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:
Articles
It’s not too late. In fact, it never will be. Whatever you may have read over the past year — as extreme weather brought a global heat wave and unprecedented wildfires burned through 1.6 million California acres and newspaper headlines declared, “Climate Change Is Here” — global warming is not binary. It is not a matter of “yes” or “no,” not a question of “fucked” or “not.” Instead, it is a problem that gets worse over time the longer we produce greenhouse gas, and can be made better if we choose to stop. Which means that no matter how hot it gets, no matter how fully climate change transforms the planet and the way we live on it, it will always be the case that the next decade could contain more warming, and more suffering, or less warming and less suffering. Just how much is up to us, and always will be.
A century and a half after the greenhouse effect was first identified, and a few decades since climate denial and misinformation began muddying our sense of what scientists do know, we are left with a set of predictions that can appear falsifiable — about global temperatures and sea-level rise and even hurricane frequency and wildfire volume. And there are, it is true, feedback loops in the climate system that we do not yet perfectly understand and dynamic processes that remain mysterious. But to the extent that we live today under clouds of uncertainty about the future of climate change, those clouds are, overwhelmingly, not projections of collective ignorance about the natural world but of blindness about the human one, and they can be dispersed by human action. The question of how bad things will get is not, actually, a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to forestall disaster and how quickly?
Over the past several years, there has been a raft of papers showing that the intuitive terms of that bargain are backward: Faster action on climate will save or gain the world enormous amounts of money ($26 trillion in potential growth by just 2030, according to one estimate; those $600 trillion in damages avoided by the end of the century, according to another).
The Cautious Case for Climate Optimism
TC: Are the biggest challenges in 2009 the same as today? What are the final cruxes that remain?
DOLGOV: In 2009, all the challenges were all about one-off problems we needed to solve and today it’s all about turning it into a product.
It’s about the presentation of this self-driving stack and about building the tools and the framework for evaluation and deployment of the technology. You know, what has stayed true is that it’s all about the speed of iteration and the ability to learn new things and solve new technical problems as we discover them.
Waymo CTO on the company’s past, present and what comes next
During a recent hotel stay, I had a conversation about how staff divides gratuities with the gentleman who brought my room service. It evolved into a master class—generously given by him—on how to manage hours and earnings in the hospitality industry. He told me the advice he gives less experienced staff on how to time joining a new hotel so they can get the tenure needed to control their schedules. I could see he didn’t just have a Plan B, but a Plan C, D and E for when his children get sick, or he’s needed on an extra shift. Every day, week and month, he manages a complex, ever-shifting matrix that would impress any director of logistics.
There are millions of people like this room service attendant—sharp, talented individuals, working what we often call “low skill” jobs. You know them: the server at your neighborhood grill, the barista working during your morning coffee run or the home health worker who cares for your parent. It might even be you. Every day, these workers pour their intelligence and ingenuity, craft and creativity, and sometimes mind-boggling resourcefulness into jobs where these attributes are sometimes appreciated, but rarely rewarded.
What are the jobs that we blithely assume anyone can do? Restaurant servers juggle five or six tables at a time, preempting customers’ needs and keeping a high-stakes, continuously recalibrating to-do list in their heads. Caregivers administer drugs and nurse our loved ones through what can be the most difficult times of their lives. Migrant workers acquire, deploy and pass on a deep understanding of the crop patterns of various fruits, vegetables and trees in a range of soil conditions.
Such jobs require optimizing time tradeoffs, quality control, emotional intelligence and project management. They are not low skill, but they are low wage.
Low Wage, Not Low Skill: Why Devaluing Our Workers Matters
What a great signal - How to use Twitter from uber-science journal Nature. Communication with a larger public and a social network is vital. Dave Snowden a maven of knowledge management noted that Twitter was the best knowledge management tool he has ever used.
