Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
The nature of work is in a constant process of change. In a time of rapid innovation, the expectations for high-quality digital services seem to be outgrowing the budgets that fuel the provision of these services. The lack of resources in combination with growing demands leads to a higher workload for the people who make it all possible. In reality, the human workforce is being robbed of valuable time as they often perform monotonous tasks that could already be delegated to software robots. Flowit, the Estonian company providing work process automation solutions, has realised this and is determined to be the catalyst for change.
e-Talks: The future of work with Flowit CEO Andres Aavik
“Stem cells are something people have been working on for years” in studies of development, wound healing and cancer, Ruiz-Trillo said. Now, it’s becoming clear that they will be “interesting for understanding evolution as well,” for discovering how animals came to be.
Scientists Debate the Origin of Cell Types in the First Animals
without any map – digital or paper – navigation is often an unsettling, time-consuming challenge. Sometimes, it’s even a nightmare, and innumerable lives have been lost when navigation failed.
For the bulk of our evolution, before we could be considered ‘human’, our navigational abilities relied on using our sense organs. We take it for granted that we can see our way with our eyes. But we also have other senses that we can use to orient ourselves – more than ‘six’ if we include the vestibular system, which underlies our ability to balance, and proprioception, our sense of bodily articulation and movement. Yet, we seem so unlike nonhuman animals, who tap a host of alternative senses to find their way: bees see ultraviolet light, sharks sense electrical patterns, and bats echolocate.
When no other sensory aid is available, some nonhuman animals can also guide themselves using Earth’s magnetic field. Our planet is an enormous magnet, an object whose internal electrical charge causes it to be positive at one end and negative at the other. This means that Earth – like other, smaller magnets – can physically align a compass needle towards its North and South poles, a property known as polarity. The pull of a magnet is represented, in textbooks, by lines of force that predict where, precisely, the needle will point. But it’s nuanced: the force lines shift with what scientists call ‘inclination’ and ‘declination’, pointing towards Earth with increasing or decreasing angles to the horizontal plane, depending on how far or near the observer is to each pole. Arguably, these properties offer far superior navigational cues relative to your smartphone, which can break, malfunction or, ironically, become lost.
When no other sensory aid is available, some nonhuman animals can also guide themselves using Earth’s magnetic field.
Human magnetism
McLuhan urged us to think ahead. "Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force." By giving up our resistance and allowing our minds to travel ahead of the coming changes, McLuhan allowed some chance that we will rescue something of our humanity or invent something better to replace it.
The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool
how might new economics move us beyond the mechanistic view of policy and regulation, and towards a view that takes into account the complexity, unpredictability, and reflexivity of the economy?
My view is that we must take a more deliberately evolutionary view of policy development. Rather than thinking of policy as a fixed set of rules or institutions engineered to address a particular set of issues, we should think of policy as an adapting portfolio of experiments that helps shape the evolution of the economy and society over time.
New economics has the potential to significantly reframe these debates. It isn’t merely a matter of centrist compromise, of just splitting the difference. Rather it is a different frame that agrees with the right on some things, with the left on others, and neither on still other areas. For example, new economic work shows that Hayek was ahead of his time in his insights into the power of markets to self-organise, efficiently process information from millions of producers and consumers, and innovate. But new economic work also shows that Keynes was ahead of his time in his concerns about inherent instabilities in markets, the possibility that markets can fail to self-correct, and the need for the state to intervene when markets malfunction. Likewise, new economics research shows that humans are neither the selfish individualists of Hume nor the noble altruists of Rousseau, rather they are complex social creatures who engage in a never ending dance of cooperation and competition. Humans are what researchers such as Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles (2005) call ‘conditional co-operators and altruistic punishers’ – our cooperative instincts are strong and provide the basis for all organisation in the economy, but we also harshly punish cheaters and free-riders, and compete intensely for wealth and status.
How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant
This is a very important signal of the future of the city and the community. We all need to re-imagine what a walkable life with more people over 65 than under 15. How can we create flourishing multi-generational, diverse (including cognitively diverse) multi-use communities?
