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:
Eurocentric commerce and scholarship have tended to focus on industrial forms of top-down production, meaning-making, and media that privilege the idea of a singular author, and by extension a singular authority. This methodology of media production often serves as a rationalization of extractive, harmful, and commodifying practices.
By contrast, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her 2009 lecture: “When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” Co-creation is increasingly recognized in such areas as education, healthcare, technology and urban design. Although each of these and other fields have distinct approaches, fundamentally co-creation is an alternative to—and often a contestation of— a singular voice, authority, and/or process. Further, within digital infrastructures, the lines between audiences, subjects, and makers are blurred, and often erased.
Collective Wisdom - CO-CREATING MEDIA WITHIN COMMUNITIES, ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND WITH ALGORITHMS
What if performance is incorrectly attributed to win-lose competition and is, in effect, more a result of diversity, self-organizing communication and non-competitive processes of creative cooperation?
The basic units of the industrial era were transacting entities enabled by market, price and coordination mechanisms. It was a world of separations, us versus them.
In terms of game theory, on a societal level, we are playing win-lose, them-against-us, games. That is strangely fundamental to our theory of life, although it is then essentially a zero-sum dynamic behind most of the things we do.
Every time we replace natural, complex systems with simplified us-versus-them, win-lose -cultures we gain in short-term productivity, but at the cost of long-term resilience and viability. Accordingly, many organizations are productive in the short term, but fragile in the long term. As long as the environment remains exactly the same, simplified systems are efficient, but they immediately become counterproductive when the environment changes even slightly. And it always will.
The games we play have been played under the assumption that the unit of survival is the player, meaning the individual, a company, or a country. However, today the reality is that the unit of survival is the player in the game being played.
Following Darwinian rhetoric, the unit of survival is the species in its interdependent environment. Who wins and who loses is of minor importance compared to the decay of the game itself as a result of the competition.
In the future of economics, one of the key defining criteria has to be that the incentive of every agent in the living system, at least in theory, has to be aligned with the well-being of every other agent, every other person and every other living thing.
Our humanity needs to develop at the same speed as our technology
We can expect huge advances on three frontiers: the very small, the very large, and the very complex. Nonetheless – and I’m sticking my neck out here – my hunch is there’s a limit to what we can understand. Efforts to understand very complex systems, such as our own brains, might well be the first to hit such limits. Perhaps complex aggregates of atoms, whether brains or electronic machines, can never know all there is to know about themselves.
The chess-champion Garry Kasparov argues in Deep Thinking (2017) that ‘human plus machine’ is more powerful than either alone. Perhaps it’s by exploiting the strengthening symbiosis between the two that new discoveries will be made. For example, it will become progressively more advantageous to use computer simulations rather than run experiments in drug development and material science. Whether the machines will eventually surpass us to a qualitative degree – and even themselves become conscious – is a live controversy.
Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity, spanning tens of millennia at most, will probably be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the post-human era – evolved not by Darwinian selection but via ‘intelligent design’. Whether the long-range future lies with organic post-humans or with electronic super-intelligent machines is a matter for debate. But we would be unduly anthropocentric to believe that a full understanding of physical reality is within humanity’s grasp, and that no enigmas will remain to challenge our remote descendants.
Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits
This is a very important signal of not only changes in demographics, social structure but also of the future of identity and the concept of family and community.
“My most important family,” says Dan, who has been single his entire life, “is the family that I’ve selected and brought together.”
Dan has never been married. He doesn’t have kids. Not long ago, his choice of lifestyle would have been highly unusual, even pitied.
The rising tide of solo dwellers is creating, sustaining, and perhaps even strengthening, the ties that bind us.
… More than a century of statistical scrutiny tells us that any link between singlehood and asocial behavior, including suicide, has been vastly overstated, if one exists at all.
Families of Choice Are Remaking America
Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.
In 1950, 78 percent of households in the United States had a married couple at its helm; more than half of those included children. “The accepted wisdom was that the post-World War II nuclear family style was the culmination of a long journey—the end point of changes in families that had been occurring for several hundred years,” sociologist John Scanzoni wrote in 2001.
But that wisdom was wrong: The meaning of family is morphing once again. Fueled by a convergence of historical currents—including birth control and the rising status of women, increased wealth and social security, LGBTQ activism, and the spread of personal communication technologies and social media—more people are choosing to live alone than ever before.
