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
Quotes:
Articles:
"When we think about the future, we are confronted by a vast array of possibilities," explains Assistant Professor Mile Gu of NTU Singapore, who led development of the quantum algorithm that underpins the prototype "These possibilities grow exponentially as we go deeper into the future. For instance, even if we have only two possibilities to choose from each minute, in less than half an hour there are 14 million possible futures. In less than a day, the number exceeds the number of atoms in the universe." What he and his research group realised, however, was that a quantum computer can examine all possible futures by placing them in a quantum superposition – similar to Schrödinger's famous cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead.
Scientists build machine to generate superposition of possible futures
It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no such thing as a biological individual. All organisms are intricately nested collectives: networks of relationships between cells and microbes that make it impossible to say where one “individual” starts and stops. Humans are no exception: We carry around more microbial cells than we do our own. Many of our constituent microbes themselves have symbiotic relationships. Moreover, the most dramatic moments in the history of life are the product of symbioses. From this perspective, organisms are ecosystems, and must be understood in the language of ecology. Three properties of ecosystems are relevant to this piece. First, ecosystems, like many biological systems, are emergent phenomena, meaning that they are more than the sum of their parts and so cannot be understood when disassembled into their component pieces. Second, ecosystems are dynamic non-linear systems, meaning that effects are in no way proportional to causes. Small changes can bring about large effects which can only be observed in the system as a whole. Third, ecological perspectives are inherently non-reductive, concerning as they do relationships, not things. Indeed, ecosystems are not things at all, but complex networks of processes.
...Songs, like all music, are processes in time, not things. Work songs are often sung in groups, the song is the sound of the relationships between the working members of the group. The accomplishment of the work emerges from the collective actions and voices; it cannot be completed by any one of the parts alone. It is more than the sum of its parts. The song is a technology of relation. The work, guided by song, resists reduction.
The history of life is a history of entangled sparks and flourishings enabled by relational innovations that thrive amid difference.
The history of domestication is the history of extending intelligence by refiguring the relationships between humans and nonhumans, whether animal vegetable or mineral.
What would the world look like if we spent as much time and money developing new ways to build relationships with other organisms and places as we did with machines? What would the world look like if we diverted one percent of the money being spent on developing artificial intelligence to developing work songs that resist reduction? If we defined intelligence inclusively, as the ability of organisms to respond flexibly to the problems that their lives present them with? These relational innovations can be considered ways to develop an extended, rather than an artificial, intelligence; ways of thinking with, rather than thinking about; ways of talking with the world rather than about it.
Entangled Flourishings: Ideas in Conversation with Resisting Reduction
Technologies do not have inherent meaning; people imbue them with meaning and purpose by using them. No technology can incite broad societal change unless people gather around it, use it to collaborate, make decisions, and create new systems. As in the human body and the biosphere, selective specialization and adaptation continuously evolve into a more complex system, not into total chaos. Decentralization at scale, across institutions and societies, has never been possible the way it is now. We have a new way to get things done.
Exploring Decentralization: Blockchain Tech & Complex Coordination
This is a very important signal of a deep change in our concepts of self - a transformation of the ‘atomistic, isolated, selfish individual’ toward a self grounded in social cultural being.
Our brains sculpt each other. So why do we study them in isolation?
Minds may best be understood as they exist, in social settings
Brains have long been star subjects for neuroscientists. But the typical “brain in a jar” experiments that focus on one subject in isolation may be missing a huge part of what makes us human — our social ties.
“There’s this assumption that we can understand how the mind works by just looking at individual minds, and not looking at them in interactions,” says social neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College. “I think that’s wrong.”
To answer some of the thorniest questions about the human brain, scientists will have to study the mind as it actually exists: steeped in social connections that involve rich interplay among family, friends and strangers, Wheatley argues.
Part of the tendency toward studying solitary brains is due to a lack of ways to tease apart life’s rich social interactions. Functional MRI brain scanners are built for one person at a time, for example, and they usually can’t accommodate the movement that comes from talking.
Wheatley and her colleagues are getting around this issue by using special cases that fit on the head and cushion motion. The team uses this technique to study brain activity in pairs of people as they make up a story together over the internet, with one subject in a scanner at Dartmouth and the other in a scanner at Harvard University. This multiperson method, called hyperscanning, may help to reveal what’s special about people working together.
And another signal about just how social we are.
"Many kids with autism have gastrointestinal problems, and some studies, including ours, have found that those children also have worse autism-related symptoms," said Krajmalnik-Brown. "In many cases, when you are able to treat those gastrointestinal problems, their behavior improves."