Perhaps the most obvious, and most important, aspect of Twitter is that the platform facilitates a closer, more informal connection between scientists
How to use Twitter to further your research career
The social-media platform is often a tool for procrastination, says Jet-Sing M. Lee. But what else can it be?
The popularity of social media has exploded since Twitter launched just over a decade ago, and the platform has distinguished itself as the place to disseminate tightly packed information with immediacy. Academics have jumped on the bandwagon for a range of practical purposes.
Many are keen to make research visible and understandable to the wider community. For many, Twitter is one step towards this goal, because it allows non-scientists to find new research instantaneously without having to seek it out on lab or university websites. Twitter also provides a ‘way in’ for members of the public who want to contact scientists directly.
Circulating newly published papers allows for more exposure and has been linked to increased citations. Twitter mentions are an important alternative metric, or altmetric, a way of rigorously tracking the non-scholarly attention a paper receives. And there have been a number of calls for establishing a ‘Twitter impact factor’ that follows the popular h-index in aiming to measure both the number and citation impact of a scientist’s publications. An article last year claimed that scientists should spend more time on Twitter if they want a higher h-index, although this piece was ridiculed with no small level of irony by a number of high-profile scientists on Twitter. This is another positive for the platform — it serves as a forum for users to connect freely with the wider community.
Twitter can also be used in more technically intriguing ways. Automated paper-searching bots have been created to scour journals and platforms for articles of interest. By following a few relevant bots, or even just the Twitter accounts of journals you are interested in, your feed could be transformed into a digest of relevant papers.
The Internet-Of-Things (IoT) is a deeply transformative and disruptive technology - It can support a new political-economic paradigm and undermine a the incumbent forms of democracy (depending on how we legislate transparency).
The real reason America is scared of Huawei: internet-connected everything
Five things you need to know about 5G, the next generation of wireless tech that’s fueling tensions between the US and China.
WHAT IS 5G?
Rather than a protocol or device, 5G refers to an array of networking technologies meant to work in concert to connect everything from self-driving cars to home appliances over the air. It’s expected to provide bandwidth of up to 20 gigabits per second—enough to download high-definition movies instantly and use virtual and augmented reality. On your smartphone.
The first 5G smartphones and infrastructure arrive this year, but a full transition will take many more years.
WHY IS IT BETTER?
5G networks operate on two different frequency ranges. In one mode, they will exploit the same frequencies as existing 4G and Wi-Fi networks, while using a more efficient coding scheme and larger channel sizes to achieve a 25% to 50% speed boost. In a second mode, 5G networks will use much higher, millimeter-wave frequencies that can transmit data at higher speeds, albeit over shorter ranges.
WHAT ARE THE SECURITY RISKS?
One of 5G’s biggest security issues is simply how widely it will be used.
WHY IS HUAWEI’S 5G CAUSING SO MUCH CONCERN?
As the world’s biggest supplier of networking equipment and second largest smartphone maker, Huawei is in a prime position to snatch the lion’s share of a 5G market that, by some estimates, could be worth $123 billion in five years’ time.
The world of AI and robotics continue to make progress in developing all manner of ‘labor saving devices’. These signals bring to mind the wave of marketing in the post-war 50s for home appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners, toasters, etc.). Humans come to depend on humans, humans depend on things that in turn depend on humans and other things. Also these AI-ssistants enable many other people doing different sorts of work - to work from home. There is a 6 min video - which makes it obvious that this is not ready for primetime. But it is a signal of the future.
Remotely Operated Home Robot Can Do Your Laundry
In Japan, you'll be able to rent a home robot that someone else occasionally inhabits to fold your clothes
Laundry is way, way, way up there on the list of things that people really wish robots could do for them. It’s a very hard problem, though—we’ve (sort of) seen some amount of laundry cycle success in a research environment, and there are robots out there that will fold some of your clothes while taking up a lot of space and probably not working very well, all things considered.
