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:
Most interesting was that the swarm’s viscosity overpowered its elasticity, leading to the strong damping effect observed in the midges’ movements. “The way the insects are interacting not only allows them to all stay together, but makes them resilient to those external perturbations that might otherwise destroy the swarm,” Ouellette said. The damping effect makes the group more stable — which, he posits, might help the swarm stay in place so that females can find it.
If that’s the case, Hu said, “it means damping has some real biological relevance.”
How Swarming Insects Act Like Fluids
the spiritual welfare of this country depends altogether upon the fate of its creative minds. If they cannot grow and ripen, where are we going to get the new ideals, the finer attitudes, that we must get if we are ever to emerge from our existing travesty of a civilization? From this point of view our contemporary literature could hardly be in a graver state. We want bold ideas, and we have nuances. We want courage, and we have universal fear. We want individuality, and we have idiosyncrasy. We want vitality, and we have intellectualism. We want emblems of desire, and we have Niagaras of emotionality. We want expansion of soul, and we have an elephantiasis of the vocal organs. Why? Because we have no cultural economy, no abiding sense of spiritual values, no body of critical understanding? Of course; that is the burden of all our criticism. But these conditions result largely, I think, from another condition that is, in part at least, remediable. The present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value. But is this the only possible past? If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?
Discover, invent a usable past we cer- tainly can, and that is what a vital criticism always does.
What is important for us? What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American lit- erary mind, ought we to elect to remember? The more personally we answer this question, it seems to me, the more likely we are to get a vital order out of the anarchy of the present.
On Creating a Usable Past
VAN WYCK BROOKS - 1918 - The Dial - p.339
If you want to measure how the state of the world is changing, and that’s a valuable thing to do, you need some kind of reference point. It’s natural we take some past point and monitor things into the future. But when you reference back to some time in the past to identify how things are changed, it tempts us to think that this baseline is a more idealized way the world was or should be. Then you tend to think that the environment is deteriorating, when it may just be changing.
I also think that there’s the human social perspective. Many of us are reflecting on our childhoods, or maybe things that we have read about. In England we have loads of cultural traditions about snowy Christmases because there was a string of snowy years when Charles Dickens was a child, and he wrote about them. It’s well-known in social science circles that people often imagine a time, in the relatively recent-to-medium past, that was an idealized state of the world.
The difficulty is time goes forward. The biological processes of the birth and death of individuals, the better survival of some species than others, the evolution of new genetic types—all of the biological processes that take place on the planet—are dynamic ones. The expectation that things should stay exactly as they are is not a realistic expectation of the biological systems of the world.
Looking backward is really informative. It’s extremely valuable. Don’t get me wrong. But we should also, in our aspirations, look forward to how we might make things better for ourselves, even if that “better for ourselves” and whatever we care about, such as wildlife, becomes less like it was in the past.
Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?
We are supposedly living in the golden age of the American metropolis, with the same story playing out across the country. Dirty and violent downtowns typified by the “mean streets” of the 1970s became clean and safe in the 1990s. Young college graduates flocked to brunchable neighborhoods in the 2000s, and rich companies followed them with downtown offices.
New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.
The Future of the City Is Childless
It could be that the people aren’t as indifferent as we assume. This is a great signal of human sociality as well as signaling new research methods and capabilities arising in the digital environment.
The study finds that in nine out of 10 incidents, at least one bystander intervened, with an average of 3.8 interveners. There was also no significant difference across the three countries and cities, even though they differ greatly in levels of crime and violence.
Surveillance Cameras Debunk the Bystander Effect
A new study uses camera footage to track the frequency of bystander intervention in heated incidents in Amsterdam; Cape Town; and Lancaster, England.
It’s one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don’t count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behavior refuse to intervene.
Psychologists dubbed this non-response as the “bystander effect”—a phenomenon which has been replicated in scores of subsequent psychological studies. The “bystander effect” holds that the reason people don’t intervene is because we look to one another. The presence of many bystanders diffuses our own sense of personal responsibility, leading people to essentially do nothing and wait for someone else to jump in.
Past studies have used police reports to estimate the effect, but results ranged from 11 percent to 74 percent of incidents being interventions. Now, widespread surveillance cameras allow for a new method to assess real-life human interactions. A new study published this year in the American Psychologist finds that this well-established bystander effect may largely be a myth. The study uses footage of more than 200 incidents from surveillance cameras in Amsterdam; Cape Town; and Lancaster, England.
