Thursday, March 10, 2016

Friday Thinking 11 March 2016

Hello – Friday Thinking is curated on the basis of my own curiosity and offered in the spirit of sharing. Many thanks to those who enjoy this. 

In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.


Another thing that’s going on is that population geneticists, such as myself, are a bit unschooled. We haven’t gone through graduate school in anthropology, or linguistics, or history, and yet, we’re making very strong statements about these people’s fields. It's a little bit like barbarians are walking into your room, and you can’t ignore barbarians because they have information, weapons, and technology that you didn’t have access to before.

It’s a new type of information. I’ve been at a series of interdisciplinary meetings between linguists and archeologists and geneticists recently, and the genetics give succor to some people but it doesn’t make everybody happy; nobody is completely happy with the genetic data. It doesn’t perfectly play into anyone’s theory. In general, there is this battle line that’s been drawn between people who support what’s called the Anatolian hypothesis, the arrival of Indo-European languages from the Near East with farming, and people who think it arose later through a homeland in the steppe.

I opened up my own ancient DNA laboratory in Boston in 2013 with the help of Svante Pääbo, to study some of the topics that he wasn’t interested in studying himself, mostly population transformations after the Ice Age, and that’s what the work of the last three years has been. It’s been turning ancient DNA into an industrial process, studying very large numbers of samples, moving away from the model of studying just one or two or three amazing interesting samples and studying dozens or hundreds of people and understanding how carefully constructed time transects through different places in the world, and how populations have changed over time.        
The Genomic Ancient DNA Revolution- A New Way to Investigate the Past
A Conversation With David Reich


Attention is intimate, the kaleidoscopic point at which the self twines with a panoply of strange others, both human and non-human. Like the self, attention can do very well without an off-the-shelf concept of what it is and should be. Attention is about redistribution of action, and so can never be a final and stabilized state. It can't be hoarded. Its strength is not always in unity, purity, and concentration.

...a different way of describing and discussing attention: a lexicon that neither worships technology nor romanticizes nature. I want to move past a vocabulary of emancipation vs. enslavement. To think about attention through the language of ecology is to see it as a sound-wave that a bow draws from a violin: in constant flux, not just existing in its surroundings, but actually unable to be abstracted from the constituting conditions of the resin on the bow, the quality of the horsehair, the density of the wood, the moisture in the room's air. Attention is contingent on shifting attachments between individuals, collectivities, histories, technological and material conditions. To husband our attention requires a commitment to digital and analog life at once because, in so many ways, we are each other's attention.
A Better Way of Talking About Attention Loss
Economic models for contemporary attention-loss are cynical—and incomplete.
It's time to talk about an "ecology of attention."


“Innovation is not always about invention. It’s often about integration of ideas that pre-exist, and then you put them together in a novel package.”
Verdant Global: Germinating a Future by Growing Food Indoors


Ultimately, people still need a town center where they’re going to gather. I think a lot of retail space probably needs to be repurposed. There’s always a need to reimagine space and how people use it
For NREC’s Sam Sidiqi, Real Estate in Africa Offers a Way to Hedge Currency Risk


This is a great discussion exploring Google’s efforts to understand how to develop and support great teams and teamwork.
traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.
Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).

In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Dubey, a leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers.

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. ... Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency.


This is a top 10 list for 2016 - I thought I would include it because of one recommendation - one that I believe is vital for harnessing talent in any large organization.
Altimeter’s Top Digital Trends for 2016
From Charlene Li
Digital governance becomes a necessity
While terribly mundane, many organizations will reach a breaking point in 2016 where the morass known as digital/social/mobile will require a wholesale review of how they work with each other and across the enterprise. Central to this effort will be the rationalization of the digital C-Suite, identifying the roles and digital responsibilities of the CEO, COO, CMO, CIO, and the need for new positions like the Chief Digital Officer and Chief Experience Officer.


It seems like science and especially social science may not be in such a crisis after all - despite the incredible degree of complexity involved in social research. This is actually a must read - as efforts to replicate may have to be even more rigorous than the original study.
Who Says Most Psychology Studies Can't Be Replicated?
A high-profile paper left that impression last year. Now, Harvard University researchers are offering a detailed rebuttal.
Here's the thing about research: It can always be challenged, re-examined, re-interpreted. In a high-profile example of that process, a much-publicized 2015 paper looked at 100 psychology studies published in major journals, and found only 36 percent of them could be successfully replicated.

This led to many commentaries about a crisis in psychological research. But now the re-examination process has, in a sense, come full circle.

A group of researchers led by prominent Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert has published a detailed rebuttal of the 2015 paper. It points to three statistical errors that, in their analysis, led the original authors to an unwarranted conclusion.

After controlling for those mistakes, "the data (of the original paper) are consistent with the opposite conclusion—namely, that the reproducibility of psychological science is quite high," the researchers write in this week's issue of the journal Science.


