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. Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works. Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Elinor Ostrom was also challenging the received wisdom in her field of political science. Starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 8) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.
Lin’s design principles (DP) had “major evolutionary transition” written all over them. Clearly defined boundaries (DP1) meant that members knew they were part of a group and what the group was about (e.g., fisherman with access to a bay or farmers managing an irrigation system). Proportional equivalence of costs and benefits (DP2) meant that members had to earn their benefits and couldn’t just appropriate them. Collective choice arrangements (DP3) meant that group members had to agree upon decisions so nobody could be bossed around. Monitoring (DP4) and graduated sanctions (DP5) meant that disruptive self-serving behaviors could be detected and punished. Fast and fair conflict resolution (DP6) meant that the group would not be torn apart by internal conflicts of interest. Local autonomy (DP7) meant that the group had the elbow room to manage its own affairs. Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule making authority (DP8) meant that everything regulating the conduct of individuals within a given group also was needed to regulate conduct among groups in a multi group population.
The concordance between Lin’s core design principle approach and multilevel selection theory had three major implications. First, it placed the core design principle approach on a more general theoretical foundation. Lin’s “Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)” framework emanated from political science and she was an early adopter of economic game theory, but her main case for the design principle approach was the empirical database that she compiled for common-pool resource groups around the world, as described in her most influential book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990). Multilevel selection theory showed how the core design principle approach follows from the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and from our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species.
Second, because of its theoretical generality, the core design principle approach is likely to apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources (CPRs). Almost any group whose members must work together to achieve a common goal is vulnerable to self-serving behaviors and should benefit from the same principles.
Third, the core design principle approach can provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in the real world. It should be possible for almost any kind of group to assess itself with respect to the design principles, address shortcomings, and function better as a result. ….
The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life’s Greatest Dilemmas
But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? In the 1980s? The 1950s? The 1930s? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era – the internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?
A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (“nobody’s land”), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history.
In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiensis a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the stone age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.
Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things – for example about the sources of your own power – that will anger allies, dishearten followers or undermine social harmony. Scholars throughout history faced this dilemma: do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments – whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or communist ideologues – placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.
Yuval Noah Harari extract: ‘Humans are a post-truth species’
Without deep knowledge of a company’s critical research — which businesses may be reluctant to share, for competitive reasons — it’s difficult for outsiders to evaluate a start-up’s worth. That makes it harder to obtain funding, and it may be partly responsible for certain trends: why there are fewer initial public offerings these days, why smaller companies are being swallowed by the giants, and why so many companies remain private for longer.
That creates opportunities for private equity firms, which have insider access to innovative start-ups that may never go directly to the public markets. Meanwhile, Main Street investors are consigned to a less diverse universe than they may realize.
There’s a broader problem. Our visibility into the inner workings of public companies isn’t great, but we know far more about them than we do private companies, which aren’t required to disclose nearly as much information.
And these changing dynamics mean we know far less about many of the creators of American profits and jobs than would otherwise be the case.
In a democracy in which corporations already have enormous clout, that is worth worrying about.
The Stock Market Is Shrinking. That’s a Problem for Everyone
The game of Monopoly was originally quite different when it was first patented in 1904 by a progressive woman named Lizzie Magie. Magie’s game, called “The Landlord’s Game,” was like the version you grew up playing, in that it could be won by accruing as many land lots, properties, and cash as possible. But her version came with a twist. At any time, the players could choose a more egalitarian future by voting in the Single Tax rules.
Once activated, the Single Tax required players to redirect all fines and rents on empty lots into the Public Treasury’s coffers. For any player to erect properties or collect a fine on an existing property, the Treasury first had to receive rent on the land. These public funds paid for public utilities, transportation, and college, which then became available to everyone for free. Residual funds were redistributed as higher wages for everyone. No individual could really win the Single Tax game, other than by collaborating to break up all monopolies.