Researchers watched footage and coded the nature of the conflict, the number of direct participants in it, and the number of bystanders. Bystanders were defined as intervening if they attempted a variety of acts, including pacifying gestures, calming touches, blocking contact between parties, consoling victims of aggression, providing practical help to a physical harmed victim, or holding, pushing, or pulling an aggressor away. Each event had an average of 16 bystanders and lasted slightly more than three minutes.
This is a considered reflection of Craiglist via an interview with its founder.
Craigslist's Craig Newmark: 'Outrage is profitable. Most online outrage is faked for profit'
The founder of the online classifieds site is a survivor from the era of internet optimism. He has given significant sums to protect the future of news – and rejects the idea his website helped cause journalism’s financial crisis
After 24 years at Craigslist, often dealing with customers directly, Newmark reflects: “When you’re looking at tens or hundreds of ads in a day you get a better grasp of what people are really like than the more dramatic flare-ups. So that’s the basis for my optimism.”
Indeed, he remains convinced that the internet is still a positive for humanity. “It allows people of goodwill to get together and work together for common good. Bad actors are much louder, they make for more sensational news and we’re seeing a period of that now. The US, in a way, is lucky. Bad actors interfering with our elections may have had some success but their success is not complete and it means that people of goodwill are fighting back vigorously.
“I play a microscopic role in that. I find the people who do the real work and then I help fund them, I get them to talk with each other, and I’m funnier than they are. I remind myself that a nerd’s got to do what a nerd’s got to do and that’s my driving slogan. In my gut, that incorporates the notions of treating people like you want to be treated.”
How, then, would he like to be remembered? He considers for a moment before stepping outside to see the birds. “As a nerd that stayed true to his nerditude,” he says. “And that I knew that I wasn’t as funny as I think I am.”
This is an interesting signal - perhaps it’s a weak signal of the power of emerging artisanal enterprises or a stronger signal of the decline of the importance of shelf space in consumer ecologies as online shopping & delivery become easier and easier. Perhaps it signals both.
Consumers are piling into nouveau and generic brands — like Kylie Jenner's Kylie Cosmetics and Brandless —some of which aren't even sold in physical stores.
The companies that used to set the trends are now the followers. Desperate to remain relevant, old-line companies — already late — often jump into the fad of the moment.
Iconic brands lose their luster
From Oscar Mayer and Campbell's to Clairol and CoverGirl, some of America's most famous supermarket and drug store brands are losing market share as consumers' tastes and shopping habits change.
Why it matters: The challenges facing well-loved brands reflect shifts that aren't likely to swing back in their favor. As older companies scramble to keep up with upstart competitors, they are introducing more modern product lines, like ones with plant-based ingredients.
Driving the news: Legacy brands are concentrated within a handful of huge corporations that are losing money on various business lines as their products fade in relevance and popularity.
- Kraft Heinz said this year that the value of its Oscar Mayer and Kraft brands — with products like Oscar Mayer hot dogs, Jell-O and Kraft Mac & Cheese — were worth $15 billion less than it had previously stated.
- Coty, which purchased the Clairol and CoverGirl brands from Procter & Gamble 3 years ago, recently wrote down the value of those brands by $3 billion, following a previous writedown of $965 million.
- Sales of Campbell's namesake soups have fallen in 8 out of the past 10 fiscal years.
This is an important signal - about success leading to vapourware in the short term which can delay real success in the long run. This is a longish article worth while for anyone interested in the history of Watson.
How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care
After its triumph on Jeopardy!, IBM’s AI seemed poised to revolutionize medicine. Doctors are still waiting
In 2014, IBM opened swanky new headquarters for its artificial intelligence division, known as IBM Watson. Inside the glassy tower in lower Manhattan, IBMers can bring prospective clients and visiting journalists into the “immersion room,” which resembles a miniature planetarium. There, in the darkened space, visitors sit on swiveling stools while fancy graphics flash around the curved screens covering the walls. It’s the closest you can get, IBMers sometimes say, to being inside Watson’s electronic brain.
IBM’s partners at the University of North Carolina published the first paper about the effectiveness of Watson for Genomics in 2017. For 32 percent of cancer patients enrolled in that study, Watson spotted potentially important mutations not identified by a human review, which made these patients good candidates for a new drug or a just-opened clinical trial. But there’s no indication, as of yet, that Watson for Genomics leads to better outcomes.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs uses Watson for Genomics reports in more than 70 hospitals nationwide, says Michael Kelley, the VA’s national program director for oncology. The VA first tried the system on lung cancer and now uses it for all solid tumors. “I do think it improves patient care,” Kelley says. When VA oncologists are deciding on a treatment plan, “it is a source of information they can bring to the discussion,” he says. But Kelley says he doesn’t think of Watson as a robot doctor. “I tend to think of it as a robot who is a master medical librarian.”