This is another ‘weak signal’ related to a fundamental re-imagining of political-economies through reformulation of the basic science underlying the current pseudo-science of neo-classical economics - who’s ‘strong simplifying assumptions’ may actually make dangerously simplistic.
...a fundamental error in traditional economic models — they rely on data meant to approximate the actions of a single rational individual or average person. But the economy is not comprised of average people acting rationally and independently. Relying on models that assume so makes it difficult for experts to see what’s really going on.
In particular, traditional models have largely failed to account for the interactions between people or institutions. They don’t have any way to measure phenomena such as positive feedback, which is when a slight disturbance in a system causes a domino effect that sends it spiraling out of control.
The Next Financial Crisis Could Be Predicted By A Smarter Economic Model, Experts Say
What if ecologists who study food webs and epidemiologists who study disease outbreaks could help central bankers predict the next financial crisis? That idea isn’t so far-fetched to some economists who want to adapt a widely used scientific strategy to monitor the global economy.

A group of financial experts, including the chief economist of the Bank of England, issued a call to action Thursday in a major scientific journal asking scientists for help in building a better economic model.

Specifically, they want to incorporate complexity theory, which is already used by scientists to understand webs and systems in physics, computer science, biology and epidemiology. The model they hope to create will allow regulators and central bankers to forecast the impacts of new policies and possibly even anticipate the next financial crisis.

“Truth be told, the workhorse model in economics and finance, God bless it, does come with some strong simplifying assumptions, some of which mean it's not often well equipped to deal with situations of stress,” Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England who co-authored the proposal in Science, said.


Here’s a 12 page paper discussing a possible evolution of the blockchain for privacy. Worth the read for anyone interested in the future of the digital environment and privacy.
Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy
A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma’s computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modi- fied distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data. For the first time, users are able to share their data with cryptographic guarantees regarding their privacy.


I think of fiber optic infrastructure to every household and business as the basic utility of the digital environment - just as building roads aren’t the ‘source’ of wealth buth the enable the economy to innovate the creation of wealth through ever new uses. Here’s an article by a key thinker in this domain Susan Crawford.
This is a must read - it illuminates new business models to deliver public infrastructure - one can easily imagine each city building this - and leasing it out competitively.
In reality, the way competition actually happens in telecommunications is to have a world-class, basic, fixed-price, passive, wholesale wire to every home and business that can be used by any retail operator to provide services. That’s it. That’s the sensible model. Once you have that in place, competition explodes: the retail sellers know how much the wholesale input costs and can rely on that pricing while they differentiate their services by price, customer service, and quality commitments. Presto: prices charged to consumers begin to approach the marginal cost of the service and service quality climbs.
You Didn’t Notice It, But Google Fiber Just Began the Golden Age of High Speed Internet Access
Its “dark fiber” project in Huntsville creates a model that might finally thrust US Internet access into the 21st Century
This week, Google launched what amounts to a religious war in American telecom land.

In a surprising announcement, the Alphabet company known as Google Fiber said it would expand its high speed Internet access services to Huntsville, Alabama — but in a different way that it currently has started up operations in cities like Austin and Kansas City. In cities it services to date, Google Fiber actually lays down the fiber-optic cables that allow it to deliver super-high numbers of bits to customers and businesses. But in Huntsville, it will lease “dark” fiber that will be built and owned by the electric utility in that city. (Dark fiber is passive, unlit by lasers, so not capable of carrying information until someone comes along and lights it.) The Google lease is nonexclusive — any other ISP can show up and provide services — and will allow Google to provide retail gigabit fiber Internet access services to any home or business that Huntsville decides to serve.

...this is the model that has been used with enormous success in several other cities — and could be revolutionary here in smashing the current dogma that keeps Americans overcharged and under-served.


Here is a great example of leaping into the digital environment.
More phones, few banks and years of instability are transforming Somalia to a cashless society
Ahmed Farah Hassan no longer carries the tattered Somali shilling notes that were the currency of his war-torn country’s economy for years.

At a gas station in Mogadishu recently, the 32-year-old filled up his car and then paid with a few clicks of his phone.

“It’s easy nowadays. I don’t need to carry my cash. I just use my phone to pay bills everywhere I buy goods and services,” said Hassan, a driver at the Kheyre Development and Rehabilitation Organization, a local NGO that works with UNICEF to help street children. “Everyone here has his own bank. It’s safe.”
In the streets of Mogadishu, the future has arrived: cash is disappearing, credit cards are unnecessary, and daily shopping is speedy and digital.


And as the world accesses the Internet with mobile technology - the power of the computer becomes ever more massive - and ethereal.
“Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?”
Each of the 12.1 billion queries that Google’s 1.2 billion searchers conduct each day tutor the deep-learning AI over and over again. With another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand-fold more data and 100 times more computing resources, Google will have an unrivaled AI. My prediction: By 2024, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.
The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World
The original Watson is ... about the size of a bedroom, with 10 upright, refrigerator-shaped machines forming the four walls. The tiny interior cavity gives technicians access to the jumble of wires and cables on the machines’ backs. It is surprisingly warm inside, as if the cluster were alive.

Today’s Watson is very different. It no longer exists solely within a wall of cabinets but is spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred “instances” of the AI at once. Like all things cloudy, Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers. This kind of AI can be scaled up or down on demand. Because AI improves as people use it, Watson is always getting smarter; anything it learns in one instance can be immediately transferred to the others. And instead of one single program, it’s an aggregation of diverse software engines—its logic-deduction engine and its language-parsing engine might operate on different code, on different chips, in different locations—all cleverly integrated into a unified stream of intelligence.

