Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
John Verdon - Probe
Articles:
If we continue to assume that some people are intelligent or creative, while most are not, and continue to see intelligence and creativity as fixed, personal possessions, the options for the needed large-scale systemic changes will be few.
Belief systems are contagious. If, over an extended period of time, people are treated as if they are intelligent, they actually become more so. The opposite can also be true.
Success in life has been seen governed by two concepts: skills and effort; how bright you are and how hard you work. Recently, researchers have claimed that there is a third and decisive concept. It is the practice of lifelong curiosity and learning: “knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do” as Piaget put it.
To benefit from technology, we need imagination. It means to be constantly looking for new human centric use cases for the new intelligent technologies and tools. It also means new services to augment human cognition: if you have a smartphone in your pocket, you should have an easy access to education in your pocket.
Intelligence is social and arises in communities and communication. The world has never been a more networked place, and yet schools and workplaces still focus on individuals. That needs to change.
Work starts from problems and learning starts from questions. Work is creating value and learning is creating knowledge. Both work and learning require the same things: interaction and engagement.
Scientists have discovered that learning is learnable. With the help of modern tools, we can create ways for very large numbers of people to become learners. But learning itself has changed, it is not first acquiring skills and then utilizing those skills at work. Post-industrial work is learning. It is figuring out how to solve a particular problem and then scaling up what has been learned— both with technology and with other people.
Esko Kilpi - How to scale up learning
How is it OK that a scant 15% of employees around the world are emotionally engaged in their work?
How is it OK that 70% of jobs in the US require little or no originality — this according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics?
How is it OK that only 12% of employees in Europe say they’re always consulted before objectives are set for their work?
How it OK that 50% of employees say they’ve had to change jobs to escape an incompetent or autocratic boss?
How is it OK that in a Harvard Business Review survey, designed by the Management Lab, 79% of respondents from large companies said new ideas were greeted with skepticism or hostility?
How is it OK that in the same survey 76% of respondents said that political behaviors highly influence who gets ahead?
How it OK that the average first level employee in a large organization is buried under 8 or more layers of management?
The Moral Case for Busting Bureaucracy
The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die.
She spent the past three and a half weeks in training, trying to harden herself against the daily onslaught of disturbing posts: the hate speech, the violent attacks, the graphic pornography. In a few more days, she will become a full-time Facebook content moderator, or what the company she works for, a professional services vendor named Cognizant, opaquely calls a “process executive.”
For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it’s her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.
The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America
What sort of quantum Bingo will elder post-millennium play - AI-entangled 'Bing-Go' games?
we don't embody a set of values - we live a process of valuing our values - What is the future of gamification-social-credit?
John Verdon - Probe
humanity for the Babylonians was defined through society. To be human was a distinctly social affair. And not just any kind of society: it was the social life of cities that made you a ‘true man’. Babylonian culture was, at heart, an urban culture. Cities such as Uruk, Babylon or Ur were the building blocks of civilisation, and the world outside the city walls was seen as a dangerous and uncultured wasteland.
Second, we learn that humanity is a sliding scale. After a week of sex, Enkidu has not become fully human. There is an intermediary stage, where he speaks like a human but thinks like an animal. Even after the second week, he still has to learn how to eat bread, drink beer and put on clothes. In short, becoming human is a step-by-step process, not an either/or binary.
One is not simply born human: to be human, for the ancient Babylonians, involved finding a place for oneself within a wider field defined by society, gods and the animal world.
Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic
This is a fascinating signal - not a new one - but growing in strength. I was alerted to this by my son who says you have to understand dril to understand modern internet culture. It not only alerted me to a ubiquitous feature I had felt but could not put my finger on. It was a quality of humor that I was ‘feeling’ but not quite understanding - but seemed pervasive in many of my younger friends and acquaintances. This longish article is worth the read for anyone who hasn't heard of @drl
dril
@dril is a pseudonymous Twitter user best known for his idiosyncratic style of absurdist humor and non sequiturs. The account, its author, and the character associated with the tweets are all commonly referred to as dril (the handle without the at sign) or wint (the account's display name), both rendered lowercase but often capitalized by others. Since his first tweet in 2008, dril has become a popular and influential Twitter user with more than one million followers.
dril is one of the most notable accounts associated with "Weird Twitter", a subculture on the site that shares a surreal, ironic sense of humor. The character associated with dril is highly distinctive, often described as a bizarre reflection of a typical male American Internet user. dril's tweets are frequently satirical. Other social media users have repurposed dril's tweets for humorous or satiric effect in a variety of political and cultural contexts. Many of dril's tweets, phrases, and tropes have become familiar parts of Internet slang.
