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
Contents
Quotes:
Articles
narrative research is part of historical research. It consists in finding the form of recounting that does the most justice to the facts. For example, history is most often related in chronological order, whereas historical investigation starts from the present. It takes off from a source that is necessarily current, a remnant or an archive, and goes back into the past. Consequently, the “natural ” order of our access to events is, paradoxically, not that of the chronological account. In order to recount, not how an event happened, but how this is known, it is necessary to describe the investigation.
A Different Perspective on African History
“Economists are tellers of stories and makers of poems,” wrote the economic historian Deidre McCloskey in 1990. It’s a curious observation for a profession that prides itself on hard-nosed, quantitative analysis and strives continually for predictive power. The Nobel-prizewinning economist Robert Shiller goes even further.
Stories are more powerful than statistics, he claims. The irrationality inherent in financial exuberance (and despair) defies the neat territory of numbers and demands a deeper excursion into the decidedly unruly world of narratives. That is the declared aim of his book Narrative Economics.
The storied state of economics
The existence of money, importantly, does not entail the existence of a market, for some form of money has been around in almost all human societies. Money simply provides a recognized unit of value. That unit can be a price in the market, but it can also be the size of a gift or a measure of need. Equating money with coinage, as is commonly done, confuses form with function. It implies that money embodies value when it simply represents value. Money can take the form of something with use value (cattle, grain), something with social value (a special stone, shells), something with little or no value (paper, wood, base metal), or even something with no physical form (bank transfers, verbal promises). The unit of value may be either tangible (sheep, beads) or intangible (pound, dollar, euro).
Money, in other words, is a social and political construct. Using money does not intrinsically encourage human exploitation or ecological destruction. It is neoliberal capitalist ideology that puts monetary gain above social and ecological concerns, and it is the private, bank-issued money system that leaves us with a pernicious cycle of debt and growth. Money could encourage socially and ecologically sustainable production and consumption, but only if it ceases to be a creature of the market and is reclaimed as a social and public representation of value.
One of the most significant obstacles to reclaiming money for the public good is the widespread misunderstanding of what money is. The conventional history of money rests on a series of myths that obscure its social and political origins. The first myth is that money and the market share a common origin, with modern money-based economies emerging from non-money barter. There is no historical evidence of widespread barter-based economies, and money, as the next section will explain, has a far more complex social and political history. The second myth is that money originated as precious metal coinage. While money has at times been made of such metal, it has also taken far less valuable forms whose use long predated the invention of coinage. Seeing money as made of something valuable (gold, silver) suggests that money is desirable in itself, an embodiment of value. Recognizing that money is valueless in itself (base metal, wood, paper) helps one to see it as a token representing a social relationship—what it really is.
Assumptions about the historical importance of precious metal coinage gave rise to a third myth: that banking activity emerged from the management of precious metal deposits that eventually came to be represented by paper money and accounting records. In reality, banking activity originated long before precious metal coinage, with accounting records as a central feature. This historical misapprehension, in turn, helped create a fourth myth: that banks today merely link savers (depositors) and borrowers. As has been increasingly recognized by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the International Monetary Fund, and has long been argued by monetary theorists, banks, in fact, create new money when they make loans, crediting deposits of previously nonexistent money to the accounts of those who receive them. Public monetary authorities retain a monopoly on the production of cash (notes and coin), but the money that banks create is also part of the national money supply and circulates through the economy as such.
These widespread myths all rest on a misreading of the history of money.
Money for the People
As in the 1990’s, when Big Tobacco felt its home market dwindling, the companies decided to stimulate smoking in the Third World. Facebook’s tactics are reminiscence of that. Today, it subsidizes connectivity in the developing world, offering attractive deals to telecoms in Asia and Africa, in exchange for making FB the main gateway to the internet. In India, Facebook went a bit too far with Free Basic, an ill-fated attempt to corner the internet by providing a free or nearly free data plan. Having some experience with Western colonialism, the Indian government rejected the deal (read this superb investigation by the Guardian).
