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:
...recently, some researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited. None of the new studies fully address exactly how information learned or acquired in the somatic tissues is communicated and incorporated into the germline. But mechanisms centering around small RNA molecules and forms of hormonal communication are actively being investigated.
“The major outstanding question is not whether these [epigenetic inheritance] effects are happening, but what are the mechanisms by which these changes are happening,”
The evolutionary “why” for epigenetic inheritance is also an area of active investigation because it’s paradoxical. If learned adaptive behaviors can be passed on to the next generation, that would seem to eliminate the necessity for certain standard evolved changes to the genome. On the other hand, if epigenetically transmitted traits are adaptive, why not hardwire them into the genome so that they can be inherited more stably?
early-life trauma in mice leads to the release of stress hormones that affect the animal throughout its life span, producing depressed or risk-taking behaviors, metabolic dysregulation, and other health problems. They also affect the developing germ cells, causing the same behaviors and metabolic alterations to be inherited in the offspring for up to five generations.
by injecting the blood of traumatized mice into control mice, they could induce similar metabolic symptoms. The injected blood also appeared to affect the mice’s germ cells because their offspring inherited the metabolic abnormalities too.
Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain
The human brain is often described in the language of tipping points: It toes a careful line between high and low activity, between dense and sparse networks, between order and disorder. Now, by analyzing firing patterns from a record number of neurons, researchers have uncovered yet another tipping point — this time, in the neural code, the mathematical relationship between incoming sensory information and the brain’s neural representation of that information. ...findings, suggest that the brain strikes a balance between encoding as much information as possible and responding flexibly to noise, which allows it to prioritize the most significant features of a stimulus rather than endlessly cataloging smaller details. The way it accomplishes this feat could offer fresh insights into how artificial intelligence systems might work, too.
A Power Law Keeps the Brain’s Perceptions Balanced
This is most fascinating - a signal that we should all monitor. The planet emerging as an art project.
The first deployment of the TSN consists of 112 satellites that capture visible, non-visible, and radar remote sensing imagery and data over the whole earth at once, at ground resolutions as small as 25 centimeters. Unlike traditional tasking satellites, the TSN operates in “Total-Capture®” mode, acquiring data over the whole earth at a rate faster than the underlying activity rate of most physical industries and applications. Total-Capture® is a step-change capability that completely and permanently eliminates tasking and revisit rate paradigms.
THEIA IS CHANGING HUMANITY’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD
As populations grow and more people emerge from subsistence-living conditions to become consumers, the physical industries and activities that underpin civilized life must become dramatically more efficient. Understanding real-world events and managing real-life activities in real-time is more important than ever.
THEIA and its aerospace partners are building the world’s first satellite constellation designed specifically to digitize the entire earth continuously, in visible and non-visible wavelengths, with the resolution and quality necessary to fuel Decision-Grade® analytics for physical world activities and businesses, including the major physical industries that underpin nation-state economies.
The “online world” today contains about 50 billion pages of information that humans decided to put on computers and connect to the internet network… search engines can search those 50 billion pages for about 20 million words, comprising all of the words in all of the languages of the world.
But the “offline world” - the real world - contains over 2 quadrillion half-meter square “physical pages” just covering the surface of the earth. These “physical pages” have over a googol combinations of activities, elements, and processes that are happening in them and on them, continuously.
This is a good article and the current state of development of China’s Social Credit Systems (SCS). While suggesting that China has still not released a national system and that it is not a system to rate citizens. But in explaining how cities and regions are developing their own ‘apps’ - it is hard to imagine that the “data sharing” system will not become a rating systems as well.
Overall this is an important signal of a very real possible future for us all.
China’s social credit system isn’t about scoring citizens — it’s a massive API
China’s emerging social credit system (SCS): rarely has a topic been more hotly discussed, and more poorly understood.
When most people think about the SCS, they imagine it primarily as a scoring mechanism, a way for the central government to rank China’s citizens and companies based on their behavior. But that’s a skewed misconception of what social credit actually is. The social credit system, at its core, is perhaps better described as a data-sharing service; the more technical among you could reasonably think of it as a massive national API.