THE RULES OF MONOPOLY
The subject of money, currency is both a concrete reality and a mass hallucination shimmering in the Zeitgeist of change. Not just the world of Finance or the dominant paradigms of our economy is secure as new forms of bits or social credit become our means of recognizing and exchange value. But still a comprehensive accounting of our values and how we value are values seems clear. It worth looking at the history of money (beyond the tired fable of economist’s ideas of its roots in barter).
Early governments created money to pay off public works debts and to collect taxes, Rosenswig contends. Bartering had nothing to do with it. Instead, money grew out of older systems of credit and debt, which anthropologists have documented for more than a century. In small-scale societies, debts concern obligations to others. Among hunter-gatherer and farming groups, for example, daughters given away in marriage create debts that are partially repaid with goods known as bridewealth. Full repayment requires that the recipient of the first bride provide a bride in return. No cash needed.
Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money
Thousands of years ago, money was a means of debt payment, archaeologists and anthropologists say
Economists and revisionists alike agree that an object defined as money works in four ways: First, it serves as a means for exchanging goods and services. Currency enables payment of debts. It represents a general measure of value, making it possible to calculate prices of all sorts of items. And, finally, money can be stored as a wealth reserve.
From there, the two groups split. Mainstream economists assume that bartering of goods and services inspired money’s invention. Anthropologists and archaeologists contend that early states invented currency as a means of debt payment.
“Much academic work assumes that [monetary systems] arose in nation-states within the last 200 to 400 years,” says sociocultural anthropologist Daniel Souleles of Copenhagen Business School in Frederiksberg. But financialized transactions and debt show up in lots of places much further back in time.
Recent research from the Americas adds new questions to the debate. These investigations suggest that money independently appeared for different reasons and assumed different tangible forms in many parts of the world, starting thousands of years ago.
This paper has wonderful illustrations that support the article above. The origin of writing is accounting - this article (15 pages - available as a downloadable pdf) is well worth the read for anyone interested in the origins of writing.
The Evolution of Writing
Abstract
Writing – a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language – has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. 3200 BC, was first. It is also the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin. This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction.
Well speaking about money and its possible future - this might seem an inevitable development.
Facebook recently started asking banks for your financial data
A report from the Wall Street Journal today revealed Facebook was attempting to gain detailed financial information from its users’ banks. Oof, in how many languages can I say “no?”
According to the Journal, Facebook has approached the likes of Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup with an eye toward partnership. In exchange for users’ banking data, it proposed to offer a bank’s customers the ability to conduct business within Facebook itself.
This is an interesting signal of optimum team size, organizational architecture and shared incentives.
“Passionate workers can do much more in a few work hours than any dev forced to work on weekends or late at night,” he said. “We were able to achieve much more being eight people than when we were 20+, so we plan to stay below the 15-person limit.”
Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same
The game industry is not exactly known for valuing workers. Big studios are rife with soul-destroying crunch and end-of-project layoffs. French studio Motion Twin, developer of the Castlevania-inspired roguelike Dead Cells, is trying something different: Workers own and manage the company. There is no boss.
Motion Twin describes itself as an “anarcho-syndical workers cooperative.” What this means in practical terms is that all of its 11 workers are, in theory, equal. Same pay, same say.
“We actually just use a super basic formula: if a project finds success, people are basically paid more in bonuses, and everyone is paid the absolute same way,” said longtime Motion Twin game designer Sébastien Bénard in an email. “The devs and the artists are paid the same amount of money, and people like me who have been here for 17 years are paid the same amount as people who were recruited last year.”
Bénard says that lately the studio has gotten good about just telling people who seem to be on the verge of burnout to go home. The company puts an emphasis on employees being happy and driven, and burnout risks stripping away both those crucial qualities forever. “It’s obviously better to lose a few work hours than a colleague,” said Bénard. “There’s absolutely no discussion about that.”
This article signals a couple of things - China’s rise as a true competitor in the world of hardware, software and AI - and the rise of computational paradigms based on specific purpose architectures.