The challenge, as always, is that complex manipulation tasks are very hard for robots, especially when vision is involved and everything gets wrapped up in a semi-structured, non-optimized environment. From that perspective, laundry is a fantastic example of tasks that humans are ideal for but that robots struggle with. A solution to this problem is to just let humans help the robots out—for example, by remotely operating a mobile manipulator in your house to do the laundry for you. That’s exactly what a Japanese startup, Mira Robotics, is going to offer consumers, who’ll be able to rent a robot named Ugo to handle the chore.
Another robotic signal - this one maybe be better funded by medical, security, surveillance and espionage sources than the remote butler/maid. There is a 30 sec video.
Four-Legged Walking Robot Is Smaller Than an Ant's Face
As far as we know, this is the smallest legged robot in existence
A few years ago, we wrote about the tiniest little quadruped robot we’d ever seen—a mere 20 millimeters long, with a hip height of 5.6 mm and weight of about 1.6 gram. The designer, Ryan St. Pierre from Sarah Bergbreiter’s lab at the University of Maryland, also showed us a picture of an even smaller version that weighed just 100 mg. When we saw these things at ICRA 2016, we asked Ryan about going even smaller:
“It’s always a fun challenge to try to make robots as small as possible,” he told us. “Currently, I am working on making a robot, of the same design, that would be 2.5 mm long, an order of magnitude smaller than the ones we presented at ICRA. Smaller robots can more easily go places that larger robots can’t, and having them in various sizes would increase their utility.”
As it turns out, an order of magnitude wasn’t good enough, and instead, St. Pierre developed a quadruped that’s 10 times smaller than that: It weighs just one single milligram, and is smaller than an ant’s head.
This is a strong signal - because killer drones are already a reality. But being able to use drone for agricultural and pest control and monitoring environmental conditions.
Drones Help Rid Galapagos Island of Invasive Rats
Fast and efficient, drones are a versatile new tool against invasive species
The Galapagos Islands are famous for their exotic wildlife, which in most cases is not nearly as afraid of humans as it should be. Humans have done some seriously horrible things to the animals living there, like packing thousands of giant tortoises upside down on ships because they would stay alive without food or water for months and could then be eaten. People traveling to and living in the Galapagos have caused other serious problems to the fragile ecosystem: In addition to devastating oil spills, humans have introduced numerous invasive species to the islands. In particular, goats, which were brought on purpose, and rats, which were brought accidentally, have been catastrophic for endemic animal populations.
For decades, the Galapagos National Park Directorate (DPNG) has been working to remove invasive species island by island, including tens of thousands of feral goats, pigs, and donkeys. But rats are an enormous problem as well, especially on the smaller islands. In early 2018, the island of North Seymour suffered a black and brown rat infestation, which is a serious problem on a little smidge of land 1.9 square kilometers in area that is home to thousands of birds that lay their eggs directly on the ground.
Now the DPNG, in cooperation with Island Conservation, is trying something new to deal with the rats: Sending drones flying over the island to drop rat poison as quickly (and cheaply) as possible.
This is a very strong signal of the new world of autonomous intelligent machines.
In a First, China Launches Weather Observation Rockets from a Robotic Ship at Sea
Launching research rockets from crewless marine vehicles could mean improved access to atmospheric data over the oceans.
A team of Chinese scientists has successfully tested the world’s first robotic, semi-submersible boat for launching weather rockets.
According to a paper published last week in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science that describes the trials, the new technology could help meteorologists fill in crucial gaps in atmospheric data and thus better predict the weather.
The researchers used the boat to launch rocketsondes, rockets carrying meteorological instruments, in brief flights as high as five miles up in the atmosphere, beyond the reach of weather balloons.
Such rockets are typically shot off from land, but having marine launch pads could make it possible to surveil the skies over the nearly three-quarters of Earth’s surface that’s blanketed by oceans.
In the zeitgeist of ‘fake news’ (which of course is not new - but actually an eternally present condition - just ask the Catholic Church what it thought of the Gutenberg Press) - science is not exempt from ‘contamination’.
