Thursday, May 12, 2016

Friday Thinking 13 May 2016

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.

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Quotes:
The next AI is no AI
After Panama: Stepping up the Fight Against Anonymous Companies
Articles:
In Novel Tactic on Climate Change, Citizens Sue Their Governments
How to Make the Most of Your Career
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Anticipating artificial intelligence
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Electric Cars Could Wreak Havoc on Oil Markets Within a Decade
Japan has more car chargers than gas stations
Here's what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy
Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity
Carbon Dioxide Emissions Keep Falling in the U.S.
These images illustrate the future of autonomous vehicles
Taxis to take flight
Here's What the First Full-Scale Test of the Hyperloop Will Look Like
Microsoft’s Testing DNA Storage: 1,000,000,000 TB in 1 Gram
Exotic quantum effects can govern the chemistry around us
Scientists Make Sea Water Drinkable, Produce 6.3 Million Litres A Day
Connected Cattle: Wearables are Changing the Dairy Industry
How space technology is helping Canadians boldly grow where no one has grown before


Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in — and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans. Even the experts themselves don’t always fully understand how an AI system operates.

In the near future, artificial intelligence will commonly become intangible, indistinguishable and incomprehensible for humans.

The next AI is no AI



The massive revelations in the Panama Papers have shined the starkest light yet on the vital need to fight corruption and end anonymous companies. Today, a group of leading organizations advocating for greater transparency in business, announced plans to create a Global Beneficial Ownership Register, a powerful new tool for exposing and ending the clandestine activities of anonymous companies, part of a broader effort to curtail the widespread global problem of bribery and other illegal activities.

The Global Beneficial Ownership Register (GBOR) would enable businesses to know who they are doing business with, financial institutions to know who their customers are, citizens to see who benefits from public funds, and law enforcement to hold individuals accountable for crime and corruption.

No global system for beneficial ownership transparency currently exists. The UK, Norway and Netherlands have all announced public registries containing beneficial ownership information. Even where progress is slow on the national level, sector specific projects such as the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative, local governments such as Sao Paulo, or development bodies such as the World Bank are adopting similar requirements.

After Panama: Stepping up the Fight Against Anonymous Companies



This may be a ‘weak signal’ for a new form of global citizen-activism one that both counters secret trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (conducted not only in secrecy but with only select participants representing incumbent interests - rather than a broad-based inclusive forum of all potential stakeholders) and begins to hold countries & corporations more directly accountable to citizens. This is important as the recent development are attempting embed the ability of private corporations to sue nations for enacting legislation that may protect their citizen but harm their profit. Examples include everything from food labeling to prohibiting ingredients.

In Novel Tactic on Climate Change, Citizens Sue Their Governments

In the United States, an environmental law nonprofit is suing the federal government on behalf of 21 young plaintiffs. Individuals in Pakistan and New Zealand have sued to force their governments to take stronger action to fight climate change. A farmer in Peru has sued a giant German energy utility over its part in causing global warming.

And while the arguments can be unconventional and surprising, some of the suits are making progress.

Last month, a federal magistrate judge in Oregon startled many legal experts by allowing the lawsuit filed on behalf of 21 teenagers and children to go forward, despite motions from the Obama administration and fossil fuel companies to dismiss it; the suit would force the government to take more aggressive action against climate change. The ruling by the magistrate judge, Thomas M. Coffin, now goes to Federal District Court to be accepted or rejected.

This is a short 3 min read - by Iconoclast and generally insightful ranter - Umair Haque. This is worth the read for anyone interested in the future of work.
You can’t plan a journey like a career. A career was up. But a journey is out. In a journey, you can’t plot a linear path full of objectives (“one day, I’ll be the VP!”). But you can think about possibilities. So break it down into 5–7 year chunks. After 5 years of programming, designing, marketing, what do you want to do? What will it allow you to build a new career doing? Maybe teaching, investing, writing, researching. I don’t know, you don’t know. Now you’re thinking possibilities, not just objectives.
A good journey tells a story. The story of you. Paul’s journey from journalism to entrepreneurship to investing tells a story of mastery.

How to Make the Most of Your Career

8 Rules for Thinking About Your Career
You do it, I do it. Think and fret about our careers. The world’s a baffling place these days. Life and work aren’t what they used to be. So neither is making the most of yourself.

Here’s how to think about it well.
You’re going to have careers the way your parents had jobs. They had 3–5 jobs in a single field or industry. The economy’s not the same. You’ll have 3–5 careers, across industries and fields. Paul is a journalist who became an entrepreneur and went on to be an investor. Mary is a teacher who became a therapist who became a professor.

Your series of careers is your journey. There’s not a good word for this idea of multiple careers. So I’ll just call it your journey. To plan it well, you have to turn yesterday’s career thinking on its head.

We used to think about where our careers would take us. But now we must think about the journeys we want to take. Careers were standard and interchangeable and had set paths. So much so that we gave them set names. Lawyer, doctor, engineer. That’s what those words mean, right?


For anyone interested in the work of Daniel Kahneman - but hasn’t read his book - here’s a 10 min video.

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW BY DANIEL KAHNEMAN | ANIMATED BOOK REVIEW.


The hue and cry of concern over the rapidly developing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been shared even in the most innocuous mass media. Omens of the singularity for good and ill have been promulgated as supporting evidence. This next article is a well-balanced piece from the journal Nature - worth the read.

Anticipating artificial intelligence

Concerns over AI are not simply fear-mongering. Progress in the field will affect society profoundly, and it is important to make sure that the changes benefit everyone.
In January, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington DC gave its annual Luddite Award to “a loose coalition of scientists and luminaries who stirred fear and hysteria in 2015 by raising alarms that artificial intelligence (AI) could spell doom for humanity”.