Roughly 30-50% of all people with autism have chronic gastrointestinal (GI) problems, primarily constipation and/or diarrhea that can last for many years. That chronic discomfort and pain can cause irritability, decreased attention and learning, and negatively impact behavior.
Autism symptoms reduced nearly 50 percent two years after fecal transplant
The apparent rise in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its stubborn resistance to treatment has spurred a legion of researchers to enter the field and explore the disability in innovative ways.
One promising avenue of autism research involves the gut microbiome, which is the collection of microbes that lives in our intestines and helps us in many ways including digestion of our food, training our immune system and preventing overgrowth of harmful bacteria. Recent research suggests our gut microbiomes also affect brain communication and neurological health. Worldwide, interest is growing in the idea that changes in normal gut microbiota may be responsible for triggering a vast range of diseases.
In a new study, "Long-term benefit of Microbiota Transfer Therapy in Autism Symptoms and Gut Microbiota," published in Scientific Reports, Arizona State University researchers Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown, Ph.D., James Adams, Ph.D, and lead author Dae-Wook Kang, Ph.D, demonstrate long-term beneficial effects for children diagnosed with ASD through a revolutionary technique known as Microbiota Transfer Therapy (MTT), a special type of fecal transplant originally pioneered by Dr. Thomas Borody, an Australian gastroenterologist. Remarkably, improvements in gut health and autism symptoms appear to persist long after treatment.
At two years post-treatment, most of the initial improvements in gut symptoms remained. In addition, parents reported a slow steady reduction of ASD symptoms during treatment and over the next two years. A professional evaluator found a 45% reduction in core ASD symptoms (language, social interaction and behavior) at two years post-treatment compared to before treatment began.
And here’s a good signal for most of us as we age.
More Evidence that Humans Do Appear to Create New Neurons in Old Age
Despite doubts last year about human adult neurogenesis, a study shows even 80-year-olds develop new cells in the hippocampus, but such growth is diminished in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
New neurons develop in the brains of healthy adult humans, but neurogenesis is severely diminished in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients no matter their age, researchers report today (March 26) in Nature Medicine.
“This is the first really strong evidence showing that neurogenesis is reduced in human Alzheimer’s disease patients,” Xinyu Zhao, a neurobiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist. Perhaps, the authors suggest, finding a way to promote neurogenesis in these patients could help in treating Alzheimer’s disease.
The results show that neurogenesis does decrease moderately with age. But the number of immature neurons in healthy people appears to be consistently higher than the number found in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, regardless of their age. These patients typically had tens of thousands fewer immature neurons compared with healthy subjects and the loss of cells progressed with the severity of the disease, the team found.
This short article and 1 min video is an uncanny signal of a looming sci-fi movie. AI and robotics - for work, pleasure and sport coming soon? When will the The Iditarod Trail robot-sled-dog race happen?
"This robot will be available next year," he said at the time, referring to SpotMini. "We've built 10 by hand, we're building 100 with manufacturers at the end of this year, and in the middle of 2019, we're going to begin production at the rate of about 1,000 a year."
Boston Dynamics' Latest Video Shows Herd of Robotic Dogs Hauling Truck With Ease
Boston Dynamics' latest video of its four-legged robot, SpotMini, is just over a minute long.
But that's all the time it takes to impress upon viewers that the technology company has developed machines capable of pulling a full-size box truck up a slight incline.
An individual SpotMini can carry 31 pounds, but the crew of robots apparently contains enough collective power to pull a vehicle that likely weighs at least 10,000 pounds. It takes 10 of the 66-pound robots - hitched together like metallic sled dogs and marching with militaristic precision - to get the vehicle rolling.
This is a very important signal of the future of air transportation.
“This is an important step forward for the safe testing and integration of drones into our economy. Safety continues to be our Number One priority as this technology continues to develop and realize its full potential,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Elaine L. Chao.
Wing becomes first certified Air Carrier for drones in the US
Wing achieved a significant milestone today, becoming the first drone delivery company to receive Air Carrier Certification from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This is an important step for the FAA and the drone industry in the United States; the result of years of work to safely integrate drones into the national airspace. We’re grateful for the vision of the Administration, the Department of Transportation, and the FAA for creating the Unmanned Aircraft System Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP) to advance the drone industry in the US.
FAA certification required us to submit evidence that our operations are safe. These submissions included data showing that a delivery by Wing carries a lower risk to pedestrians than the same trip made by car. Our drones have flown over 70,000 test flights, and more than 3,000 deliveries to doorsteps, driveways and backyards of our customers in Australia.
