Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Creation of the Universe…. is a wonderfully clear and simple account of the evolution of the cosmos revealed by modern observations, written for readers untrained in mathematics. Chapter 6, “How Order Was Born of Chaos,” is the best account that I have ever seen of the paradox of order and disorder.
The paradox of order and disorder was a big problem for people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries confronting the facts of biological and cosmic evolution. The paradox arises because heat is the most disordered form of energy. Heat is our name for the energy of atoms randomly moving in all directions. The atoms reach a state of maximum disorder when the heat is distributed evenly between objects all at the same temperature. According to the second law of thermodynamics, one of the firmly established laws of modern physics, heat always flows in one direction, from warmer objects to colder objects. Therefore it would seem that, as the universe evolves, warm objects should become cooler and cold objects should become warmer, with everything tending toward a final state of uniform temperature and maximum disorder. In the final state of uniform temperature, life would be impossible and the universe would be dead.
This gloomy picture of the future was known as the heat death. Learned scientists and scholars portrayed the heat death as our inevitable fate. The paradox appears when we look out at the real universe and see nothing resembling the heat death. Both in the world of astronomy and in the world of biology, we see evolution moving in the opposite direction, from disorder to order, from death to life. Everywhere we see new and intricately ordered structures arising out of primeval chaos. The most obvious and familiar example of order growing out of chaos is the emergence of our ordered system of sun and planets out of a featureless cloud of interstellar dust and gas.
Fang’s chapter “How Order Was Born of Chaos” is a beautiful piece of scientific explanation. He explains the paradox of order and disorder as a consequence of the peculiar behavior of gravity. Unlike other kinds of energy, gravitational energy is predominantly negative. Our gravitational energy becomes more and more negative as we walk downhill toward the center of the earth. In any situation where gravitational energy is dominant, temperature and energy flow in opposite directions. The flow of heat works against the heat death, making warm objects hotter and cool objects colder. Instead of disappearing, temperature differences grow as time goes on. In the universe as a whole, gravitational energy is always dominant, and so the heat death never happens. Order grows out of chaos because we live in a universe with structures dominated by gravity. The dismal images of doom and gloom associated with the heat death turn out to be illusory. Fang’s understanding of the paradox brings us into a hopeful universe, with beauty and diversity growing around us as we move into the future.
The Heritage of a Great Man
Bold efforts to push academic publishing towards an open-access model are gaining steam. Negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe are sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of contracts that could see more articles appear outside paywalls. And inspired by the results of a stand-off in Germany, they increasingly declare that if they don’t like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all. On 16 May, a Swedish consortium became the latest to say that it wouldn’t renew its contract, with publishing giant Elsevier.
Under the new contracts, termed ‘read and publish’ deals, libraries still pay subscriptions for access to paywalled articles, but their researchers can also publish under open-access terms so that anyone can read their work for free.
… One reason that libraries no longer fear an end to their contracts with publishers is that a growing number of free versions of paywalled articles can be found online as preprints or accepted manuscripts, notes Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an advocacy group in Washington DC. Sci-Hub, a website that illicitly hosts full copies of papers and is used by academics around the world, is also a big factor, says Joseph Esposito, a publishing consultant in New York City. “Without Sci-Hub the researchers would be screaming at the libraries and state agencies not to cut them off,” he says.
Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread
Given the speed and scale of the changes, and the slow pace of processes defining governance models to handle them, present solutions to these questions are being rapidly superseded. We end up operating in the "too late zone".
We need to think and act quickly. At the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are laying the foundations for a new, global "operating system (OS) to facilitate delineation between the rights and responsibilities of different stakeholders.
This is all part of efforts to ensure this new phase of civilization is human-centric, benefitting not just the privileged few and driven not by the imperatives of technological development, but serving all of society. We must ensure that algorithms driven by vast data harvesting are trustworthy; that artificial intelligence and machine learning are as ethical as they are intelligent; and that data ownership is clear. These questions and many more are coming at us faster than we can formulate answers.
What are the building blocks of an operating system that could cope with such complex questions?
We need a new Operating System for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
This is an alert for a new type of malware affecting Internet routers. If you have a router listed - read the article.
Hackers infect 500,000 consumer routers all over the world with malware
Hackers possibly working for an advanced nation have infected more than 500,000 home and small-office routers around the world with malware that can be used to collect communications, launch attacks on others, and permanently destroy the devices with a single command, researchers at Cisco warned Wednesday.
