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:
Modern science is big, and author lists are growing. The celebrated 2015 paper estimating the Higgs boson’s mass had a record-breaking 5,154 authors. And the number of papers with more than 1,000 authors has surged.
At the other end of the scale, single-author papers are scarce — almost non-existent in some fields. In an ecology journal, for instance, they dropped from 60% of publications in the 1960s, to just 4% over the past decade (J. Barlow et al. J. Appl. Ecol. 55, 1–4; 2018). And the average number of authors per paper rose from 3.8 in 2007 to 4.5 in 2011.
There are many reasons underlying the shift, including the enormous growth of the scientific community and the increasing amount of evidence presented in a single paper. But what are the consequences? Is the nature of research changing as larger teams are doing the work?
The researchers found that, by this metric, teams containing fewer than five people tend to produce more disruptive work, whereas larger teams generate more incremental or consolidatory work. This held true for papers, patents and code, and across fields and time. This makes sense — large teams can marshal technical expertise and resources to tackle well-defined problems, but might be less likely to conceive unconventional ideas or be nimble enough to pursue them.
Embrace teams large and small to foster the health of research
EVERY DECEMBER, ADAM Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” What Savage encountered on the other side of the glasses was a glimpse of the mirrorworld.
The mirrorworld doesn’t yet fully exist, but it is coming. Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. The author Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map exactly the same size as the territory it represented. “In time,” Borges wrote, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” We are now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.
Kevin Kelly - AR Will Spark Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld
I think there's something within people that they want to attach their lives to something bigger and more epic, something grander, and so the idea that it's not just they themselves personally who will die but the whole world gives things a more epic or purposeful appearance to them. So I think that's why of course the various religions that have prophecies have cataclysmic events as the end. That plays into that as well.
'Earth Shattering' - all the ways the universe is trying to kill us
This is a great account of some of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking with recent comments being made by his son Eric McLuhan. It provides wonderful glimpses of just how prescient Marshall was and how relevant he and his son’s work continues to be. The video is about an hour - well worth the view.
Archive: Marshall McLuhan's ABC
Canada's foremost media academic explains some of his more famous insights and aphorisms in key interviews with Mike McManus and author Tom Wolfe, while his son Eric McLuhan and wife Corinne, in recent interviews, comment on McLuhan's legacy and expand on his theories.
This is an amazing story and significant signal - of the ways that every single person can create real social value in the digital environment.
Before his death, these grieving visitors would not have thought of Mats as Mats - but instead as Ibelin, a nobleman by birth, a philanderer and a detective. Some of those paying their respects lived close by, but others had come from afar. They wept for their good friend.
Later in the funeral service one of them would speak, and tell the gathering that just now, all across Europe, people were lighting candles for Mats.
My disabled son’s amazing gaming life in the World of Warcraft
Robert and Trude mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life for their disabled son. But when Mats died, they discovered that people all over Europe lit candles in his memory.
Sitting in a cafe by his office at Oslo City Hall, Robert Steen describes how he used to worry about his son staying up late into the night.
"In retrospect, I think we should have been more interested in the game world, where he spent so much time," says 56-year-old Robert. "By not doing so, we robbed ourselves of an opportunity that we didn't know we had."
Robert delivered his funeral eulogy for Mats in late 2014, in a chapel at the Norwegian capital's Western Cemetery.
Among those who sat listening to his words - in-between relatives and a few people from the health service who knew Mats well - was a group of people the family didn't know.
Only Robert had met them. And only once, the evening before.
Mats had barely left the basement flat underneath his family's home in the last years of his life, so it was strange that people unknown to the family were present at the funeral. Even stranger - Mats himself had also never met these people.
An interesting signal of the future of community - cohousing urban networked villages in clusters of multigenerational mixed use neighborhoods.
Many cohousing kids talked about the power of being exposed to a wide range of professions through the adults in their communities. So many of us leave high school woefully unaware of the range of directions we might go, in large part because we have limited exposure to the world of adults.
most cohousing kids have been coloring under a table or building Legos in proximity to more meetings than they could possibly count. While many remember the tedium most acutely, they also testify to getting an overall impression that creating structures and systems that work for a wide range of people is complex and rewarding work.
Our weekly check-in meetings, garden work parties, and shared meals developed in everyone the skill of open, honest conversation, which I have relied on my entire life and believe is really valuable in any situation.
Coming of age in cohousing
Growing up communally brings exposure to the world of adults—and lessons in interdependence
The archetypical cohousing community is made up of a couple dozen private households that are built to face one another around a central courtyard. They share common spaces, like a kitchen and eating area, a garden, tool shed, and laundry facilities, as well as a belief in the value of intergenerational interdependence. In practical terms, this usually means shared meals and communal workdays on the land. In spiritual terms, it means “you’ve got my back, I’ve got yours.” Today, there are more than 160 cohousing communities in 25 states across the country, according to the Cohousing Association of America.
