Hello all – Merry Seasonings
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:
Who owns the information?
Privacy advocate and scholar Bob Gellman illustrates the intractability of this problem with an example of how medical information can simultaneously belong to a patient, the patient’s family, the school, pharmacy, supermarket, pediatrician, drug manufacturer, social media platform, various web sites, Internet tracking and advertising companies and Internet service providers. Each of these actors has an interest in the same information about a child’s illness.
This example generalizes because almost all information about people concerns their interaction with others. If I bought something from you, then you sold it to me. People are social creatures and most of what they do is in relationship with other people.
Author Larry Downes emphasizes the point that when information is about more than one person, it is impossible to determine how a property right should be allocated: “Would it be shared property, owned equally by everyone referenced? If not, would any one person hold a veto?”
Privacy Is Not A Property Right In Personal Information
As if stand-alone technologies weren’t advancing fast enough, we’re in age where we must study the intersection points of these technologies. How is what’s happening in robotics influenced by what’s happening in 3D printing? What could be made possible by applying the latest advances in quantum computing to nanotechnology?
Along these lines, one crucial tech intersection is that of artificial intelligence and genomics. Each field is seeing constant progress, but Jamie Metzl believes it’s their convergence that will really push us into uncharted territory, beyond even what we’ve imagined in science fiction. “There’s going to be this push and pull, this competition between the reality of our biology with its built-in limitations and the scope of our aspirations,” he said.
Readable, writable, and hackable, what’s clear is that human beings are recognizing that we are another form of information technology, and just like our IT has entered this exponential curve of discovery, we will have that with ourselves, - And it’s intersecting with the AI revolution.
“We all need to be part of an inclusive, integrated, global dialogue on the future of our species,”
Designer Babies, & Their Babies: How AI & Genomics Will Impact Reproduction
Much has been written about PPPs: public private partnerships. But for vital issues such as climate change, a third partner has been missing: the plural sector.
Otherwise known as “civil society”, and other labels, this is the sector of NGOs, foundations, cooperatives, many of the world’s renowned universities, and more, including social initiatives and social movements—much of all this community-based. In other words, included here are all the associations that are neither public nor private, that is, owned not by the state or by private investors, but by members (as in cooperatives), or else, like trusts, by no-one.
This sector is huge–think of all such activities you have associated with in the past week. Yet it has been obscured by the centuries-old divide between left and right, government controls and market forces. Now we are discovering, with a vengeance, that no healthy society, like no stable stool, can balance itself on two legs. A third is required–the plural sector—alongside those called private and public.
Henry Mintzberg - PPPPs for Climate Change
But when each of us set out to understand the other’s generation, we realized the distinctions between us and the generations we represent aren’t that profound below the surface. That’s important, because with five generations currently working alongside each other, focusing too closely on our differences threatens to become a major distraction from our common goals.
In fact, we have found that we essentially want the same things on the job: passion and love for what we do, learning every day, and helping others along the way, all with a deep sense of purpose. We drew this conclusion not just from comparing our own preferences, but also from interviews with dozens of members from each of our generations.
Three ideas to foster intergenerational harmony in the workplace
In our pursuit of ‘getting more things done,’ we’ve lost sight of the true meaning of productivity.
Productivity isn’t about getting more things done, rather it’s about getting the right things done, while doing less.
The best way to figure out the right things to focus on and the best ways to tackle them, is to spend more time alone with your thoughts and embrace solitude.
And just like Einstein, you’ll achieve much more and unleash your potential.
Einstein on the only productivity tip you’ll ever need to know
Charlemont has about 1,300 residents and covers about 26 square miles in northwest Massachusetts. Town officials estimate that building a municipal fiber network reaching 100 percent of homes would cost $1,466,972 plus interest over 20 years.
An increase in property taxes would cover the construction cost. But the town would also bring in revenue from selling broadband service and potentially break even, making the project less expensive than Comcast's offer.
"With 59 percent of households taking broadband service, the tax hike would be 29 cents [per $1,000 of assessed home value], similar to that for Comcast," a Recorder article last month said. "But if 72 percent or more of households subscribe to the municipal-owned network, there is no tax impact, because subscriber fees would pay for it."