Antivirus provider Symantec issued its own advisory Wednesday that identified the targeted devices as:
Linksys E1200
Linksys E2500
Linksys WRVS4400N
Mikrotik RouterOS for Cloud Core Routers: Versions 1016, 1036, and 1072
Netgear DGN2200
Netgear R6400
Netgear R7000
Netgear R8000
Netgear WNR1000
Netgear WNR2000
QNAP TS251
QNAP TS439 Pro
Other QNAP NAS devices running QTS software
TP-Link R600VPN
This is a good signal from a military frame - that is not only related to quantifiable data - but to the vulnerability to a confirmation bias of predictability that an emphasis on quantitative approaches can produce.
The risks of over-reliance on quantifiable data
The rise of interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning has a flip side. It might not be so smart if we fail to design the methods correctly. A question out there — can we compress the reality into measurable numbers? Artificial Intelligence relies on what can be measured and quantified, risking an over-reliance on measurable knowledge.
The problem with many other technical problems is that it all ends with humans that design and assess according to their own perceived reality. The designers’ bias, perceived reality, weltanschauung, and outlook — everything goes into the design. The limitations are not on the machine side; the humans are far more limiting. Even if the machines learn from a point forward, it is still a human that stake out the starting point and the initial landscape.
Quantifiable data has historically served America well; it was a part of the American boom after World War II when America was one of the first countries that took a scientific look on how to improve, streamline and increase production utilizing fewer resources and manpower.
Numbers have also misled. Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara used the numbers to tell how to win the Vietnam War, which clearly indicated how to reach a decisive military victory — according to the numbers…..
Fake news is on the verge of getting much scarier. The 1 min must view video explains the whole article.
The US military is funding an effort to catch deepfakes and other AI trickery
But DARPA’s technologists admit that it might be a losing battle.
The Department of Defense is funding a project that will try to determine whether the increasingly real-looking fake video and audio generated by artificial intelligence might soon be impossible to distinguish from the real thing—even for another AI system.
This summer, under a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the world’s leading digital forensics experts will gather for an AI fakery contest. They will compete to generate the most convincing AI-generated fake video, imagery, and audio—and they will also try to develop tools that can catch these counterfeits automatically.
This is an interesting bi-partisan discussion about the future of the city - although it is focused on U.S. cities - most of the discussion is relevant to all efforts to innovate in the city. Cities are the most salient laboratory of institutional innovation today. They are were democracy and the digital environment can experiment with considerably more agility to explore new approaches to the challenges of the 21st Century - including Climate Change.
When people used an app to report issues they felt they were contributing - when they used the phone for the same thing, they felt they were complaining.
Susan Crawford & Stephen Goldsmith: "The Responsive City"
American cities are on the brink of the most significant change in local and state governance in the last century. Across a wide range of political convictions and practical expertise, innovators — Republicans and Democrats, technocrats and citizen activists, businesses and nonprofit organizations, street-level bureaucrats and their clients —together are revolutionizing local government. Join Susan and Stephen to discuss what's working and what's next.
This is a good signal of the shift in the role cities are and will play in transforming our social and economic paradigms. The likely result of a cities investment in fostering technology innovation will include an ability to accelerate the implementation of ‘smarter’ city infrastructures. City governance is closer to the levels of implementation.
China's city of Tianjin to set up $16-billion artificial intelligence fund
China’s northern port city of Tianjin announced plans on Thursday to set up funds worth 100 billion yuan ($16 billion) to support the artificial intelligence industry, official news agency Xinhua said.
Tianjin will pour the funds into developing sectors such as intelligent robots and hardware and software. It will also set aside 30 billion yuan in a sub-fund for intelligent devices and intelligent upgrades for traditional industries.
Sun Wenkui, vice mayor of Tianjin, pledged financial support of up to 30 million yuan for each scientific research institution, whether a provincial- or national-level body, that sets up in Tianjin.
Tianjin will also set up a separate fund worth 10 billion yuan to promote intelligent manufacturing, Xinhua added, but did not specify a timetable for setting up the fund.
Another powerful signal related to changing demographics city design of how we house and live our lives. New forms of housing and community to enable a walkable life with really diverse neighborhoods.
The changing face of retirement: Apartment living, active lifestyles, and rural homes
How a “silver tsunami” of aging boomers will reshape the senior housing market
Trend forecasters rightfully focus on the housing needs of millennials when predicting the future of the U.S. real estate market. But the rising senior population, sometimes referred to as a “silver tsunami,” suggests baby boomers shouldn’t be written out of the story just yet.