Most doctors would probably be delighted to have an AI librarian at their beck and call—and if that’s what IBM had originally promised them, they might not be so disappointed today. The Watson Health story is a cautionary tale of hubris and hype. Everyone likes ambition, everyone likes moon shots, but nobody wants to climb into a rocket that doesn’t work.
Maybe there could be a simpler yet vital role for AI like Watson available to everyone. If food is medicine helping people figure out the best personal diet and outlining practical regimes of meals for their health would be a great contribution.
Medically tailored meals save lives. Health plans should cover their cost
If nutritious meals can provide the same kind of benefit as medication, then why don’t health plans cover the cost of medically tailored meals, just as they cover prescription medications? It’s a question my colleagues and I at Community Servings, a nonprofit organization that provides nutritious meals for people with critical illnesses who are too sick to feed themselves or their families, have been wrestling with for years.
The meals we provide keep people alive. Community Servings started in 1990 at the height of the AIDS crisis with meals for those living with HIV/AIDS. At the time, many people with this disease died of malnutrition as lean body mass was consumed to fight the virus. Today it serves people with a broad cross section of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and kidney disease. Community Servings now makes and delivers about 2,500 meals a day for as many as 15 different diets specially designed for particular illnesses or, in some cases, combinations of illnesses. Essentially, we manage complex dietary restrictions for people who are unable to do it on their own.
A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine provides added validation of the medical and economic benefits of medically tailored meals. Using data from Community Servings and a statewide claims database from Massachusetts, the researchers found a 16% reduction in health care costs among patients who received medically tailored meals. The savings were attributed to a reduction in admissions to hospitals and nursing homes.
Another signal of AI enhancing our capacity to design diets and meals to treat the full range of what ails us.
HyperFoods: Machine intelligent mapping of cancer-beating molecules in foods
Abstract
Recent data indicate that up-to 30–40% of cancers can be prevented by dietary and lifestyle measures alone. Herein, we introduce a unique network-based machine learning platform to identify putative food-based cancer-beating molecules. These have been identified through their molecular biological network commonality with clinically approved anti-cancer therapies. A machine-learning algorithm of random walks on graphs (operating within the supercomputing DreamLab platform) was used to simulate drug actions on human interactome networks to obtain genome-wide activity profiles of 1962 approved drugs (199 of which were classified as “anti-cancer” with their primary indications). A supervised approach was employed to predict cancer-beating molecules using these ‘learned’ interactome activity profiles. The validated model performance predicted anti-cancer therapeutics with classification accuracy of 84–90%. A comprehensive database of 7962 bioactive molecules within foods was fed into the model, which predicted 110 cancer-beating molecules (defined by anti-cancer drug likeness threshold of >70%) with expected capacity comparable to clinically approved anti-cancer drugs from a variety of chemical classes including flavonoids, terpenoids, and polyphenols. This in turn was used to construct a ‘food map’ with anti-cancer potential of each ingredient defined by the number of cancer-beating molecules found therein. Our analysis underpins the design of next-generation cancer preventative and therapeutic nutrition strategies.
On the other hand here is a signal of robotics and AI enhancing human capabilities and experiences - in the medical domain.
While Moxi’s job is to take as many mundane tasks as possible off nurses’ plates so that they could spend more time interacting with patients, the Diligent team was surprised to find that patients were fascinated by the robot and wanted to interact with it during their beta trials. Patients ended up being so infatuated with Moxi that they would ask for selfies with the robot; one child even sent Diligent Robotics a letter asking where Moxi lived.
The robot was so popular that the Diligent team programmed superfluous activities for Moxi to do once an hour so that the robot would wander around the floor and flash heart eyes at people. “In between tasks Moxi would make a social lap to talk to her fans,” Thomaz says.
A hospital introduced a robot to help nurses. They didn’t expect it to be so popular
Moxi is a robot designed to make nurses’ lives easier. But the friendly bot is turning out to be a welcome presence for some patients, too.
Nurses are in high demand: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of jobs for nurses will grow 15% from 2016 to 2026, which is much faster than other jobs. The current shortage has left hospitals in a crunch—and a few hospitals in Texas recently turned to an unusual solution: a robot named Moxi.
But Moxi, which was designed and built by the Austin-based company Diligent Robotics, isn’t trying to act like a nurse. Instead, Diligent Robotics founders Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu have designed their robot to run the approximately 30% of tasks nurses do that don’t involve interacting with patients, like running errands around the floor or dropping off specimens for analysis at a lab.