Currently, Comcast covers about 9.5 percent of Charlemont, while Verizon DSL is available in about 88 percent, according to estimates by BroadbandNow.
The town plans to charge $79 a month for standalone Internet service with gigabit download and upload speeds and no data caps, though the price could rise to $99 a month if fewer than 40 percent of households buy the service. The town also plans to offer phone and TV service at rates cheaper than Comcast's.
Comcast rejected by small town—residents vote municipal fiber instead
This is an important signal - although unpredictable - it points out that there are other existential challenges for all living systems on earth.
The last reversal occurred between 772,000 and 774,000 years ago. Since then, the field has almost reversed 15 times, called an excursion, dropping in strength significantly but not quite reaching the threshold needed before rising again. This is when we are most at risk - as the field decays and then recovers its strength. The last excursion occurred 40,000 years ago, and evidence suggests we are heading in that direction again.
Earth’s magnetic poles could start to flip. What happens then?
As Earth's magnetic shield fails, so do its satellites. First, our communications satellites in the highest orbits go down. Next, astronauts in low-Earth orbit can no longer phone home. And finally, cosmic rays start to bombard every human on Earth.
This is a possibility that we may start to face not in the next million years, not in the next thousand, but in the next hundred. If Earth’s magnetic field were to decay significantly, it could collapse altogether and flip polarity – changing magnetic north to south and vice versa. The consequences of this process could be dire for our planet.
Most worryingly, we may be headed right for this scenario.
‘The geomagnetic field has been decaying for the last 3,000 years,’ said Dr Nicolas Thouveny from the European Centre for Research and Teaching of Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence, France. ‘If it continues to fall down at this rate, in less than one millennium we will be in a critical (period).’
Dr Thouveny is one of the principal investigators on the five-year EDIFICE project, which has been running since 2014. Together with his colleagues, he has been investigating the history of Earth’s magnetic field, including when it has reversed in the past, and when it might again.
This is a good article summarizing the global picture of the state of development of AI.
The AI boom is happening all over the world, and it’s accelerating quickly
The second annual AI Index report pulls together data and expert findings on the field’s progress and acceleration
The rate of progress in the field of artificial intelligence is one of the most hotly contested aspects of the ongoing boom in teaching computers and robots how to see the world, make sense of it, and eventually perform complex tasks both in the physical realm and the virtual one. And just how fast the industry is moving, and to what end, is typically measured not just by actual product advancements and research milestones, but also by the prognostications and voiced concerns of AI leaders, futurists, academics, economists, and policymakers. AI is going to change the world — but how and when are still open questions.
Today, findings from a group of experts were published in an ongoing effort to help answer those questions. The experts include members of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the nonprofit OpenAI, and the Partnership on AI industry consortium, among others, and they were put together as part of the second annual AI Index. The goal is to measure the field’s progress using hard data and to try and make sense of that progress as it relates to thorny subjects like workplace automation and the overarching quest for artificial general intelligence, or the type of intelligence that could let a machine perform any task a human could.
This is an interesting viewpoint from Garry Kasparov on the evolving capabilities of AI and the utility of Chess as a laboratory of logic.
Chess, a Drosophila of reasoning
The recent world chess championship saw Magnus Carlsen defend his title against Fabiano Caruana. But it was not a contest between the two strongest chess players on the planet, only the strongest humans. Soon after I lost my rematch against IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the short window of human-machine chess competition slammed shut forever. Unlike humans, machines keep getting faster, and today a smartphone chess app can be stronger than Deep Blue. But as we see with the AlphaZero system, machine dominance has not ended the historical role of chess as a laboratory of cognition.
… the chess fruit fly is back under the microscope. Based on a generic game-playing algorithm, AlphaZero incorporates deep learning and other AI techniques like Monte Carlo tree search to play against itself to generate its own chess knowledge. Unlike top traditional programs like Stockfish and Fritz, which employ many preset evaluation functions as well as massive libraries of opening and endgame moves, AlphaZero starts out knowing only the rules of chess, with no embedded human strategies. In just a few hours, it plays more games against itself than have been recorded in human chess history. It teaches itself the best way to play, reevaluating such fundamental concepts as the relative values of the pieces. It quickly becomes strong enough to defeat the best chess-playing entities in the world, winning 28, drawing 72, and losing none in a victory over Stockfish.