“Between 2010 and 2040, we predict the nation’s 65-plus population will grow by roughly 90 percent,” says Hamilton Lombard, a demographics researcher for the University of Virginia. “In some areas of the country, most of the population growth will come from retirees.”
This ballooning number of seniors will impact industries as diverse as health care, technology, and, especially, real estate, as changing expectations around retirement mean new challenges and opportunities for developers.
Here are some of the trends—many overlapping, some contradictory—shaping how this generation will spend its golden years, demonstrating that older Americans, like millennials, are far from homogenous.
This is a must read - a review by a great mind - Freeman Dyson of a recent breakthrough book by Geoffrey West called “Scale”. Dyson gives a clear and profound account of aspects of complexity, fractals, and more.
The Key to Everything
Geoffrey West spent most of his life as a research scientist and administrator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, running programs concerned not with nuclear weapons but with peaceful physics. After retiring from Los Alamos, he became director of the nearby Santa Fe Institute, where he switched from physics to a broader interdisciplinary program known as complexity science. The Santa Fe Institute is leading the world in complexity science, with a mixed group of physicists, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer experts, and mathematicians working together. Their aim is to reach a deep understanding of the complexities of the natural environment and of human society, using the methods of science.
Scale is a progress report, summarizing the insights that West and his colleagues at Santa Fe have achieved. West does remarkably well as a writer, making a complicated world seem simple. He uses pictures and diagrams to explain the facts, with a leisurely text to put the facts into their proper setting, and no equations. There are many digressions, expressing personal opinions and telling stories that give a commonsense meaning to scientific conclusions. The text and the pictures could probably be understood and enjoyed by a bright ten-year-old or by a not-so-bright grandparent.
The title, Scale, needs some clarification. To explain what his book is about, West added the subtitle “The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.” The title tells us that the universal laws the book lays down are scaling laws. The word “scale” is a verb meaning “vary together.” Each scaling law says that two measurable quantities vary together in a particular way.
This is a very interesting account of the history of debt and even a re-cognition of Christ's work.
David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" is where I first encountered the ideas in this interview. The book is a must read - for anyone interested in economic history. Graeber made the point the the original Indo-European word for Sin, Guilt and Debt - was the same word. Thus we aren't born in 'original sin' as much as we are all born in original debt - to our mothers, parents, socio-cultural-environmental benefits that enabled us to be human and survive and prosper.
This interview provides the results of years of economic history scholarship - and profound insights for the next economy.
BRONZE AGE REDUX: ON DEBT, CLEAN SLATES AND WHAT THE ANCIENTS HAVE TO TEACH US
Economists once on the academic fringes - in university outposts like the University of Missouri Kansas City and Bard’s Levy Institute - are being looked to not only for understanding how to prevent bankers from setting the economy on fire again, but on how to build a social system that works for the majority.
Among the most brilliant of these heterodox economists is Michael Hudson. Coming to New York City in the 60s to study under a renowned classical music conductor, Michael switched to economics when he became beguiled by an accidental acquaintance with what he saw as the aesthetical flows inter-connecting natural and financial cycles and public debt. His biography contains elements of an epic novel: growing up the son of a jailed Trotskyist labor leader in whose Chicago home he met Rosa Luxembourg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s colleagues; serving as a young balance of payments analyst for David Rockefeller whose Chase Manhattan Bank was calculating how much interest the bank could extract on loans to South American countries; touring America on Vatican-sponsored economics lectures; turning after a riot at a UN Third World debt meeting in Mexico to the study of ancient debt cancellation practices through Harvard’s Babylonian Archeology department; authoring many books about finance from Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire [1972] to J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception [2017]; and lately, among many other ventures, commuting from his Queens home to lecture at Peking University in Beijing where he hopes to convince the Chinese to avoid the debt-fuelled economic model off which Western big bankers feast and apply lessons he and his colleagues have learned about the debt relief practices of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.
I talked to Michael about his forthcoming book Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Forfeiture and Redemption that comes with an astounding re-reading of the Bible and the true meaning of the life and persecution of Jesus. Based on scholarly breakthroughs in decoding ancient languages, it places a debt cancellation message inherited from Babylonian times at the center of Mosaic law and the Jewish Bible. And when it comes to Jesus, his message is revealed to be a social justice message. Through the lens of this reinterpretation, Jesus was actually an activist advocating for debt cancellation. He died not for the sins of the people but for their debts.
Here’s another signal of the emerging shifts in scientific publications.
