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
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By grounding mathematics in what can be constructed, intuitionism has far-reaching consequences for the practice of math, and for determining which statements can be deemed true. The most radical departure from standard math is that the law of excluded middle, a vaunted principle since the time of Aristotle, doesn’t hold. The law of excluded middle says that either a proposition is true, or its negation is true — a clear set of alternatives that offers a powerful mode of inference. But in Brouwer’s framework, statements about numbers might be neither true nor false at a given time, since the number’s exact value hasn’t yet revealed itself.
Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math
In the age of GPS, we tend to take our navigation and spatial abilities for granted, until they – or the technology – let us down. It is easy to forget that they have sustained us for tens of thousands of years. Over the course of our evolution, Homo sapiens developed an appetite for exploration and a wayfinding spirit that set us apart from previous human species. It had a huge effect on our future. One of the most intriguing recent ideas in anthropology is that our ability to navigate was essential to our success as a species, because it allowed us to cultivate extensive social networks. In prehistoric times, when people lived in small family units and spent much of their time looking for food and shelter, being able to share information with other groups about the whereabouts of resources and the movements of predators would have given us an evolutionary edge. Friends were a survival asset: if you ran out of food, you knew where to go; if you needed help on a hunt, you knew whom to ask.
You would need a very dynamic cognitive map, which you would constantly have to update with information about your contacts and what they were telling you about the landscape.’ In this way, the human brain became primed for wayfinding. Navigation and spatial awareness are part of our DNA.
We are wayfinders
Scientists define infectiousness using the ‘reproduction number’ — how many people, on average, would be infected by a single person with the virus, in a population that has no immunity. For Ebola, that number is estimated at 1.5–2.5. The new coronavirus terrifying the world seems to be somewhere between 2 and 3. Measles tops the charts with a reproduction number of 12–18, which makes it the most contagious virus known. You don’t need to be in the same room as an infected person to catch the virus — it is spread by respiratory droplets that can linger in the air for hours.
Why measles deaths are surging — coronavirus could make it worse
That is why COVID 19 is the greatest opportunity for this planet, as it has forced most people, who have too much and those do not have much, to go within - to reflect, ponder and become mindful - focus on the breath and realize that the nature of life is fairplay, the big LOVE, togetherness, community and not selfishness, competition and separation based on survival of the fittest.
The need of the hour is for the G20 plus to come together with selfless leadership for humanity - not to close minds and borders in fear, retreat to our superficial identities of race, nation, religion, colour and creed. That is a hollow losing battle for humanity which will implode on us. Now is the time to let go of trying to fix things through a selfish lens - for profit with guns. Now is the time to quiet our minds to let wisdom and intelligence guide us.
That begins with self to face this reality fearlessly - and that self LOVE, compassion, peace and harmony within can bring equanimity to live in grace with uncertainty and impermanence to spread beyond us to all sentient beings to thrive together in a 'power of balance'.
May that leadership emerge within and among us is my wish to the universe.
My Real Education with Farmers, Pagan Rituals, IMF and Neoliberlism
Weber began with a blunt account of the material conditions of the university. He enumerated the structural problems: terrible teaching, workplace discrimination, the exploitation of the labour force, an arbitrary hiring process, and a businesslike and, thus, uninspired understanding of the scholar’s vocation. The universitas litterarum (the ideal of the university as a corporation of scholars devoted to learning), he concluded, had become a ‘fiction’.
The transformation of the university into a capital-intensive, bureaucratically organised enterprise was not simply an effect of academic specialisation. More than a century earlier, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant had observed how some universities had begun to function as factories and organise themselves around the division of intellectual labour. Weber considered what he called the ‘Americanisation’ of German universities – their saturation by the ‘spirit’ of American capitalism – more consequential than specialisation. They now required large scale funding. They separated the academic ‘worker from the means of [scholarly] production’ – libraries accumulated unprecedented numbers of books, research institutes stockpiled instruments, and state-appointed bureaucrats controlled access to both. Universities had become ‘state capitalist enterprises’.