Mark Zuckerberg is not giving up on capturing the global internet experience inside Facebook’s walled garden. Far from it. The Internet.org initiative embodies Zuck’s dream of granting global access to the internet, extolling its benefit for local economies, as recounted by The Guardian
[Mark Zuckerberg talking:] “ There was this Deloitte study that came out the other day, that said if you could connect everyone in emerging markets, you could create more than 100 million jobs and bring a lot of people out of poverty.” The Deloitte study, which did indeed say this, was commissioned by Facebook, based on data provided by Facebook, and was about Facebook.
It’s a compelling hypothesis. Since the 1960s, we have known that science is socially constructed. Since the 1980s, sociologists have sought to understand the ‘social amplification of risk’ — in which people are drawn inexorably towards stories of disaster or triumph (rather than statistics or probabilities) as the lodestone for the perceptions of risk that guide their everyday decisions. Around the same time, philanthropist George Soros adapted the concept of reflexivity to explain how investors’ perceptions affect the social environment, which, in turn, informs their perceptions.
A convincing case is made, for instance, that fears of a ‘singularity’ — a point of no return arising from technological advances — are perennial. He notes numerous viral outbursts of this meme (associated with cotton mills, electricity and computers, for instance) dating back to the nineteenth century. Today’s apocalyptic anxieties about a robot takeover are nothing new and should not be heeded, Shiller seems to imply. How that will turn out remains to be seen.
Facebook has a Big Tobacco Problem
This is an interesting signal - not just about the shift from internal combustion transportation toward electric vehicles. But also it could be a hint that more policy makers are hearing about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) - they just don’t think the ‘masses’ are ready to hear about MMT. Once MMT is understood it becomes clear that government have no barrier to implementing The Green New Deal and all the infrastructure associated with flourishing in the 21st Century.
Schumer proposes $462 billion car swap—gas for electric
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is moving Democrats' climate talk to where the rubber meets the road, proposing a $462 billion trade-in program to get millions of Americans out of climate-damaging gas vehicles and into electric or hybrid cars over the next decade.
Schumer's rebate proposal late Thursday joins a mix of trillion- and multitrillion-dollar programs that Democratic presidential candidates have outlined to urgently cut oil, gas and coal emissions, as climate change weighs as an issue in the 2020 campaigns.
Schumer said the "proposal to bring clean cars to all of America" would be a key part of climate legislation by Senate Democrats. The injection of government-supported spending for electric cars "could position the U.S. to lead the world in clean auto manufacturing," he said.
The New York Democrat's plan would give American car buyers thousands of dollars each to trade in gas-burning cars for U.S.-assembled electric, hybrid or hydrogen cell cars. Lower-income households, and buyers of cars with American-made parts, would get extra credits.
About $45 billion would go to boost availability of charging stations and other electric car infrastructure. And $17 billion would help automakers increase their production of electric cars, batteries and parts.
This is perhaps a signal of the inevitable interface with the digital environment. A great convenience for living in the digital environment - but because all technology can also be weaponized - something that we will have to carefully regulate.
In 2017, Facebook announced that it would be investing in the development of non-invasive, wearable BCI that would allow Facebook users to “type with their brains”.
Since then, Facebook has funded research to achieve this goal, including a study by the same lab at University of California, San Francisco.
Mind-reading tech? How private companies could gain access to our brains
Social media companies can already use online data to make reliable guesses about pregnancy or suicidal ideation – and new BCI technology will push this even further
As powerful as the recommendation algorithms have become, we still assume that our innermost dialogue is internal unless otherwise disclosed. But recent advances in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which integrates cognitive activity with a computer, might challenge this.
In the past year, researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to translate directly from brain activity into synthetic speech or text by recording and decoding a person’s neural signals, using sophisticated AI algorithms.
While such technology offers a promising horizon for those suffering from neurological conditions that affect speech, this research is also being followed closely, and occasionally funded by technology companies like Facebook. A shift to brain-computer interfaces, they propose, will offer a revolutionary way to communicate with our machines and each other, a direct line between mind and device.
But will the price we pay for these cognitive devices be an incursion into our last bastion of real privacy? Are we ready to surrender our cognitive liberty for more streamlined online services and better targeted ads?
Does Art anticipate Life? This is an interesting signal of how emerging technology will provide many forms of enhancing prosthetics - including programmable digital tattoos. The two short videos are worth the view.