“Machine learning has been at the forefront of the movement for free and open access to research… We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine learning research and believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine learning community would be a retrograde step,”
Thousands of academics spurn Nature’s new paid-access Machine Learning journal
Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, has just announce plans to create a Machine Intelligence imprint, and researchers are not happy. The field has been doing fine with open-access journals — why clog it up with the paid-access model everyone has been trying to escape for decades? Over two thousand have signed a statement saying they won’t publish in it.
Academic publishing is a tumult right now, with open-access journals and proponents thereof battling with the old-guard prestige of the likes of Science and Nature — along with the fees from jealous keepers such as Elsevier and Springer. Meanwhile sites like Sci-Hub have worked to liberate the data held by paid journals, illegally of course, and become indispensable in the process.
This is an interesting signal related to how all forms of data even text can now be embedded with metadata.
Hiding Information in Plain Text
Subtle changes to letter shapes can embed messages
Computer scientists have now invented a way to hide secret messages in ordinary text by imperceptibly changing the shapes of letters.
The new technique, named FontCode, works with common font families such as Times Roman and Helvetica. It is compatible with most word-processing software, including Microsoft Word, as well as image-editing and drawing programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Although there are obvious applications for espionage with FontCode, its inventors suggest it has more practical uses in terms of embedding metadata into texts, much like watermarking. “You can imagine that it would be used to provide extra information, such as authors, copyright and so on, about a document,” says study senior author Changxi Zheng, a computer scientist at Columbia University. “Another application is to protect legal documents: Our technique can be used to detect if a document, even when printed on paper, has been tampered with or not. It can even be used to tell which part of the document is tampered.”
Changxi and his collaborators will detail their findings in August at the SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver.
A 5 minute video demonstrating this is here
This is an interesting development in the domain of energy storage and use - a signal of a possible paradigm innovation.
LI-ION BATTERIES THAT CHARGE IN UNDER 1 SECOND (NOT SUPERCAPACITORS) DEVELOPED IN NORWAY, BUT NOT IDEAL FOR CARS
Two researchers in Norway say they have invented just such a device. Professor Ola Nilsen of the Chemistry Department at the University of Oslo and Knut Bjarne Gandrud, a graduate of the university who now works in Belgium, say they have invented a battery that can be recharged in just half a second. Their discovery could revolutionize the electric vehicle industry.
“Yes, maybe this could be something big,” Gandrud says. “We have created a battery that is the world’s fastest recharging. It can be recharged at a half second. Initially, we think that this may be a good solution for the future of environmentally friendly buses. To save most weight, we envisage that these buses only need battery power to run from one stop to the next. At each stop, it can be rapidly replenished.”
This is a good signal of the phase transition in global energy geopolitics - new infrastructure paradigms.
Solar, wind will drive the value of energy storage in the US
A much heralded report shows solar and wind will lower wholesale prices, but it also shows a coming evolution in the pricing profile of the grid. These shifts in timing, shape, regularity and length will drive energy storage demand.
Despite a heavy build-out of gas plants over the last two decades, the United States is moving solidly in the direction of electricity grid dominated by renewable energy. And as we reach higher penetrations, the needs change. Some of the more forward-looking models suggest we’ll need on the order of 12 hours to three weeks worth of energy storage to move to an 80% and then 100% solar- and wind-powered grid.
A recently published report by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Impacts of High Variable Renewable Energy Futures on Whole Electricity Prices, and on Electric-Sector Decision Making (PDF), shows that another affect will be aggressive downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices as solar and wind approach 50% of all electricity.
This is an important qualifying signal - related to Google’s announcement last week about it’s new AI Google Duplex. Although this uncanny and stunning demonstration - is very narrow - given the speed of progress - new domains should be forthcoming.
A.I. Is Harder Than You Think
Last week, Mr. Pichai stood onstage in front of a cheering audience and proudly showed a video in which a new Google program, Google Duplex, made a phone call and scheduled a hair salon appointment. The program performed those tasks well enough that a human at the other end of the call didn’t suspect she was talking to a computer.
Assuming the demonstration is legitimate, that’s an impressive (if somewhat creepy) accomplishment. But Google Duplex is not the advance toward meaningful A.I. that many people seem to think.
If you read Google’s public statement about Google Duplex, you’ll discover that the initial scope of the project is surprisingly limited. It encompasses just three tasks: helping users “make restaurant reservations, schedule hair salon appointments, and get holiday hours.”