Pick a random American household today, and it’s more likely to look like Dan’s than like Ozzie and Harriet’s. Nearly half of adults ages 18 and older are single. About 1 in 7 live alone. Americans are marrying later, divorcing in larger numbers, and becoming less interested in remarrying. According to the Pew Research Center, by the time today’s young adults reach age 50, a quarter of them will have never married at all.
The surge of singlehood is not just an American phenomenon. Between 1980 and 2011, the number of one-person households worldwide more than doubled, from about 118 million to 277 million, and will rise to 334 million by 2020, according to Euromonitor International. More than a dozen countries, including Japan and several European nations, now have even larger proportions of solo-dwellers than the U.S. (Sweden ranks highest at almost 50 percent.) Individuals, not couples or clans or other social groups, are fast becoming the fundamental units of society.
Here’s another signal - I’m not sure just how strong it is - but interesting all the same.
Why Children Born in Big Cities Earn More As Adults
Just being born in a big city has a positive effect on later-life wages, new research finds.
For the world’s cities, the advantages of size have only grown. Big, superstar cities attract more talent and have higher rates of productivity and innovation than smaller cities. And the people who work in these cities tend to make more money. But does simply being born in a big city confer a lifelong advantage?
That’s the question at the heart of a new study published in the Journal of Urban Economics. In the study, economists Clément Bosquet of the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France and Henry G. Overman of the London School of Economics use detailed data from the British Household Panel Survey to track the connection between the size of an individual’s birth city in Britain and their earnings as a working adult. The minimum sample (after cleaning) is 7,500 individuals aged 16 and older, interviewed multiple times from 1991 to 2009.
What they find: The size of one’s birth city does have a sizable effect on later-life earnings. Technically speaking, the elasticity of wages with respect to the size of birthplace is 4.2 percent—two-thirds of the elasticity with respect to current city size (6.8 percent). That’s a pretty big effect. For example, controlling only for demographic characteristics like age and gender, a person born London in 1971 will make, on average, 6.6 percent more than someone born in Manchester and 9.3 percent more than someone born in Liverpool.
This is a wonderful use of data visualization to provide a 6 min video illustrating the pattern of immigration to the US from 1830 to 2015. Well worth the view for anyone interested in demographic change as well as some insight into current and future political changes in the U.S.
For a radical new perspective on immigration, picture the US as an ancient tree
With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country’s population growth through immigration. Cruz depicts these accumulating figures as an ageing tree trunk, with each new ring accounting for a decade of population growth, and each coloured cell representing 100 immigrants from a cultural-geographical region. According to Cruz, the tree metaphor ‘carries the idea that these marks in the past are immutable’ and it ‘embodies the concept that all cells contributed to the organism’s growth’. As with so many renderings of US history, indigenous populations are conspicuously absent from the tableau. Still, Cruz’s skilfully deployed data doubles as a resonant work of cultural commentary, offering a rich and often surprising look at the ever-evolving makeup of the country.
This is an interesting signal - one consistent with a re-imagining of our institutions for the digital environment. This article has inspired me to imagine how current institutions could be re-imagined for the digital environment. For example - the Post Office of every nation could provide and register an individual domain name (Internet Protocol - IP address) for everyone - given to them at birth. Furthermore the Post Office could host a basic website and storage for every individual. Thus mail (email and snail-mail) is then addressed via their personal domain name. Information can be changed by the individual and all information duly encrypted. This is no less a massive change then was required for every house to have an address.
A Simple Plan to Make Moving Less Awful
Missing mail can be disastrous. A permanent postal PIN would fix the problem.
To take the pain out of changing addresses, the USPS should allow customers to register for unique, portable, and permanent “mailing PINs.” These PINs would be connected to your preferred delivery address. Following any relocation, you would simply log in to the USPS website (or stop by the local post office) and change the address linked to the PIN. Anyone who has your PIN will always be able to reach you by mail, no matter how many times you move. No more dealing with magazine subscription service departments or change-of-address forms. No more missed mail after moves.
In addition to facilitating permanent relocations, these PINs could also reroute mail during temporary living situations like seasonal jobs or internships, shared custody arrangements, extended vacations, or stays with friends and family during financial emergencies. This portability would be akin to your ability to keep a cell phone number after switching carriers—a right that has been protected by the Federal Communications Commission since 2003—or a permanent personal email address.