The winners — if that is the correct word — included pioneering inventor Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking.
In January last year, both signed an open letter that argued for research and regulatory and ethical frameworks to ensure that AI benefits humanity and to guarantee that “our AI systems must do what we want them to do”. Hardly “fear and hysteria”.

As AI converges with progress in robotics, cloud computing and precision manufacturing, tipping points will arise at which significant technological changes are likely to occur very quickly. Crucially, advances in robot vision and hearing, combined with AI, are allowing robots to better perceive their environments. This could lead to an explosion of intelligent robot applications — including those in which robots will work closely with humans.


Many people worry about the influence of algorithms in shaping the information that reaches us. That is definitely a concern - but the intuitive thinking of relying on people is perhaps no more comforting - nor should we consider this any ‘new’ development.

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”


Here’s a 4 min MUST VIEW video - about the S-curve, peak oil Demand, looming electric cars.

Electric Cars Could Wreak Havoc on Oil Markets Within a Decade

There are more than one billion cars on the road worldwide today, and only one tenth of one percent of them have a plug. OPEC contends that even in the year 2040, EVs will make up just one percent. But don't be so sure. By 2020, some electric cars and SUVs will be faster, safer, cheaper, and more convenient than their gasoline counterparts. What if people just stop buying oil? In the first episode of our animated series, Sooner Than You Think, Bloomberg's Tom Randall does the math on when oil markets might be headed for the big crash.


And if we’re still a bit skeptical about how fast a switch from gas to electric cars can happen - here’s a definite ‘medium-strong’ signal.
As charging stations become more common, electric-car support services are also emerging. Open Charge Map, for example, operates an online listing of public charging points worldwide. A mobile app combines the data with GPS technology to guide drivers to the nearest site.

Japan has more car chargers than gas stations

That surprising discovery comes from Nissan Motor Co., which reported that the number of power points in Japan, including fast-chargers and those in homes, has surged to 40,000, surpassing the nation’s 34,000 gas stations.

The figure shows that in the relatively brief time since electric vehicles were introduced, the infrastructure to support them has become bigger than what the oil industry built over decades in the world’s third-biggest economy — at least by this one measure.

Why that matters is obvious. Nissan’s battery-powered Leaf can travel 135 km on a charge, and the anxiety of being stuck away from home without power has restrained consumer demand. As the charging network expands and batteries become more powerful, that concern will wane.


And here’s an interesting article about some work that shows us how possible it is to engage in a phase transition into a new world of geo-political energy - a zero-marginal cost energy world. Wouldn’t it be interesting if all those solar powered parking meters - could also become charging stations?
Electrifying everything produces an enormous drop in projected demand, since the energy-to-work conversion of electric motors is much more efficient than combustion motors, which lose a ton of energy to heat. So the amount of energy necessary to meet projected demand drops by a third just from the conversion.

Here's what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy

It is technically and economically feasible to run the US economy entirely on renewable energy, and to do so by 2050. That is the conclusion of a study last year in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, authored by Stanford scholar Mark Z. Jacobson and nine colleagues.

Jacobson is well-known for his ambitious andcontroversial work on renewable energy. In 2011 he published, with Mark A. Delucchi, a two-part paper on "providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power." In 2013 he published a feasibility study on moving New York state entirely to renewables, and in 2014 he created a road map for California to do the same.

His team's 2015 paper contains 50 such road maps, one for every state, with detailed modeling on how to get to a US energy system entirely powered by wind, water, and solar (WWS). That means no oil and coal. It also means no natural gas, no nuclear power, no carbon capture and sequestration, and no biofuels.

The road maps show how 80 to 85 percent of existing energy could be replaced by wind, water, and solar by 2030, with 100 percent by 2050. The result is a substantial savings relative to the status quo baseline, in terms of energy costs, health costs, and climate costs alike. The resulting land footprint of energy is manageable, grid reliability is maintained, and more jobs will be created in renewables than destroyed in fossil fuels.


Here’s another signal - I suppose this is still technically a ‘weak signal’, however it’s a signal of an energy abundance that is entirely plausible - perhaps inevitable given the economics of zero-marginal costs - and also why energy will have to be a public infrastructure - since the real return on investment will be the huge domains of consequential positive externalities.

Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity

On Sunday, May 8, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation. Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country’s solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%.

Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity.

….Germany’s power surplus on Sunday wasn’t all good news. The system is still too rigid for power suppliers and consumers to respond quickly to price signals. Though gas power plants were taken offline, nuclear and coal plants can’t be quickly shut down, so they went on running and had to pay to sell power into the grid for several hours, while industrial customers such as refineries and foundries earned money by consuming electricity.


This is another positive sign of progress in the climate change domain. What important to note is that while the decline in carbon emissions -despite continued economic growth  is partly the result of warmer winters - but also despite warmer summers which always uses electricity for air conditioning.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Keep Falling in the U.S.

Despite continued economic growth, emissions in the U.S. are on a steady decline thanks in large part to cheap natural gas.
Carbon dioxide emissions in the United States fell again in 2015, according to new data from the federal government. Though the levels increased slightly in 2013 and 2014, last year’s drop is in line with the gradual decline that’s been occurring for a decade. The nearly 5.3 billion metric tons of energy-related carbon dioxide the country added to the atmosphere in 2015 is 12 percent smaller than that number in 2005.

Most of the reduction comes from burning less coal. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, changes in the national mix of electricity production—especially the shift toward cleaner-burning natural gas—accounted for 68 percent of the emissions reductions between 2005 and 2015.

A relatively mild winter likely also contributed to the drop seen in 2015. The number of so-called “heating degree days,” an indicator that reflects energy use for heating, was the lowest since 2012.