This is a great signal - that finally science publishing is catching up to the inherent capacity of the digital environment - A must read for anyone who want more transparency and access to published science research.
Introducing eLife’s first computationally reproducible article
Blending the traditional manuscript with live code, data and interactive figures, we showcase a new way for researchers to tell their full story.
In September 2017 eLife announced the start of the Reproducible Document Stack (RDS) project, a collaboration between Substance, Stencila and eLife to support the development of an open-source technology stack aimed at enabling researchers to publish reproducible manuscripts through online journals. Reproducible manuscripts enrich the traditional narrative of a research article with code, data and interactive figures that can be executed in the browser, downloaded and explored, giving readers a direct insight into the methods, algorithms and key data behind the published research.
Today eLife, in collaboration with Substance, Stencila and Tim Errington, Director of Research ar the Center for Open Science, US, published its first reproducible article, based on one of Errington’s papers in the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology. This reproducible version of the article showcases some of what’s possible with the new RDS tools, and we invite researchers to explore the newly available opportunities to tell their story.
This is a good book review that is a strong signal in the enhancement of evolutionary theory to explain the rise of cooperative behavior and collective intelligence and more. This is not a long read and well worth the attention.
How evolutionary theory guides policy
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder welcomes a study on Darwinian solutions to social issues.
The principal thesis of This View of Life is that policy is a branch of biology, a claim that may sound jarring, radical, hegemonic or even dangerous. But Wilson shows convincingly that it is none of these. Policy is devised to constrain and incentivize behaviour. And ethology has been recognized as a branch of biology since the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for their evolutionary analyses of behaviour.
Wilson makes his case with fascinating examples from biology, anthropology and business. These include the importance of prioritizing play over academic work at preschool, and of educating the public on the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ germs with respect to inoculating children against “diseases of civilization” (such as asthma or diabetes). Here, we have straightforward cases of good policy based on good science. The highly scripted interaction between an organism’s development and its environment has been shaped over evolutionary time; we mess with it at our peril.
This is a long article but a must read signal of the transformation of our economic paradigm away from the neoliberal one of the last 50 years toward new forms of economic reasoning.
Economics After Neoliberalism
Contemporary economics is finally breaking free from its market fetishism, offering plenty of tools we can use to make society more inclusive.
We live in an age of astonishing inequality. Income and wealth disparities in the United States have risen to heights not seen since the Gilded Age and are among the highest in the developed world. Median wages for U.S. workers have stagnated for nearly fifty years. Fewer and fewer younger Americans can expect to do better than their parents. Racial disparities in wealth and well-being remain stubbornly persistent. In 2017, life expectancy in the United States declined for the third year in a row, and the allocation of healthcare looks both inefficient and unfair. Advances in automation and digitization threaten even greater labor market disruptions in the years ahead. Climate change-fueled disasters increasingly disrupt everyday life.
We believe that these are all solvable problems—at the very least, that we can make serious headway on them. But addressing them will require a broad and deep public discussion of new policy ideas. Social scientists have a responsibility to be part of this discussion. And economists—the kinds of economists who work in the leading academic centers of the country—have an indispensable role to play. Indeed, they have already started to play it. Economics is in a state of creative ferment that is often invisible to outsiders. While the sociology of the profession—career incentives, norms, socialization patterns—often militates against engagement with the policy world, especially by younger academic economists, a sense of public responsibility is bringing people into the fray.
The tools of economics are critical to developing a policy framework for what we call “inclusive prosperity.” While prosperity is the traditional concern of economists, the “inclusive” modifier demands both that we consider the whole distribution of outcomes, not simply the average (the “middle class”), and that we consider human prosperity broadly, including non-pecuniary sources of well-being, from health to climate change to political rights. To improve the quality of public discussion around inclusive prosperity, we have organized a group of economists—the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP) network—to make policy recommendations across a wide range of topics, including labor markets, public finance, international trade, and finance. The purpose of this nascent collective effort is not simply to offer a list of prescriptions for different domains of policy, but to provide an overall vision for economic policy that stands as a genuine alternative to the market fundamentalism that is often—and wrongly—identified with economics.