And another important signal of a new mode of air transportation.
New aircraft rises 'like a balloon'
Despite being 15m (50ft) long with a mass of 120kg (19 stone) she rises gracefully into the air. She looks a little like an airship, except airships don't have wings.
"It flies under its own propulsion although it has no engines," he says.
"The central fuselage is filled with helium, which makes it buoyant so it can ascend like a balloon. "And inside that there's another bag with compressors on it that brings air from outside, compresses the air, which makes the aeroplane heavier and then it descends like a glider."
This ability to "breathe" - to switch quickly between being heavier or lighter than air - doesn't just make the plane go up and down. It is the key to driving it forward. Phoenix is the first large-scale aircraft to be powered by variable-buoyancy propulsion.
It moves through the air like a porpoise through water.
That means it can travel long distances and stay aloft for long periods.
The point? To create a cheaper alternative to launching satellites.
Here a good signal of emerging domestication of DNA and of 3D printing.
A 3D-printed heart with blood vessels has been made using human tissue
The rabbit-sized heart was made from a patient’s own cells and tissues, using techniques that could help to increase the rate of successful heart transplants in future.
How it worked: A biopsy of tissue was taken from patients, and then its materials were separated. Some molecules, including collagen and glycoproteins, were processed into a hydrogel, which became the printing “ink.” Once the hydrogel was mixed with stem cells from the tissue, the researchers from Tel Aviv University were able to create a patient-specific heart that included blood vessels. The idea is that such a heart would be less likely to be rejected when transplanted. The study was published in the journal Advanced Science.
Let it flow: Until now, researchers have only been able to print simple tissues lacking blood vessels, so a 3D, fully vascularized engineered heart is a step in the right direction.
The impact: Heart disease causes one in four deaths in the US (about 610,000 people a year), and there’s a shortage of heart donors for transplants, so 3D-printed hearts could help solve a major issue.
Next steps: The team in Tel Aviv is planning on culturing the printed hearts and then transplanting them into animals. We’re still many, many years away from this being used for humans, though.
Another interesting signal of the emergence of new medical devices via combined areas of manufacturing, materials and AI. While not ready for primetime it harkens a new type of treatment.
Wearable Device Scrubs Cancer Cells from Blood
Researchers shrink oven-size machine for diagnosing and halting the spread of cancer to something worn on the wrist
A new wearable device, tested on animals, can capture and remove tumor cells circulating in the bloodstream. With further development, the blood-filtering gadget could be used to diagnose, and perhaps treat, metastatic cancer in humans.
Inventors of the microfluidic device, at the University of Michigan, described it last week in the journal Nature Communications.
the team says they hope to increase the throughput of the device so that all of the blood in the human body can run through it in two to three hours. “We have some ideas about how we want to accomplish that,” Nagrath says.
In the current prototype, tested on dogs, blood is filtered through graphene oxide nanosheets equipped with antibodies that bind to the surface of cancer cells. The system also continually injects a drug called Heparin to prevent blood from clotting while in the device. Finally, the blood—minus the cancer cells that are stuck to the nanosheets like flies on flypaper—is pumped back into the body. The device contains an on-board power source and microcontroller that communicates wirelessly.
In addition to its envisioned purpose as a cancer treatment that filters out tumor cells, the microfluidic machine could be used in a diagnostic role. The researchers say it could estimate the number of circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream, or help characterize the tumor from which they came.
Treatments for cancer based on gene-therapy make advances.
CRISPR has been used to treat US cancer patients for the first time
The gene-editing tool has been used in a trial to enhance the blood cells of two patients with cancer, according to NPR.
The trial: The experimental research, under way at the University of Pennsylvania, involves genetically altering a person’s T cells so that they attack and destroy cancer. A university spokesman confirmed it has treated the first patients, one with sarcoma and one with multiple myeloma.
Ex vivo: It’s safer and easier to employ the CRISPR technique on cells removed from a patient’s body. That’s the case in the new cancer study, in which doctors collected blood from patients and then genetically engineered the immune cells present in it before returning the cells to the patients.
The edit: Researchers added one gene to make the T cells attack cancer, but they also used CRISPR to delete a different gene, called PD-1, which can act as a brake on the immune system’s defenses.
Pharmaceutical drugs that inhibit PD-1, known as immunotherapies, have been dramatically effective in treating a few cancers. Now the idea is to install the same capacity directly into the DNA of T cells.
And elsewhere with the same CRISPR technology.