Last year, China announced sweeping plans to curb research misconduct. That’s a great first step. Next should be a review of publication quotas and cash rewards, and the closure of ‘paper factories’.
We need to talk about systematic fraud
Software that uncovers suspicious papers will do little for a community that does not confront organized research fraud, says Jennifer Byrne.
From where I work at the University of Sydney, you cannot see the ocean. However, in Australia, the ocean is part of our national consciousness. This is perhaps why I think of the research literature as an ocean, linking researchers in disparate yet ultimately connected fields. Just as there is growing alarm about our rising, polluted oceans, scientists are increasingly talking about the swelling research literature and its contamination by incorrect research results.
Most of the talk centres on unconscious bias and ill-informed sloppiness; conversations about intentional deception are more difficult. Unlike most faulty research practices, fraud actively evades detection. It is also overlooked because the scientific community has been unwilling to have frank and open discussions about it.
Another good signal of the transformation of the publishing industry - especially important to science and open access to data and findings.
“Some blockchain applications are productive and sensible, while others are foolish and introduce complexity with little benefit,” says Daniel Himmelstein, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who has developed blockchain-based software.
Bitcoin for the biological literature
Scientific publishing is increasingly adopting the technology underlying cryptocurrencies.
When Sarah Bajan finished a study on the argonaute-2 protein last year, she found herself in a position all too common in scientific research: she had an interesting finding, but not enough for a full publication. “I had data from a project that was mostly observational, with no more resources to continue,” says Bajan, a geneticist at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. But she was happy with the results, which revealed a previously unidentified form of the protein, and it would have been a shame to stuff them in a drawer.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to. A colleague told Bajan about ScienceMatters, an open-access publishing platform that posts peer-reviewed short papers and single-observation studies — research that most journals would dismiss. Bajan submitted her work last October and it was accepted two weeks later.
That speed, as well as the subject matter, is unusual. But ScienceMatters is different in another way, too: it’s developing a peer-review process based on the Bitcoin blockchain technology — a public, but tamper-proof database of transactions shared across thousands of computers around the world.
Blockchain technology seems to be everywhere, from the financial industry and energy grids to manufacturing. Over the past year or so, a number of blockchain-based tools and services for scientists have popped up, offering simple ways to manage collaborations, establish precedence and publish early results. But all of them are preliminary, and it remains to be seen whether they can become the game changers that their adherents think they are.
For ScienceMatters, plans are under way to use blockchain to promote scientific transparency. Using a peer-review platform called Eureka, ScienceMatters will this year begin offering its triple-blind peer-review process through a publishing platform that uses the Ethereum blockchain, another popular choice. Authors and reviewers will be unknown to one another (with reviewers crowdsourced from Eureka users), but their activities and reviews will be logged for all to see.
This is a great signal of progress in the domestication of DNA, or progress in artificial intelligence, and more broadly of how future research and huge data will accelerate our creative research imagination.
Jason Lewis, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, shares that view. “Our imagination has been constrained by our focus on living people or on the fossils we’ve found from Europe, Africa and western Asia,” he said. “What deep learning techniques can do, in a strange way, is refocus the possibilities. The approach is no longer limited by our imagination.”
Artificial Intelligence Finds Ancient ‘Ghosts’ in Modern DNA
With the help of deep learning techniques, paleoanthropologists find evidence of long-lost branches on the human family tree.
In a paper published last month in Nature Communications, researchers showed the potential for deep learning techniques to help fill in some of the missing pieces, pieces that experts may not have even been aware of. They used deep learning to sift out evidence of another ghost population: an unknown human ancestor in Eurasia, likely a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid or a relative of the Denisovan line.
The work points to the future usefulness of artificial intelligence in paleontology, not only for identifying unforeseen ghosts but also for uncovering the very faded footprints of the evolutionary processes that have shaped who we’ve become.