The practices involved in creating knowledge within the science and arts share more than most people consider. Physical tacit knowledge is fundamental to both especially when it comes the need to ‘tinker’ with instrumentation. This is an important signal about Knowledge Management - including the skills, competencies, knowledge and agencies that are transferable across many domains of human interest.
Science in hand: how art and craft can boost reproducibility
Artists and performers inform the physical act of experimentation — Roger Kneebone, Claudia Schlegel and Alan Spivey explore.
Even shaking a sample, rather than stirring it, can change results. Why then, among the many reasons discussed for the reproducibility crisis, does lab practice not get more attention?
Most science students enter university with years of screen time under their belts, but very little experimental experience. Indeed, many early-stage PhD students struggle with the transition from predetermined practicals to independent experimentation and design, where the ability to notice tiny departures from the expected might be crucial to discovery.
Some might not have ‘good hands’. Moreover, written accounts are notoriously open to interpretation: ‘add reagent X dropwise until the solution changes from red to yellow’ seethes with potential ambiguity. Laboratory knowing takes place at the intersection between materials, tools and a researcher’s body. Its rhythms differ from those of simply absorbing facts.
We — a surgeon, a research nurse and a synthetic chemist — looked beyond science to discover how people steeped in artistic skills might help to close this ‘haptic gap’, the deficit in skills of touch and object manipulation. We have found that craftspeople and performers can work fruitfully alongside scientists to address some of the challenges. We have also discovered striking similarities between the observational skills of an entomologist and an analytical chemist; the dexterity of a jeweller and a microsurgeon; the bodily awareness of a dancer and a space scientist; and the creative skills of a scientific glassblower, a reconstructive surgeon, a potter and a chef.
In Jurassic Park the Jeff Goldblum character repeated the mantra that “Life finds a way” - this is an awesome confirmation of this and even of the possibilities of where life can exist.
“It’s like finding a whole new reservoir of life on Earth,” said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “We are discovering new types of life all the time. So much of life is within the Earth rather than on top of it.”
The results suggest 70% of Earth’s bacteria and archaea exist in the subsurface, including barbed Altiarchaeales that live in sulphuric springs and Geogemma barossii, a single-celled organism found at 121C hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea.
Scientists identify vast underground ecosystem containing billions of micro-organisms
Global team of scientists find ecosystem below earth that is twice the size of world’s oceans
The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of all the world’s oceans.
Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.
Researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory say the diversity of underworld species bears comparison to the Amazon or the Galápagos Islands, but unlike those places the environment is still largely pristine because people have yet to probe most of the subsurface.
The team combines 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology and microbiology to chemistry and physics. A year before the conclusion of their 10-year study, they will present an amalgamation of findings to date before the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting opens this week.
This is a very good signal of the emerging digital environment as a platform for ubiquitous sensors - as the article suggests not just the Internet-of-Things but the Internet-of-Living-Things (IoLT). And the consequence could be the capacity for people with augmented/virtual technologies to actually ‘feel/experience’ the world, based on exponentially growing ‘Big Data’ and AI - an new potential of ‘conscious ecological homeostasis’.
Potential applications for what the researchers call "living Internet of Things platforms" might include smart farming to measure plant health. For example, moisture and humidity sensors could assist with precision irrigation, and temperature sensors can detect whether growing conditions are optimal for specific crops. Whereas "drones can't really fly between plants, bees can fly pretty much wherever they want to get more fine-grained information than drones," Gollakota says.
Scientists Outfit Bees With Wireless Sensors to Create a "Living IoT Platform"
A research team tries to turn bees into living drones by gluing wireless sensor platforms to their backs
Drones are growing in popularity for their ability to serve as a kind of eye in the sky. However, they can generally only last up to 30 minutes on a charge because of the limits of current battery technology.
Now, a research team at the University of Washington has found a way to make bumblebees act like tiny drones. The group has developed a platform for sensing, computing, and wireless communication devices that’s small enough to piggyback on the insects.