When, in plain English, I give it the symptoms of a disease I once contracted in India, it gives me a list of hunches, ranked from most to least probable. The most likely cause, it declares, is Giardia—the correct answer. This expertise isn’t yet available to patients directly; IBM provides access to Watson’s intelligence to partners, helping them develop user-friendly interfaces for subscribing doctors and hospitals. “I believe something like Watson will soon be the world’s best diagnostician—whether machine or human,” says Alan Greene, chief medical officer of Scanadu, a startup that is building a diagnostic device inspired by the Star Trek medical tricorder and powered by a cloud AI. “At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.”

Here’s a 15 min interview with Geoffrey Hinton on AI. Worth the view.
The Code That Runs Our Lives
From searching on Google to real-time translation, millions of people use deep learning every day, mostly without knowing it. It's a form of artificial intelligence designed to mimic the human brain. Geoffrey Hinton is a professor in the department of computer science at the University of Toronto. His work on deep learning has been snapped up by Google and is now being used to power its search engine. He joins The Agenda to discuss deep learning and the future of artificial intelligence.


And in relation to AI and perhaps a potential aspect of a personal AI-ssistant.
The Artificially Intelligent Doctor Will Hear You Now
U.K.-based startup Babylon will launch an app later this year that will listen to your symptoms and provide medical advice. Will it help or hinder the health-care system?
There are about 10,000 known human diseases, yet human doctors are only able to recall a fraction of them at any given moment. As many as 40,500 patients die annually in an ICU in the U.S. as a result of misdiagnosis, according to a 2012 Johns Hopkins study. British entrepreneur Ali Parsa believes that artificial intelligence can help doctors avoid these mistakes.

Parsa is the founder and CEO of Babylon, a U.K.-based subscription health service that plans to launch an AI-based app designed to improve doctors’ hit rate. Users will report the symptoms of their illness to the app, which will check them against a database of diseases using speech recognition. After taking into account the patient’s history and circumstances, Babylon will offer an appropriate course of action. Currently in beta testing, the app is expected to be available later this year.

The concept is comparable to IBM’s Watson computer, which is currently in use by oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. IBM’s software draws from 600,000 medical evidence reports, 1.5 million patient records and clinical trials, and two million pages of text from medical journals to help doctors develop treatment plans tailored to patients’ individual symptoms, genetics, and histories.


The phase transition in finance is also startling - it’s not just mobile currency but the shift to a more distributed platform - at least partially enabled by the blockchain technology.
Open ledgers may also make possible new 'smart' securities and derivatives that will revolutionize operational and transactional efficiency, They may help reduce some of the enormous cost of the increased financial system infrastructure required by new laws and regulations, including Dodd-Frank.
...we actually think open source is going to have a really big role in this space, probably more so than any other initiative in our industry, maybe ever.
CFTC Hearing Explores Role of Regulators in Blockchain Future
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) Technology Advisory Committee discussed how blockchain applications could reshape the derivatives market at a meeting today in with special attention was paid to the need for industry standards and collaboration.

The hearing, originally announced in January but later postponed, featured testimony from representatives from both traditional finance firms as well as startups in the blockchain space.

Notably, the CFTC commissioners present indicated a willingness to avoid cumbersome regulatory demands on the still-nascent technology, with CFTC Chairman Timothy Massad remarking that, despite questions about what industry problems blockchain tech could solve, the agency doesn't want to prevent any possible benefits.


This is a very interesting article - a weak signal on the future of organizational planning, and perhaps even of a more participative democracy.
the game gives universities an opportunity to take the pulse of the community and build literacy about the future, which allows them to become more resilient.
UC Davis Uses Online Game to Crowdsource Its Future
The university community spent 36 hours generating ideas about where UC Davis should go in the future.
More than 2,000 people can't fit around a conference table, but they can envision their university's future together in an online game.

For 36 hours last week, members of the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) community built off of each other's ideas and asked questions about what learning, work and public engagement would look like in 2026. The public research university had been working on a strategic planning initiative, but the typical committees, discussions and public comment periods have their limits. UC Davis needed people with more diverse perspectives to infuse fresh ideas on research, curriculum development, classroom instruction and lower-level operational changes.

This "Envision UC Davis" game engaged students and brought more people into the public idea-generating process. Students played with enthusiasm and thanked university leaders for asking their opinion — a sign that the university may not ask students for their opinion as often as it should, said Gary Sandy, project manager in the Office of Chancellor and Provost.

UC Davis became the second university to play a serious future game on the Foresight Engine, which Jane McGonigal designed for the not-for-profit think tank Institute for the Future. The game asked players to share their ideas in 140 characters or less. Once a gamer played an idea card, others could ask questions, advance the idea and add their perspective. The game rewarded players with points when they collaborated on big ideas.


About 3 years ago I paid $100 to 23andMe for a light-weight gene analysis - found out that I’m about 2.6% Neanderthal (0.1% below average) and lots more. We are getting closer to a cost where our full DNA sequence could become a standard medical requirement - maybe even covered under health care insurance based on being able to increase effectiveness of preventative health measures and better targeted-tailored drugs.
For $999, Veritas Genetics Will Put Your Genome on a Smartphone App
Getting your entire genome decoded is now more affordable than ever. Will consumers buy it?
The $1,000 genome is a reality. Actually, you’ll save a dollar. It’s $999.
A Cambridge, Massachusetts, company, Veritas Genetics, said this week that is how much it will charge for a consumer-friendly know-your-genome service that would pair insight into your genetic makeup with a handy phone app and on-demand video calls with genetic counselors.