Schedule hair salon appointments? The dream of artificial intelligence was supposed to be grander than this — to help revolutionize medicine, say, or to produce trustworthy robot helpers for the home.
The reason Google Duplex is so narrow in scope isn’t that it represents a small but important first step toward such goals. The reason is that the field of A.I. doesn’t yet have a clue how to do any better.
This is definitely a strong signal - very related to “Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law - on Steroids” While the hardware dimension of Moore’s Law is nearing certain constraints (and other computation paradigms are banging on the door) AI seems to be accelerating with super-exponential speed. This is well worth the read for anyone interested in pragmatic assessments of the future of AI.
AI and Compute
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period). Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (an 18-month doubling period would yield only a 12x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.
For this analysis, we believe the relevant number is not the speed of a single GPU, nor the capacity of the biggest datacenter, but the amount of compute that is used to train a single model — this is the number most likely to correlate to how powerful our best models are. Compute per model differs greatly from total bulk compute because limits on parallelism (both hardware and algorithmic) have constrained how big a model can be or how much it can be usefully trained. Of course, important breakthroughs are still made with modest amounts of compute — this analysis just covers compute capability.
The trend represents an increase by roughly a factor of 10 each year. It’s been partly driven by custom hardware that allows more operations to be performed per second for a given price (GPUs and TPUs), but it’s been primarily propelled by researchers repeatedly finding ways to use more chips in parallel and being willing to pay the economic cost of doing so.
Last week Google brought us further into the uncanny valley with it’s AI product called Duplex, - an AI capable of having human-sounding conversations. And it may seem that image recognition is old hat (although we are only at the beginning) - now we have voice recognition entering the scene.
Interpol’s New Software Will Recognize Criminals by Their Voices
A new platform aims to identify offenders by matching voice recordings to speech samples stored in a massive database, raising privacy concerns
The world’s largest police network is evaluating software that would match samples of speech taken from phone calls or social media posts to voice recordings of criminals stored within a massive database shared by law enforcement agencies.
The platform, as described by developers, would employ several speech analysis algorithms to filter voice samples by gender, age, language, and accent. It will be managed by Interpol at its base in Lyon, France with a goal of increasing the accuracy of voice data, and boosting its reliability and judicial admissibility.
The development team completed successful field tests of the system in March and November 2017. Next up is a project review this June in Brussels.
Here’s an interesting signal about the future of autonomous vehicles - while the article is about flying unpersoned autonomous vehicles - the approach will likely be relevant to many other dimensions of Unpersoned Autonomous Vehicles.
DARPA's Semi-Disposable Gremlin Drones Will Fly by 2019
Dynetics gets funding from DARPA to launch and recover multiple reusable drones from a C-130
We first reported on Gremlins back in 2015, as one of those “DARPA wants” projects that seems like it might be a bit far-fetched—in this case, DARPA wanted swarms of nearly disposable UAVs that could launch and be retrieved from flying aircraft carrier motherships in mid-air. Over the last few years, we’ve seen some progress towards disposable drones, but the tricky part was always going to be the mid-air retrieval. We speculated a bit in our original post about how it might be done, but we didn’t get it quite right, which we know because DARPA has given a company called Dynetics a US $38.6 million contract to make Gremlins real.
The Gremlin aircraft themselves are intended to be a compromise between the disposable single-use drones that both DARPA and the Marine Corps have been experimenting with, and traditional drones that are designed to last for years. Each Gremlin will be designed to function for perhaps 20 missions, with minor refurbishment between missions. They likely won’t be that much more expensive than a disposable drone, and the extra investment will make them much more useful. It’s a bit of a philosophical shift for the military, and makes the meaning of “military-grade hardware” potentially quite different.
The day of the robotic pet, personal assistant and guard may be getting closer.
Boston Dynamics to start selling SpotMini robot as soon as 2019
The four-legged Boston Dynamics robot that became an internet star when it featured in a series of viral videos is set to go on sale next year.
US-based robotics company Boston Dynamics announced the semi-autonomous SpotMini is scheduled to go into production in mid-2019.
The robot caused a stir online earlier this year when videos showed it navigating offices, climbing stairs, opening doors and even fighting off a human armed with a hockey stick.
And there’s competition - these droids promise to be arriving soon as well. The short videos are worth the view.
This start-up is building a humanoid robot that could soon be delivering packages to your door
A world where humanoid robots deliver your packages to your door may be as little as two to three years away.
That's according to Damion Shelton, the CEO and co-founder of Agility Robotics, a start-up based in Albany, Oregon, which is building robots that can walk and run.