When I asked Durrett, now 27 and studying public policy and international relations at Princeton, whether she ever rebelled against the family business, as it were, she shook her head and answered: “Look, they did all the hard work. They brought cohousing across an ocean, and got so many people to care about it, and convinced planning commissions that didn’t get it that it was a good idea, and actually found the financing, and built these communities. I just got to soak up all the benefits!”
Durrett is part of the first generation—potentially 1,000 strong—to spend its formative childhood years in cohousing communities. Twenty-five years into this grand experiment, what are the benefits to the kids who grew up in and among them? An informal survey and a handful of in-depth interviews reveal that coming of age in a cohousing community has wide-ranging and long-term impacts.
The digital environment is enacting a change in conditions of change - which has profound implications in our sense of identity - even the physical sense of proprioception - our sense of self in space-time. This is a wonderful exploration or human entanglement with things.
STUDIES IN HUMAN-THING ENTANGLEMENT
By Ian Hodder
The rich will make temples for Shiva
What should I, a poor man, do
My legs are pillars
The body the shrine
The head the cupola of gold
Listen O Lord of the Meeting Rivers
Things standing shall fall
But the moving ever shall stay
Basavanna, 12th century AD Indian philosopher and poet
premises of entanglement theory
• humans depend on things
• things depend on other things
• things depend on humans
• humans depend on things that depend on
humans (entanglement as interdependency)
• the entanglement of humans and things
played out over time influences the success
or failure of social and cultural traits
‘Things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay’. Much contemporary work that seeks to explore the relationships between human society and material culture assumes that the fixity and solidity of material culture provides a stability and continuity to social life. Because material things endure, they help to tie society together through time. The argument in this volume is that material things do indeed tie people together, but at the same time materials are unruly and difficult to manage. Things fall apart. The human dependence on things is productive, but it also draws humans more fully into a dependence on and care for things that is entrapping.
The idea that movement and instability are at the core of human experience is also present in Western thought. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes published his ‘Leviathan’. The core of his argument about how society should best be governed is motion. Drives, appetites, aversions are all motions within us that are caused by the actions of external objects (Leviathan Chapter 6) that are themselves continually in motion. Society needs to find mechanisms of government to promote and manage this motion. Today we are more fully aware of the ways in which matter is made of sub-atomic particles that are in continual motion. Modern scientists and philosophers describe the fundamental uncertainty and relationality of the physical and biological worlds. For example, John Dupré in his book ‘The disorder of things’ asserts ‘the extreme diversity of the contents of the world’ (1993, 1) such that it is difficult for science to come up with discrete categories or species. Things such as biological species keep changing. ‘An assumption that dates back at least to Aristotle is that organisms can be unambiguously sorted into discrete, non-overlapping kinds on the basis of gross morphological properties. Since the theory of evolution undermined the belief in the fixity of species this position has become increasingly difficult to defend, and has indeed been almost universally rejected’ (ibid., 54).
Given the spread of ‘weapons grade’ technology - for example the assault rifle in the US - this technology will have interesting consequences - the participatory panopticon or ubiquitous surveillance or both. Spouse keeping track of each other, or of their children or of their neighbors. The short video and images provide a good view of this technology.
Black Hornet PRS
AIRBORNE PERSONAL RECONNAISSANCE SYSTEM (PRS) FOR DISMOUNTED SOLDIERS
The FLIR Black Hornet PRS equips the non-specialist dismounted soldier with immediate covert situational awareness (SA). Game-changing EO and IR technology bridges the gap between aerial and ground-based sensors, with the same SA as a larger UAV and threat location capabilities of UGVs. Extremely light, nearly silent, and with a flight time up to 25 minutes, the combat-proven, pocket-sized Black Hornet PRS transmits live video and HD still images back to the operator.
This is a brief progress ‘report’ on the ongoing social experiment of Social Credit. This is something already nascent in the current state of the digital environment - all platforms are tracking us and shaping us via ‘likes’ ‘pluses’ ‘shares’ etc. Anyone concerned with their ‘personal brand’ is already being shaped by the ‘social credit’ of their reputation.
This article is worth the read - to understand that there is still a considerable distance to go before it is completely implemented as a ubiquitous feature of a digital environment.
The social credit system is designed to solve many real problems in a country still riddled with fraud, counterfeit products, and food safety and public health failures.
But the system could also be used to reinforce political control.
The complex reality of China’s social credit system:
Hi-tech dystopian plot or low-key incentive scheme?