The company said a genome test, which it will launch in April, should essentially replace every other type of genetic test since it effectively provides all the answers at once. It will include all six billion letters of a person’s genome, analyzed by an algorithm to highlight medical predispositions. Consumers would learn facts ranging from the silly (is their earwax wet or dry?) to the potentially scary, like whether they have “highly pathogenic germline mutations” that cause things like malignant hyperthermia. They’ll also learn whether their genomes harbor mutations in 150 genes linked to cancer susceptibility, such as the BRCA breast cancer genes.

A “$1,000 genome” was first announced by Illumina in 2014, but that referred to the cost of producing the raw data on that company’s instruments. What’s new is that Veritas is offering the data, along with interpretation, for a price of less than $1,000.


Part of the domestication of DNA is the re-domestication of plants -new form of urban agriculture - bringing a new definition to the factory farm - this is a Canadian example.
All of our economics have been done based upon normal, wholesale market conditions against existing incumbents. The reason for that, of course, is they exist and if you can’t compete with them, you’re going to be taken out of the market. That being said, we also are essentially an organic product. We’re a premium product. We’re tastier, we’re fresher, we’re local, which gives us an upside that we can actually capitalize on. Our average selling price is higher than the wholesale market price but well within the range of normal stores.
Verdant Global: Germinating a Future by Growing Food Indoors
How do you feed a growing world population with fresh, nutritious food in the face of limited resources such as farmable land? Canadian firm Verdant Global has an innovative solution: efficiently grow produce indoors at scale in “agrifactories” close to local populations so food tastes fresher because it wasn’t harvested early for travel. In these indoor facilities, plants are stacked in layers and the environment is controlled so they can grow year-round and without pesticides. Verdant claims a yield of 20 times bigger than greenhouses. Knowledge@Wharton spoke to Verdant CEO Douglas James about how his company is at the leading edge of the future of farming.

The way I see the market evolving is that a major center like Philadelphia ultimately could have five to 15 of these growing different things in the local marketplace, so that’s really the scale.


Here are two articles discussing our past and potential future relationship with viral DNA - the future in intimately connected with the human domestication of DNA.
Ancient Viruses Hidden in Your DNA Fight Off New Viruses
THE HUMAN GENOME is three billion letters long. About 240 million letters of it, scientists estimate, is viral. Yes, eight percent of human DNA comes from ancient viruses that once infected our ancestors.
Most viral infections are as fleeting as a cold, but two things made the ancient ones unusual: One, these viruses had the special ability to copy themselves into the DNA of their hosts. And two, they sometimes got lucky enough to copy themselves into an egg that became fertilized and grew into a full-fledged adult. So that viral DNA got passed down from generation to human generation as so-called endogenous retroviruses.

But there’s no need for alarm about the DNA of viral origin teeming inside your cells. Some of it may even make you you. As a growing fetus, you co-opted a gene from an ancient virus to form the placenta that kept you nourished in the womb. And in recent years, scientists poring over gigabytes of genetic sequencing data have seen other tantalizing hints of endogenous retroviruses turning useful. A new paper out today in Science suggests humans have also co-opted the remnants of ancient viruses to direct the immune system against other pathogens. Ah, the irony. “The tables have been turned,” says Nels Elde, a biologist at the University of Utah and coauthor of the study. “We’ve claimed those elements to fight off modern viruses.”


And our future not unlike our past but with more conscious choices…
Engineering foe into friend
Bose Grant awardee Jacquin Niles aims to repurpose the malaria parasite for drug delivery.
What if a centuries-old foe could become a workhorse for drug delivery in the future? Jacquin Niles, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT, sees potential for such a transformation in what others might consider an unlikely subject: the malaria parasite.

Niles’ lab works mainly on eliminating malaria as a disease, but he is taking a radically different approach to the parasite with his project to re-engineer the organism as a vehicle for drug delivery. The project is funded by an Amar G. Bose Grant, which supports high-risk, high-reward research.

As Niles delved deeper into the biology of the parasite, he began to ponder another side of the organism. Around half a million people die each year from malaria — but some 200 million that are infected survive. Many experience no symptoms. These people are clinically immune, meaning they carry the parasite, but show no overt disease symptoms. This makes it hard to identify carriers of the disease, as the malaria parasite survives in the bloodstream at some level, but the carrier is unaware.

“That’s a problem for eliminating the disease, but if you flip that around to think about the organism as a potential therapeutic vehicle, it becomes an interesting ‘feature’ rather than a ‘bug’,” Niles says.


The phase transition in energy geo-politics seems to have caught almost everyone by surprise - some may still be in doubt.
Over the past four decades, most of the debate over energy security has focused on oil. But the forum’s report suggests that in the coming few decades, the pivotal problems for energy security will center around electric power.
What does our energy future look like? This new report offers a glimpse.
What a difference a year makes. Just 12 months ago, in March 2015, oil prices had dropped to $50 — about half of what a barrel fetched the summer before. Oil producers were hurting, but they could also imagine that the markets would soon correct, the slide would stop and prices might rebound.

Today, oil prices have been cut in half again, and there’s no correction in sight. Demand for oil remains slack, thanks to the slowdown in the global economy and to policies aimed at cutting oil consumption. Supplies remain high while investment in production has crashed. For oil sellers and for the governments that rely on oil revenue, it’s a nightmare. Cheap oil, they hope, will rekindle demand and the prices that suppliers can charge will rise again.