Mailing PINs would also give us greater control over our personal information. Right now, any website or company you’ve ordered something from could have a record of your home address in a database that is vulnerable to breach—a concern magnified by recent retail hacks and the rise of “peer-to-peer” transactions facilitated through sites like Etsy and eBay. Under this new system, it would be possible to order packages without divulging exactly where you live. All you would have to do is provide your mailing PIN. Only the USPS would be able to connect it to your home address.
This is a good signal of changing approaches to scientific collaboration that precedes the research and publication of research. Simple and proactive.
Our experience with the Registered Report format
“This is the review process we have both learned the most from,” say psychologists Joyce He and Stéphane Côté, who authored one of two pioneering Registered Reports in Nature Human Behaviour. In this approach, peer review and the decision to publish precede data collection and analysis. The process felt more collaborative and less confrontational, say He and Côté, and knowing the study would be published — no matter what — made the decision to fund an expensive experiment easier. “I for one will find it difficult to go back to ‘traditional’ ways of publishing research,” said Côté on Twitter.
We decided to try the RR format for the first time when around the same time:
- We learned that Nature Human Behavior started welcoming these types of contributions
- We attended a session on pre-registration and RRs at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference that addressed many of our questions about the format
- We were planning studies on self-insight and adjustment that seemed important for both theoretical and practical reasons.
This is an interesting signal about the transformation of retail delivery - it is definitely not ready for primetime - and will likely require more regulation.
Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash
An emergency parachute failure raises questions about the safety of urban delivery drones
For about a year, Swiss Post and Matternet have been collaborating on a drone delivery service in three different cities in Switzerland, with drones ferrying lab samples between hospitals far faster and more efficiently than is possible with conventional ground transportation. The service had made about 3,000 successful flights as of last January, but a January 25th crash into Lake Zurich put things on hold until April.
A second crash in May caused Swiss Post to suspend the service indefinitely, and a recently released interim report published by the Swiss Safety Investigation Board provides some detail on what happened—and a reminder that for all the delivery drone hype, there are some basic problems that are still not totally solved.
Swiss Post’s delivery drones are made by Matternet, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup that has raised over $25 million in funding. Matternet’s drones are fairly conventional quadrotors, but large ones, designed to carry 2-kilogram payloads up to 10 kilometers with a total system weight of over 10 kg.
It is not only hardware that continues to evolve - the programming languages that enable software also evolve - and will be necessary to help hardware-software do more, faster.
According to Alan Edelman, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who co-created Julia, the language has been downloaded some 9 million times so far. Julia is now listed among the world’s 50 most-popular programming languages, according to one index.
Julia: come for the syntax, stay for the speed
Researchers often find themselves coding algorithms in one programming language, only to have to rewrite them in a faster one. An up-and-coming language could be the answer.
Launched in 2012, Julia is an open-source language that combines the interactivity and syntax of ‘scripting’ languages, such as Python, Matlab and R, with the speed of ‘compiled’ languages such as Fortran and C.
Jane Herriman, who is studying materials science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says that she has seen tenfold-faster runs since rewriting her Python codes in Julia. Michael Stumpf, a systems biologist and self-styled Julia proselytizer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who has ported computational models from R, has seen an 800-fold improvement. “You can do things in an hour that would otherwise take weeks or months,” he says.
That acceleration, combined with Julia’s user-friendly syntax and its promise to tackle the ‘two-language problem’ — researchers often prototype algorithms in a user-friendly language such as Python but then have to rewrite them in a faster language — is raising the language’s profile, particularly among those dealing with computationally intensive problems. Besides climate modelling, the language is being adopted in disciplines such as artificial intelligence, finance and bioinformatics.
This is a good signal of the change in computing paradigm - using the memristor tailored toward ever more powerful AI.
First Programmable Memristor Computer
Michigan team builds memristors atop standard CMOS logic to demo a system that can do a variety of edge computing AI tasks
Hoping to speed AI and neuromorphic computing and cut down on power consumption, startups, scientists, and established chip companies have all been looking to do more computing in memory rather than in a processor’s computing core. Memristors and other nonvolatile memory seem to lend themselves to the task particularly well. However, most demonstrations of in-memory computing have been in standalone accelerator chips that either are built for a particular type of AI problem or that need the off-chip resources of a separate processor in order to operate. University of Michigan engineers are claiming the first memristor-based programmable computer for AI that can work on all its own.
