three startups selected for investment by the non-profit organization PRIME Coalition, which focuses on a high tech approach to manage climate change.
The company’s new technology addresses a couple of key issues involved in conventional lithium extraction. Lilac describes the problem in a nutshell:
Lilac has developed a modular technology that can be scaled up (or down, presumably) in reaction to market trends. The key to Lilac’s technology is ion exchange. Lilac has identified a group of high performance materials that can absorb and release lithium from brine quickly and in high concentration, while requiring less water than conventional methods.
In contrast to a months-long wait involve in conventional brine evaporation, the Lilac process takes a matter of hours.
Lilac also makes the point that its materials can function efficiently with brine sources that conventional extraction methods can’t access, due to the presence of calcium, magnesium and other interfering substances.
In addition, Lilac anticipates that its technology can be used on low-concentration brines that would otherwise be uneconomical to process.
Domesticating photosynthesis is a serious effort that will eventually enable not only better plants for new ways to harness energy and manufacture new materials. There is a 2 min video.
Genetic Engineering with Algae Boosts Crop Photosynthesis
Researchers developed a genetic engineering technique adding algae genes to some staple crops for capturing more carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and improving their yields. A team from Australian National University in Canberra describes this process in yesterday’s issue of the journal Nature Communications.
A project in the lab of molecular biologist Dean Price and led by postdoctoral researcher Ben Long, is seeking to improve the way plant crops process carbon dioxide, to improve the efficiency of their photosynthesis in staple crops like wheat grown worldwide and cassava farmed in many developing regions. Improving the photosynthesis process — conversion of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to sugar — is a prime objective for boosting crop yields, and the focus of the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, or RIPE consortium, an international research group funding the study, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other agencies and organizations.
An obstacle to increasing photosynthesis output in crops is a key catalytic enzyme known as ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase or Rubisco that absorbs and converts carbon dioxide in the air to sugar. But that process is slow and prone to errors, since Rubisco cannot always discriminate between oxygen and carbon dioxide. The team’s solution is to genetically engineer plants with components of blue-green algae, also called cyanobacteria, that conduct photosynthesis much more efficiently.
Speaking of domesticating photosynthesis - here is a good signal of progress toward this.
Artificial photosynthesis is not revolutionary in and of itself—techniques to achieve this effect have existed for decades. What makes this recent discovery so important is its partly artificial, partly natural approach. This is the first time a man-made photosynthesis method has been modeled specifically to produce renewable energy.
The University of Cambridge and the Ruhr University Bochum team is primarily using hydrogenase, an enzyme which has remained dormant in algae for millions of years. Hydrogenase combined with synthetic pigments to provoke sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen unassisted.
Artificial Photosynthesis: A New Renewable Energy Source?
An international team of scientists has made a major breakthrough for the future of sustainable fuel. They achieved this major milestone by copying the methods of some of the cleanest energy producers on the planet—plants. Scientists from the University of Cambridge and the Ruhr University Bochum have discovered a new technique that mimics the natural process of photosynthesis in plants, which could be used to produce hydrogen fuel, an extremely clean (zero carbon dioxide emissions) and essentially unlimited energy source.
In a paper published in the Nature Energy scientific journal, the team of scientists explained their proof-of-principle method for splitting water molecules into the individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms of which they are composed using sunlight. The technique mirrors photosynthesis, the natural process wherein plants split water molecules when they convert sunlight to energy to feed themselves. This achievement has far-reaching implications—Erwin Reisner, lead author of the study, told Newsweek that “solar energy conversion to produce renewable fuels and chemicals—i.e., solar fuel synthesis—is an important strategy for powering our society in a post-fossil era.”
Here is a very interesting signal - pointing to a unique human quality.
The brain cells have been named "rose hip neurons" by a team at the University of Szeged in Hungary, which played a key role in the discovery.
What Makes A Human Brain Unique? A Newly Discovered Neuron May Be A Clue
Scientists have taken another step toward understanding what makes the human brain unique.
An international team has identified a kind of brain cell that exists in people but not mice, the team reported Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"This particular type of cell had properties that had never actually been described in another species," says Ed Lein, one of the study's authors and an investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
The finding could help explain why many experimental treatments for brain disorders have worked in mice, but failed in people. It could also provide new clues to scientists who study human brain disorders ranging from autism to Alzheimer's disease to schizophrenia.
"It may be that in order to fully understand psychiatric disorders, we need to get access to these special types of neurons that exist only in humans," says Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the research.
This is an important signal for the world of computing, mobile communication and the Internet of Things - file it under Moore’s law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law. Also it signals a shift in the center of innovation toward China. The details of its performance are worth the short read.