You Want a Prosthetic Leg With a Tesla Coil and Spark Gaps? No Problem
For Viktoria Modesta's Rolls Royce video, a tech-savvy team made a unique artificial limb
Imagine performing complicated choreography with thousands of volts rippling up and down inside your leg, creating a ladder of buzzing miniature bolts of lightning. That’s what Viktoria Modesta does in a promotional art video released this week for Rolls Royce’s line of Black Badge cars. The video, which you can see at the bottom of this page, is in a “cybernetic glam” style that shows Modesta striding through futuristic settings until she transforms into the famous leaning woman ornament that adorns the front bonnet of Rolls Royces.
Modesta is a self-described bionic pop artist who often uses very elaborate versions of her prosthetic limb. To create her outfit for the video—including the 3D printed matching bodice—she turned to fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht (who wrote about her creation of a maker-friendly EEG headset in the June issue of IEEE Spectrum) and Sophie de Oliveira Barata of the Alternative Limb Project.
Modesta, Wipprecht, and de Oliveira Barata started visiting their local Rolls Royce dealerships and brainstorming about what Modesta’s look could be for the video. Wipprecht began thinking about using a Tesla coil to generate electric “wings,” and brought on two previous collaborators: Joe DiPrima (profiled in Spectrum’s May issue) and his brother John. The DiPrima’s are the founders of ArcAttack, which makes and performs with Tesla coils. ArcAttack often makes large coils, some of which have been installed as attractions in U.S. science museums. Soon the team began wondering if they could put a Jacob’s Ladder inside a hollow leg. (If you’ve ever seen an old-school mad scientist’s laboratory in a movie, you’re familiar with the rising spark effect of a Jacob’s Ladder).
This is an important signal that we need to rethink our healthcare systems and institutions. We need more than guaranteed healthcare for all - we need more practitioners and better support for them - and perhaps for other sectors including our social and public services and teachers.
"The Committee came to realize that addressing clinician burnout will require a deliberate and substantive health care system redesign with a focus on those activities that deliver the most value to patients while enabling and empowering clinicians to deliver high-quality care,"
Consensus report shows burnout prevalent in health care community
Clinician burnout is affecting between one-third and one-half of all of U.S. nurses and physicians, and 45 to 60% of medical students and residents, according to a National Academy of Medicine (NAM) report released today.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center is among 32 institutions and foundations that sponsored the 296-page report, "Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being," which investigates the causes of widespread clinician burnout and offers solutions to address the problem at its source.
"There's an all too direct connection between clinician burnout and health care safety and quality. While clinician burnout isn't a new problem, its worsening prevalence and impact are due to system factors inherent in the modern health care system," said Matthew Weinger, MD, professor of Anesthesiology and Norman Ty Smith Chair in Patient Safety and Medical Simulation at VUMC, and a member of the NAM authoring committee for the new report.
We live in a ‘Beta World’ which hopefully is a signal for an ever better world. The moment you feel you’ve mastered some technology - it changes :). Search will always be vital to wayfinding the digital environment and of course there are many players who continually work to ‘game’ any search algorithm to make their efforts come first in the list of results.
Google digs into deeper meanings of searches
Google is paying more attention to the small words in your searches. Want to figure out how to park on a hill with no curb? Google now takes that "no" into account, and shows top results that include parking instructions without curbs.
The company is rolling out the change to English language searches in the U.S. starting this week. Google said it expects the shift will give better results for every one in 10 searches.
Tweaking its massive search engine is nothing new for Google. The company makes regular changes to be more accurate and show more useful results. But this one is the biggest the company has released in at least five years, said Pandu Nayak, Google's vice president of Search.
"It looks at the whole context of words to try to understand what's going on," he said.
The change is rooted in Google's natural language processing research, which studies how to teach computers to understand the nuance of speech and communication. This newest update is based on a training technique called Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers, or BERT.
This 5 min video - is a clear warning signal - not only about the power of Facebook - but the capacity for mass customized advertising and marketing.
The digital guru who helped Donald Trump to the presidency
Many of the "Tech Gods" were dismayed when Donald Trump - who holds a very different worldview - won the American presidency. But did they actually help him to win?