But if big cities are shedding people, they’re growing in other ways—specifically, in wealth and workism. The richest 25 metro areas now account for more than half of the U.S. economy, according to an Axios analysis of government data. Rich cities particularly specialize in the new tech economy: Just five counties account for about half of the nation’s internet and web-portal jobs. Toiling to build this metropolitan wealth are young college graduates, many of them childless or without school-age children; that is, workers who are sufficiently unattached to family life that they can pour their lives into their careers.
In 2018, the U.S. fertility rate fell to its all-time low. Without sustained immigration, the U.S. could shrink for the first time since World World I.
The Future of the City Is Childless
Last year, for the first time in four decades, something strange happened in New York City. In a non-recession year, it shrank.
We are supposedly living in the golden age of the American metropolis, with the same story playing out across the country. Dirty and violent downtowns typified by the “mean streets” of the 1970s became clean and safe in the 1990s. Young college graduates flocked to brunchable neighborhoods in the 2000s, and rich companies followed them with downtown offices.
New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.
In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.
If the future of the city is childless - what is the future of the ‘citizen’. This is an vital signal for a flourishing world - where we can grasp the crisis of consciousness that realizes humans as a single species in a single environment. What is it to be a human on the spaceship earth?
Citizens are splintered into two groups: natural citizens who claim citizenship as an automatic right and naturalized citizens who passively receive citizenship as a gift.
Rethinking Birthright
Amidst chants of “send her back,” it’s clear that we need a more just conception of citizenship—one that abolishes the distinction between “natural” and naturalized citizens.
On May 6, 2019, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor was born in a private London hospital to an American mother (Meghan Markle) and an English father (Prince Harry). Archie came into this world seventh in line to inherit the English Crown. He also came into the world the first member of the Royal family to be a citizen of both the United Kingdom and the United States. Importantly, however, at his birth, Archie became not only a citizen of the United States, he became a natural born citizen. This is the status first mentioned in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”
This is a very interesting signal - not just of AI learning and the literary domain - but a way to start researching in a deeper way many venues of popular culture and its Zeitgeist - and/or many other domains of social science research.
"SentiArt is a very simplistic tool that can be used by non-experts to simply compare the words in their test text (i.e., the text they want to do a sentiment analysis on) with an excel sheet that they can download from my homepage for free," Jacobs explained. "In principle, the tool should work in any language for which you can download Facebook's so called vector space models, on the fastText webpage. While my study focuses on English and German, you could also use it in Malaysian, Farsi or a Chinese dialect, and a multitude of other languages, as fastText has vector space models for over 290 languages."
SentiArt: a sentiment analysis tool for profiling characters from world literature texts
Arthur Jacobs, a professor and researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, has recently developed SentiArt, a new machine learning technique to carry out sentiment analyses of literary texts, as well as both fictional and non-fictional figures. In his paper, set to be published by Frontiers in Robotics and AI, he applied this tool to passages and characters from the Harry Potter books.
Jacobs has a background in neurolinguistics, a branch of linguistics that explores the neural mechanisms associated with language acquisition, comprehension and expression. In his previous work, he has often investigated how machine learning tools could be used to analyze and better understand human language. He is particularly interested in what he calls computational poetics, an area of study that focuses on the use of computational tools to understand literary content.
"In 2011, I wrote a book with Austrian poet Raoul Schrott called 'Brain and Poetry,' where we speculated that it would help to develop sentiment analysis tools for literary texts and poetry, not only for movie reviews or Trump tweets, which appears to be the gold standard in classical sentiment analysis," Jacobs told TechXplore. "We also wanted to develop a tool that can predict human neuronal and behavioral data, not only self-reports collected via Amazon Turk."
In his new study, Jacobs tried to put some of the ideas introduced in his previous work into practice by developing a tool for analyzing sentiment in literary texts. The technique he proposed, called SentiArt, uses vector space models and theory-guided, empirically validated lists of labels to compute the valence of individual words in a text. Vector space models are representations of text documents as vectors of identifiers, which are often used to filter, retrieve or organize information.