They’re free to hope. But over the past year, another striking trend has darkened the long-term outlook for purveyors of fossil fuels: serious policy on climate change.


This is fascinating.
Eyeglasses That Can Focus Themselves Are on the Way
Deep Optics is working on glasses with liquid-crystal lenses that can constantly refocus; it could be good news for aging eyes and virtual reality, too.
An Israeli startup is making glasses with lenses that can automatically adjust their optical power in real time, which may be a boon to people with age-related trouble focusing on nearby objects and could also be helpful for making virtual reality less nauseating.

Called Deep Optics, the startup has spent the last three years building lenses with a see-through liquid-crystal layer that can change its refractive index—that is, the way light bends while passing through it—when subjected to an electrical current that depends on sensor data about where a wearer’s eyes are trying to focus. This month it announced it had brought in $4 million in venture capital to help make this happen; investors include Essilor, a French company that makes eyeglass lenses.

While the technology is not entirely new—it’s been used in smartphone camera lenses in the past, for instance—Deep Optics claims to be able to use it in lenses that are larger and more optically powerful.

You won’t be able to buy glasses that include this technology any time soon. While the company has the basics of a working prototype, including functional lenses and other components, it still has a lot of work to do when it comes to perfecting the lenses and the system for detecting pupil distance, Haddad says, not to mention figuring out how to shrink everything down so it can fit into something as slim as a pair of eyeglasses. He expects that it will be two years before Deep Optics will start having people test the glasses extensively.

Haddad says the Deep Optics technology may be useful for other things besides vision problems. For example, it may offer a way to focus your eyes more naturally when wearing a virtual-reality headset. The experience requires you to focus both on a flat display ahead of you and on 3-D images that look closer to your eyes, which makes some people feel sick. Haddad thinks the constantly adjusting lenses can help.


This is so cool - a 4 min MUST SEE video about a new game - you have to see the video to understand what this is doing to stretch our imagination.
A look at the Technology behind the 4D Game Miegakure
4D Crystals made using Tetrahedral Meshes FTW

Stay tuned for the next video, which will show more gameplay! We also will make more videos explaining the fourth dimension using the game.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Friday Thinking 4 March 2016

Hello – Friday Thinking is curated on the basis of my own curiosity and offered in the spirit of sharing. Many thanks to those who enjoy this. 

In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.


"We are 21st century citizens doing our best to interact with 19th century designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century.

It's time we start asking: What is democracy for the internet era?"
Pia Mancini: How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era


I see technology as taking human goals and making them able to be automatically executed by machines. The human goals that we've had in the past have been things like moving objects from here to there and using a forklift rather than our own hands. Now, the things that we can do automatically are more intellectual kinds of things that have traditionally been the professions' work, so to speak. These are things that we are going to be able to do by machine. The machine is able to execute things, but something or someone has to define what its goals should be and what it's trying to execute.

...what does the world look like when most people can write code? We had a transition, maybe 500 years ago or something, from a time when only scribes and a small set of the population were literate and could write natural language. Today, a small fraction of the population can write code. Most of the code they can write is for computers only. You don't understand things by reading code.

What's the future of the humans in a world where, once we can describe what we want to do, things can get done automatically? What do the humans do? One of my little hobby projects is trying to understand the evolution of human purposes over time. Today, we've got all kinds of purposes. We sit and have a big discussion about purposes, which presumably has some purpose. We do all the different things that we do in the world.
AI & The Future Of Civilization






I remember in the Fall of 2012 getting into a rather heated discussion about the future of education - having to be free - that an innovation-based economy could not afford to make education expensive - that it had to invest in …. well the Wealth of People. But I’m not one to say I told you so. :) Besides this remains early days.
Ontario budget 2016’s free tuition pledge: What the changes mean for some students
University and college will soon be free for students from low-income families and more affordable for those from middle-class homes.

Under the new program, half of students from families with incomes of $83,000 will qualify for non-repayable grants for tuition and no student will receive less than they can currently receive.


This interesting interview was recommended to me by two different people - it does ask some vital questions about AI and is definitely worth the read for anyone curious about the future of AI and the digital environment..
The App is already dead - what is being born is a personal AI-ssistant. Future of personal AI-ssistant - is to enhance, deepen, broaden, diversity our unconscious processing and memory -e.g. we’ll have access to the entire dictionary as our vocabulary -
What will happen, more to the point, is that there will be an AI that knows our history, and knows that on this menu, you're probably going to want to order this, or you're talking to this person, you should talk to them about this. I've looked at your interests, I know something about their interests, these are the common interests that you have, these are some great topics that you can talk to them about.
AI & The Future Of Civilization
A Conversation With Stephen Wolfram
What makes us different from all these things? What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history.

The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes—execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate. We've been automating it for thousands of years. We will succeed in having very good automation of those goals. I've spent some significant part of my life building technology to essentially go from a human concept of a goal to something that gets done in the world.

There are many questions that come from this. For example, we've got these great AIs and they're able to execute goals, how do we tell them what to do?...

A ‘weak signal’ of the looming emergence of AI-ssistants. There’s a 1 min video as well.
Google kicks off a public pilot for Hands Free mobile payments
The downside: It's only live in part of the SF Bay Area.