This is an interesting article and series of images about the future of autonomous transportation. Worth the view - an 8 min video included.

These images illustrate the future of autonomous vehicles

But when we talk about autonomous vehicles, we often get mired in the day-to-day details: Will it make parallel parking easier? Will it reduce traffic congestion? Is it safe to take my hands of the wheel?

To explore what the future of driving could look like, Honda commissioned Map and Mori Inc. to create a concept for the future of transportation. “Honda. Great Journey” depicts seven terrain-specific, self-driving concept vehicles for a cross-continent journey across deserts, mountains, snowy tundra, and rainforests.
The future of transportation is about more than automating our commutes and drug store runs: It’s about exploring what’s possible. That means creating vehicles that can take us from Africa to the Arctic and back again—and handle all the extreme situations along the way. The self-driving vehicle of the future will anticipate (and solve) problems that people can’t, from muddy roads to cracked ice to rockslides on narrow mountain roads.


These aren’t autonomous quite yet - but it seems totally awesome - I can visualize that with a proper ‘head up’ display - even travel lanes will be well marked so that anyone can use these. The ‘flying car’? Maybe.

Taxis to take flight

The premiere of manned flights with the world's first certified Multicopter, e-volo's Volocopter VC200, Karlsruhe, Germany, marks a step forward in urban mobility. Volocopter is a personal aerial vehicle designed to be so easy and safe to fly that anyone can command it. Due to its electric propulsion, it has no tailpipe emissions and is impressively quiet. For the first time, the dream of personal flight as a daily routine is viable. The vehicle not only offers more widespread use in conventional aircraft domains, but brings us a step closer to air taxi services and entire transportation systems in the third dimension.

Volocopter VC200 received the permit-to-fly as an ultralight aircraft from German aviation authorities in February 2016. In the context of the commenced test program, e-volo has started to conduct manned flights. The historic world premiere of a flight with a certified multicopter was made by e-volo managing director Alexander Zosel on March 30, 2016 on an airfield in Southern Germany.

"The flight was totally awesome," says Alex Zosel after his landing. "The first flight was unbelievable. I got in, we did the pre-checks for what felt like maybe 20 seconds, and after that I'd already got the all-clear for flying. I didn't wait long, I simply pushed the lever upward and Volocopter sprung upward in a single bound. It hovered totally weightlessly."

Thanks to its innovative flight control, the vertical take-off and landing aircraft (VTOL) is extremely easy to fly. The aircraft is piloted one-handedly with a single joystick and significantly reduces the number one reason for accidents in conventional helicopters: human error. To demonstrate this feature, Zosel releases his hand from the joystick to applaud his team during the premiere flight, while Volocopter automatically holds its position. A comprehensive redundancy concept compensates any failure by critical components including the loss of several motors. This was demonstrated exhaustively during the certification process. Furthermore, the vehicle is quiet and due to its purely electric motor with its quickly interchangeable battery system, it is also absolutely emission free.


This is another very interesting prototype - that if it is successful could revolutionize certain domains of transportation - the illustration is well worth the look.

Here's What the First Full-Scale Test of the Hyperloop Will Look Like

Wednesday morning, in the Nevada desert, one of the companies working to develop a hyperloop will deliver a proof of concept—the first full-scale demonstration of the transportation technology that will be able to travel at speeds over 300 mph in an open-air environment, potentially changing the future of transit along the way.

What engineers are calling a “propulsion open-air test” (POAT) will be the first public peek at the electromagnetic propulsion system developed by Hyperloop One, formerly Hyperloop Technologies, which released this animation today. The company’s name change, also announced today, will differentiate the two-year-old startup from its competitor Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT). On Monday, HTT made its own announcement that it had licensed a different propulsion technology using passive magnetic levitation.


For anyone who doubts that biology is now an information science - this is an important signal in the advance of computing beyond silicon - and perhaps of a looming phase transition in Moore’s law.
Although the technology is still years away from coming out with a commercially viable DNA data storage solution, these early experiments by Microsoft and Twist Bioscience are quickly pushing the of data storage density and longevity.

Microsoft’s Testing DNA Storage: 1,000,000,000 TB in 1 Gram

Microsoft has purchased 10,000,000 strands of DNA from biology startup Twist Bioscience towards researching digital data storage solutions.
Microsoft is now looking to biology to come up with solutions for data storage. The tech giant just purchased ten million strands of synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience to use for digital data storage research.

The purchase involves ten million long oligonucleotides. Twist Bioscience CEO Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D. said in a press release: “Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded. DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs.”

“We need new methods for long-term, secure data storage,” says Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect in its Technology and Research organization. Their initial tests have shown that they can successfully encode and recover 100 percent of binary data from synthetic DNA.


The boundaries through which science is ‘boldly going’ - may be accelerating. 100 years ago physicists were grappling with Einstein and relativity - which also introduced us to the strangeness of quantum mechanics. The 21st Century is not only the century of complexity but perhaps of whole new domains of ‘strange’ science - including revealing how that strangeness is entangled in our everyday lives - and minds.
"The tunneling of protons in molecules of porphycene in solution is spectacular proof that even at room temperature and in a dense environment, a purely quantum effect can rule the course of a chemical reaction. But this is not the end of the surprises. We have a reasonable suspicion that one more exotic quantum phenomenon is involved in the movements of the two protons in porphycene, always jumping together. The world of chemistry around us would then be even more interesting," says Prof. Waluk.

Exotic quantum effects can govern the chemistry around us

Objects of the quantum world have a concealed and cold-blooded nature—they usually behave in a quantum manner only when they are significantly cooled and isolated from the environment. Experiments carried out by chemists and physicists from Warsaw have changed this simple picture. It turns out that not only does one of the most interesting quantum effects occur at room temperature and higher, but it plays a dominant role in the course of chemical reactions in solutions.