Current statistical methods involve examining four genomes at a time for shared traits. It’s a test of similarity, but not necessarily of actual ancestry, because there are many different ways of interpreting the small amounts of genetic mixture it uncovers. For instance, such analyses might suggest that a modern-day European shares certain traits with the Neanderthal genome but not a modern-day African. But that doesn’t necessarily set in stone that those genes came from interbreeding between the Neanderthals and the ancestors of Europeans. The latter, for instance, could have instead bred with a different population, one closely related to Neanderthals but not the Neanderthals themselves.
The new deep learning method is an attempt to do better, by seeking to explain levels of gene flow that are too small for the usual statistical approaches, and by offering a far more vast and complicated range of models to do so. Through training, the neural network can learn to classify various patterns in genomic data based on what demographic histories most likely gave rise to them, without being told how to make those connections.
This is a very good signal for those suffering from arthritis.
Scientists identify reversible molecular defect underlying rheumatoid arthritis
In rheumatoid arthritis, immune cells called helper T cells behave differently from their counterparts in healthy cells and in other autoimmune diseases. Stanford scientists have learned why.
Stanford University School of Medicine investigators succeeded in countering inflammation and tissue damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis in mice engrafted with human joint-lining tissue and a human immune system.
The researchers accomplished this by shutting down a faulty molecular mechanism that they identified in humans with the disease.
In addition, they found that a novel drug, which is not yet commercially available, helped protect both human cells in a dish and the humanized mice from rheumatoid arthritis. Clinical trials of the drug or a closely related compound could begin in the near future.
The findings were published online Feb. 4 in Nature Immunology. Cornelia Weyand, MD, Ph.D., professor and chief of immunology and rheumatology, is the senior author. The lead author is postdoctoral scholar Zhenke Wen, MD, Ph.D.
This is strong signal of the emerging understanding of our dependence on our microbial ecology for our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing - and perhaps the transformation of our sense of self.
Evidence mounts that gut bacteria can influence mood, prevent depression
Of all the many ways the teeming ecosystem of microbes in a person’s gut and other tissues might affect health, its potential influences on the brain may be the most provocative. Now, a study of two large groups of Europeans has found several species of gut bacteria are missing in people with depression. The researchers can’t say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness, but they showed that many gut bacteria could make substances that affect nerve cell function—and maybe mood.
“It’s the first real stab at tracking how” a microbe’s chemicals might affect mood in humans, says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who has been one of the most vocal proponents of a microbiome-brain connection. The study “really pushes the field from where it’s been” with small studies of depressed people or animal experiments. Interventions based on the gut microbiome are now under investigation: The University of Basel in Switzerland, for example, is planning a trial of fecal transplants, which can restore or alter the gut microbiome, in depressed people.
Two kinds of microbes, Coprococcus and Dialister, were missing from the microbiomes of the depressed subjects, but not from those with a high quality of life. The finding held up when the researchers allowed for factors such as age, sex, or antidepressant use, all of which influence the microbiome, the team reports today in Nature Microbiology. They also found the depressed people had an increase in bacteria implicated in Crohn disease, suggesting inflammation may be at fault.
This is a great signal of advances in neuroscience - but also the pervasive importance of emotions in a reasonable life.
Depression is a disorder, but one that’s tightly linked to emotion. It turns out that emotions span much of the brain. “Emotions are more widespread than we thought,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kevin LaBar. With his colleagues at Duke University, LaBar has used functional MRI scans to find signatures of certain emotions throughout the brain as people are feeling those emotions.
Data from electrodes monitoring brain activity helped researchers predict the moods of seven people over time (each icon shape represents one person). The closer an icon is to the diagonal line, the better the prediction matched self-reported mood.
Brain-zapping implants that fight depression are inching closer to reality
Researchers are resetting the part of the brain that can shift mood
researchers finally got the effect they were hunting for by targeting the brain area just behind her eyes. Asked how she felt, the woman answered: “Calmer in my nerves.”