“Memory is really the bottleneck,” says University of Michigan professor Wei Lu. “Machine learning models are getting larger and larger, and we don’t have enough on-chip memory to store the weights.” Going off-chip for data, to DRAM, say, can take 100 times as much computing time and energy. Even if you do have everything you need stored in on-chip memory, moving it back and forth to the computing core also takes too much time and energy, he says. “Instead, you do the computing in the memory.”
His lab has been working with memristors (also called resistive RAM, or RRAM), which store data as resistance, for more than a decade and has demonstrated the mechanics of their potential to efficiently perform AI computations such as the multiply-and-accumulate operations at the heart of deep learning. Arrays of memristors can do these tasks efficiently because they become analog computations instead of digital.
This is an early weak signal but one that promises a safer, healthier way to deal with microplastics that are currently an ecological hazard.
Magnetic 'springs' break down marine microplastic pollution
Plastic waste that finds its way into oceans and rivers poses a global environmental threat with damaging health consequences for animals, humans, and ecosystems. Now, using tiny coil-shaped carbon-based magnets, researchers in Australia have developed a new approach to purging water sources of the microplastics that pollute them without harming nearby microorganisms. Their work appears July 31 in the journal Matter.
To decompose the microplastics, the researchers had to generate short-lived chemicals called reactive oxygen species, which trigger chain reactions that chop the various long molecules that make up microplastics into tiny and harmless segments that dissolve in water.
Shaped like springs, the carbon nanotube catalysts removed a significant fraction of microplastics in just eight hours while remaining stable themselves in the harsh oxidative conditions needed for microplastics breakdown. The coiled shape increases stability and maximises reactive surface area. As a bonus, by including a small amount of manganese, buried far from the surface of the nanotubes to prevent it from leaching into water, the minute springs became magnetic.
This is a great signal of domesticating DNA, understanding bio-energy-sources and possibly an important lever to how evolution can find new ways to produce energy.
A marine microbe could play increasingly important role in regulating climate
A USC-led research team has found that marine microbes with a special metabolism are ubiquitous and could play an important role in how Earth regulates climate.
The study finds bacteria containing rhodopsins, a sunshine-grabbing pigment, are more abundant than once thought. Unlike algae, they don't pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air. And they will likely become more abundant in warming oceans, signaling a shuffling of microbial communities at the base of the food chain where the nitty-gritty work of energy conversion occurs.
"Oceans are important for climate change because they play a key role in the carbon cycle. Understanding how that works, and the marine organisms involved, helps us refine our climate models to predict climate in the future," said Laura Gómez-Consarnau, assistant professor (research) of biology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The study appears today in Science Advances. Gómez-Consarnau is the lead author among an international team of scientists from California, China, the United Kingdom and Spain.
The findings break from the traditional interpretation of marine ecology found in textbooks, which states that nearly all sunlight in the ocean is captured by chlorophyll in algae. Instead, rhodopsin-equipped bacteria function like hybrid cars, powered by organic matter when available—as most bacteria are—and by sunlight when nutrients are scarce.
Here is another important signal for meeting the challenges of water availability.
"Our study shows that the use of low-cost "free" heat—such as geothermal or solar heat or industrial waste heat generated by machines—combined with thermally responsive ionic liquids could offset a large fraction of costs that goes into current RO desalination technologies that solely rely on electricity."
Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater
As populations boom and chronic droughts persist, coastal cities like Carlsbad in Southern California have increasingly turned to ocean desalination to supplement a dwindling fresh water supply. Now scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) investigating how to make desalination less expensive have hit on promising design rules for making so-called "thermally responsive" ionic liquids to separate water from salt.
Ionic liquids are a liquid salt that binds to water, making them useful in forward osmosis to separate contaminants from water. Even better are thermally responsive ionic liquids as they use thermal energy rather than electricity, which is required by conventional reverse osmosis (RO) desalination for the separation. The new Berkeley Lab study, published recently in the journal Nature Communications Chemistry, studied the chemical structures of several types of ionic liquid/water to determine what "recipe" would work best.
This is definitely a good signal, although the title is a little misleading - it represents an order of magnitude improvement.