CRISPR is being used to treat a patient with a dangerous blood disease
A Swiss biotechnology company says it has used CRISPR to treat a patient with beta thalassemia, marking the gene-editing technology’s inaugural trial run by the Western drug industry.
The treatment: CRISPR Therapeutics, of Zug, Switzerland, says it used CRISPR to try to cure a single patient of beta thalassemia, a dangerous blood disease that leaves people dependent on transfusions. Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston is sponsoring the effort.
The problem: People with beta thalassemia inherit defective copies of the gene that makes hemoglobin, the molecule that red blood cells use to transport oxygen. However, everyone’s body has a second copy of the gene—called fetal hemoglobin—that gets shut off after we’re born. In the clinical trial, scientists are employing CRISPR editing in an attempt to turn the fetal gene back on.
Outside the body: The treatment involves collecting bone marrow stem cells from a patient and then fixing their DNA in the lab using CRISPR. After that, the cells are reinfused into the bloodstream. In theory, the one-time treatment could cure the disease, though it’s too soon to know the result. CRISPR Therapeutics says it will wait to see how its first patient responds before treating more people. The company also has plans to treat patients with sickle-cell anemia using the same strategy.
And this signal is one of many efforts to deal with obesity. Perhaps this one will lead to a successful way to be healthier.
This Genetic Mutation Makes People Feel Full — All the Time
Two new studies confirm that weight control is often the result of genetics, not willpower.
The study subjects had been thin all their lives, and not because they had unusual metabolisms. They just did not care much about food.
They never ate enormous amounts, never obsessed on the next meal. Now, a group of researchers in Britain may have found the reason.
The people carry a genetic alteration that mutes appetite. It also greatly reduces their chances of getting diabetes or heart disease.
The scientists’ study, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, relied on data from the U.K. Biobank, which includes a half million people aged 40 to 69. Participants have provided DNA samples and medical records, and have allowed researchers to track their health over years.
A second study in the same journal also used data from this population to develop a genetic risk score for obesity. It can help predict, as early as childhood, who is at high risk for a lifetime of obesity and who is not.
Together, the studies confirm a truth that researchers wish more people understood. There are biological reasons that some struggle mightily with their weight and others do not, and the biological impacts often are seen on appetite, not metabolism. People who gain too much weight or fight to stay thin feel hungrier than naturally thin people.
Another signal of medical advances in treatments for cancer.
Experimental gene therapy frees ‘bubble-boy’ babies from a life of isolation
Treatment restores immune-system function in young children with severe disorder.
An experimental gene therapy has restored functioning immune systems to seven young children with a severe disorder that would have sentenced them to a life of isolation to avoid potentially deadly infections. They are now with family at home, and an eighth child is slated to be released from hospital at the end of this week.
The children have mutations in a gene that is crucial for immune-system development, causing a disorder called X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID-X1). The gene-therapy treatment replaces the mutated gene, called IL2RG, with a corrected copy. SCID-X1 and related disorders are sometimes called ‘bubble-boy’ diseases because of the plastic enclosures that were once used to protect affected children from possible infection. For them, even a common cold can be fatal.
But seven of the babies in the study, which was published on 17 April in The New England Journal of Medicine, now have immune systems that can protect them against common childhood ailments. “They are all toddlers now, exploring life and attending daycares,” says Ewelina Mamcarz, a physician at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and a lead author on the study.
This is another great signal of an exponential increase in understanding the workings of our cellular biology.
DEVICE TESTS THOUSANDS OF STEM CELLS SUPER FAST
A new “lab-on-a-chip” can examine thousands of individual live cells over a week-long period, performing experiments that would take more than 1 million steps in a laboratory.
The credit-card-sized, microfluidic device not only saves time and money, but also offers a new glimpse into how single stem cells react to different molecules and environments.
When researchers examined neural stem cells on the device and analyzed the data, they found several new rules that determine the timing and signaling sequences necessary for the cells to differentiate or renew themselves. The finding could have implications in understanding brain development or in treating patients with immunotherapy.
“We wanted to develop a microfluidic device that could sort, image, and culture single cells in an automated, high-throughput way,” says Savas Tay, associate professor at the University of Chicago and lead author of the research, which appears in Science Advances.
“We achieved that, and now we have an understanding of how stem cells make decisions. That’s pretty exciting.”
A great article by Cory Doctorow about electronic voting - as probably the worst way to conceive of progressing democracy in the digital environment. Worth the read.