...Yet, all disciplines can form as well as deform the lives they are purported to guide. They can fail and harm not because disciplines and rules are necessarily oppressive, but rather because historically they have often developed into what Weber in the Protestant Ethic called ‘shells as hard as steel’. Instead of helping people shoulder intellectual or moral burdens, disciplines and rules can become fixed and obviate the possibility of judgment and exceptions. The automation of physical labour has an analogue in the formalisation of intellectual and moral activity: the hardening of habits into mechanicalness. When disciplines and rules become recalcitrant and rigid, reflection on why a given rule or discipline exists at all can become impossible.
The scholar’s vocation
Understanding the future is the most valuable knowledge there is. The prime example is Moore's Law. But there is another law with even higher accuracy that can teach us a lot about the future, not at least about electric cars.
Wright's Law is the best way to predict the future
This is a great signal for how to provide the requisite platform for social adaptability.
The guiding principle was not top-down control but mutual respect and cooperation. Privacy was carefully protected, and the movements of an individual were not visible to others. This approach supported an astonishing degree of social coordination, which reduced transmission. And despite being an open, participatory system, the platform did not spur the spread of disinformation or panic.
How Civic Technology Can Help Stop a Pandemic
Taiwan’s Initial Success Is a Model for the Rest of the World
Taiwan’s success has rested on a fusion of technology, activism, and civic participation. A small but technologically cutting-edge democracy, living in the shadow of the superpower across the strait, Taiwan has in recent years developed one of the world’s most vibrant political cultures by making technology work to democracy’s advantage rather than detriment. This culture of civic technology has proved to be the country’s strongest immune response to the new coronavirus.
TECH FOR DEMOCRACY
The value of Taiwan’s tech-enabled civic culture has become abundantly clear in the current crisis. Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, “hacktivism” (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country’s success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus. A recent report from the Stanford University School of Medicine documents 124 distinct interventions that Taiwan implemented with remarkable speed. Many of these interventions bubbled into the public sector through community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation on the vTaiwan digital democracy platform, on which almost half the country’s population participates. (The platform enables large-scale hacktivism, civic deliberation, and scaling up of initiatives in an orderly and largely consensual manner.) A decentralized community of participants used tools such as Slack and HackMD to refine successful projects. (Much of our analysis is based on open interviews through these tools with leaders in the g0v community of civic hackers.)
One of the most celebrated examples is the Face Mask Map, a collaboration initiated by an entrepreneur working with g0v. To prevent the panicked buying of facemasks, which hindered Taiwan’s response to SARS in 2003, the government instituted a national rationing scheme of two facemasks per week per citizen. Anticipating that this national policy would be insufficient to avoid local runs on pharmacies, the government (via its prestigious digital ministry) released an application programming interface (API) that provided real-time, location-specific data to the public on mask availability.
Speaking of civic technology and more democratically oriented business models this is an interesting signal of work to be done, and changes taking place - as well as the promise of what sort of value could be created with a universal basic income.
Wikipedia is a world built by and for men. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is changing that.
Only 18 percent of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women
In the foothills of Nevada City in Northern California, half a mile down a grass-cut road, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight crusades against the sexism of the Internet.
Her brown eyes trained to the screen of her MacBook Air, the 66-year-old retired health-care administrator writes about brave women of the past — a Scottish surgeon criticized for volunteering her services in WWI-Serbia, an Angolan nationalist dismembered for her beliefs, an American author shamed for pursuing her writing — on Wikipedia.
Five years ago, Stephenson-Goodknight didn’t have her own Wikipedia page. For most of her life, she didn’t contribute to the website at all. But Stephenson-Goodknight has become a superstar in the community, and a pioneer for gender equality on a platform deeply in need of articles about women. She has written over 5,000 articles for the website, nearly 1,400 dedicated to women specifically.
That’s not insignificant, given that only 18 percent of Wikipedia’s biography entries are about women. With 6 million articles, the free crowdsourced encyclopedia is the seventh-most visited website, the first result of most Google searches and a content-generator for other resources. Though Wikipedia is sometimes dismissed as unreliable, its omnipresence continues to reinforce notions of what makes a person — a woman — notable.
This is an great signal of an emerging improvement in our understanding of evolution. I guess it was sometime last year that I saw a presentation that asserted that junk DNA was in fact just junk - needless accumulations.