"We wanted to leverage nature's best flying machines," says Shyam Gollakota, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, who led the research. "Insects can feed themselves—we don't need to keep recharging their batteries. Fats and sugars can store much more energy for their weight than batteries."
The scientists experimented with three species of bumblebees and found that healthy worker bees could fly and hover while carrying up to roughly 105 milligrams. Knowing this, the researchers developed an electronic platform that weighs only 102 milligrams and measures just 6.1 by 6.4 millimeters in size. It includes a 70-milligram rechargeable lithium-ion battery that can last up to seven hours, as well as a microcontroller, antenna, and sensors that could analyze humidity, temperature, and light intensity once every four seconds. Then, the research team glued these platforms onto the backs of bees. "All the electronics we used were off-the-shelf components," Gollakota says.
This is a signal to watch despite being very early in its development.
“There are all kinds of things you can do with this,” Boyden said. “Democratizing nanofabrication could open up frontiers we can’t yet imagine.”
MIT Figured out a Way to Shrink Objects to Nanoscale
A new nanotech breakthrough comes courtesy of a material you’d likely find in any nursery.
A team from MIT has figured out a way to quickly and inexpensively shrink objects to the nanoscale. It calls the process implosion fabrication, and it all starts with polyacrylate — the super-absorbent polymer typically found in baby diapers.
According to the MIT team’s paper, published Thursday in Science, the first step in the implosion fabrication process is adding a liquid solution to a piece of polyacrylate, causing it to swell.
Next, the team used lasers to bind fluorescein molecules to the polyacrylate in a pattern of their choosing. Those molecules acted as anchor points for whatever material the researchers wanted to shrink to the nanoscale.
As for what those researchers might shrink, the MIT team is already exploring potential uses for implosion fabrication, including in the fields of optics and robotics. But ultimately, they see no limit to the technique’s possible applications.
This could be very good news for all of us who worry about agriculture becoming privateered by Corporations who apply Intellectual Property tools to ‘own’ life.
The research marks an important step toward cloning hybrid grains, says Anna Koltunow of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Glen Osmond, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Hybrid rice engineered with CRISPR can clone its seeds
The research raises hopes of making bigger crop yields more affordable
After more than 20 years of theorizing about it, scientists have tweaked a hybrid variety of rice so that some of the plants produce cloned seeds. No plant sex necessary. The feat, described December 12 in Nature, is encouraging for efforts to feed an increasingly crowded world.
Crossing two good varieties of grain can make one fabulous one, combining the best versions of genes to give crops desirable traits such as higher yields. But such hybrid grain marvels often don’t pass along those coveted genetic qualities to all seeds during reproduction. So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year. This new lab version of hybrid rice would preserve those qualities through self-cloning, says study coauthor Venkatesan Sundaresan, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis.
Though 400 kinds of plants, including some blackberries and citruses, have developed self-cloning seeds naturally, re-creating those pathways in crop plants has “been harder than anyone expected,” Sundaresan says. He and his colleagues got the idea for the new research while studying “how a fertilized egg becomes a zygote, this magical cell that regenerates an entire organism,” as Sundaresan puts it.
This is a great signal related to the emerging power of ‘Big Data’, AI and other tools to begin to grasp complex systems.
Big data reveals hints of how, when and where mental disorders start
New genetic complexities emerge for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism
Psychiatric disorders’ many complexities have stymied scientists looking for clear genetic culprits. But a new giant dataset holds clues to how, when and where these brain disorders begin.
Called PsychENCODE, the project’s first large data release has revealed intricate insights into the behavior of genes and the stretches of genetic material between them in both healthy brains and those from people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or autism spectrum disorder.
The results, split among 10 studies published online December 13 in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine, offer some of the most detailed looks yet at the links between these genetic elements and brain health. “It’s all connected, and now we have the tools to unravel those connections,” says geneticist Thomas Lehner of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., who oversaw the project but wasn’t involved in the research.
A weak but important signal of emerging possibilities for both understanding and potentially aiding the treatment of brain diseases and trauma.
Functional 3-D Human Neural Networks Grown From Stem Cells
Three-dimensional human tissue culture models for the central nervous system have been developed by a team of Tufts University-led researchers. The models mimic structural and functional features of the brain and demonstrate neural activity sustained over a period of many months.