Clearing up the 'dark side' of artificial leaves
Artificial leaves work by converting carbon dioxide to fuel and water to oxygen using energy from the sun. The two processes take place separately and simultaneously on either side of a photovoltaic cell: the oxygen is produced on the "positive" side of the cell and fuel is produced on the "negative" side.
Singh, who is the corresponding author of a new paper in ACS Applied Energy Materials, says that current artificial leaves are wildly inefficient. They wind up converting only 15% of the carbon dioxide they take in into fuel and release 85% of it, along with oxygen gas, back to the atmosphere.
Singh, in collaboration with Caltech researchers Meng Lin, Lihao Han and Chengxiang Xiang, devised a system that uses a bipolar membrane that prevents the bicarbonate anions from reaching the "positive" side of the leaf while neutralizing the proton produced.
The membrane placed in between the two sides of the photoelectrochemical cell keeps the carbon dioxide away from the acidic side of the leaf, preventing its escape back into the atmosphere. Artificial leaves using this specialized membrane turned 60% to 70% of the carbon dioxide they took in into fuel.
Another signal regarding how useful AI will be in many forms of limited applications.
Researchers Say This AI Can Spot Unsafe Food on Amazon Faster Than the FDA
In a study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the researchers detail the steps they went through to train their neural network, which started with the arduous task of collecting 1,297,156 reviews of food products sold on Amazon.com and then matched 5,149 of them to products that had been officially recalled by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2012 and 2014.
The next step was to teach a type of deep learning AI known as a Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformations—or BERT, for short—to spot telltale terminology in these reviews that could indicate a product was legitimately unsafe. That required real people to sort 6,000 of the collected reviews that contained the same words and terminology the FDA used to justify recalls (like “sick,” “rotten,” and even “label”) into four different categories. Those included if the reviewer got sick, had an allergic reaction, or found an error in the product’s labeling; the product looked or tasted bad, was expired, or needed further inspection; the reviewer made no claims the product was unsafe; or none of the previous three categorizations.
Using the sorted reviews, as well as additional information like the review’s title and the number of stars the reviewer gave the product, the BERT AI was able to correctly identify which foods had been officially recalled by the FDA with around 74-percent accuracy. But it also managed to identify red flags in over 20,000 other food products, most of which have yet to be officially recalled.
On the other hand - AI may contribute to more unwelcomed ‘nudging’ of behavioral architectures.
CHASE COMMITS TO AI AFTER MACHINES OUTPERFORM HUMANS IN COPYWRITING TRIALS
Bank enters a five-year deal with AI partner Persado to help create marketing language across platforms
Chase is getting more creative with its marketing language—by tapping machines to write it. The bank announced Tuesday it has signed a five-year deal with Persado, a New York-based company that applies artificial intelligence to marketing creative. Chase began testing a pilot relationship with Persado three years ago, by using the tool for its card and mortgage businesses. That relationship has now expanded across the financial giant’s platforms.
Chase says that ads created by Persado’s machine learning performed better than ads written by humans, with a higher percent of consumers clicking on them—more than twice as many in some cases. The difference can be as simple as what word choice resonates with consumers. One digital ad written by humans read, “Access cash from the equity in your home.” However, Persado’s version, “It’s true—You can unlock cash from the equity in your home,” performed better with customers.
A good signal of the emerging phase transition in energy creation and storage.
Tesla’s Megapack battery is big enough to help grids handle peak demand
A new industrial storage product coming as the company’s lost its lead in home solar
Tesla announced a new massive battery today called Megapack that could replace so-called “peaker” power plants, which provide energy when a local electrical grid gets overloaded. Tesla says that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will deploy several Megapacks at Moss Landing on Monterrey Bay in California, which is one of four locations where the California utility plans to install more cost-effective energy storage solutions.
Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy at a time, and it’s possible to string enough Megapacks together to create a battery with more than 1 GWh of energy storage, Tesla says. The company says this would be enough energy to power “every home in San Francisco for six hours.” Telsa will deliver the Megapacks fully assembled, and they include “battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls.” Tesla says the Megapack takes up 40 percent less space, requires a tenth of the parts to build, and can be assembled 10 times as fast as alternative energy storage solutions.
This is a key signal getting stronger for the transformation of transportation.
Electric Car Price Tag Shrinks Along With Battery Cost
The crossover point — when electric vehicles become cheaper than their combustion-engine equivalents — will be a crucial moment for the EV market.