But this article suggests that evolution likes to have some handy old and novel parts kicking around.
in the past 15 years, evidence for de novo genes has steadily accumulated, so much so that the debate has shifted from whether de novo genes exist to how much they contribute to evolution and adaptation.
Yet as whole genomes became more available and researchers scoured them for information, it seemed that pieces were missing from the puzzle. Some genes did not seem to belong to any family. These “orphan genes” appeared specifically in certain lineages and had no obvious ancestors or cousins. The question then focused on how these orphan genes came to be.
Where Do New Genes Come From?
In their search for sources of genetic novelty, researchers find that some “orphan genes” with no obvious ancestors evolve out of junk DNA, contrary to old assumptions.
The evolution of new genes often goes hand in hand with the emergence of novel traits in species as they evolve. One of the great riddles in evolutionary biology has therefore always been how genetic novelty arises.
For the half past century or more, most biologists agreed with the conclusions of the geneticist Susumu Ohno in his influential 1970 book Evolution by Gene Duplication. While acknowledging that the first genes had to come from somewhere, he wrote: “Yet, in a strict sense, nothing in evolution is created de novo. Each new gene must have arisen from an existing gene…”
This explanation seemed sound because truly de novo genes would have to emerge through evolution acting on the abundant “nongenic” DNA (often dismissed as junk) between genes. It was hard to imagine how that could happen. Cells’ fitness generally depends on the smooth functioning of networks of genes that have coevolved to work together over millions of years. Genes derived from other genes have a better chance of blending into those networks. In comparison, the fairly random transcripts from nascent de novo genes seem as though they should be, at best, inconsequential and more likely harmful to cells’ prospects. “The received wisdom is that random sequences are more likely to mess things up than to make them better,” said Aoife McLysaght, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.
This is a great signal of the possibility of a metabolic economy - where every product can eventually be metabolized (at the end of their use) into other products. Let’s not ban plastic (which won’t change the business model or its design principles) - let’s ban landfill, waterfill, and airfill - forcing every product we make to be designed to be metabolized.
The team used the optimised enzyme to break down a tonne of waste plastic bottles, which were 90% degraded within 10 hours. The scientists then used the material to create new food-grade plastic bottles.
Carbios has a deal with the biotechnology company Novozymes to produce the new enzyme at scale using fungi. It said the cost of the enzyme was just 4% of the cost of virgin plastic made from oil.
Scientists create mutant enzyme that recycles plastic bottles in hours
Bacterial enzyme originally found in compost can be used to make high-quality new bottles
A mutant bacterial enzyme that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours has been created by scientists.
The enzyme, originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, reduced the bottles to chemical building blocks that were then used to make high-quality new bottles. Existing recycling technologies usually produce plastic only good enough for clothing and carpets.
The company behind the breakthrough, Carbios, said it was aiming for industrial-scale recycling within five years. It has partnered with major companies including Pepsi and L’Oréal to accelerate development. Independent experts called the new enzyme a major advance.
The new enzyme was revealed in research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The work began with the screening of 100,000 micro-organisms for promising candidates, including the leaf compost bug, which was first discovered in 2012.
This is a good signal of the acceleration in the transformation of energy geopolitics - despite the current collapse of oil prices.
Oil Companies Are Collapsing, but Wind and Solar Energy Keep Growing
The renewable-energy business is expected to keep growing, though more slowly, in contrast to fossil fuel companies, which have been hammered by low oil and gas prices.
A few years ago, the kind of double-digit drop in oil and gas prices the world is experiencing now because of the coronavirus pandemic might have increased the use of fossil fuels and hurt renewable energy sources like wind and solar farms.
That is not happening.
In fact, renewable energy sources are set to account for nearly 21 percent of the electricity the United States uses for the first time this year, up from about 18 percent last year and 10 percent in 2010, according to one forecast published last week. And while work on some solar and wind projects has been delayed by the outbreak, industry executives and analysts expect the renewable business to continue growing in 2020 and next year even as oil, gas and coal companies struggle financially or seek bankruptcy protection.
In many parts of the world, including California and Texas, wind turbines and solar panels now produce electricity more cheaply than natural gas and coal. That has made them attractive to electric utilities and investors alike. It also helps that while oil prices have been more than halved since the pandemic forced most state governments to order people to stay home, natural gas and coal prices have not dropped nearly as much.