China’s central government doesn’t see its own role in the SCS as an assigner of scores, but rather as a record keeper, whose job is to consolidate government files into a central database of social credit records, and then through that database, provide state agencies, city governments, banks, industry associations, and the general public with data on individuals and companies so they can make their own evaluations.
The master database of social credit records has already been built: it’s called the National Credit Information Sharing Platform (NCISP), and a significant amount of the data it contains is open for public sharing.
Though the central government has yet to put out its own flagship social credit app, it has actively encouraged local governments and private developers to build mobile applications that incorporate NCISP data in innovative ways.
Whatever China’s Social Credit system is claimed to be - it must also be understood in the context of the rise of a surveillance state.
China’s New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide
The Chinese government has been working for several years on a comprehensive Internet security/surveillance program. This program is based on the Cybersecurity Law adopted on 2016. The plan is vast and includes a number of subsidiary laws and regulations. On December 1, 2018, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security announced it will finally roll-out the full plan.
The core of the plan is for China’s Ministry of Security to fully access the massive amounts of raw data transmitted across Chinese networks and housed on servers in China. Since raw data has little value, the key to the Ministry’s success will be in processing that data. Seeing that this is the key issue, the Ministry has appointed Wang Yingwei to be its new head of the Cybersecurity Bureau. Wang is a noted “big data” expert and he will be tasked with making sense of the raw data that will be gathered under the new system.
The plan for the new system is ambitious and comprehensive. As explained by Guo Qiquan, the chief cheerleader for the plan, the main goal of the new system is to provide “full coverage”. As explained by Guo, “It will cover every district, every ministry, every business and other institution, basically covering the whole society. It will also cover all targets that need [cybersecurity] protection, including all networks, information systems, cloud platforms, the internet of things, control systems, big data and mobile internet.”
This system will apply to foreign owned companies in China on the same basis as to all Chinese persons, entities or individuals. No information contained on any server located within China will be exempted from this full coverage program. No communication from or to China will be exempted. There will be no secrets. No VPNs. No private or encrypted messages. No anonymous online accounts. No trade secrets. No confidential data. Any and all data will be available and open to the Chinese government.
This is a related signal about the transformation of our social welfare systems. This is why community will become ever more important in taking care of our poor and disabled family members.
Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor
In an exclusive global series, the Guardian lays bare the tech revolution transforming the welfare system worldwide – while penalising the most vulnerable
All around the world, from small-town Illinois in the US to Rochdale in England, from Perth, Australia, to Dumka in northern India, a revolution is under way in how governments treat the poor.
You can’t see it happening, and may have heard nothing about it. It’s being planned by engineers and coders behind closed doors, in secure government locations far from public view.
Only mathematicians and computer scientists fully understand the sea change, powered as it is by artificial intelligence (AI), predictive algorithms, risk modeling and biometrics. But if you are one of the millions of vulnerable people at the receiving end of the radical reshaping of welfare benefits, you know it is real and that its consequences can be serious – even deadly.
The Guardian has spent the past three months investigating how billions are being poured into AI innovations that are explosively recasting how low-income people interact with the state. Together, our reporters in the US, Britain, India and Australia have explored what amounts to the birth of the digital welfare state.
A good signal about the impact of automation.
There's an Automation Crisis Underway Right Now, It's Just Mostly Invisible
Armed with a uniquely robust dataset—the researchers had access to employee and administrative data, as well as information about expenditures on automation for 36,490 Dutch companies, or around 5 million workers—the economists examined how automation events impacted employees in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2016. They measured daily and annual wages, employment rates, the collection of unemployment insurance and welfare receipts.
What emerges is a portrait of workplace automation that is ominous in a less dramatic manner than we’re typically made to understand. For one thing, there is no ‘robot apocalypse’, even after a major corporate automation event. Unlike mass layoffs, automation does not appear to immediately and directly send workers packing en masse.
Instead, automation increases the likelihood that workers will be driven away from their previous jobs at the companies—whether they’re fired, or moved to less rewarding tasks, or quit—and causes a long-term loss of wages for the employee.