A dozen or so cities throughout the country are test beds for carrot-and-stick programmes to encourage businesses and individuals to comply with existing rules
The efforts have been roundly condemned overseas as Orwellian but for members of the public, the impact of the systems can vary
According to the official blueprint released in 2014, a national system will be rolling out by 2020 to “allow the trustworthy to benefit wherever they go while making it difficult for the discredited to take a single step”.
But as the Chinese authorities embrace new information technology to monitor, manage and control the public like never before, the prospect of a sweeping social credit system has raised alarm around the world, especially with the ever-tightening grip on civil society, rights activism and religion.
in reality, only some pilot cities have scores and each does it in their own way. There is also no standardised national social credit score for everyone – instead there is a complex web of systems run by different ministries, levels of governments and regions interconnected by data sharing.
From social credit to new forms of currency - this is an important signal of the transformation of money, accounting and social currency. The blockchain signals the emergence of a new institution of records and accounting.
"So anything that currently exists in the world, as that moves onto the blockchain, this would be the payment leg for that transaction," said Umar Farooq, head of J.P. Morgan's blockchain projects. "The applications are frankly quite endless; anything where you have a distributed ledger which involves corporations or institutions can use this."
JP Morgan is rolling out the first US bank-backed cryptocurrency to transform payments business
Engineers at the lender have created the "JPM Coin," a digital token that will be used to instantly settle transactions between clients of its wholesale payments business.
Only a tiny fraction of payments will initially be transmitted using the cryptocurrency, but the trial represents the first real-world use of a digital coin by a major U.S. bank.
While J.P. Morgan's Jamie Dimon has bashed bitcoin as a "fraud," the bank chief and his managers have consistently said blockchain and regulated digital currencies held promise.
The lender moves more than $6 trillion around the world every day for corporations in its massive wholesale payments business. In trials set to start in a few months, a tiny fraction of that will happen over something called "JPM Coin," the digital token created by engineers at the New York-based bank to instantly settle payments between clients.
Our entanglement with things should also include the more virtual things - like ideas (memes) and our software environment - very soon there will be swarms of Artificial agents with new forms of distributed agency and a new uncanny valley. :) The images are worth the view.
Thispersondoesnotexist.com is face-generating AI at its creepiest
The most impressive magic trick AI‘s learned in the modern era is the one where it conjures people out of thin air. And there’s no better machine learning-powered wizardry than Nvidia‘s.
Nvidia is a company most lauded for its impressive graphics cards. But in the world of machine learning, it’s one of the most ingenious companies using deep learning today. A couple of years back TNW reported on a new generative adversarial network (GAN) the company developed. At the time, it was an amazing example of how powerful deep learning had become.
This is an important signal about the possible end of Moore’s Law in our current computational paradigm.
The Accelerator Wall: A New Problem for a Post-Moore’s Law World
Specialized chips and circuits may not save the computer industry after all
Accelerators are already everywhere: The world’s Bitcoin is mined by chips designed to speed the cryptocurrency’s key algorithm, nearly every digital something that makes a sound uses hardwired audio decoders, and dozens of startups are chasing speedy silicon that could make deep learning AI omnipresent. This kind of specialization, where common algorithms once run as software on CPUs are made faster by recreating them in hardware, has been thought of as a way to keep computing from stagnating after Moore’s Law peters out in one or two more chip generations.
But it won’t work. At least, it won’t work for very long. That’s the conclusion that Princeton University associate professor of electrical engineering David Wentzlaff and his doctoral student Adi Fuchs come to in research to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture this month. Chip specialization, they calculate, can’t produce the kinds of gains that Moore’s Law could. Progress on accelerators, in other words, will hit a wall just like shrinking transistors will, and it will happen sooner than expected.
Another interesting signal of the accelerating extension of digital environment - to place not yet covered and giving project Loon a competitive challenge.
HAPS offer higher resolution than satellites can achieve, over a broader area than aeroplanes can study, and with more precision than drifting balloons can muster. They can hover over a particular region for months, with applications that include Earth observation, telecommunications and navigation
High-flying pseudosatellites get their day in the sun
Planes and airships that can soar through the stratosphere could enable new approaches to research.
In April, if all goes to plan, a spindly uncrewed aeroplane with a wingspan wider than a jumbo jet will take flight in Puerto Rico. Powered by solar panels and soaring up to 20 kilometres high, the plane, called Odysseus, will test a new kind of high-altitude, long-duration flight — on which researchers will soon fly instruments.
“This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in my entire scientific lifetime,” says James Anderson, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has worked on the concept for three decades. “It’s hard for me to go to sleep at night.”