A good signal - a 1.5 min video on state of holograms and assemblages of other AI
Microsoft hologram speaking Japanese
Microsoft is using its Mixed Reality studios and neural TTS engines to create a hologram of a person speaking in another language. The voice will sound just like the original person, but with a different language.
Another signal of the ‘Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law’ file.
Intel’s Neuromorphic System Hits 8 Million Neurons, 100 Million Coming by 2020
Researchers can use the 64-chip Pohoiki Beach system to make systems that learn and see the world more like humans
At the DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative Summit today in Detroit, Intel plans to unveil an 8-million-neuron neuromorphic system comprising 64 Loihi research chips—codenamed Pohoiki Beach. Loihi chips are built with an architecture that more closely matches the way the brain works than do chips designed to do deep learning or other forms of AI. For the set of problems that such “spiking neural networks” are particularly good at, Loihi is about 1,000 times as fast as a CPU and 10,000 times as energy efficient. The new 64-Loihi system represents the equivalent of 8-million neurons, but that’s just a step to a 768-chip, 100-million-neuron system that the company plans for the end of 2019.
Intel and its research partners are just beginning to test what massive neural systems like Pohoiki Beach can do, but so far the evidence points to even greater performance and efficiency, says Mike Davies, director of neuromorphic research at Intel.
Going from a single-Loihi to 64 of them is more of a software issue than a hardware one. “We designed scalability into the Loihi chip from the beginning,” says Davies. “The chip has a hierarchical routing interface…which allows us to scale to up to 16,000 chips. So 64 is just the next step.”
A fascinating signal - that may be more important to enabling communities on earth as we deal with the impact of climate change and begin a struggle to make the earth a worthy art project for a flourishing future.
Silica aerogel could make Mars habitable
People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would "yield ~10 s g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water."
Sagan's work inspired other researchers and futurists to take seriously the idea of terraforming. The key question was: are there enough greenhouse gases and water on Mars to increase its atmospheric pressure to Earth-like levels?
In 2018, a pair of NASA-funded researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder and Northern Arizona University found that processing all the sources available on Mars would only increase atmospheric pressure to about 7 percent that of Earth—far short of what is needed to make the planet habitable.
Terraforming Mars, it seemed, was an unfulfillable dream.
Now, researchers from the Harvard University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and the University of Edinburgh, have a new idea. Rather than trying to change the whole planet, what if you took a more regional approach?
Evolution is about survival and adaptation is necessary to survive. Life changes the environment - which requires changes in living systems - and on and on. This is a good signal of how we adapt and change.
A (Very) Close Look at Carbon Capture and Storage
A material called ZIF-8 swells up when carbon dioxide molecules are trapped inside, new images reveal
A new kind of molecular-scale microscope has been trained for the first time on a promising wonder material for carbon capture and storage. The results, researchers say, suggest a few tweaks to this material could further enhance its ability to scrub greenhouse gases from emissions produced by traditional power plants.
The announcement comes in the wake of a separate study concerning carbon capture published in the journal Nature. The researchers involved in that study found that keeping the average global temperature change to below 1.5 degrees C (the goal of the Paris climate accords) may require more aggressive action than previously anticipated. It will not be enough, they calculated, to stop building new greenhouse-gas-emitting power stations and allow existing plants to age out of existence. Some existing plants will also need to be shuttered or retrofitted with carbon capture and sequestration technology.
The wonder material that could potentially help is a cage-like lattice inside which individual carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules can be trapped. Called a metal-organic framework (MOF), the material (consisting of metal ions attached like K’NEX hubs to rods made of organic molecules) also holds promise as a medium for drug therapies, desalination filters, nuclear waste containers, and photovoltaics.
Creating the energy to produce clean water could enable many new business models for food and energy production.