The report finds that “firm-level automation increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 11 percent of one year’s earnings.” That’s a pretty significant loss.
This is a great signal about the potential of the future of work - where anyone can create value for others outside of a traditional employment framework. A possible consideration for a Universal Basic Income - that enables people to engage in innumerable creative ways to create value.
One of Lintott’s key messages is that citizen science is much more than free labour. Many such projects exploit the human brain’s ability to recognize patterns, or to spot unusual features in data that even the most sophisticated computer algorithms can miss. Collaborations between professional and amateur researchers also increase public understanding of science, and have produced a growing list of publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Putting the ‘I’ in science
Chris Lintott’s chronicle of the booming citizen-science project Zooniverse is inspirational, finds Michael West.
Citizen science is booming. Today, anyone with a computer or a smartphone can participate in research in astronomy, oceanography, medicine, zoology and beyond. With such studies no longer the exclusive realm of an elite few, communities of amateur and professional scientists have joined together to democratize the discipline, harnessing mutual enthusiasm and collective wisdom to gather and analyse data.
As a research tool, crowdsourcing is nothing new. Charles Darwin maintained a voluminous correspondence with fellow naturalists and lay enthusiasts in the Victorian era. For more than a century, the US-based National Audubon Society has relied on an army of volunteers to count birds across North America each December. And since 1911, the American Association of Variable Star Observers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has enlisted a network of predominantly amateur astronomers to collect nearly 40 million observations of stars that have fluctuating brightness. That endeavour has provided valuable insights into stellar lifecycles and distances to galaxies. SETI@home, launched in 1999, meanwhile uses the idle time on millions of home computers to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
In recent years we’ve seen an explosion in new opportunities, in fields such as cetology, linguistics and space archaeology. The SciStarter website, for example, currently aggregates thousands of citizen-science projects and events from around the world.
This is likely to be contested despite the science behind it.
Does time spent using social media impact mental health?: An eight year longitudinal study
Highlights
Time spent using social media was not related to individual changes in depression or anxiety over 8 years.
This lack of a relationship was found even in the transition between adolescence and emerging adulthood.
Results were not stronger for girls or boys.
Abstract
Many studies have found a link between time spent using social media and mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. However, the existing research is plagued by cross-sectional research and lacks analytic techniques examining individual change over time. The current research involves an 8-year longitudinal study examining the association between time spent using social media and depression and anxiety at the intra-individual level. Participants included 500 adolescents who completed once-yearly questionnaires between the ages of 13 and 20. Results revealed that increased time spent on social media was not associated with increased mental health issues across development when examined at the individual level. Hopefully these results can move the field of research beyond its past focus on screen time.
Another interesting signal about the emerging digital environment, ubiquitous computing, Internet-of-Things-Sensors and more.
Antenna system with tenfold speedup in data transmit and receive rates
The use of wireless devices is exploding. Statista, an international research service, estimated in March 2019 that roughly 13 billion mobile devices (e.g., phones, tablets, laptops) were in use worldwide, and Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, predicts that the internet of things will swell that number to more than 21 billion devices by the end of 2020.
The widespread use of mobile devices already creates significant demand on the cellular system that supports all this wireless connectivity, especially at locations, such as an outdoor concert or a sports arena, where large numbers of users may be simultaneously connecting. The ability of current-era cellular technology, or even the proposed next-generation 5G technology, will be severely strained to provide the high data rates and wide-area communication range needed to support the escalating device usage.
The communications community has been looking at in-band full-duplex (IBFD) technology to increase the capacity and the number of supported devices by allowing the devices to transmit and receive on the same frequency at the same time. This ability not only doubles the devices' efficiency within the frequency spectrum, but also reduces the time for a message to be processed between send and receive modes.
the research team estimates that the phased-array antenna system with IBFD capability can support 100 times more devices and 10 times higher data rates than the currently used 4G LTE (fourth-generation long-term evolution) standard for wireless communications. Moreover, the phased-array system can achieve an extended communication range of 60 miles, which is more than 2.5 times greater than the next-best system
There seems to be accelerating progress in our domestication of DNA.