A critical flaw in Switzerland's e-voting system is a microcosm of everything wrong with e-voting, security practice, and auditing firms
Switzerland is about to have a national election with electronic voting, overseen by Swiss Post; e-voting is a terrible idea and the general consensus among security experts who don't work for e-voting vendors is that it shouldn't be attempted, but if you put out an RFP for magic beans, someone will always show up to sell you magic beans, whether or not magic beans exist.
Swiss Post contracted with Barcelona firm Scytl to build the system, then consulted with outside security experts and KPMG to audit the system, and then announced a bug-bounty program that would allow people who promised to only disclose defects on Swiss Post's terms to look at some of the source code.
This kind of bug bounty is pretty common, and firms like to assert that they can be trusted to be responsible stewards of bad news about their own products and should have the right to decide who can make truthful disclosures about their mistakes and the defects in their offerings. During the fight over DRM standardization for browsers at the W3C, we pointed out that one side-effect of adding DRM to browsers would be that browser vendors and media companies would acquire a new right to silence security researchers who wanted to make factual statements about security defects in their products. At first, the commercial members and browser vendors denied that this was the case, but eventually they decided that it was true, and that this was a feature, not a bug, and set about trying to craft rules for when it would be OK for companies to decide that users couldn't know about defects in their products.
The belief that companies can be trusted with this power defies all logic, but it persists. Someone found Swiss Post's embrace of the idea too odious to bear, and they leaked the source code that Swiss Post had shared under its nondisclosure terms, and then an international team of some of the world's top security experts (including some of our favorites, like Matthew Green) set about analyzing that code, and (as every security expert who doesn't work for an e-voting company has predicted since the beginning of time), they found an incredibly powerful bug that would allow a single untrusted party at Swiss Post to undetectably alter the election results.
It’s been over a decade since the first memristor was discovered/invented - however, as a computational paradigm it continues to be under development. This signal - harkens the mission impossible scene of self-destructive memory.
Now You See It Now You Don’t: A Soluble Memristor
This new memristor mimics the activity of neural networks, but can be thrown into water and dissolved if data is at risk of falling into the wrong hands
… scientists have long sought to mimic neural networks, which are both compact and efficient, with electronic devices. One way is with the development of memristors, devices that retain a “memory” of the direction and amount of electrical charge that has flowed through them. Over the past decade, researchers have made some progress in developing memristors, but the latest advance comes with a twist: This new memristor can dissolve in water.
While such a design could result in more environmentally friendly electronic devices, it is perhaps most useful for those who want to stop valuable information from falling into the hands of an enemy.
“Combining transient materials that can physically disappear on demand within a memristor device can be an effective way to achieve secure storage applications,” explains Hong Wang, a researcher at the School of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, at Xidian University. “For example, it can be more convenient for us to throw a transient storage device in water when information security is under serious threat. This [holds] great value for military applications, especially.”
Wang’s team recently published a description of their design for a soluble memristor in IEEE Electron Device Letters. Using a water-assisted transfer printing method, they were able to transfer layers of silver and magnesium oxide, in combination with tungsten-based electrodes, onto transient substrates. They arranged these components so that the end result is a memristor that mimics the signaling between neurons.
This is a fantastic signal - we have been locked-in by the QWERTY keyboards designed to slow us down - But in the age of software there should be no reason why keyboards can’t customizable for everyone and every language.
“We are now in the process of making our algorithms openly available, and we purposefully made them general for adaptability,” Feit says. “With new data from other languages it would be very easy to design for the next one, which is really exciting to us.
Merveilleux! New AZERTY Keyboard Makes It Easier to Type in French
Keyboards with algorithm-powered AZERTY standard rolling out this summer
Billions of people use keyboards daily, all across the globe. But the keys traditionally used were designed for English; special characters in other languages, like letters with accent marks, are difficult to access or missing altogether.
Now researchers have harnessed the power of the algorithm to create a new keyboard standard for French typists—and they say it’s easily adaptable to design new keyboards for all kinds of European languages.
The new AZERTY standard developed for France’s Ministry of Culture by AFNOR, the benchmark French body for voluntary standards, used a predictive algorithm to design a keyboard that is more intuitive and ergonomic for French speakers than the current AZERTY keyboard. It includes common French characters like œ and É, as well as 60 other new characters not included on the existing keyboard. Symbols such as @ and #, which have come into greater use in the age of Twitter and Facebook, have been moved to more accessible locations.
The project began in 2015, when the French government decided it wanted a new keyboard standard. A team at Finland’s Aalto University read about it in the news and, after consulting with a postdoc on their team from France, they seized the opportunity to apply their work in computational methods to the design.