Perhaps if we considered Artificial Intelligence - more as Artificial Agents (with narrow capabilities - rather than ‘intelligence’) then it would be easier to see how human capabilities could be enhanced by being able to engage the world and our lives with fields of distributed agency? (Yes we much be careful - because all technologies, ideas, words and more can, have been and will be weaponized).
This is an excellent 50 min presentation on the topic of the need to carefully design a human social orientation in all our systems.
Frank Chen - Humanity + Machine Learning
This is a strong signal of the emerging world of next phase automation. Think of all the current similar manufacturers.
And just when you thought things couldn’t get any more redolent of outright corporate dystopia, wait till you hear what those savings will be “plowed into.” Spoiler alert: they are “consumption occasions.” Laguarta noted as much in the call: “Across snacks and beverages, we’ll invest to capture a greater share of consumption occasions, from indulgent to functional, social to individual, value to premium, and across dayparts from morning to night.”
PepsiCo Is ‘Relentlessly Automating’ Its Workforce and It’s Even More Dystopian Than It Sounds
Yesterday morning, news went viral that PepsiCo was spending $2.5 billion on a plan to restructure the company that involved laying off an untold number of its workers. It was probably the phrase “relentlessly automating,” which Business Insider threw in the headline, that did the trick. Pepsi’s new CEO, Ramon Laguarta had said in an earnings call last week that Pepsi was already “relentlessly automating and merging the best of our optimized business models with the best new thinking and technologies.”
Most major corporations try not to say the quiet part loud, so Laguarta’s blunt corporate enthusiasm was at least refreshing in that regard. But it justifiably stoked fears of creeping automation-fueled job loss, as it turned out the bulk of that $2.5 billion was going to be spent paying out severance for the apparently quite significant portion of PepsiCo’s 263,000 employees that were going to be laid off.
But that’s not the most unsettling part about this saga of corporate efficiency—it’s that PepsiCo turned a robust profit last year.
This is a startling signal - not just domesticating DNA - but rather inventing new fundamental living codes for new forms of life.
“It’s a real landmark,” says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The study implies that there is nothing particularly “magic” or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth, says Romesberg. “That’s a conceptual breakthrough,” he adds.
Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet
Synthetic DNA seems to behave like the natural variety, suggesting that chemicals beyond nature’s four familiar bases could support life on Earth.
The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals — guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively.
Now scientists have doubled this number of life’s building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA.
In a study published on 22 February in Science, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life.
The theory of evolution is also evolving - this is a good signal of emerging understanding of horizontal gene transfer.
Grasses can acquire genes from neighbouring plants
In plants and animals, natural selection primarily operates on genes passed down from one generation to the next. This paradigm has been challenged, however, by an international team including Guillaume Besnard, CNRS researcher at the “Evolution et diversité biologique” laboratory (CNRS/IRD/Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier). Published in the 18 February 2019 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study reveals that the genome of Alloteropsis semialata, a grass found in Australia, contains nearly 60 genes acquired from at least nine donor grasses species. Some of these transferred genes code for enzymes involved in photosynthesis, or for proteins involved in disease resistance or soil adaptation. This mechanism, quite common in bacteria, had rarely been observed in plants. From an ecological perspective, these results show that certain plants are capable of adapting relatively quickly to environmental change by using the genes of neighbouring species. While further studies are necessary to understand the phenomenon, it should be considered in efforts to better assess the risks posed by genetically-modified plants, in particular to reduce the possibility of resistance genes being transferred to so-called “weeds”.
This is a weak signal of a possible new approach to restoring brain functions after injury or disease.
Drug Combo Creates New Neurons from Neighboring Cells
A simple drug cocktail that converts cells neighboring damaged neurons into functional new neurons could potentially be used to treat stroke, Alzheimer's disease, and brain injuries. A team of researchers at Penn State identified a set of four, or even three, molecules that could convert glial cells--which normally provide support and insulation for neurons--into new neurons. A paper describing the approach appears online in the journal Stem Cell Reports on February 7, 2019.
"The biggest problem for brain repair is that neurons don't regenerate after brain damage, because they don't divide," said Gong Chen, professor of biology and Verne M. Willaman Chair in Life Sciences at Penn State and leader of the research team. "In contrast, glial cells, which gather around damaged brain tissue, can proliferate after brain injury. I believe turning glial cells that are the neighbors of dead neurons into new neurons is the best way to restore lost neuronal functions."