Heads up, Silicon Valley residents: the days of pulling out your credit card to pay for Big Macs are numbered. Google just announced that the pilot program for its Hands Free payments scheme has gone live for certain stores in San Francisco's South Bay, so all you'll have to do is tell the cashier you're "Paying with Google." We're trying to figure out if there's a cap to how many people can sign up, but for now, it looks like all local residents need is an Android device running 4.2 or newer, or an iPhone 4S and newer.


Here’s one possibility for the 21st Century digital environment - providing the world with vast ubiquitous Internet.
These Terabit Satellites Will Bring Internet To The Remotest Places On Earth
The U.S.-based satellite company ViaSat has announced that it has teamed up with aerospace giant Boeing to create three new satellites that will bring high-speed Internet to the remotest parts of the world.

The three ViaSat-3 satellite will join the already 400 other connected satellites in space. However, the ViaSat-3s will deliver twice the network capacity of the other 400—combined. The satellites will be capable of 1 terabit speeds each (that’s 1,000 gigabits per second). That amount of bandwidth will be able to provide fast enough Internet to reliably deliver bandwidth-hogging 4k video to isolated areas—and in the sky.

As for the ViaSat-3 satellites, the first two will be completed and delivered into space via Boeing Satellite Systems in 2019 and provide service for users in the Americas and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The third satellite will go up sometime after 2019 and provide service to users in Asia.


The emerging digital environment will provide a fundamentally different platform for our institutions, economy and societies. A change in the conditions of change. Here’s is one hint - a small glimpse of some changes in the institutions of collective decisioning.
How one woman's app is changing politics in the digital age
Argentina’s Pia Mancini is using technology to destroy barriers between politicians and people around the world
For a woman whose day-to-day work revolves around reimagining democracy for the digital era, Pia Mancini is pretty relaxed. On a windy day in San Francisco, where the Argentine political scientist is based, she Skypes me between meetings, her hair whipping across her face in the breeze.

The 33-year-old has worked for thinktanks, in public policy and on a range of political campaigns. But in recent years she has devoted her time to launching non-profit organisations and venture-backed collaborative projects that could change the way citizens engage with politics all over the world.

“There’s so much that is out of sync between the state, the government and the younger generation,” she says. “A huge divide exists between how we organise and communicate in our everyday lives, and how these old institutions expect us to interact with them.”

One of Mancini’s central projects, DemocracyOS, provides a platform for citizens to engage with politics away from those outdated structures. When a new piece of legislation is brought to congress in Argentina DemocracyOS is used to immediately translate and explain it in plain language. Citizens are also able to discuss and directly “vote” on these new bills using the site or desktop app.


This is a 1hr video presentation on the future of AI - a very good summary by a leader in the field - who’s also leading Google’s efforts in this domain. The discussion includes a nice explanation of the AI Google developed to beat a high level Go player. This is well worth the watch for anyone wanting to get some intuitive sense of the acceleration in AI to enhance human effort in all areas of pursuit - including science and art.
Demis Hassabis - The Future of Artificial Intelligence
This talk was held on Wed, Feb 24 2016

Dr. Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading General Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, which was acquired by Google in 2014 in their largest ever European acquisition. Demis will draw on his eclectic experiences as an AI researcher, neuroscientist and videogames designer to discuss what is happening at the cutting edge of AI research, its future impact on fields such as science and healthcare, and how developing AI may help us better understand the human mind.


The future of AI may also be involved in new forms of computing - this is a short fascinating article.
Building, Living Breathing Supercomputers
The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of super-computers. That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Nicolau, the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe. They've published an article on the subject earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do.

Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current super-computers, uses much less energy, and uses proteins present in all living cells to function.


This is an interesting 22 min We Evolve video about the future of medicine - the informed patient and data enabled doctor. Our wearables in a digital environment will scan, calculate, report and learn to help us learn.
The Era of Citizen Doctors
The difference between a doctor and a machine is like the difference between a private banker and an ATM machine
Last December, Walter De Brouwer, Scanadu’s founder and CEO was invited to keynote at the Tencent WE Summit 2015 in Beijing, China along with Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito.

In his 20-minute talk Walter shares his view about why we, patients and consumers, will play a major role in our own health and how we’re getting there.


Self-check-out is expanding - soon autonomous robots will stock shelves and we’ll do the rest. But this is the new convenience store.
In Sweden's 1st unstaffed food shop, all you need is a phone
Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

The shop has basics like milk, bread, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products that you expect to find in a small convenience store. It doesn't have tobacco or medical drugs because of the risk of theft. Alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden.


This is not quite ready for prime time - but… the domestication of DNA continues. Another aspect of this article is the subject of who’s owns science? This is worth the read.
Genetically engineered immune cells are saving the lives of cancer patients. That may be just the start.
Availability: 1-2 years
The doctors looking at Layla Richards saw a little girl with leukemia bubbling in her veins. She’d had bags and bags of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. But the cancer still thrived. By last June, the 12-month-old was desperately ill. Her parents begged—wasn’t there anything?

There was. In a freezer at her hospital—Great Ormond Street, in London—sat a vial of white blood cells. The cells had been genetically altered to hunt and destroy leukemia, but the hospital hadn’t yet sought permission to test them. They were the most extensively engineered cells ever proposed as a therapy, with a total of four genetic changes, two of them introduced by the new technique of genome editing.