We generally derive our experimental knowledge of quantum phenomena from experiments carried out using sophisticated equipment under exotic conditions: at extremely low temperatures and in a vacuum, isolating quantum objects from the disturbing influence of the environment. Scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw, led by Prof. Jacek Waluk and Prof. Czeslaw Radzewicz's group from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw (FUW), have just shown that one of the most spectacular quantum phenomena—quantum tunneling—takes place even at temperatures above the boiling point of water. However, what is particularly surprising is the fact that the observed effect applies to hydrogen nuclei, which tunnel in particles floating in solution. The measurements leave no doubt that in conditions typical for our environment, tunneling turns out to be the main factor responsible for the chemical reaction.


The earth is definitely not short of water - it’s just that most of it is ocean water. However, the energy to desalinate water is increasingly available at zero-marginal cost. But beyond solar and wind - other advances are occuring that can help potential water shortages.

Scientists Make Sea Water Drinkable, Produce 6.3 Million Litres A Day

MUMBAI: As 13 states struggle with drought, scientists in a corner of India have devised a way to make potable water - 6.3 million litre of it every day - from sea water.  They have also developed certain filtration methods that ensure groundwater containing arsenic and uranium are safe to drink.

The pilot plant at Tamil Nadu's Kalpakkam, built by scientists of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre use waste steam from a nuclear reactor to purify the seawater. Its capacity is 6.3 million litre every day.

"Besides, BARC has developed several membranes, by which, at a very small cost, groundwater contaminated by uranium or arsenic can be purified and make fit for drinking," Dr Vyas added.

On his recent visit to BARC, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had pedalled a bicycle that had a water purifier installed on it. It turns dirty contaminated water into potable water. Turning the pedals produces the energy the purifier needs.

The nuclear scientists have also made several household water purifiers that are being marketed all over drought-hit Marathwada. Some these use thin membranes and special filters to separate the contaminants.


For anyone who thinks the digital environment - and ubiquitous, high bandwidth Internet is primarily for the urban situation - here’s an interesting development. What’s important is to imagine all the sensors that could make any form of agricultural service and product better, more efficient or more. All forms of husbandry or cultivation could benefit.
“This is not a very sexy industry; it’s not the next killer app,” says Saad Ansari, cofounder and chief technical officer of Connecterra. “But improving food manufacturing productivity is a real problem, and not a lot of people are working on it.”
Ansari, a computer scientist, says his company’s mission is to use data analytics to improve food production.
“By 2050, food output will have to be increased by 60 percent worldwide, so we started a venture that would lay the groundwork,” he says. “We really don’t need more cows; we need more milk from fewer cows.”

Connected Cattle: Wearables are Changing the Dairy Industry

Trackers using cloud computing applications are increasing milk production
Dairy farming is a vital part of the economy in many countries. One key to profitability is getting the most cows pregnant during a breeding season. But knowing when a cow is in estrus—in heat—and ready for insemination can be tricky. The answer from at least two companies is simple: Outfit the cows with high-tech pedometers.

Estrus occurs every 21 days and lasts from 6 to 24 hours. Most dairy farmers look for the characteristics visually—difficult if the farmers are in charge of hundreds of cattle or if estrus occurs at night. If the signs are missed, there’s another 21-day wait. Miss them too many times and the cow might be sold for meat. For small farmers, that can be a significant loss, because selling the milk from cows that give birth is often their primary source of income.

To spot signs of estrus in a more automated way farmers are turning to cow-tracking systems. One of the most common indicators is that the cows walk more—some up to six times as much. A Fujitsu system counts steps, while another one from startup Connecterra also monitors the cows’ health. The two companies recently displayed their systems at separate events attended by IEEE. Fujitsu, Japan’s largest IT service provider, headquartered in Tokyo, demonstrated its support service for commercial farmers and breeders in February at the Mobile World Congress. Connecterra, a predictive analytics startup from Amsterdam, showed off its system for small dairy farms at the Web Summit in November.


However, agriculture may also become a key urban activity and part of urban social economy.
The northern pilot project will grow six perishable foods — cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries, bell peppers, lettuce and herbs — otherwise imported.

How space technology is helping Canadians boldly grow where no one has grown before

A hydroponic system designed to feed astronauts is part of a pilot project for growing fresh fruits and vegetables in Canada's North, where food insecurity persists.
Canadian researchers are using space technology to grow crops above the 60th parallel.

Using a hydroponic system designed to feed astronauts, residents can harvest fruits and vegetables year-round in the extreme climate of northern Canada.
The prototype is destined for Hay River, N.W.T., where the Northern Farm Training Institute will house five units.

Environmental biologist Mike Dixon knows what it takes to grow plants in barren places, both on and off Earth.
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Thursday, May 5, 2016

Friday Thinking 6 May 2016

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.