Currently, Agility Robotics is selling Cassie, a two-legged robot with no arms, to researchers for robotics work. (Cassie is named after the cassowary, a two-legged flightless bird from Australia and New Zealand.) … the next generation of the company's legged robots will also have arms, says Shelton. And one target use for the more humanoid robot will be carrying packages from delivery trucks to your door.
And maybe in the nearish future you’ll try to swat something that looks like an insect but isn’t.
“Before now, the concept of wireless insect-sized flying robots was science fiction. Would we ever be able to make them work without needing a wire?” said co-author Sawyer Fuller, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Our new wireless RoboFly shows they’re much closer to real life.”
The first wireless flying robotic insect takes off
Insect-sized flying robots could help with time-consuming tasks like surveying crop growth on large farms or sniffing out gas leaks. These robots soar by fluttering tiny wings because they are too small to use propellers, like those seen on their larger drone cousins. Small size is advantageous: These robots are cheap to make and can easily slip into tight places that are inaccessible to big drones.
But current flying robo-insects are still tethered to the ground. The electronics they need to power and control their wings are too heavy for these miniature robots to carry.
Now, engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time cut the cord and added a brain, allowing their RoboFly to take its first independent flaps. This might be one small flap for a robot, but it’s one giant leap for robot-kind. The team will present its findings May 23 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Brisbane, Australia.
RoboFly is slightly heavier than a toothpick and is powered by a laser beam. It uses a tiny onboard circuit that converts the laser energy into enough electricity to operate its wings.
This is a very interesting signal of the emerging integration of AI, neuro-cogni-science and the enhancing of human performance.
Brain-computer-interface training helps tetraplegics win avatar race
When humans actively participate with AI in improving performance
Noninvasive brain–computer interface (BCI) systems can restore functions lost to disability — allowing for spontaneous, direct brain control of external devices without the risks associated with surgical implantation of neural interfaces. But as machine-learning algorithms have become faster and more powerful, researchers have mostly focused on increasing performance by optimizing pattern-recognition algorithms.
But what about letting patients actively participate with AI in improving performance?
To test that idea, researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), based in Geneva, Switzerland, conducted research using “mutual learning” between computer and humans — two severely impaired (tetraplegic) participants with chronic spinal cord injury. The goal: win a live virtual racing game at an international event.
This is a great signal of our emerging grasp of the ‘hyperobject’ (objects so massive and distributed they are beyond human scale perception) of our earth and climate - and the emergence of our capacity to begin to transform our impact. The 3 min video is worth the view.
NASA Satellites Reveal Major Shifts in Global Freshwater
In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists have combined an array of NASA satellite observations of Earth with data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing around the globe and why.
The study, published today in the journal Nature, finds that Earth's wet land areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles.
This is a strong signal of one more step in the emerging domestication of DNA and of course bacteria.
E. coli tailored to convert plants into renewable chemicals
What does jet fuel have in common with pantyhose and plastic soda bottles? They're all products currently derived from petroleum. Sandia National Laboratories scientists have demonstrated a new technology based on bioengineered bacteria that could make it economically feasible to produce all three from renewable plant sources.
Economically and efficiently converting tough plant matter, called lignin, has long been a stumbling block for wider use of the energy source and making it cost competitive. Piecing together mechanisms from other known lignin degraders, Sandia bioengineer Seema Singh and two postdoctoral researchers, Weihua Wu, now at Lodo Therapeutics Corp., and Fang Liu, have engineered E. coli into an efficient and productive bioconversion cell factory.
"For years, we've been researching cost-effective ways to break down lignin and convert it into valuable platform chemicals," Singh said. "We applied our understanding of natural lignin degraders to E. coli because that bacterium grows fast and can survive harsh industrial processes."
The work, "Towards Engineering E. coli with an Auto-Regulatory System for Lignin Valorization," was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and was supported by Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.
This is an interesting signal for understanding health care.
Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980
The spending began soaring beyond that of other advanced nations, but without the same benefits in life expectancy.
The United States devotes a lot more of its economic resources to health care than any other nation, and yet its health care outcomes aren’t better for it.
That hasn’t always been the case. America was in the realm of other countries in per-capita health spending through about 1980. Then it diverged.
It’s the same story with health spending as a fraction of gross domestic product. Likewise, life expectancy. In 1980, the U.S. was right in the middle of the pack of peer nations in life expectancy at birth. But by the mid-2000s, we were at the bottom of the pack.
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