Moxi is equipped with a robotic arm and a set of wheels on its base, and can be preprogrammed to run errands around the hospital. It works like this: Moxi is hooked into the hospital’s electronic health record system. Nurses can set up rules and tasks so that the robot gets a command for an errand when certain things change in a patient’s record on Moxi’s floor. For instance, if a patient has been discharged and their room is marked clean in the health record, Moxi will get a command to take an admission bucket—a set of fresh supplies for a new patient—to the room so that it’s all ready to go for the next person.
This is a fascinating signal with very interesting implications for future employment.
Robots and firms
The rise of robots has sparked an intense debate about the labour market effects of their adoption. This column explores differences in robot adoption across firms and analyses the labour market effects of robot adoption at the firm level. It reveals a productivity-enhancing reallocation of labour and market shares across firms, with robot-adopting firms creating new job opportunities and expanding their scale of operations, while non-adopters experience negative output and employment effects in the face of tougher competition.
firm heterogeneity in the adoption of robots matters greatly for the labour market effects of robot technology. It demonstrates that firms that adopted robots between 1990 and 1998 (‘robot adopters’) increased the number of jobs by more than 50% between 1998 and 2016, while firms that did not adopt robots (‘non-adopters’) reduced the number of jobs by more than 20% over the same period. From macro-level information on robot use, as employed in the existing literature, it is impossible to identify and investigate this striking pattern in the data.
We provide strong support for a hitherto neglected mechanism, namely, that robot adopters expand their scale of operations and create jobs, while non-adopters experience negative output and employment effects in the face of tougher competition with high-technology firms. Aggregate productivity gains are partly driven by substantial intra-industry reallocation of market shares and resources following a more widespread diffusion of robot technology, and a polarization between high-productivity robot adopters and low-productivity non-adopters.
It is amazing that despite so much press dedicated to the ‘attack on science’ that there continues to be some incredible advances in fundamental science. We are definitely in a trajectory of 'hacking matter' molecular computers embedded in everything seems increasingly plausible. The much hyped idea of ‘hacking matter’ or the domestication of matter is producing stranger than fiction magic. The 3 min video does an excellent job in describing-illustrating the achievement.
Quantum Scientists Have Built The First Silicon Two-Qubit Gate Between Atom Qubits
In a major step forward for atomic-scale quantum computing, scientists have built the first two-qubit gate between atoms in silicon, allowing qubits to communicate with each other and perform operations faster than ever before.
Since a two-qubit gate is the fundamental building block of a quantum computer, this has pretty amazing implications.
"A lot of people thought this would not be possible," said quantum physicist Michelle Simmons of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.
Now, by placing two atom qubits closer together than they've ever been, and measuring and controlling their spin states in real time, a different team led by Simmons has reduced the time of a two-qubit operation to just 0.8 nanoseconds.
That's 200 times faster than any other two-qubit gate developed to date.
By many accounts Google is knocking on the door of quantum supremacy and could demonstrate it before the end of the year. (Of course, the same was said in 2017.) But a number of other groups have the potential to achieve quantum supremacy soon, including those at IBM, IonQ, Rigetti and Harvard University.
These groups are using several distinct approaches to building a quantum computer. Google, IBM and Rigetti perform quantum calculations using superconducting circuits. IonQ uses trapped ions. The Harvard initiative, led by Mikhail Lukin, uses rubidium atoms. Microsoft’s approach, which involves “topological qubits,” seems like more of a long shot.
Each approach has its pros and cons.
In Canada horizons of fundamental science are being pushed as well.
The search for dark matter
Drs. Gilles Gerbier and Alvine Kamaha listen for the "tiny music" of dark matter.
Alvine Kamaha, Post-doctoral fellow
Gilles Gerbier, Professor, Canada Excellence Research Chair
Queen's Department of Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy
Gilles Gerbier: The experiments I am working on at SNOLAB are designed to test hypotheses on the nature of dark matter particles. There is a lot of evidence that there is dark matter – not ordinary matter (protons, neutrons, electrons) – particles of a different nature.
The goal of our experiments is to detect these particles. We know the impact they should have on detectors and on matter, and we know the interactions are going to be tiny and very rare.
Dark matter is our little music – it is very tiny music and to listen to it, we have to take off all the noise from all the other particles.
The detectors have to be very good – we’ve been building detectors for 30 years now, and still we haven’t seen any hint of dark matter. We have to build new and better detectors. This is what we are developing in my group – detectors that are sensitive to a mass at the lower end of the mass range (such as the proton). I proposed two experiments focusing on the quality of the instruments to address this low mass. You cannot buy these detectors off the shelf.