Super-precise new CRISPR tool could tackle a plethora of genetic diseases
The system allows researchers more control over DNA changes, potentially opening up conditions that have challenged gene-editors.
For all the ease with which the wildly popular CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tool alters genomes, it’s still somewhat clunky and prone to errors and unintended effects. Now, a recently developed alternative offers greater control over genome edits — an advance that could be particularly important for developing gene therapies.
The alternative method, called prime editing, improves the chances that researchers will end up with only the edits they want, instead of a mix of changes that they can’t predict. The tool, described in a study published on 21 October in Nature, also reduces the ‘off-target’ effects that are a key challenge for some applications of the standard CRISPR–Cas9 system. That could make prime-editing-based gene therapies safer for use in people.
The tool also seems capable of making a wider variety of edits, which might one day allow it to be used to treat the many genetic diseases that have so far stymied gene-editors. David Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lead study author, estimates that prime editing might help researchers tackle nearly 90% of the more than 75,000 disease-associated DNA variants listed in ClinVar, a public database developed by the US National Institutes of Health.
The specificity of the changes that this latest tool is capable of could also make it easier for researchers to develop models of disease in the laboratory, or to study the function of specific genes, says Liu.
This signals another breakthrough in the domestication of DNA - ever finer details and increasing complexity.
Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are," says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.
New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics
Muscles house some gargantuan proteins. Dystrophin, a structural protein whose gene can carry mutations that cause muscular dystrophy, has more than 3600 amino acids. Titin, which acts like a spring to give muscles elasticity, is the biggest known protein, with more than 34,000 amino acids. The protein disabled in the mice has a paltry 46. Although researchers have probed how muscles work for more than 150 years, they had completely missed the huge impact this tiny protein, called myoregulin, has on muscle function.
Olson and his colleagues weren't the only ones to be blindsided by Lilliputian proteins. As scientists now realize, their initial rules for analyzing genomes discriminated against identifying those pint-size molecules. Now, broader criteria and better detection methods are uncovering minuscule proteins by the thousands, not just in mice, but in many other species, including humans. "For the first time, we are about to explore this universe of new proteins," says biochemist Jonathan Weissman of the University of California, San Francisco.
Biologists are just beginning to delve into the functions of those molecules, called microproteins, micropeptides, or miniproteins. But their small size seems to allow them to jam the intricate workings of larger proteins, inhibiting some cellular processes while unleashing others. Early findings suggest microproteins bolster the immune system, control destruction of faulty RNA molecules, protect bacteria from heat and cold, dictate when plants flower, and provide the toxic punch for many types of venom. "There's probably going to be small [proteins] involved in all biological processes. We just haven't looked for them before," says biochemist Alan Saghatelian of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California.
Despite the remaining mysteries, scientists are already testing potential uses for the molecules. One company sells insecticides derived from small proteins in the poison of an Australian funnel-web spider. And a clinical trial is evaluating an imaging agent based on another minute protein in scorpion venom, designed to highlight the borders of tumors so that surgeons can remove them more precisely. Many drug companies are now searching for small proteins with medical potential, says biochemist Glenn King of the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. "It's one of the most rapidly growing areas."
This is an important signal about the challenges we face in the next decades to transform energy production and consumption.
Getting Real About Green Energy
An honest analysis of what it CAN'T promise
I want to be optimistic about the future. I really do.
But there’s virtually no chance of the world transitioning gently to an alternative energy-powered future.
These Are The ‘Good Old Days’
I’m often asked where I stand on wind, solar and other alternative energy sources.
My answer is: I love them. But they’re incapable of enabling our society to smoothly slip over to powering itself by other means.
They’re not going to “save us”.
Some people are convinced otherwise. If we can just fight off the evil oil companies, get our act together, and install a national alternative energy system infrastructure, we’ll be just fine. Meaning that we”ll be able to continue to live as we do today, but powered fully by clean renewable energy.