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”

Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Contents
Quotes
Articles


As an auditor, investor, or trading partner, you might want to drill down and try to test the assumptions that the company is making and see what would happen if those were incorrect at the time they were recorded, or turned out to be wrong sometime in the future. You might also want to understand how buying another company would change your own company based on the way your obligations and bets interacted with theirs. You could rack up millions of dollars in auditor fees to “get to the bottom” of any number of assumptions. The process would involve manually reviewing the legal contracts, and also the assumptions made in every cell of every spreadsheet. That’s because standard accounting is a very “lossy” process that reduces complex and context-dependant functions and transforms them into static numbers at every step. The underlying information is somewhere, but only exposed with a lot of manual digging.
Right now, the technology of the financial system is built on top of a way of thinking about money and value that was designed back when all we had were pen and paper, and when reducing the complexity of the web of dependencies and obligations was the only way to make the system functionally efficient. The way we reduce complexity is to use a common method of pricing, put elements into categories, and add them up. This just builds on 700­-year­-old building blocks, trying to make the system “better” by doing very sophisticated analysis of the patterns and information without addressing the underlying problem of a lossy and oversimplified view of the world: a view where everything of “value” should be as quickly as possible recorded as a number.
The standard idea of the “value” of things is a reductionist view of the world that is useful to scale the trading of commodities that are roughly of equal worth to a large set of people. But, in fact, most things have very different values to different people at different times

Joi Ito - Reinventing Bookkeeping and Accounting (In Search of Certainty)
One of the most interesting insights from our u.lab experience is that you can operate transformative learning environments at marginal cost of close to zero (MOOCs tend to have marginal costs of zero), which makes their potential future impact and scale almost unlimited. The key to making it work requires, however, a complete inversion of the enabling learning infrastructure….

Otto Scharmer - MITx u.lab: Education As Activating Social Fields
Where exactly are the words in your head? Scientists have created an interactive map showing which brain areas respond to hearing different words. The map reveals how language is spread throughout the cortex and across both hemispheres, showing groups of words clustered together by meaning. The beautiful interactive model allows us to explore the complex organisation of the enormous dictionaries in our heads.

Brain’s ‘Thesaurus’ Mapped to Help Decode Inner Thoughts



The basic assumption is that there is some underlying coherence, and the task of the philosopher is to discover it. That really is the theme of conversation, if you think about it. As a psychologist, I just don't make that assumption. It's obvious to me, in every context including statistical intuitions, moral intuitions, physical intuitions, they're not coherent. We have all sorts of intuitions and if you try to connect them logically, they're not consistent. It's interesting, but it's a very general effect.              

Experimental Philosophy Meets Psychology

A Conversation between Joshua Knobe, Daniel Kahneman



Building the infrastructure for the 21st Century has to include the digital environment - here a 6 min read by one of my favorite champions - Susan Crawford.

I Have Seen the Future — And It Has a Swedish Accent

Stockholm’s secret sauce is the accessible fiber connectivity that the US lacks
Over spring break I went to Stockholm to visit the future. I’m not sure other people in the U.S. think of Stockholm as the future; I’m not sure people here think about Stockholm at all. But I had an inkling that the city’s ubiquitous and cheap fiber Internet access would be making a difference right about now. And what I found in the course of my recent week of interviews was both disturbing and comforting.
The troubling part is that Stockholm has become an experimental sandbox for 21st century life-changing technologies because it has something we don’t: a wholesale, passive municipal fiber-optic network. Because it took the step to install this facility more than twenty years, ago, Stockholm is already planning to implement at scale new ideas in energy management, eldercare, responsive city service delivery, and transportation. By being able to ship around enormous amounts of data with ease to everyone in the city, they’re ahead of us in many ways. (Here’s something to ponder: 67% of Stockholm’s two-year-olds are online.) And they’re using their well-developed design sense to enhance what they’re up to — I’ll have more about this part of the story in a later column.
Of course this has the immediately foreseeable use - military personnel, physical workers (construction, garbage, moving, etc) - but the looming wave of retired Boomers - with travel-lust and desires for more activity. They say it will be on the market this year.

SuperFlex's lightweight exosuit will put a spring in your step

Don't call it an exoskeleton. This is the SuperFlex, a lightweight "exosuit" that delivers 200 times more power than its weight - far beyond the capacity of most humans.
Originally developed for DARPA's Warrior Web programme to help US soldiers carry heavy loads over long distances, SuperFlex is made from a soft flexigrip material that keeps the external robotic muscles, sensors, processors and batteries in place, while distributing their weight across the body's soft tissue. The robotic muscles work alongside the body's knee, calf and - in future iterations - back muscles to reduce the amount of work they need to do or to increase their strength. Its thin and flexible electroactive polymers mimic human muscles by expanding when exposed to an electric current and contracting when it is removed. This means that its batteries last longer or can be smaller.
Here’s the website for SuperFlex


Here’s a wonderful idea - a new way to work-live and travel - especially in the digital environment.

Instead Of Renting An Apartment, Sign A Lease That Lets You Live Around The World

Roam provides short-term apartments with a communal feel, for today's digital work-from-anywhere nomad.
If you can afford the airfare, it's getting easier to be a digital nomad. Roam, a new network of co-living spaces, offers a lease that lets you continually move: After a couple of weeks or months in Madrid, you can head to Miami, or Ubud, Bali. By 2017, the startup plans to have 8-10 locations around the world.
These aren't designed as places for vacations. Instead, it's an alternative way to think about home for "location-independent" people who can work remotely. After living and working nomadically in his twenties, founder Bruno Haid wanted to make it easier.
"Just managing my stuff and going back and forth between Airbnbs and housesitting became more cumbersome over time," Haid says. "At the same time, I was involved in a couple of early co-living communities in San Francisco, and saw the cultural value of something like that."
Michael Geist is a world renown Canadian researcher and expert related to the digital environment and copyright. This is a 1 hr video presentation he gave very recently. For anyone who wants a good analysis of the implication of the TransPacific Partnership for copyright, intellectual property and the rights of citizens - this is worth the view.

The TPP, IP, and Digital Policy: My CABE Presentation

Earlier this week, I delivered a webinar for the Canadian Association of Business Economics on the implications of the TPP. The talk touched on a wide range of concerns including copyright, privacy, culture, and digital policies.


And another outstanding Canadian’s analysis of the current state of the Internet - its enclosure by the large players - Facebook, Google, ….