Chen's team previously published research describing a sequence of nine small molecules that could directly convert human glial cells into neurons, but the large number of molecules and the specific sequence required for reprogramming the glial cells complicated the transition to a clinical treatment. In the current study, the team tested various numbers and combinations of molecules to identify a streamlined approach to the reprogramming of astrocytes, a type of glial cells, into neurons.
A good signal of the use of CRISPR for diagnosis rather then genetic treatment.
The CRISPR tests offer the tantalizing possibility of diagnosing infections as accurately as conventional methods, and almost as simply as an at-home pregnancy test. And because CRISPR is engineered to target specific genetic sequences, researchers hope to develop a tool based on the technology that can be fine-tuned to identify, within a week, whatever viral strain is circulating.
Faster, better, cheaper: the rise of CRISPR in disease detection
Powerful gene-editing tool could help to diagnose illnesses such as Lassa fever early and rein in the spread of infection.
An epidemic of Lassa fever in Nigeria that has killed 69 people this year is on track to be the worst ever recorded anywhere. Now, in the hope of reducing deaths from Lassa in years to come, researchers in Nigeria are trying out a new diagnostic test based on the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
The test relies on CRISPR’s ability to hunt down genetic snippets ― in this case, RNA from the Lassa virus ― that it has been programmed to find. If the approach is successful, it could help to catch a wide range of viral infections early so that treatments can be more effective and health workers can curb the spread of infection.
Scientists in Honduras and California are testing CRISPR diagnostics for dengue viruses, Zika viruses and strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) associated with cancer. And a study to explore a CRISPR test for the Ebola virus is pending in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A robust, user-friendly test could reduce the death rates from Lassa fever, which can be as high as 60%, says Jessica Uwanibe, a molecular biologist developing a Lassa diagnostic at Redeemer’s University in Ede, Nigeria. “I’m working on something that could save a lot of lives.”
Another signal arising from an accelerated advancement of our understanding of CRISPR.
CRISPR Gene Editing Makes Stem Cells ‘Invisible’ to Immune System
Technique Prevents Transplant Rejection in the Lab, a Major Advance for Stem Cell Therapies
UC San Francisco scientists have used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system to create the first pluripotent stem cells that are functionally “invisible” to the immune system, a feat of biological engineering that, in laboratory studies, prevented rejection of stem cell transplants. Because these “universal” stem cells can be manufactured more efficiently than stem cells tailor-made for each patient – the individualized approach that dominated earlier efforts – they bring the promise of regenerative medicine a step closer to reality.
“Scientists often tout the therapeutic potential of pluripotent stem cells, which can mature into any adult tissue, but the immune system has been a major impediment to safe and effective stem cell therapies,” said Tobias Deuse, MD, the Julien I.E. Hoffman, MD, Endowed Chair in Cardiac Surgery at UCSF and lead author of the new study, published Feb. 18 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
The immune system is unforgiving. It’s programmed to eradicate anything it perceives as alien, which protects the body against infectious agents and other invaders that could wreak havoc if given free rein. But this also means that transplanted organs, tissues or cells are seen as a potentially dangerous foreign incursion, which invariably provokes a vigorous immune response leading to transplant rejection. When this occurs, donor and recipient are said to be – in medical parlance – “histocompatibility mismatched.”
This is a weak signal - but worth tracking as other similar efforts are underway.
Squid Is the New Eco-Friendly Plastic, Study Says
Bacteria could be genetically engineered to produce industrial quantities of biodegradable polymers based on squid teeth.
Plastic pollution is devastating the oceans by poisoning animals and contaminating marine environments, but scientists think that the seas may also have a solution to the problem—the tentacles of squid.
Squid have evolved complex proteins in the suction-cup cavities that line their tentacles. The proteins are used to build squid ring teeth (SRT), a spiky circle of biopolymer material inside the suckers that allows the animals to grasp prey.
Penn State University materials scientists Abdon Pena-Francesch and Melik Demirel think SRT could be engineered as a promising biodegradable replacement for plastics.
Fortunately, that would not mean harvesting innocent shrimp for their sucker teeth. In a study published Thursday in Frontiers in Chemistry, the team describe how bacteria such as E. coli could be genetically engineered to potentially produce industrial quantities of the special proteins that make SRT so flexible, strong, and eco-friendly.