In lab experiments under a lamp whose illumination mimics the sun, a prototype device converted about 11 percent of incoming light into electricity. That’s comparable to commercial solar cells, which usually transform some 10 to 20 percent of the sunlight they soak up into usable energy. The researchers tested how well their prototype purified water by feeding saltwater and dirty water laced with heavy metals into the distiller. Based on those experiments, a device about a meter across is estimated to pump out about 1.7 kilograms of clean water per hour.
This solar-powered device produces energy and cleans water at the same time
Still a prototype, the machine could one day help curb electricity and freshwater shortages
By mounting a water distillation system on the back of a solar cell, engineers have constructed a device that doubles as an energy generator and water purifier.
While the solar cell harvests sunlight for electricity, heat from the solar panel drives evaporation in the water distiller below. That vapor wafts through a porous polystyrene membrane that filters out salt and other contaminants, allowing clean water to condense on the other side. “It doesn’t affect the electricity production by the [solar cell]. And at the same time, it gives you bonus freshwater,” says study coauthor Peng Wang, an engineer at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
Solar farms that install these two-for-one machines could help meet the increasing global demand for freshwater while cranking out electricity, researchers report online July 9 in Nature Communications.
Using this kind of technology to tackle two big challenges at once “is a great idea,” says Jun Zhou, a materials scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, not involved in the work.
One more signal of the transformation of energy geopolitics.
Kenya launches largest wind power plant in Africa
Kenya has launched Africa's largest wind power farm in a bid to boost electricity generating capacity and to meet the country's ambitious goal of 100% green energy by 2020.
The farm, known as the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) will generate around 310 megawatts of power to the national grid and will increase the country's electricity supply by 13%, President Uhuru Kenyatta said at the launch of the project on Friday.
In many ways we are entering the world of corporate space colonization (yes all those sci-fi movies may have a point). But this is a fascinating signal of an alternative between government and corporate space exploration.
Crowdfunded spacecraft LightSail 2 snaps amazing photos ahead of solar sail deployment
LightSail 2 may still have at least a few days to go before it begins its primary purpose, by unfurling the solar sail it has on board and finding out more about propelling a spacecraft using only the force of photons, but it’s not wasting any time on its orbital voyage. New photos from the crowdfunded spacecraft, which is operated by The Planetary Society, provide a stunning high-resolution look at the Earth from its unique vantage point.
The spacecraft just got a firmware update that corrected some issues with its orientation control after a test of its solar sailing mode, absent the actual use of the sail itself. The patch was uploaded successfully, according to The Planetary Society, and the spacecraft overall is “healthy and stable” as it stands. The earliest possible date for solar sail deployment is July 21, which is this Sunday, but that’ll depend on the mission team’s confidence in it actually being ready to unfurl and use successfully.
LightSail 2’s development was funded in part via a successful crowdfunding campaign run by the Bill Nye-led Planetary Society, and continues to seek on CrowdRise funding for its ongoing operation. Its goal is to test a spacecraft’s ability to fly powered only by the force of photons from the Sun striking a solar sail constructed of Mylar. This method of space-based transportation is extremely slow to get started, but thanks to the inertia-free medium of outer space, it could be an extremely energy-efficient way for research craft to travel long distances.
It launched on June 25 as part of the shared payload of SpaceX’s most recent Falcon Heavy launch.
The economic paradigm that dominates our world creates barriers to human capacity to explosively expand human knowledge in a way that enables evolutionary adaptive survival. Science needs to be ‘open-source’ serving human creative generativity for all.
The plan to mine the world’s research papers
A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but is it legal?
Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories. He has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from building codes to court records, and then arguing that such texts represent public-domain law that ought to be available to any citizen online. Sometimes, he has won those arguments in court. Now, the 60-year-old American technologist is turning his sights on a new objective: freeing paywalled scientific literature. And he thinks he has a legal way to do it.
Over the past year, Malamud has — without asking publishers — teamed up with Indian researchers to build a gigantic store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles dating from 1847 up to the present day. The cache, which is still being created, will be kept on a 576-terabyte storage facility at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. “This is not every journal article ever written, but it’s a lot,” Malamud says. It’s comparable to the size of the core collection in the Web of Science database, for instance. Malamud and his JNU collaborator, bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, call their facility the JNU data depot.