A key insider from the Trump campaign's digital operation - Theresa Hong - unravels for the first time the role played by social media and Facebook's in getting Trump into the White House.
Jamie Bartlett learns how Facebook's vast power to persuade was first built for advertisers, combining data about our internet use and psychological insights into how we think.
Wow a cloaking device or at least material!! A Canadian innovation - the video is a must see.
WATCH A REAL-LIFE INVISIBILITY CLOAK DESIGNED FOR MILITARY USE
Canada’s Hyperstealth Biotechnology already manufactures camouflage uniforms for militaries across the globe.
But now, the company has patented a new “Quantum Stealth” material that disguises a military’s soldiers — or even its tanks, aircraft, and ships — by making anything behind it seem invisible.
Earlier in October, Hyperstealth filed a patent for the material, which doesn’t require a power source and is both paper-thin and inexpensive — all traits that could make it appealing for use on the battlefield.
According to a press release, it works by bending the light around a target to make it seemingly disappear. This light can be in the visible spectrum, or it can be ultraviolet, infrared, or shortwave infrared light, making the material what Hyperstealth calls a “broadband invisibility cloak.”
A fascinating signal of the domestication endosymbiosis.
The researchers injected either green algae (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii) or cyanobacteria (Synechocystis) into tadpoles’ blood vessels, creating an eerie greenish animal. Both algae species make oxygen in response to light shining through the tadpoles’ translucent bodies.
Algae inside blood vessels could act as oxygen factories
An unconventional way to get O₂ to nerve cells might one day aid stroke patients
It’s a strange mash-up, but it works: Algae living inside tadpoles’ blood vessels can pump out oxygen for nearby oxygen-starved nerve cells.
Using algae as local oxygen factories in the brain might one day lead to therapies for strokes or other damage from too little oxygen, researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich said October 21 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
“In the beginning, it sounds really funny,” says neurobiologist Suzan Özugur. “But it works, so why not? I think it has great potential.” Even more futuristic possibilities include using algae in the veins of astronauts on long-haul space missions, says neurobiologist Hans Straka.
Straka, Özugur and their colleagues had been bubbling oxygen into severed tadpole heads to keep nerve cells active. But in talks with botanists, Straka got the idea to use algae instead. “I wouldn’t call it crazy, but unconventional, let’s say.”
Another important signal related to the relationship between our physical-cognitive ‘selves’ and our microbiome. What is a self? What forms of bio-cognitive therapy may be developed in the future.
Chemicals released by bacteria may help gut control the brain, mouse study suggests
The more researchers look, the more connections they find between the microbes in our intestines and those in our brain. Gut bacteria appear to influence everything from depression to autism. Now, a study on how mice overcome fear is starting to reveal more about the mysterious link between gut and mind.
The research used a classic Pavlovian test: Shock a mouse on the foot while playing a tone and the rodent will quickly learn to associate the noise with pain, flinching whenever it hears the sound. But the association doesn’t last forever. After several sessions of hearing the tone but not getting the shock, the mouse will forget the association, and the sound will have no effect. This “forgetting” is important for people as well; it’s impaired, for example, in those with chronic anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
David Artis, an immunologist and microbiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, wondered whether gut bacteria played any role in the learning and forgetting responses. He and colleagues treated mice with antibiotics to totally rid them of the bacteria in their gut, collectively known as the microbiome. They then played a tone and right after gave the mouse a mild shock, doing this multiple times.
All of the animals quickly learned to associate the noise with pain, freezing when they heard the sound. But only mice with normal microbiomes eventually forgot the connection: By 3 days, the noise no longer affected them most of them, whereas the antibiotic-treated mice still reacted, the team reports today in Nature.
Another signal of the power of mushrooms and fungi as sources of medicine and agricultural productivity and ecological health.
"These fungi are not a silver bullet for improving productivity of food crops, but they have the potential to help reduce our current overreliance on agricultural fertilisers."
Fungi could reduce reliance on fertilizers
Introducing fungi to wheat boosted their uptake of key nutrients and could lead to new, 'climate smart' varieties of crops, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Leeds have demonstrated a partnership between wheat and soil fungi that could be utilised to develop new food crops and farming systems which are less reliant on fertilisers, reducing their contribution to the escalating climate crisis.