Why the future of web browsers belongs to the biggest tech firms

Changes made to browser standards will make it harder for new companies to disrupt the status quo and cement the power of Google and Apple
Ten years ago, there were two web browsers that anyone cared about: Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Each browser vied for favour with web publishers, begging them to optimise their pages for one browser or the other. The browser with the most pages would, the browser companies thought, win the most users and thus the web, and so the first browser wars were fought to win over publishers.
But that fight came at the expense of users, because the one thing publishers of web 1.0 really wanted was pop-up ads – and the more obnoxious the better. Remember ads that showed up one pixel square and ran away from your mouse-pointer if you tried to close them, while auto-playing sound adverts? And those weren’t even the worst! Browsers didn’t have pop-up blocking – they had pop-up “enhancing”. Any company that blocked pop-ups would be de-optimized by the big publishers and doomed to obscurity.
Then came Mozilla – a not-for-profit, openly developed web browser that didn’t care about publishers. It cared about users. It blocked pop-ups by default, understanding that users wanted the see the publishers’ sites but not their pop-ups, and if Mozilla had enough users, it wouldn’t matter if publishers hated them.
Skip to 2016 and the web is a very different place. The World Wide Web Consortium, the not-for-profit organization that creates the web’s open technology standards, made a brave effort to tame the web’s lunatic proprietary HTML extensions that paid off, making those “Best viewed with” badges on websites a relic of the past. All the browsers have changed, too: Netscape vanished, Mozilla begat Firefox, Internet Explorer morphed into Edge, and Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome grew from obscure side projects to two of the dominant forces on the web.
Ten years is an eternity in web years, and in a decade, everything can change.
Here is an very interesting article by Otto Scharmer on his experience with MOOC’s - well worth the read - for anyone interested in the future of education and the evolution of teaching.

MITx u.lab: Education As Activating Social Fields

Until last year, the number of students in my classes at MIT numbered 50 or so. Less than twelve months later, I have just completed my first class with 50,000 registered participants. They came from 185 countries, and together they co-generated:
• >400 prototype (action learning) initiatives
• >560 self-organized hubs in a vibrant global eco-system
• >1,000 self-organized coaching circles.
What explains the growth in group size from 50 to 50,000? It’s moving my class at MIT Sloan to the edX platform, making it a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).
Designed to blend open access with deep learning, the u.lab was first launched in early 2015 with 26,000 registered participants. When we offered it for a second time, in September, we had 50,000 registered participants. According to the exit survey, 93% found their experience “inspiring” (60%) or “life changing” (33%); and 62% of those who came into the u.lab without any contemplative practice have one now.
One-third of the participants had “life changing” experiences? How is that possible in a mere seven-week online course? The answer is: it’s not. The u.lab isn’t just an online course. It’s an o2o (online-to-offline) blended learning environment that provides participants with quality spaces for reflection, dialogue, and collaborative action.
From the perspective of the course co-facilitation team, the whole u.lab experience felt like a journey of profound personal, relational, and institutional inversion. To invert something means to turn it inside-out or outside-in. In the case of the u.lab, not only was the classroom experience inverted, but so was the conversation among learners and the learners’ cognitive experience. Unlike traditional classrooms, the u.lab is characterized by:
• distributed organizing: opening up the classroom to many self-organized hubs around the world;
• generative dialogue: opening up the conversation from teacher-centric downloading to student-centric generative dialogue;
• collective governance: opening up the institution to a global innovation context while cultivating spaces that help the system sense and see itself;
• prototyping practices: opening up the learning modes through hands-on action learning methodologies;
• self-transformation: opening up the deeper sources of human intelligence by activating the open mind, open heart, and open will.


Considering education - this may be of interest to anyone wondering about how people educate themselves today.

We asked 15,000 people who they are, and how they’re learning to code

More than 15,000 people responded to the 2016 New Coder Survey, granting researchers an unprecedented glimpse into how adults are learning to code.
We’ve released the entire dataset of participants’ individual responses to all 48 questions — under the Open Data Common License — on a public GitHub repository.
In the coming weeks, we’ll publish a website filled with interactive visualizations of these data, answering dozens of questions like:
  • How does the population density of a city affect attendance of coding events?
  • How does desire to work remotely affect getting a first developer job?
  • How does prior military service affect salary at a first developer job, country-by-country?
In the meantime, here are a few high-level statistics from the 2016 New Coder Survey results to tide you over.
This is a very entertaining article - maybe because I have so many books-bookshelves that it spoke to my own issues. But it is also fundamental to the problem of information and knowledge management.
You have control over your content — defined as books, jars, pictures, website copy, or nearly anything else that can convey a message — but you don’t have control over your information. Information is interpreted. Information is subjective and personal. Information belongs to your user.
A master information architect would come up with an arrangement that strikes a balance between all possible audiences, pleasing all and offending none. Does that sound difficult? Maybe even impossible? Now you’re standing to understand why information architecture is a full time job.
“Information Architecture in the mid-2010’s is steadily growing into a channel- or medium-specific multi-disciplinary framing: conversations about labeling, website user interfaces, and hierarchies have elevated to conversations about sense-making, place-making, service design, architecture, and embodied cognition.”

Understanding Information Architecture via My Bookshelf

Abby “the IA” Covert reminds us in her book How to Make Sense of Any Mess that information is “subjective, not objective. It’s whatever a user interprets from the arrangement or sequence of things they encounter.” I can’t control what impression you form about me when you look at my bookshelf. But I can guide you in a certain direction.
Being aware of what information your content conveys is half the challenge. The other half is to ensure that that information conveys the message you intend. To do this, you’ll need to carefully craft the conditions necessary to send the right information every time. In other words, you’ll need to be an information architect.
This is a very interesting analysis of potential trends arising from an analysis of 8 years of applications to Y-Combinator - one of the most (if not the most) successful incubators for new start-up. This is a very worth the view both to understand the speed of change in the world of technology and to get a sense of current trends.