….Cellectis began developing the treatment in 2011 after doctors in New York and Philadelphia reported that they’d found a way to gain control over T cells, the so-called killer cells of the immune system. They had shown that they could take T cells from a person’s bloodstream and, using a virus, add new DNA instructions to aim them at the type of blood cell that goes awry in leukemia. The technique has now been tested in more than 300 patients, with spectacular results, often resulting in complete remission. A dozen drug firms and biotechnology companies are now working to bring such a treatment to market.

In November, Great Ormond announced that Layla was cured. The British press jumped on the heartwarming story of a brave kid and daring doctors. Accounts splashed on front pages sent Cellectis’s stock price shooting upward. Two weeks later, the drug companies Pfizer and Servier announced they would ante up $40 million to purchase rights to the treatment.


The Internet-of-Things includes the propagation of countless sensors - even when they are cheap one can think they are expensive - but these sensors are both simple and cheap.
THIS ARTIFICIAL SKIN CAN DETECT TOUCH — AND IT’S MADE FROM TINFOIL AND STICKY NOTES
An artificial skin with the sensory function of human skin has been created out of household items by a team of researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The low-cost sensor platform can detect touch, pressure, temperature, acidity and humidity. The “paper skin,” as it’s called by the researchers, is in the early stages of development.

The innovative material is made from common kitchen items including aluminum foil, sticky note paper, sponges, and tape. The materials were assembled into an artificial skin platform that can respond to external stimuli such as humidity, temperature changes, and even the presence of a finger. The system is based on electrical conductance, detecting the changes in electrical conductivity produced by these external stimuli. To detect these changes, the skin is connected to a device capable of measuring voltage, resistance and capacitance.  As arranged, this system could detect multiple stimuli simultaneously in real time.

The team used both individual and combined elements to mimic skin function, For example, the sticky note was used to detect humidity while the sponge was used to monitor changes in pressure. Multiple elements such as lead pencil on paper and conductive silver ink on aluminum foil could be used to measure more complex stimuli such as acidity levels, or temperature fluctuations.


This is apparently available now - something that many professionals and occupations may find very useful. There’s pictures and a 1 min video.
Augmented-Reality Construction Helmet to 'Change the Nature of Work'
Called the Daqri Smart Helmet, the wearable device enables a user to see an augmented reality – the real world overlaid with computer imagery.

The helmet – which has a blue scratch-resistant visor – was specifically created for workers in industrial settings, such as construction sites. It is intended to increase productivity, efficiency and safety, said the company.

"We've been working in the medium of augmented reality for the past four years, and what we found was, you just can't solve the most challenging problems with devices that were designed for consumers," said Brian Mullins, Daqri's founder and CEO. "We needed something that was designed specifically for industrial applications."

The headgear uses a combination of cameras and sensors to capture and record real-time information about the user's surroundings, from valve readings to thermal data. It can also show the wearer stored information like safety guidelines and worker instructions.


This is another nice advance in 3-D printing.
One 3-D Printer for 21 Metals
A new additive manufacturing technique makes it possible to 3-D-print parts out of multiple metals.
A new technology for 3-D-printing metal parts could be a cheaper and more versatile alternative to common industrial metalworking techniques. It also opens the door to new kinds of parts with unique properties that arise from the precise combination of multiple metals. Possible applications include structural parts for things like car or airplane bodies, as well as components of engines, electrical devices, or other machines.

That’s according to AJ Perez, CEO of NVBOTS, the Boston-based startup that developed the new method. The company says the technology, which is capable of printing 21 different metals from aluminum, nickel, and tin to alloys like stainless steel and nickel titanium, is the only one that can use multiple metals during the same job.


Here’s an interesting potential development which supports the trajectory of more flexible types of screens in the emerging digital environment.
Flexible Glass Could Bring Back the Flip Phone
Schott can make a sheet of glass thinner than your hair and half a kilometer long that bends, but doesn’t yet fold.
Imagine a flip phone that fits in your pocket but opens up to reveal a tablet-sized screen. Glassmakers are already manufacturing bendable glass that’s thinner than a human hair, and they say foldable glass is just around the corner.

German glassmaker Schott is now mass-manufacturing glass that’s ultrathin, strong, and smooth. Electronics can be made on it, and it flexes like plastic. The first consumer product to use Schott’s new glass is the fingerprint sensor on a smartphone made by LeTV, a large video-streaming company in China. Company representatives hope that this and other niche applications will give the new material a foothold while industrial designers play around with it.

...the company can now continuously manufacture flexible glass in kilometers-long sheets.


Here’s something that can use solar energy in a couple of forms to transform carbon-dioxide and water into oxygen and fuel.
Liquid hydrocarbon fuel created from CO2 and water in breakthrough one-step process
As scientists look for ways to help remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a number of experiments have focused on employing this gas to create usable fuels. Both hydrogen and methanol have resulted from such experiments, but the processes often involve a range of intricate steps and a variety of methods. Now researchers have demonstrated a one-step conversion of carbon dioxide and water directly into a simple and inexpensive liquid hydrocarbon fuel using a combination of high-intensity light, concentrated heat, and high pressure.

According to the researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), this breakthrough sustainable fuels technology uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with the added benefit of also producing oxygen as a byproduct, which should create a clear positive environmental impact.