Odysseus is one of the latest high-altitude pseudosatellites (HAPS), so named because they fly tens of kilometres above Earth, but do not make it all the way to orbit. The platforms range from solar-powered drones such as Odysseus, which was developed by Aurora Flight Sciences in Manassas, Virginia, to floating airships such as the Stratobus that Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, France, hopes to have ready for the early 2020s.
This is another good signal of the emerging phase transition toward a new energy geopolitics - makes on think of where energy investment money should be spent - on the protection of energy incumbents or the future of energy innovation?
France's Macron unveils plan to give electric battery industry a jolt
France will invest 700 million euros (614 million pounds) over the next five years into projects to boost the European electric car battery industry and reduce its carmakers’ reliance on dominant Asian rivals, President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday.
In a speech to the Paris-based International Organisation of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, Macron unveiled his strategy to help the French car industry fend off competition on electric vehicles (EV) and autonomous cars from Asian and U.S. tech giants.
The plan comes after Germany in November set aside 1 billion euros to support battery cell production to reduce dependence on Asian suppliers and shore up jobs at home that may be at risk from the shift away from combustion engines.
Macron said two factories would be built, one each in France and Germany, under a French-German initiative, at a time when their countries’ carmakers are waking up to the threats posed from relying on Chinese suppliers in an age of international trade wars.
This is a very significant signal of the emerging transition in energy geopolitics.
Petro-Canada to build coast-to-coast electric vehicle charging network
EV charging in Canada just got a major boost
Petro-Canada announced plans to build 50 EV charging stations across Canada. A new section of the company’s website shows off a map of a nationwide charger network that will run alongside the Trans-Canada highway from what looks like Vancouver to the east coast of Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the network will extend to Newfoundland and Labrador or anywhere north.
“Keeping Canadians moving is what we do. We know the needs of our customers are evolving as we transition to a low-carbon future which is why we are excited to expand our current offering to support this growing customer segment,” said Kris Smith, the executive vice president of Downstream and Suncor. “We’re also investing in the fastest charging EV technology available today, which will be able to upgrade as technology advances easily,” adds Smith.
This is a nice very concise sort of survey of recent advances. Some of the highlights have good videos.
From Parkour to Surgery, Here Are the Top 10 Recent Advancements in Robotics
The robot revolution may not be here quite yet, but our mechanical cousins have made some serious strides. And now some of the leading experts in the field have provided a rundown of what they see as the 10 most exciting recent developments.
Compiled by the editors of the journal Science Robotics, the list includes some of the most impressive original research and innovative commercial products to make a splash in 2018, as well as a couple from 2017 that really changed the game.
This is a weak signal of one more potential solution to enabling people to have safe drinking water.
A new 2-D material uses light to quickly and safely purify water
In tests, it killed 99.9999 percent of the bacteria in contaminated water
Using light, a prototype “green” material can purify enough daily drinking water for four people in just one hour. In tests, it killed nearly 100 percent of bacteria in 10 liters of water, researchers report February 7 in Chem.
This new material, a 2-D sheet of graphitic carbon nitride, is a photocatalyst: It releases electrons when illuminated to create destructive oxygen-based chemicals that destroy microbes. The design avoids pitfalls of other similar technology. Today’s most effective photocatalysts contain metals that can leach into water as toxic pollutants. Others are non-metallic, like the new 2-D sheets, but are less efficient because they hold onto electrons more tightly.
it killed microbes more quickly than previous best metal-free photocatalysts, which take over an hour to achieve what the new design did in 30 minutes.
The team then attached the nanosheets to the inside surface of plastic bags, purifying 10 liters of water in an hour.
“Our motive was to develop an efficient way to use sunlight to produce water for undeveloped or remote regions without a central supply of clean water,” Wang says, noting that the carbon and nitrogen composition should make the material inexpensive. The researchers next aim to work with engineers to scale up the design for commercial use.
Like all things even science has to evolve - for quite a while there has been increasing pressure to change the way science results are published and shared. This is a great signal on the emerging transformation of science publications.
“I think the case for publishing peer reviews is quite clear in terms of transparency and accountability,” says Tony Ross-Hellauer, an information scientist at the Graz University of Technology in Austria who conducted a 2017 survey about open peer review. “In terms of clearing away some doubts about publishing peer reviews, I think this study is really good news.”
Rare trial of open peer review allays common concerns
Study suggests that making reviewers’ reports freely readable doesn’t compromise peer-review process.
A rare analysis of open peer review — in which reviews are posted alongside published papers — has overturned some common conceptions about the practice: notably, that it doesn’t put the reviewers off or affect their recommendations on whether to accept a paper.
The analysis, published on 18 January in Nature Communications, also indicates that open reviewers mostly prefer to remain anonymous, and that they don’t take any longer to complete reviews than in the conventional process.
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