Zapping the same spot in other participants’ brains evoked similar responses: “I feel positive, relaxed,” said a 53-year-old woman. A 60-year-old man described “starting to feel a little more alive, a little more energy.” With stimulation to that one part of the brain, “participants would sit up a little straighter and seem a little bit more alert,” says UCSF neuroscientist Kristin Sellers.
Such positive mood changes in response to light neural jolts, described in the Dec. 17 Current Biology, bring researchers closer to an audacious goal: a device implanted into the brains of severely depressed people to detect a looming crisis coming on and zap the brain out of it.
This is definitely an interesting signal of progress in the prosthetic sciences to help the recovery of lost abilities and to add new domains of sensorium.
“A big motivation to develop this e-skin sensor was to extend the capabilities of this technology to superhuman abilities,” he said. “We proved that e-skin can alarm humans of the surrounding danger before accidents happen.”
Artificial ‘superhuman’ skin could help burn victims, amputees ‘feel’ again
Researchers have developed a new kind of sensor designed to let artificial skin sense pressure, vibrations, and even magnetic fields. Developed by engineers, chemists, and biologists at the University of Connecticut and University of Toronto, the technology could help burn victims and amputees “feel” again through their prosthetic skin.
“The type of artificial skin we developed can be called an electronic skin or e-skin,” Islam Mosa, a postdoctoral fellow at UConn, told Digital Trends. “It is a new group of smart wearable electronics that are flexible, stretchable, shapable, and possess unique sensing capabilities that mimic human skin.”
To create the sensor for the artificial skin, Mosa and his team wrapped a silicone tube with a copper wire and filled the tube with an iron oxide nanoparticle fluid. As the nanoparticles move around the tube, they create an electrical current, which is picked up by the copper wire. When the tube experiences pressure, the current changes.
Beyond its ability to sense environmental changes similar to human skin, the e-skin can even feel magnetic field and sound wave vibrations.
A good article with a strong signal of the emerging environment of distributed machine intelligent agents - remember ‘Castaway’ the movie with Tom Hanks - this is Wilson with sensors and AI creating a responsive agent and distributed agency.
New voices at patients’ bedsides: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple
At first it was a novelty: Hospitals began using voice assistants to allow patients to order lunch, check medication regimens, and get on-demand medical advice at home.
But these devices, manufactured by Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others, are now making deeper inroads into patient care. Hospitals are exploring new uses in intensive care units and surgical recovery rooms, and contemplating a future in which Alexa, or another voice avatar, becomes a virtual member of the medical team — monitoring doctor-patient interactions, suggesting treatment approaches, or even alerting caregivers to voice changes that could be an early warning of a health emergency.
“Why not have a connected speaker in the room listening to conversations?” asked John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, which is piloting dozens of voice applications. Voice technology still remains at the edges of patient care, he added, but the hospital is already using it to improve the efficiency of ICU care and help prepare doctors for transplant surgeries.
This is a very important signal - not just for plastic - but for the concept of a metabolic political economy that ensure all it produces can be metabolized later to serve as input to other productive processes. The short 1.5 min video discusses the article.
Quarter of Our Plastic Waste into Fuel
The process could help convert millions of tons of plastic we generate every year into an gasoline and diesel-like fuel.
The world is drowning in plastic. Each year, over 300 million tons of plastic finds its way to a landfill or into the environment where it will take hundreds of years to decompose and kill all manner of wildlife in the meantime.
A team of chemists at Purdue may have found a partial solution to our plastic woes. As detailed in a paper published this week in Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, the chemists discovered a way to convert polypropylene—a type of plastic commonly used in toys, medical devices, and product packaging like potato chip bags—into gasoline and diesel-like fuel. The researchers said that this fuel is pure enough to be used as blendstock, a main component of fuel used in motorized vehicles.
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