The Startup Zeitgeist - Reading applications to Y Combinator is like having access to a crystal ball

Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.
Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.
But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term.
So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.
This is a Great TED Talk about the future of cities, geo-politics and the digital environment.

How megacities are changing the map of the world

"I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth," says global strategist Parag Khanna. As our expanding cities grow ever more connected through transportation, energy and communications networks, we evolve from geography to what he calls "connectography." This emerging global network civilization holds the promise of reducing pollution and inequality — and even overcoming geopolitical rivalries. In this talk, Khanna asks us to embrace a new maxim for the future: "Connectivity is destiny."
This is a great breakthrough - despite its low efficiency rating (thus far).

Australian researchers develop breakthrough in solar technology

‘Zero-energy’ buildings—which generate as much power as they consume—are now much closer after a team at Australia’s University of New South Wales achieved the world’s highest efficiency using flexible solar cells that are non-toxic and cheap to make.
Until now, the promise of ‘zero-energy’ buildings been held back by two hurdles: the cost of the thin-film solar cells (used in façades, roofs and windows), and the fact they’re made from scarce, and highly toxic, materials.
That’s about to change: the UNSW team, led by Dr Xiaojing Hao of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at the UNSW School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, have achieved the world’s highest efficiency rating for a full-sized thin-film solar cell using a competing thin-film technology, known as CZTS.
NREL, the USA’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, confirmed this world leading 7.6% efficiency in a 1cm2 area CZTS cell this month.
Unlike its thin-film competitors, CZTS cells are made from abundant materials: copper, zinc, tin and sulphur.
Is it just me or is the speed of solarization increasing? Here’s a concise article on Dubai’s plan to wean itself from oil.

Costs tumble as Dubai’s Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park sets the mark

The hotly contested race to win the latest phase of work at Dubai’s utility-scale solar plant is pushing bids down to record-breaking lows, at less than half the price of power generated by natural gas, potentially helping to boost the emirate’s efforts to diversify its energy mix.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is the largest single-site project to generate electricity from solar energy in the world, with a planned capacity of 5,000 megawatts  Dewa has received five bids for the park’s 800MW third phase, with the lowest at 2.99 US cents per kilowatt hour (kWh).
That compares to the second phase’s winning bid last year, a then world record 5.84 cents per kWh, from Saudi Arabia’s Acwa Power and its Spanish partner TSK. The average cost for power produced from natural gas in the UAE, its biggest source, is about 7 cents per kWh, according to industry experts.
Dubai is targeting a share of power output from clean energy sources of 7 per cent by 2020, 25 per cent by 2030 and 75 per cent by 2050.
The accelerating speed of change in the conditions of change - here’s one observation.

I Was Wrong About the Limits of Solar; PV Is Becoming Dirt Cheap.

The price of solar power is falling faster than many thought was possible. Harvard’s David Keith comes honest with us about solar power: “Facts have changed. I was wrong.”
The unsubsidized electricity cost from industrial-scale solar PV in the most favorable locations is now well below $40 per megawatt-hour and could very easily be below $20 per megawatt-hour by 2020. Compared to other new sources of supply, this would be the cheapest electricity on the planet.
The price of solar power has fallen for multiple reasons – the largest, I would argue, is that the volume of solar power being manufactured has skyrocketed. Of the almost 240GW of solar power installed globally, 85% of it has been installed in the past five years.
And very smart people are predicting that this 240GW of solar power will be only 2% of what will be installed within the next twelve years. That suggests that the price of solar power will continue to fall further.
This is just cool.

A Giant Windwheel Is Coming to Rotterdam

Rotterdam is set to welcome its newest landmark: a 570-foot-high windwheel
Goodbye, windmill. The Dutch clean energy movement will soon have a new face: the windwheel. Come 2020, the shores of Rotterdam will be home to the 570-foot-tall Dutch Windwheel, a giant mixed-use structure distinguished by its unique circular shape and energy-positive output.
The steel-and-glass creation, designed by BLOC and Meysters in collaboration with Doepel Strijkers architecture studio, will rise above Europe’s largest port from a subaquatic foundation, giving the illusion of buoyancy. Visitors will have a chance to experience the wheel firsthand with forty mobile cabins that transport travelers around the structure’s circumference, offering views as far as Delft, The Hague, and Dordrecht. Upon its completion, the Windwheel will house both a 160-room hotel and a 72-unit residential development.
This is very interesting - a Canadian company offering a technology that enables blind people to see - offices in Toronto and Ottawa. There is a short video in the article as well.

Blind Woman Sees Her Newborn Baby For The First Time (Video)

This is the incredible moment a blind woman sees her newborn baby for the first time.
Kathy Beitz has been legally blind since childhood, and was given the gift of sight just after she gave birth to her son, thanks to new technology.
Kathy was loaned the special eSight glasses form Sight Corporation - the company behind new technology that allows legally blind people to see.
The amazing footage of the moment Kathy met her son – the first baby she had ever seen – was uploaded to YouTube by her sister, Yvonne.
Speaking about the birth, Kathy said: "For the first baby that I get to actually look at being my own is very overwhelming.
Here’s eSight’s website with other information and videos as well.



Well we haven’t heard about Google Glass in quite awhile - now I don’t think Glass is dead - but here’s a likely trajectory for the next generation of Mixed Reality vision.