Kunlun can be deployed in the cloud or at the edge, such as in autonomous vehicles, an area in which Chinese companies are allocating sizeable research and development funds. But edge deployments of AI do not stop there. On-device AI is used in mobile phone cameras to improve picture quality, it can provide speech and voice recognition, and it may be used in security systems, drones or robots.
Cloud-to-Edge AI Chip Kunlun Repositions Baidu in AI Market Globally
Search engine giant Baidu has recently unveiled China’s first cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip —Kunlun — at Baidu Create 2018. The move repositions the company in not only the Chinese market but also globally, says leading data and analytics company GlobalData.
Launched this month, Kunlun is China’s first cloud-to-edge AI chip, built to accommodate high performance requirements of a wide variety of AI scenarios. With this, Baidu joined the ranks of Google, Nvidia, Intel, and many other tech companies making processors especially for AI.
Additionally, Baidu also joins select few companies that not only offer an AI platform to help enterprises deploy AI-infused solutions but also have their own hardware to maximize AI processing. Built to accommodate the high performance requirements of a wide variety of AI scenarios, Kunlun includes training chip ‘818-300’ and inference chip ‘818-100’. It can be used to provide AI capabilities such as speech and text analytics, natural language processing, and visual recognition.
And another signal of the same trends in Machine Learning (ML).
Google AI Chief Jeff Dean’s ML System Architecture Blueprint
Dean has often pointed out that ML’s growth trend as reflected in related arXiv papers has already surpassed Moore’s Law, the 1975 prediction for chip growth.
Dean and Patterson dissect hardware design in their Golden Age paper, using the example of the Google-developed TPUv1 and TPUv2 Tensor Processing Units (TPU), which are advanced application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). The duo advises engineers to look forward at least five years for hardware development, as an appropriate design must remain relevant through at least a two-year design and three-year deployment window to maintain its competitive edge, assuming standard depreciation projections.
Dean identifies six issues that impact ML hardware design within this five-year window, from purely architectural to mostly ML-driven concerns, including:
Training
Batch Size
Sparsity and Embeddings
Quantization and Distillation
Networks with Soft Memory
Learning to Learn (L2L)
But new foundations continue to emerge signaling yet another source of potential exponential developments in computational paradigms.
A neural network that operates at the speed of light
A team of researchers at the University of California has developed a novel kind of neural network—one that uses light instead of electricity to arrive at results. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their ideas, their working device, its performance, and the types of applications they believe could be well served by such a network.
Deep learning networks are computer systems that "learn" by looking at many examples of data types and then use patterns that develop as a way to make interpretations of new data. Like all other computers, they run on electricity. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to create a deep learning network that does not use electricity at all—instead, it uses light. They call it a diffractive deep neural network, or more succinctly, D2NN.
To build such a network, the researchers created small plastic plates printed using a 3-D printer. Each plate represented a layer of virtual neurons—and each neuron could behave like its biological counterpart by either transmitting or reflecting incoming light. In their example, they used five plates lined up face-to-face with a small space between them. When the system was operating, light from a laser was directed at the first plate and made its way through to the second, third, fourth and fifth in a way that revealed information about an object placed in front of the device. A sensor at the back read the light and interpreted what was found.
I am a huge fan of Robot Wars or BattleBots - an entertaining contest between robot enthusiast to see who can make the most survivable and ‘fight-worthy’. Sort of an Mixed Martial Arts for robots. Here’s an interesting signal for the future of Nanobots.
DARPA Wants Your Insect-Scale Robots for a Micro-Olympics
SHRIMP is a new DARPA program to develop insect-scale robots for disaster recovery and high-risk environments
The DARPA Robotics Challenge was a showcase for how very large, very expensive robots could potentially be useful in disaster recovery and high-risk environments. Humanoids are particularly capable in some very specific situations, but the rest of the time, they’re probably overkill, and using smaller, cheaper, more specialized robots is much more efficient. This is especially true when you’re concerned with data collection as opposed to manipulation—for the “search” part of “search and rescue,” for example, you’re better off with lots of very small robots covering as much ground as possible.