Even the decline in electricity use in recent weeks as businesses halted operations could help renewables, according to analysts at Raymond James & Associates. That’s because utilities, as revenue suffers, will try to get more electricity from wind and solar farms, which cost little to operate, and less from power plants fueled by fossil fuels.
A small signal of progress in energy storage and reuse - this time thermal energy.
"One of the big advantages of our technology is that it's modular, so you don't need a huge storage structure," Singh said. "You can make these modules of a certain manageable size, such as a 55-gallon drum or smaller, and install them in whatever number you require."
Unique technology surpasses conventional heat storage options in flexibility and efficiency
Many processes that generate electricity also produce heat, a potent energy resource that often goes untapped everywhere from factories to vehicles to power plants. An innovative system currently being developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory can quickly store heat and release it for use when needed, surpassing conventional storage options in both flexibility and efficiency.
Argonne's thermal energy storage system, or TESS, was originally developed to capture and store surplus heat from concentrated solar power facilities. It is also suitable for a variety of commercial applications, including desalination plants, combined heat and power (CHP) systems, industrial processes, and heavy-duty trucks.
Being able to recover and use waste heat can raise efficiency and cut costs by extracting more energy from the same amount of fuel. In the case of an electricity or desalination plant running on concentrated solar power, the TESS can capture heat during the day and release it at night to keep the plant running. Argonne's work to develop the system is funded by DOE's Solar Energy Technologies Office.
Another paradigm changing approach to transforming global energy geo-politics.
In the long term, this type of energy source could be the basis for a new paradigm in robotics, where machines keep themselves powered by seeking out and "eating" metal, breaking down its chemical bonds for energy like humans do with food.
In the near term, this technology is already powering a pair of spin-off companies. The winners of Penn's annual Y-Prize Competition are planning to use metal-air scavengers to power low-cost lights for off-grid homes in the developing world and long-lasting sensors for shipping containers that could alert to theft, damage or even human trafficking.
New scavenger technology allows robots to 'eat' metal for energy
When electronics need their own power sources, there are two basic options: batteries and harvesters. Batteries store energy internally, but are therefore heavy and have a limited supply. Harvesters, such as solar panels, collect energy from their environments. This gets around some of the downsides of batteries but introduces new ones, in that they can only operate in certain conditions and can't turn that energy into useful power very quickly.
New research from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science is bridging the gap between these two fundamental technologies for the first time in the form of a "metal-air scavenger" that gets the best of both worlds.
This metal-air scavenger works like a battery, in that it provides power by repeatedly breaking and forming a series of chemical bonds. But it also works like a harvester, in that power is supplied by energy in its environment: specifically, the chemical bonds in metal and air surrounding the metal-air scavenger.
The result is a power source that has 10 times more power density than the best energy harvesters and 13 times more energy density than lithium-ion batteries.
This is a small signal indicating the current state-of-the-art, challenges and progress of direct brain-machine interfaces via brain implants.
"Building water-tight, bulk enclosures for such types of implants represents one level of engineering challenge," Rogers said. "We're reporting here the successful development of materials that provide similar levels of isolation, but with thin, flexible membranes that are one hundred times thinner than a sheet of paper."
Next-generation brain implants with more than a thousand electrodes can survive for more than six years
Researchers have demonstrated the ability to implant an ultrathin, flexible neural interface with thousands of electrodes into the brain with a projected lifetime of more than six years. Protected from the ravaging environment of internal biological processes by less than a micrometer of material, the achievement is an important step toward creating high-resolution neural interfaces that can persist within a human body for an entire lifetime.
The results, appearing online April 8 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, were published by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Viventi, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University; John Rogers, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University; and Bijan Pesaran, professor of neural science at New York University.
"Trying to get these sensors to work in the brain is like tossing your foldable, flexible smartphone in the ocean and expecting it to work for 70 years," said Viventi. "Except we're making devices that are much thinner and much more flexible than the phones currently on the market. That's the challenge."
OK - this is from my son-in-law and my grandson - a key message of the season - maybe the year.