"We are the first to use both light and heat to synthesize liquid hydrocarbons in a single stage reactor from carbon dioxide and water," said Brian Dennis, UTA professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and co-principal investigator of the project. "Concentrated light drives the photochemical reaction, which generates high-energy intermediates and heat to drive thermochemical carbon-chain-forming reactions, thus producing hydrocarbons in a single-step process."


This sounds amazing - the future of solar energy continues to accelerate.
Solar cells as light as a soap bubble
Ultrathin, flexible photovoltaic cells from MIT research could find many new uses.
Imagine solar cells so thin, flexible, and lightweight that they could be placed on almost any material or surface, including your hat, shirt, or smartphone, or even on a sheet of paper or a helium balloon.

Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated just such a technology: the thinnest, lightest solar cells ever produced. Though it may take years to develop into a commercial product, the laboratory proof-of-concept shows a new approach to making solar cells that could help power the next generation of portable electronic devices.

The new process is described in a paper by MIT professor Vladimir Bulović, research scientist Annie Wang, and doctoral student Joel Jean, in the journal Organic Electronics.
“The innovative step is the realization that you can grow the substrate at the same time as you grow the device,” Bulović says.

To demonstrate just how thin and lightweight the cells are, the researchers draped a working cell on top of a soap bubble, without popping the bubble.

Whereas a typical silicon-based solar module, whose weight is dominated by a glass cover, may produce about 15 watts of power per kilogram of weight, the new cells have already demonstrated an output of 6 watts per gram — about 400 times higher.


Another approach to energy creation - there’s a 5 min video as well.
This Massive Waste-To-Energy Plant Will Be The Largest In The World
As cities figure out how to deal with growing piles of trash, they're taking two paths. Some, like San Francisco, are aiming for zero waste—composting and recycling everything that might have otherwise gone to a landfill. Others are burning garbage to turn it into electricity.

In 2020, the same year that San Francisco hopes to become a zero-waste city, the Chinese megacity of Shenzhen will open the world's largest waste-to-energy plant, stretching nearly a mile across and burning 5,000 tonnes of trash every day.


The phase transition in energy-geo-politics continues to make itself evident - this is important for any nation who’s put its eggs in expensive oil extraction initiatives - investment in the future is investment in renewable energies.
Top lobbying group in historic green energy U-turn

Energy UK, which represents big six providers, says it now supports phasing out coal-fired stations, after years of defending use of fossil fuels
The UK’s biggest energy lobbying group has shifted its position on green energy and will start campaigning for low-carbon alternatives for the first time, in what environmental campaigners are describing as a watershed moment.

Lawrence Slade, the chief executive of Energy UK, which represents the big six providers and has been regarded as a defender of fossil fuels, said the shift was urgent in order not to be left behind.

“No one wants to be running the next Nokia,” he said, referring to the mobile phone company that was overtaken by forward-looking rivals. “I want to drive change and move away from accepted (old-style) thinking.”

Energy UK now officially supports the government’s phasing out of coal-fired power stations and is critical of ministers over the way they have cut subsidies to wind and solar power so deeply and suddenly.


This article heralds breakthroughs -but is short on details - the interesting thing is the amount of investment being made toward the transformation of energy-geo-politics.
US agency says it has beaten Elon Musk and Gates to holy grail of battery storage
Breakthrough in next generation of storage batteries could transform the US electrical grid within five to 10 years, says research agency, Arpa-E
A US government agency says it has attained the “holy grail” of energy – the next-generation system of battery storage, that has has been hotly pursued by the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Arpa-E) – a branch of the Department of Energy – says it achieved its breakthrough technology in seven years.
Ellen Williams, Arpa-E’s director, said: “I think we have reached some holy grails in batteries – just in the sense of demonstrating that we can create a totally new approach to battery technology, make it work, make it commercially viable, and get it out there to let it do its thing,”

The companies incubated at Arpa-E have developed new designs for batteries, and new chemistries, which are rapidly bringing down the costs of energy storage, she said.

“Our battery teams have developed new approaches to grid-scale batteries and moved them out,” Williams said. Three companies now have batteries on the market, selling grid-scale and back-up batteries. Half a dozen other companies are developing new batteries, she added.

This investment has to be seen in the context of the developments discussed in this article.
Almost 100 Million Homes May Run Only on Solar by 2020
Almost 100 million households worldwide may be powered by solar panels by 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The off-grid solar market has grown to $700 million now from non-existent less than a decade ago, according to a report Thursday from the London-based research company and the World Bank Group’s Lighting Global. They expect that to swell to $3.1 billion by the end of the decade [4 years away].

There are about 1.2 billion people without access to energy and another billion who are connected to a national grid, but with unstable power. The report estimates that they spent $27 billion on crude lighting methods such as kerosene and candles last year. The demand for reliable energy is soaring with burgeoning populations and rising industrialization in emerging economies.


For Fun
This is 1 min video - about AI disrupting Robotics - funny.
"Coping with Humans:" A Support Group for Bots

IBM Watson is a cognitive system that's ushering in the new era of cognitive business. Recently, a group of battered science fiction bots spoke about their yen to take over the world and their dislike for working with humans. Unlike them, Watson works with humans to outthink competitors, challenges, limits. Learn more at ibm.com/outthink