Yesterday, DARPA announced a new program called SHRIMP: SHort-Range Independent Microrobotic Platforms. The goal is “to develop and demonstrate multi-functional micro-to-milli robotic platforms for use in natural and critical disaster scenarios.” To enable robots that are both tiny and useful, SHRIMP will support fundamental research in the component parts that are the most difficult to engineer, including actuators, mobility systems, and power storage.
This is a fascinating article - with great and surprising visualizations of national land use.
Here's How America Uses Its Land
There are many statistical measures that show how productive the U.S. is. Its economy is the largest in the world and grew at a rate of 4.1 percent last quarter, its fastest pace since 2014. The unemployment rate is near the lowest mark in a half century.
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth. The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.
Using surveys, satellite images and categorizations from various government agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. The data can’t be pinpointed to a city block—each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land. But piecing the data together state-by-state can give a general sense of how U.S. land is used.
Perhaps we need more cooperatives to implement and manage renewable energy and even Internet infrastructure and to develop and support more open source approaches.
As Economics Improve, Solar Shines in Rural America
Declining costs have helped some of the country's smallest electricity providers expand their use of solar in highly innovative ways
A five-year effort by electric cooperatives to expand the use of solar energy in rural parts of the United States is coming to a successful conclusion.
Under the Solar Utility Network Deployment Acceleration (SUNDA) program, which was run by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) under a cost share arrangement with the U.S. Energy Department, rural electric co-ops are on track to own or buy 1 gigawatt of solar power generation capacity by 2019.
As of April, more than 120 co-ops had at least one solar project online. Of those, half said they have plans to add more solar generating capacity.
The accomplishment is no small feat. The consumer-owned structure of co-ops means that they can’t make direct use of federal tax credits, which have helped to spur solar adoption among investor-owned utilities. Co-ops often have had to come up with innovative financing arrangements to make the numbers work. In particular, solar adoption has benefited from big drops in the cost of solar PV cells in recent years.
This is a great signal about the phase transition in energy logistics that renewable energy sources and new forms of energy storage.
Network Of Tesla Powerwall Batteries Saves Green Mountain Power $500,000 During Heat Wave
One utility company in Vermont is using a virtual power plant (VPP) comprised of 2,000 Tesla Powerwalls installed in homes across the state to beat the heat.
Last year, Green Mountain Power started offering 2,000 customers a chance to own a Tesla Powerwall residential storage battery for as little as $1,500 and $15 a month for 10 years. But there was a catch. All those Powerwalls would be accessible by the utility company to help stabilize the grid and supply extra electricity, when needed.
The program represented a significant cash outlay for Green Mountain Power. The cost of a Powerwall system plus installation is about $5,500, so the company was investing $8 million of its own money up front and betting it would recoup that investment over time. Now the company says its virtual power plant system saved it $500,000 in just one week this month as temperatures soared into the 90s.
First, by tapping into its VPP system, it was able to avoid buying electricity from other power generators at peak prices. The cost of electricity from the grid is adjusted every 5 minutes. As demand goes up, so do the prices. But there is a second factor in play, one that people who only use electricity for routine domestic purposes are not aware of.
By relying on all those Powerwall batteries, GMP skipped that peak hour, which will lower its electricity costs for the entire year. Total cost benefit to the company? $500,000, says Castonguay. “We’re always predicting the peak, looking at ISO-NE’s forecast information, looking at our own systems here. If tomorrow looks like there’s going to be a peak between 5 and 6 p.m., let’s look at running from 4 to 7 p.m. with batteries and other loads,” to lessen power purchases, he says.
Another aspect of infrastructure - mass transit - this seems applicable not only to buses, but subways and delivery transport.
The Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Bus That Produces Zero CO2 Emissions
when the Summer Games head to Japan in 2020, visitors will be greeted with Sora, Toyota’s new fleet of eco-friendly buses that can efficiently transport millions of spectators from event to exciting event. Sora buses are powered solely by hydrogen—the universe’s most abundant element—and will generate zero emissions as they move swiftly through the streets of Tokyo.
Exploring the Sora
Sora’s trailblazing technology is evident even before you step on board. The vehicle's futuristic shape, minimal colour palette, and bold LED lighting are a significant departure from the boxiness of conventional transit vehicles. Likewise, the fleet’s very name is a cheeky nod to its innovative design. “Sora” is an acronym taken from the Earth’s water cycle (Sky, Ocean, River, and Air) and the vehicles embody their name as they’re powered by hydrogen and emit water as their sole by-product.
To channel this energy effectively, Sora buses rely on the Toyota Fuel Cell System—a technology that was first developed for the Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle. Each Sora has a high-capacity external power supply system that provides a 9 KW maximum output, and an electricity supply of 235 kWh2. In case of emergency, this system can also be used as an emergency external power source, helping to provide relief and support in times of crisis.
Sometime you just need another hand - to get what you want done - done.
Well here's a good signal - human enhancement and/or Doctor Octopus - just think of the sports possible when each player has a 'handy' swarm as an extended mind.
This brain-controlled prosthetic will lend you a hand — and a whole arm
For years, scientists have been exploring how we can use signals from the brain to control prosthetic limbs. Usually, this work is focused on restoring motor function to people who have lost an arm or a leg, but new research from Japan shows how the same technology can also be used to augment existing human capabilities.
Engineers from Kyoto’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute have demonstrated how people can be taught to control a third robotic arm with their brains, even using the limb to multitask. As described in a paper published in the journal Science Robotics today, eight of 15 test subjects were able to successfully balance a ball on a board with their hands, while grabbing a water bottle with a brain-controlled robot arm.
Although this may sound like something out of science fiction, it’s important to stress that the functionality of this third arm is extremely basic. The prosthetic moved along a predetermined path and performed only a single gesture: closing and opening its hand. Similarly, the brain-machine interface used to control the arm is not some magical mind-reading device. It’s a cap fitted with electrodes that measure electrical signals produced by the brain. In this case, participants were asked to imagine opening and closing the robot hand. The scientists recorded this signal, and turned it into an instruction for the robot arm.
Even with these limitations, though, it is very interesting work. As Nishio and his colleague Christian Peñaloza point out in their paper, it seems to be the first time supernumerary limbs have been controlled using the human brain. Usually such prosthetics are operated using joysticks or, if connected directly to the human body, electrical signals from muscles.
The ubiquitous selling of bottled water has been one of the best ‘pet-rock’ like scams ever. Before the onslaught of the massive marketing campaign to sell us the ‘purity’ of personal bottled water - public drinking fountains could be found everywhere. This is a wonderful re-imaging of the fire hydrant so it can provide a dual use function. The image is a must see.
using the same process of construction used for regular fire hydrants. His new water fountain-cum-fire hydrant is cast out of iron.
Reimagined fire hydrant doubles up as a water fountain for people and dogs
This multipurpose drinking fountain, designed by ÉCAL industrial design graduate Dimitri Nassisi, can be used for fighting fires, quenching thirst, filling bottles and refreshing pet dogs.
Styled to look like an updated fire hydrant, the Drinking Hydrant is bright blue to attract the attention of anyone looking for water.
"In Switzerland you find some drinking fountains, but I don't feel there is enough of them. The problem I saw was that they would often be very discreet and people don't know where to find them," explained Nassisi.
"Also, it is very complicated to add new drinking fountains. It takes a lot of time to develop such a project and the costs are high."
A double valve system enables firemen who need to use the hydrant to combat fire to fully open both valves and run the water at very high pressure. At other times, the valves would reduce the pressure for easy drinking.
Nassisi also included a dog bowl into the foot of the hydrant. "I want anyone to be able to enjoy the fountain – grown ups, children and even dogs."
No comments:
Post a Comment