It is the first time the fungi, which form partnerships with plant roots, have been shown to provide significant amounts of phosphorous and nitrogen to a cereal crop. The fungi continued to provide nutrients under higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) predicted for 2100, which has important implications for future food security.
The results were published today in the journal Global Change Biology.
This is a weak signal which may be important in the consideration of some proposals for Terraforming or GeoEngineering solutions for capturing carbon.
These results suggest a previously-overlooked role of iron in determining which marine animals live where. They also suggest that more iron-rich environments may be unexpectedly important in producing the fish we catch, and may play key roles in fish life cycles, including the fact that salmon spawn in streams.
Iron availability in seawater, key to explaining the amount and distribution of fish
biologists do not usually consider insufficient iron supply as being an important factor for the nutrition of wild animals, and instead tend to think about the total amount of food available to them. A new paper led by ICTA-UAB researchers Eric Galbraith and Priscilla Le Mézo and published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science proposes that, in fact, the available iron supply in large areas of the ocean is insufficient for most fish, and that—as a result—there are fewer fish in the ocean than there would be if iron were more plentiful.
By comparison, the ocean—away from the coasts—is almost entirely devoid of iron. Much of the seawater at the ocean surface contains so little dissolved iron that its concentration could not be accurately measured until the 1980s. Although it is known that the vanishingly-small amounts of iron can cause photosynthetic algae to grow slowly, until now scientists had not considered iron availability as an important factor in the ecology of marine animals.
"The big clue came from looking at satellite observations of where fishing occurs," explains Galbraith. Together with co-author David Kroodsma of Global Fishing Watch, based in San Francisco, the team analyzed years of global data on where fishing boats actually catch fish when they venture out into the high sea. "We saw that there is essentially no fishing happening within the three most strongly iron-limited regions of the world—the Southern Ocean, the Eastern Equatorial Pacific and the Subarctic Pacific."
This may signal another ‘revolution’ in military affairs - or not - but it certainly bring spaceware closer.
THE AIR FORCE JUST GOT A BRUTAL NEW LASER CANNON
The U.S. Air Force finally has its hands on the laser cannon that military tech contractor Raytheon built for it.
The laser weapon, which can be mounted onto the back of a vehicle, is designed to help the Air Force take down hostile drones, Engadget reports. While the military will spend another year testing the cannon, the delivery represents an escalation in the arms race as more countries work to develop dangerous lasers.
The laser itself can fire dozens of shots per charge, according to Raytheon. But the Air Force could also hook it up to a generator to deliver a “nearly infinite number of shots,”
I can hardly wait to use my new induction range (everything will be ready before Dec) which is a fairly new way to cook - but this is a good signal of a new way to bake - I wonder how long before it comes to an oven near us.
"The heat is generated instantaneously within the complete dough," explains Prof. Henry Jäger. "This is the main advantage of the Ohmic heating technology. Conventional baking in the oven requires more time, since the heat needs to penetrate from the outside toward the center of the dough."
Scientists bake gluten-free bread using a revolutionary technology
Electric shocks are used to heat gluten-free bread from the inside, saving energy and time compared to conventional baking applying heat from the outside. A recent study from the Institute of Food Technology of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, was just published in Food and Bioprocess Technology. The researchers used a technology called Ohmic heating and adapted it to the production of gluten-free bread. First results show superior quality of the Ohmic bread while saving energy and time during the manufacturing process.
The principle is well known from the light bulb: An electrical current passing through a wire heats it up until it glows. This is due to its electrical resistance and the Ohmic law leading to the dissipation of electrical energy into heat. The resistance of bread dough results in the same effect—it doesn't glow like a wire, but heats up and bakes. The researchers used this smart solution to make gluten-free bread that is challenging to bake conventionally.
The superior quality of the gluten free Ohmic bread was accompanied by savings of energy and time. The first trials indicate savings of around two-thirds compared to the energy needed for conventional baking. Also, the Ohmic baking needs much less time compared to conventional baking. In just a few minutes, the dough is converted into a ready-to-eat, gluten-free bread.