Sony files patent for contact lens that records what you see

Although electronic devices are shrinking all the time, the idea of a smart contact lens still seems wildly ambitious. Now Sony has reached even further into the realm of the hypothetical and yanked out something that trumps all the efforts we have seen before. A patent filing by the Japanese company reveals its vision for a contact lens that not only records video and images with a simple blink, but manages to store them right there and then on the user's eyeballs.
Google, Samsung and a number of research groups have all made their plans for smart contact lenses public. The motivation behind these range from glucose monitoring to augmented reality to boosting vision through telescopic lenses. But one thing they have in common is that they are all early-stage prototypes or patented pipe dreams, with consumer-ready products seemingly still a ways off.
Sony's patent application doesn't change that, but does reveal an even bolder plan for a smarter, and probably scarier, piece of eyewear. Among the hardware built into the lens would be an image capture unit, a main control unit, storage module, antenna and a piezoelectric sensor.
I think this is one dimension of games that has to be expanded for a larger ecology of participants.

How Minecraft is helping children with autism make new friends

Playing video games online can be antisocial – but the Autcraft community is helping children with autism learn social skills and build relationships
LIKE many constructions, it started small. But now thousands of children with autism are making friends and learning social skills by playing a version of online building game Minecraft.
Stuart Duncan got the idea through a popular blog he ran about his own experiences with autism as well as bringing up a son with autism. Other parents with autistic children started telling him that their kids were crazy about a game that let them explore a randomly generated wilderness. However, despite loving the game, many of the children were being bullied by other players.
So, in 2013, Duncan, a web developer in Timmins, Canada, set up a server to run a version of Minecraft exclusively for children with autism and their families. He thought the invite-only server would attract 10 or 20 people. To his surprise, hundreds requested to join in the first few days.
Now, almost three years later, running “Autcraft” is his full-time job. The community boasts nearly 7000 members, along with a team of admins to help manage its many activities. “Parents see such a benefit for themselves and their children,” says Duncan.
Here’s something in the category of whatever can be automated will be - except who would have thought this would happen so soon?

Nimble-Fingered Robot Outperforms the Best Human Surgeons

A surgical robot was able to repair pigs’ bowels more accurately than human doctors.
A robot surgeon has been taught to perform a delicate procedure—stitching soft tissue together with a needle and thread—more precisely and reliably than even the best human doctor.
The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), developed by researchers at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., uses an advanced 3-D imaging system and very precise force sensing to apply stitches with submillimeter precision. The system was designed to copy state-of-the art surgical practice, but in tests involving living pigs, it proved capable of outperforming its teachers.
This sounds totally crazy - but….

Biotech Company Granted Ethical Permission To Attempt To Use Stem Cells To Reactivate The Brains Of The Dead

A biotech company in the U.S. has been granted ethical permission by an Institutional Review Board in the U.S. and India to use 20 brain-dead patients for what is sure to be a highly controversial study: From next year, they plan to stimulate their nervous systems in order to restart the brains. Bioquark is hoping that its part in the groundbreaking ReAnima project will reveal if people can at least partly be brought back from the dead.
It is important to note that at this point, there isn’t much evidence to suggest how genuinely realistic or even serious this endeavor is; however, the panel of experts working on the initiative does include Dr. Calixto Machado, a well-known neurological researcher and a member of the American Academy of Neurology who has written extensively on brain death.
The team will test a combination of therapies on the participants, who have been medically certified as being brain dead and are only kept from decomposing by life support machines. Injecting the brain with stem cells, giving the spinal cord infusions of beneficial chemicals, and nerve stimulation techniques – which have been shown to bring people out of comas – will all be tried out.
For anyone interested in secure platform for mobile devices - here’s a recent US government approval.

Hypori Named First Virtual Mobile Device Approved by NSA for U.S. Government Classified Use

Listing on NSA Commercial Solutions for Classified Program confirms security standards across Hypori's Platform
Hypori announces its approval by the United States government as the first Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI) vendor to meet the stringent requirements for classified mobility. The Hypori platform is now listed as a validated component on the National Security Agency (NSA) Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) Program Components List in the TLS Software Applications category.
Listing on the CSfC list enables organizations to leverage commercial products and protocols for the protection of national security information. The CSfC listing allows Hypori to be deployed to government agencies and other organizations that require mobility to adhere to stringent security standards.
Recently, the platform was awarded the Common Criteria Certification from the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), further validating the product's rigorous security standards. Hypori's mobile solution meets the compliance and security standards for various organizations and regulated industries like financial services, healthcare and payments.
Hypori enables organizations, like the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), to overcome their most significant mobile challenges, like data-at-rest (DAR) and attestation.  The company's VMI platform is a mobile-first, thin client solution that streams mobile applications running in the cloud or sanctioned datacenter to iPads, iPhones and Android mobile devices. All apps and data remain within the organization- even if a device is lost, important data is not compromised.
Here is Hypori’s web site


For Fun
I love these sorts of ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ pictures.

Enjoy Face Time with Seven of Earth's 3 to 5 Million Mite Species

A Smithsonian collection of some one million species of mites is receiving its up close and personal
Because there is no polite way to ask a mite to sit still for its portrait, Gary Bauchan often gives his tiny subjects a shot of liquid nitrogen instead. At -321 degrees Fahrenheit (-196 Celsius) these fidgety eight-legged arachnids are flash frozen. Bauchan then zooms in for a close-up.
Many of the mite species imaged with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s state-of-the-art scanning electron microscope have been on Earth for millions of years. In most instances Bauchan and USDA Entomologist Ron Ochoa are the very first humans to ever see the grotesque yet remarkable features of their bodies and faces.

Mites are everywhere, Ochoa points out. Almost every species of beetle, bird, snake, plant and ant (and everything else, it seems) has between one and four associated species of mites. Mites live in soil, in caves, on us, in the treetops, and even in the water. They’re some of the toughest pests to manage on some of the most economically important crops. Sixty thousand mite species are known to science yet experts estimate the world is crawling with as many as three to five million species.

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