No one will be allowed to read or download work from the repository, because that would breach publishers’ copyright. Instead, Malamud envisages, researchers could crawl over its text and data with computer software, scanning through the world’s scientific literature to pull out insights without actually reading the text.
The unprecedented project is generating much excitement because it could, for the first time, open up vast swathes of the paywalled literature for easy computerized analysis. Dozens of research groups already mine papers to build databases of genes and chemicals, map associations between proteins and diseases, and generate useful scientific hypotheses. But publishers control — and often limit — the speed and scope of such projects, which typically confine themselves to abstracts, not full text. Researchers in India, the United States and the United Kingdom are already making plans to use the JNU store instead. Malamud and Lynn have held workshops at Indian government laboratories and universities to explain the idea. “We bring in professors and explain what we are doing. They get all excited and they say, ‘Oh gosh, this is wonderful’,” says Malamud.
We continue to progress the domestication of DNA and human capacity to be a co-creator of evolution - the challenge is to be a great artist.
Personalized Cancer Vaccines in Clinical Trials
The field is young, but predicting antigens produced by patients’ malignant cells could yield successful treatments for individuals with a range of cancer types.
In 2014, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, six melanoma patients received infusions of an anticancer vaccine composed of their own dendritic cells. Our WashU colleagues had extracted immune cells from the patients’ blood two months earlier, cultured them in the lab, and mixed in peptides selected and synthesized based on specific mutations present in the genomes of each patient’s tumor. The cells had then taken up the peptides much as they take up foreign antigens in the body in the course of normal immune patrol. When the clinical team administered the vaccines—each patient received three infusions over several months—they hoped that the dendritic cells would induce activation and expansion of T cells capable of identifying and destroying the cancer cells, while sparing healthy tissue.
This first test of personalized cancer vaccines in people grew out of our collaborative efforts to develop a computational pipeline to identify tumor-unique mutations that could induce immune responses in cancer patients, helping them to fight their diseases. The pipeline’s origin can be traced to the ideas of Bob Schreiber, a cancer immunologist also at WashU. For many years, Schreiber had studied mice that developed sarcomas after exposure to a chemical carcinogen as a model system for characterizing the interactions between cancers and the immune system. In 2011, he approached us about the possibility of sequencing the DNA of these cancer cells to identify unique cancer peptides, or neoantigens, with the potential to stimulate the immune system against cancer. In contrast to cell-based immune therapies, which directly provide the patient with tumor-attacking T cells, the idea was that these neoantigens could be used to create vaccines that stimulate the differentiation of endogenous killer T cells.
And another amazing signal of new medical interventions.
Hopefully, this technology could lead to new therapeutic strategies not only for patients with spinal cord injury but for those with various inflammatory diseases.
An ‘EpiPen’ for spinal cord injuries
An injection of nanoparticles can prevent the body’s immune system from overreacting to trauma, potentially preventing some spinal cord injuries from resulting in paralysis.
The approach was demonstrated in mice at the University of Michigan, with the nanoparticles enhancing healing by reprogramming the aggressive immune cells—call it an “EpiPen” for trauma to the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord.
“In this work, we demonstrate that instead of overcoming an immune response, we can co-opt the immune response to work for us to promote the therapeutic response,” said Lonnie Shea, the Steven A. Goldstein Collegiate Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
U-M researchers have designed nanoparticles that intercept immune cells on their way to the spinal cord, redirecting them away from the injury. Those that reach the spinal cord have been altered to be more pro-regenerative.
This is a great site for anyone with knotty problems.
We’ve Got the Knots
Animated Knots by Grog is the web’s premiere site for learning how to tie knots of any kind. From Boating Knots, Fishing Knots and Climbing Knots to tying a tie, or even Surgical Knots — we’ve got it covered.
Follow along as ropes tie themselves, showing just the essential steps, so you can master a knot in no time. Jump into any category to get started. If you’re unsure where to begin, try starting with the Basics, our Knot of the Day or check out every knot we’ve got!