Huawei promises its 7nm Kirin 980 processor will destroy the Snapdragon 845
More power, delivered more efficiently
Huawei announced its newest system-on-a-chip, the Kirin 980, which boasts a number of world firsts. It’s the first 7nm mobile processor, the first one built around ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU and Mali-G76 GPU, the first with a Cat.21 smartphone modem supporting speeds up to 1.4Gbps, and the first chip to support 2,133MHz LPDDR4X RAM. The Kirin 980 has 6.9 billion transistors, but I’ve seen it for myself and it’s no larger than a thumbnail.
The road to today’s announcement started three years ago for Huawei, with the company engaging more than 1,000 senior semiconductor design experts and churning through more than 5,000 engineering prototypes. The end result is roughly a 20 percent speed improvement and a 40 percent reduction in power consumption relative to Huawei’s previous generation.
This may be a significant breakthrough and certainly signals the rapidly emerging zero-marginal cost change in global energy geopolitics.
Low-cost, printable solar panels offer ray of hope amid energy gridlock
Australian physicist says technology could make signing up for energy accounts as easy as a mobile phone subscription
In May last year, the University of Newcastle professor Paul Dastoor used organic printed solar cells to power screens and displays at an exhibition in Melbourne.
Less than one millimetre thick and held down with double-sided sticky tape, the panels are similar in texture to a potato chip packet and can be produced for less than $10 per square metre.
Dastoor has been working on the technology for more than a decade, but has now begun a 200 square-metre installation – the first commercial application of its kind in Australia and possibly the world.
“The low cost and speed at which this technology can be deployed is exciting as we need to find solutions, and quickly, to reduce demand on base-load power – a renewed concern as we approach another summer here in Australia,” he said.
This is an great concept using simple technology and time - a way to manage water flows. The 2 min video illustrates how the sand dam works.
Fertile Grounds: Low-Tech “Sand Dams” Breathe New Life into African Drylands
Sand dams are simple but effective on multiple levels. Like normal dams, they involve walling off areas where water flows — channels that turn into streams and rivers when it rains. They trap water (up to millions of gallons per dam), which can sink into the sand for longer-term storage above the dam (then be tapped via pipes below).
Sand dams also help keep valuable soil in place, preserving and creating new areas of arable land around them. The sand also helps filter and protect these water sources from contamination and disease.
So far, the charity pioneering these (called Excellent) has worked in multiple countries across Africa to construct around 1,000 sand dams, but they are branching out, too, aiming to take this technology to South America and South Asia as well. Their strategy is to partner with communities, helping them build out sand dams and spread knowledge of their construction as well.
This is an interesting signal - not only of the emergence of a new tools to assess algorithms - but could also weakly signal the possibility of a new form of institution a virtual assemblage of protocols and tools as an ‘Auditor General of Algorithms’.
This tool lets you see–and correct–the bias in an algorithm
Accenture’s new Fairness Tool is a way to quickly evaluate whether your data is creating fair outcomes.
Algorithms might help decide the terms of your next loan, pull data from your online shopping history to help determine your credit score, assess whether you should be offered a job, or decide whether someone is likely to commit a crime in the future. In theory, AI can eliminate some bias on the part of people making decisions–but since algorithms are designed and fed data by humans, the results often still aren’t fair. A new tool from Accenture, called the Fairness Tool, is designed to quickly identify and then help fix problems in algorithms.
“I’m hoping is that this is something that we can make accessible and available and easy to use for non-tech companies–for some of our Fortune 500 clients who are looking to expand their use of AI, but they’re very aware and very concerned about unintended consequences,” says Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture’s global responsible AI lead.
The tool uses statistical methods to identify when groups of people are treated unfairly by an algorithm–defining unfairness as predictive parity, meaning that the algorithm is equally likely to be correct or incorrect for each group. “In the past, we have found models that are highly accurate overall, but when you look at how that error breaks down over subgroups, you’ll see a huge difference between how correct the model is for, say, a white man versus a black woman,” she says.
The tool also looks for variables that are related to other sensitive variables.
For anyone interested in onlines games but also wants a sense of learning something important - this site may be interesting.
Complexity Explorables
Interactive explorations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, ecology, epidemiology and ....
The site is designed for people interested in complex systems and complex dynamical processes.
The Explorables are carefully chosen in such a way that the key elements of their behavior can be explored and explained without too much math (there are a few exceptions) and with as few words as possible.
The Site now also features Flongs, short for “foot longs”. These are tutorials on specific and paradigmatic complex systems that go a bit deeper, feature more interactive elements but require a bit more math.
Almost all interactive visualizations are implemented in D3 (Data Driven Documents). All the Explorables should work on your laptop or desktop computer and on Chrome, Safari and Firefox browsers (not sure about IE).
Some of the Explorables may not work on mobile devices but hopefully the majority does.