With the ability to populate a 3-D matrix of silk protein and collagen with cells from patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other conditions, the tissue models allow for the exploration of cell interactions, disease progression and response to treatment.
The new 3-D brain tissue models overcome a key challenge of previous models -the availability of human source neurons. This is due to the fact that neurological tissues are rarely removed from healthy patients and are usually only available post-mortem from diseased patients.
This is an interesting signal of progress in energy generation - although the progress of last decade may seem to be ‘too little’ - if we consider that these technologies tend to exponential growth curves - the next decade may well see much more significant progress. The next decade will likely see massive change in our transportation systems - away from fossil fuels and toward renewables.
Ten charts show how the world is progressing on clean energy
Rapid progress towards clean energy is needed to meet the global ambition to limit warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
But how are countries doing so far? In our Energy Revolution Global Outlook report, written with colleagues at Imperial College London and E4tech – and published by Drax– we rank progress in 25 major world economies.
Our report provides a league table of their efforts to clean up electricity generation, switch from oil to electric vehicles, deploy carbon capture and storage, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and tackle energy efficiency.
Electricity has been the fastest sector of the economy to decarbonise as countries move away from coal and embrace low-cost renewables. Yet the average carbon intensity of electricity worldwide has fallen only 7% in the last decade to 450 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour (gCO2/kWh).
The chart below maps the carbon intensity of electricity generation around the world and ranks the 25 major economies covered by our report. These countries include the G7 group of rich nations along with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the “BRICS”) and others. These countries account for 80% of global population, 77% of global GDP and 73% of the world’s CO2 emissions.
The ten charts below compare these 25 countries today and their progress over the last decade.
This is an important signal in the phase transition currently underway in energy geopolitics.
Wind, Solar Are Now The Cheapest Sources Of Power Generation
Thanks to falling costs, unsubsidized onshore wind and solar have become the cheapest sources of electricity generation in nearly all major economies in the world, including India and China, according to a new report by Bloomberg NEF.
The comparative costs for power generation—the levelized costs of electricity (LCOE)—showed that onshore wind and solar are the cheapest power generation sources for all major economies except for Japan.
Even in India and China, where “not long ago coal was king”, solar and wind beat coal with cheaper generation, according to BNEF’s latest half-year LCOE analysis.
“In India, best-in-class solar and wind plants are now half the cost of new coal plants,” says the study, as carried by Renewable Energy Magazine.
This example is likely to become a movement across our urban landscapes as more and more cities see the economic and ecological advantages.
“The rule is necessary because it sends a clear market signal that the fifth largest economy in the world is serious about zero-emissions transit buses,” says Adrian Martinez, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Earthjustice. “Even though you’ve had a lot of transit agencies step up to the plate to commit to 100%, getting the stamp of approval from a state as big and as powerful as California is important to send a signal nationally.”
California just decided to move to 100% electric city buses
The state’s clean air agency just issued a new rule to push cities to transition faster.
A decade from now, city transit agencies in California will no longer be able to buy a bus that runs on diesel or natural gas. The California Air Resources Board, the state’s clean air agency, just voted on a new rule that will require cities to shift to 100% electric buses over time.
It’s happening at a time when many California cities are already starting to buy new electric buses; more than 100 zero-emissions buses are already on roads in the state, and hundreds more are on order. But the new rule will make things move faster.
Just to indicated that California is not an anomaly.
Shenzhen's silent revolution: world's first fully electric bus fleet quietens Chinese megacity
All 16,000 buses in the fast-growing Chinese megacity are now electric, and soon all 22,000 taxis will be too
You have to keep your eyes peeled for the bus at the station in Shenzhen’s Futian central business district these days. The diesel behemoths that once signalled their arrival with a piercing hiss, a rattle of engine and a plume of fumes are no more, replaced with the world’s first and largest 100% electric bus fleet.
Shenzhen now has 16,000 electric buses in total and is noticeably quieter for it. “We find that the buses are so quiet that people might not hear them coming,” says Joseph Ma, deputy general manager at Shenzhen Bus Group, the largest of the three main bus companies in the city. “In fact, we’ve received requests to add some artificial noise to the buses so that people can hear them. We’re considering it.”
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