Every year, that crossover point gets closer. In 2017, a Bloomberg NEF analysis forecast that the crossover point was in 2026, nine years out. In 2018, the crossover point was in 2024 — six years (or, as I described it then, two lease cycles) out.
The crossover point, per the latest analysis, is now 2022 for large vehicles in the European Union. For that, we can thank the incredible shrinking electric vehicle battery, which isn’t so much shrinking in size as it is shrinking — dramatically — in cost.
Analysts have for several years been using a sort of shorthand for describing an electric vehicle battery: half the car’s total cost. That figure, and that shorthand, has changed in just a few years. For a midsize U.S. car in 2015, the battery made up more than 57 percent of the total cost. This year, it’s 33 percent. By 2025, the battery will be only 20 percent of total vehicle cost.
This is a fascinating signal of just how complex the earth’s ecosystems are.
African smoke is fertilizing Amazon rainforest and oceans, study finds
A new study led by researchers at the University of Miami's (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science found that smoke from fires in Africa may be the most important source of a key nutrient—phosphorus—that acts as a fertilizer in the Amazon rainforest, Tropical Atlantic and Southern oceans.
Nutrients found in atmospheric particles, called aerosols, are transported by winds and deposited to the ocean and on land where they stimulate the productivity of marine phytoplankton and terrestrial plants leading to the sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
"It had been assumed that Saharan dust was the main fertilizer to the Amazon Basin and Tropical Atlantic Ocean by supplying phosphorus to both of these ecosystems," said the study's senior author Cassandra Gaston, an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the UM Rosenstiel School. "Our findings reveal that biomass burning emissions transported from Africa are potentially a more important source of phosphorus to these ecosystems than dust."
This is another fascinating signal of how the future can change the past - or at least our understanding of the past.
Looking to the future, Parcak predicts artificial intelligence will be the next big thing in space archaeology. She estimates that only about 10 percent of Earth’s land has been mapped for archaeological sites, and machines will scan satellite data much faster than humans. For now, citizen scientists can help via Parcak’s online platform GlobalXplorer.
Satellites are transforming how archaeologists study the past
‘Archaeology from Space’ describes how remote sensing helps locate and monitor ancient sites
The term “space archaeology” may conjure up images of astronauts hunting for artifacts from little green men, but the field is much more down to Earth. Space archaeologists use satellite imagery and other remote-sensing techniques to look for ancient sites on our planet. As archaeologist Sarah Parcak explains in her new book, Archaeology from Space, these tools have transformed studies of antiquity. “We’ve gone from mapping a few dozen ancient sites in one summer-long archaeological season to mapping hundreds, if not thousands, of sites in weeks,” she writes.
As a lover of scotch and whiskey this is something I didn’t expect would replace human expertise - but who knows how long the wine taster has?
"In addition to its obvious potential for use in identifying counterfeit alcohols, it could be used in food safety testing, quality control, security—really any area where a portable, reusable method of tasting would be useful."
Artificial 'tongue' can distinguish between whiskies
Experts at the University of Glasgow have built the miniature taster which can even tell the difference between the same brand aged in different barrels, with more than 99 percent accuracy.
It can also distinguish between whiskies aged 12, 15 and 18 years.
The technology can identify a host of different chemicals within a complex mixture.
It could be used not only for quality control but also to combat the booming counterfeit alcohol trade: the method found several hugely expensive bottles of whisky to be fake.
The valuation and consultancy service Rare Whisky 101 found last year in laboratory tests that of 55 "rare" Scotch whiskies bought on the secondary market, 21 were discovered to be fake.
The 21 bottles collectively could have been valued at around £635,000 ($775,000, 692,000 euros), had they been genuine.
I’ve only recently discovered Dr Cornel West. I find him an amazing human mind and heart that can engage in conversation, discourse and critique with genuine humanity - that doesn’t succumb to reducing others to objects. He is erudite in ideas and the arts. I believe he signals a new way to integrate our sciences and arts in a human conversation. Well worth engaging with. This is one example.
Dr. Cornel West, "Race Matters...A Timely Discussion on the Fabric of America."
the 2019 Collins Distinguished Speakers' Lecture
April 26, 2019 - University of Oregon
Cornel West is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Harvard Divinity School and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is an ardent political activist, a keen social critic, and a prolific writer. His publications include Race Matters (1993); The Future of the Race (1996), written with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (2014), written with Tavis Smiley.
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