That’s just not going to happen. At least, not without a lot of painful disruption and sacrifice. The top three reasons why are:
Math
Human behavior
Time, scale, & cost
I walk through the detail below. I’m doing so to debunk the magical thinking behind the current “Green Revolution” because I fear it offers a false promise.
This is a great signal of the types of technology that will be emerging in the next decades. As the signal above indicates we have to develop other technologies to reach important green goals that capture carbon, increase energy efficiencies and accelerate new forms of energy production. In addition the ability to modify the algae to produce other things with that carbon.
“This device is one of our first efforts focused on fixing the planet we are on,” said Hypergiant CEO Ben Lamm in a press release reviewed by Futurism. “We hope to inspire and collaborate with others on a similar mission.”
A NEW BIOREACTOR CAPTURES AS MUCH CARBON AS AN ACRE OF TREES
A new algae bioreactor can suck as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as roughly an acre of forest — potentially giving dense cities a new weapon in the fight against catastrophic climate change.
Development firm Hypergiant Industries used AI systems to make its newly-announced Eos Bioreactor prototype, a 63-cubic foot box which is filled with algae. The startup says it takes in as much carbon as 400 trees and keeps it out of the environment.
Already an established concept — one’s being tested at the International Space Station — the algae thrives on carbon dioxide emissions. The algae could theoretically then be harvested for use as a material or a source of dietary protein.
This is a great signal of future sensors of physiotherapeutic health monitoring.
"Since you can tune the cut design to match the curvatures of all different parts of your body, you can generate a lot of data that can be used to track your form—for instance while lifting—as well as the amount of strain applied on your joints," she said. "The user could be alerted of improper form in real-time and therefore prevent injuries."
Kirigami sensor patch for shoulders could improve injury recovery, athletic training
Inspired by a University of Michigan professor's recovery after a cycling crash, an innovative patch could bring the assessment of human joints into the 21st century.
The patch uses electronic sensors to understand the functional range of motion as opposed to today's static measurements. Influenced by kirigami, the Japanese art of creating 3-D structures from cut paper, the sensor can hug the curves of a joint and yet can be manufactured flat.
The study is published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.
Collaborating with researchers working under Deanna Gates, an associate professor of movement science at U-M, Shtein's team cross-referenced the data from the kirigami sensor with arm motions captured by a camera motion tracking system. The system uses reflective markers to track the angular positions of the arm and reconstructs them in a computer simulation.
The team envisions that this kind of inexpensive sensor could be given to physical therapy patients, enabling them to log exercises and see progress through a smartphone app. This could help keep patients honest about doing their exercises and also provide more detailed information to therapists about each patient's progress.
This is an important signal of the emerging need to rethink military capabilities - including the investments in more varieties of automated, autonomous, weapon systems. Which includes new human roles, skills, and organizations.
Will ground-based hypersonic missiles replace aircraft carriers in the defense budget?
A debate on the future of aircraft carriers is roiling the U.S. Department of Defense, and it is increasingly spilling out into the open. While the debate over the efficacy of carriers in high-end conflict is nothing new, a general understanding that the DoD will not have unlimited funds with which to deter an increasingly potent China and Russia have made the questions particularly urgent.
At issue is a choice about continuing to invest in aircraft carriers and the associated air wing — the mainstay of U.S. global power projection since World War II — or to gradually reduce investment in those systems and increase investment in new capabilities such as long-range conventional hypersonic missiles.
It’s a question that Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin put bluntly in his remarks last month at the Defense News Conference.
“Let’s just propose a thought experiment,” Griffin said. “Which do you think the Chinese leadership would fear more: 2,000 conventional strike missiles possessed by the United States and its allies in the western Pacific capable of ranging Chinese targets, or one new carrier? Because those two things cost about the same amount of money. Those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves.”
This should clearly and strongly signal that nature is stranger than fiction.
Paris zoo unveils the "blob", an organism with no brain but 720 sexes
A Paris zoo showcased a mysterious new organism on Wednesday, dubbed the “blob”, a yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on display to the public on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it.
The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.
“The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries”, said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.
“It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn (...) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David added.
The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form - The Blob - consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.
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