Alvine Kamaha: I am working on one of those experiments, called New Experiments With Spheres (NEWS). It’s basically a spherical vessel made of a metallic material (like copper or stainless steel) that contains a tiny ball attached to a rod.
The sphere is filled with gas that has certain properties – when dark matter particles interact in the detector, they could deposit energy and ionize the gas. When the tiny ball is put to high voltage, the electrons liberated in the gas will drift toward the centre. Because of the high electric field at the ball, there will be an avalanche. The drifting of the ions from the avalanche yields an electrical pulse that is recorded. You collect a bunch of these avalanche data. They can sometimes lead you to dark matter and sometimes they can lead you to other things.
At the end of the day, analyzing the collected data, you remove what is not dark matter and you are left with what you think might be dark matter.
This is a good signal of the emerging transformation of our energy infrastructure.
EV charge points to be built on every new UK home
Electric vehicle (EV) charge points will be built on every new UK home or office with a car parking space, under new plans unveiled by the government today (July 15).
The UK would be the first government in the world to introduce the legislation, which it says will make charging easier, cheaper and more convenient for drivers.
Currently, the government provides a grant of £500 towards the cost of installing a charge point at home which they claim has seen over 100,000 domestic charge points installed to date.
They also say that to mitigate any negative impact on housing supply due to the cost of creating a new connection to the grid, they are proposing an exemption of £3600 per charging point, which is more than three times the average cost of an electrical capacity connection required for one charge point.
A counter signal to the current stream of ‘end-of-times’ gloom.
Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?
We are ignoring the gains that balance the losses.
After decades of researching the impact that humans are having on animal and plant species around the world, Chris Thomas has a simple message: Cheer up. Yes, we’ve wiped out woolly mammoths and ground sloths, and are finishing off black rhinos and Siberian tigers, but the doom is not all gloom. Myriad species, thanks in large part to humans who inadvertently transport them around the world, have blossomed in new regions, mated with like species and formed new hybrids that have themselves gone forth and prospered. We’re talking mammals, birds, trees, insects, microbes—all your flora and fauna. “Virtually all countries and islands in the world have experienced substantial increases in the numbers of species that can be found in and on them,” writes Thomas in his new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction.
Thomas is a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in England. He is not easily pigeonholed. He has been a go-to scientist for the media and lawmakers on how climate change is scorching the life out of animals and plants. At the same time he can turn around and write, “Wild geese, swans, storks, herons and cranes are returning as well, and the great whales, the largest animals ever to have lived on Earth, are once more plying their way across our seaways in numbers after centuries of unsustainable butchery.” Glass half empty, meet Chris Thomas.
I think I must have watched about 80% of all zombie movies ever made - I think zombies are a 20th-21st Century Archetype - the perfect homo-economicus consumer with an eternal simple desire to maximize a universal lack ‘brains’ and blood (vitality-life). Zombies as an archetype emerge with the narrative of a simple, atomistic, isolated, selfish, individual. The question of our era is ‘What is an individual’ - In this case - is it the ‘ant’, the ‘ant-fungus’ or the colony?
The images are creepy - but compelling.
A deadly fungus gives ‘zombie’ ants a case of lockjaw
Closeups of infected ants’ jaw muscles may reveal clues to how the fungi take over
Fungus-infected “zombie” ants are known to scale a plant, sink their jaws into a leaf or twig and wait to die while the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungi feast on the insects’ bodies. Eventually, a fungal stalk shoots out of the ant’s head and releases spores that rain down and infect more ants below.
The carpenter ants’ part in this nightmare may seem dictated by mind control, but the fungi don’t colonize the ants’ brains. Instead, the fungi take over ants’ jaws, forcing the muscles to contract into a death grip, researchers report July 17 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
To unravel what exactly the fungus is doing to ants, scientists peered at infected ants’ stripy, striated jaw muscle fibers using scanning electron microscopy. “In infected muscles at the time of the death grip, … [the] lines appear really swollen,” says Colleen Mangold, a molecular biologist at Penn State University. The fungi wreck the muscle fibers but don’t seem to disturb the communication system that controls the muscles.
It’s still a mystery how the fungus initiates the death grip. But researchers may have found a clue: Tiny particles resembling clusters of grapes show up on infected muscle fibers.
Mangold and her colleagues think these particles may be extracellular vesicles, or packages of molecules, that are produced by either the invader or the host. If the orbs are vesicles, they may contain messages used by the fungi to take over ant bodies or play a role in the ants’ response, says Mangold.