A brief article about non-repeating order - a signal of unpredictable unfolding order.
The quest for quasicrystals is a physics adventure tale
‘The Second Kind of Impossible’ reveals how scientists found the strange materials in nature
When Paul Steinhardt made a discovery that he had been working toward for more than 20 years, he did not cry “Eureka!” On that winter morning in the lab in 2009, he writes, he and a colleague “were dead silent, because no words were necessary.”
Steinhardt had just found a natural quasicrystal, a solid whose atoms flout the laws of crystallography by having order that does not repeat. The quasicrystal was in a rock that had been sequestered in a museum in Florence. In The Second Kind of Impossible, Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist, chronicles the detective work that led to his no-eureka-necessary moment — and sent him from Princeton University to the wilds of Siberia to find out how that rock had formed.
The very idea of quasicrystals was once derided. Chemist Linus Pauling joked, “There is no such thing as quasicrystals. Only quasi-scientists.” But in the 1980s, Steinhardt wondered if quasicrystals were truly out of the question, or if they were a “second kind of impossible” — something achievable under conditions that just hadn’t been considered yet. By 2009, scientists had synthesized these supposedly impossible materials. Steinhardt wondered if nature could make them too.
This is a great signal of the fundamental social nature of individual capacity. There is a 3.5 min video and another 2.5 min video to illustrate the advance.
It’s not just eye-candy. Scientists have been eagerly devising new ways to map entire brains with increasing precision and resolution, with the hope of unlocking the brain’s mysteries—which circuits underlie what behaviors? How are memories formed, saved, and retrieved? How do circuits reorganize with learning or age?
Neuroscientists Just Found a Way to Image the Brain 1,000 Times Faster Than Ever Before
You know those stories of scientific breakthroughs, in which the lone genius scientist struggles for years until his “eureka!” moment?
Yeah, that’s a lie.
With the big data revolution well under way, today scientific discoveries are the result of massive collaborations.
Case in point? Last week, 18 institutions teamed up and devised a method to image entire brains 1,000 times faster than anything before. Dubbed by the team as an “Avengers, unite!” moment, they combined strengths to physically blow up brain tissue to over 20 times its usual size, and scanned their inner circuits and molecular constituents—down to the nano-scale level—using a new type of blazingly fast microscopy.
Another signal of the transformation of energy geopolitics.
This origami screen turns your windows into solar panels
Solgami wants to give apartment dwellers a chance to generate their own solar power–without blocking your natural light.
If you live in an apartment, it’s difficult to have solar panels: Your landlord decides what goes on your roof. But a new design makes solar panels more accessible to those without a roof of their own. Hanging inside a window, the origami-style blinds generate electricity as light reflects against the folds of the panel. At the same time, the geometry of the design brings more natural light inside.
“We’re looking at repositioning the city as a place of production, not just a place of consumption,” says Ben Berwick, an architect and the director of the Australia-based design firm Prevalent, who is currently working with a Japanese manufacturer on a prototype of the design, called Solgami. Most of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is growing; the design is one way to allow more people to participate in the global project of transitioning to renewable energy.
This is a great signal of the omens of the Internet-of-Things and ‘Back to the Future’ Future Making. Now dumb things fail all the time - but the nature of failure of ‘smart things’ is interesting.
One user writes, "The first software update for the shoe threw an error while updating, bricking the right shoe." Another says, "App will only sync with left shoe and then fails every time. Also, app says left shoe is already connected to another device whenever I try to reinstall and start over."
"My left shoe won't even reboot." writes another. One user offers a possible solution, saying, "You need to do a manual reset of both shoes per the instructions."
Nike’s self-lacing sneakers turn into bricks after faulty firmware update
$350 self-lacing sneakers don't work with Nike's official Android app.
Nike users are experiencing some technical difficulties in the wild world of connected footwear. Nike's $350 "Adapt BB" sneakers are the latest in the company's line of self-lacing shoes, and they come with the "Nike Adapt" app for Android and iOS. The app pairs with the shoes and lets you adjust the tightness of the laces, customize the lights (yeah, there are lights), and see, uh, how much battery life your shoes have left. The only problem: Nike's Android app doesn't work.
Android users report that their new kicks aren't pairing with the app properly, and some customers report failed firmware updates for the shoes, which render them unable to pair with the app at all. Nike's app on Google Play has been flooded with 1-star reviews in response to the faulty update.
