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
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Quotes:
Articles:
we standardly criticise others’, rather than our own, views. At the same time, we clearly risk our reputation much more when proposing an idea rather than criticising it. This systematically disadvantages proponents of (new) ideas.
Adversarial criticism is commonly driven by a binary understanding of ideas. Claims are either true or false; arguments are either valid or invalid. If this understanding is correct, then the exclusion of false or invalid points does indeed seem to leave us with true ideas. If this were the case, criticism would indeed be a good way of responding to the proponent of an idea. But how well does this work in practice? The philosopher Catherine Hundleby at the University of Windsor in Ontario analysed how argumentation is taught to students and concluded that ‘argument repair’, in which the proponents of a position revise their argument in response to criticism, is greatly neglected. Instead, what is emphasised are quick tools for evaluating arguments by putting ‘fallacy labels’ onto them. This is less helpful than one might think because it’s purely negative.
If a claim is attacked, a typical reaction of the proponent is to limit the scope, tone down the emphases or adjust perspectives. The idea is pruned before it has even been looked at. Given that making bold claims might involve reputational risks, it is not surprising that people reactively exert damage control and align their claims with what they take to be acceptable. As Tim Crane of the University of Cambridge pointed out in ‘The Philosopher’s Tone’ (2018), peer review has similar effects in that authors try to pre-empt every possible objection, leaving less and less space to build up original ideas.
every argument is vulnerable to potential criticism. If this is correct, then mistakes or the options of finding them abound. By contrast, philosophical claims that will go unchallenged are extremely rare. (In fact, I can’t think of one.) This means that, in contrast to critics, proponents of ideas are at a systematic disadvantage.
The adversarial culture in philosophy does not serve the truth
In The Island from the Day Before (1994), Umberto Eco composes a love letter that includes the line: ‘[O]nly in your prison does [my heart] enjoy the most sublime of freedoms’ – that could be said of chess, too, and the experience of concentration is what makes it possible. I believe concentration is a defining feature of a fulfilling life, a necessary habit of mind for a viable civilisation, and that chess can teach us more about what concentration really means.
Concentration is not always so rewarding. It comes and goes, forms and collapses, builds and then crumbles, because there is an upper limit to what players can hold in their heads at any one time. I find that I move towards my upper limit and away from it repeatedly. Peering into the unfolding position, it is as if I am driving more or less automatically, until new possibilities flash before me like bikes emerging from side-streets, and bring me back to the challenge of steering consciousness. At such moments, the edifice of thought I have built is likely to collapse. If I’m not careful, I can spend far too many minutes in this state of perpetual irresolution, seeking but not finding an answer to what is happening, because there is just too much meaning in the position for my mind to process. This challenge of learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions is pertinent not just to chess but to life more generally.
As a chess grandmaster, I find the familiar injunction to ‘Concentrate!’ a little naive. Concentration is not like a bulb that we can turn on and off with a switch, because we are not just the bulb; we are also the switcher and the switch. Humans are more like thermostats receiving and sending out signals, seeking the optimal ‘mental temperature’ as ambient conditions around and within us change, and we’re often abruptly adjusted against our will. We succeed in concentrating when we manage to convene the dispositions that matter for a task at hand – for instance, our awareness, attention, discernment and willpower – and that is possible only if the right emotions co-arise and come along for the ride.
Our problem today is not that we don’t or can’t pay attention, but that the systems and structures of society oblige us to pay attention so frequently and fleetingly that we cannot in fact concentrate. Lacking an ability to concentrate, it’s a struggle to construct and maintain a coherent and autonomous sense of self, which leaves us at the mercy of digital, commercial and political puppeteers. Without concentration, we are not free.
Most complex problems cannot be properly understood or experienced unless we can consider several ideas and ways of thinking together at one time. However, if all we can do is simply hold ideas, we won’t be able to actually think with them or about them; we will be those thoughts but we won’t really have them. Developing concentration therefore entails developing the capacity to hold the emotional tension of mental complexity; we have to train ourselves to resist the temptation to give up, to oversimplify or project onto our perceived opponents.
Concentrate!
A nice signal of an imagined future that has been around since at least the 1950s - and maybe it is about a decade away.
Hyundai to make flying cars for Uber air taxis
Hyundai announced Monday it would mass produce flying cars for Uber's aerial rideshare network set to deploy in 2023.
The South Korean manufacturer said it would produce the four-passenger electric "vertical take-off and landing vehicles" at "automotive scale," without offering details.
The deal announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas could help Uber, which is working with other aircraft manufacturers, to achieve its goal of deploying air taxi service in a handful of cities by 2023.
Jaiwon Shin, head of Hyundai's urban air mobility division, said he expects the large-scale manufacturing to keep costs affordable for the aerial systems.
Another concurrent signal - could it be that flying autonomous vehicles are easier to make safe than driverless cars?
"Autonomous connected vehicles of any type are where transportation is headed," Trogdon said in an interview. "We want to bring these kinds of opportunities to make sure that we're economically competitive."
First in flight again: Pilotless air taxi makes public demonstration flight in Raleigh
More than 100 people, including Gov. Roy Cooper, state lawmakers and leaders of the N.C. Department of Transportation, gathered at the State Highway Patrol's test track south of Raleigh Tuesday afternoon to witness a bit of aviation history.
They were there to see what was billed as North America's first public demonstration flight of a pilotless air taxi. As they braced themselves against a stiff northwest wind, the EH 216, a two-seat drone made by the Chinese company EHang, was parked some 500 feet away, down a slight hill, outside of their view.
NCDOT had spent nearly 10 months arranging for EHang to bring its drone to Raleigh, in conjunction with the department's annual Transportation Summit this week. Transportation Secretary Jim Trogdon said North Carolina not only wants to be ready for new technologies like this but also hopes to lure the companies that are developing them.
Sixteen sets of electric motors and propellers lift the EH 216 into the air and move it forward along pre-programmed routes at up to 80 mph, said Derrick Xiong, Ehang's cofounder. The craft weighs about 600 pounds and can carry another 500 to 600 pounds of cargo or people, Xiong said.
Ehang has built dozens of them and has made demo flights like this one in Amsterdam, Vienna, Qatar, Dubai and in several cities in China, Xiong said. He said the craft is in the "very early stage of commercialization" in China, mostly limited to sightseeing flights.
This is an interesting signal of emerging concpet of nanobots that could become ubiquitous. There is a 2 min video illustrating the current state of research.
They could even attach and detach, depending on the environment and task. Instead of being a single robot that is specifically made for one single task, robogamis are designed and optimised to multitask from scratch.
Robogamis are the real heirs of terminators and transformers
I made my first origami robot, which I called a ‘robogami’, about 10 years ago. It was a simple being, a flat-sheeted robot, which could turn into a pyramid and back into a flat sheet, and then into a space shuttle.
My research, conducted with the help of PhD students and a postdoc researcher, has advanced since then, and a new robogami generation is now seeing the light of day. This new generation of robogamis serves a purpose: for example, one of them can navigate through different terrains autonomously. On dry and flat land, it can crawl. If it suddenly meets rough terrain, it will start to roll, activating a different sequence of actuators. Furthermore, if it meets an obstacle, it will simply jump over it! It does this by storing energy in each of its legs, then releasing it and catapulting itself like a slingshot.
This is an amazing signal - a must view - not yet Dr Frankenstein but definitely about domestication of biology. There is a 3 min and 2 min video.
People have been manipulating organisms for human benefit since at least the dawn of agriculture, genetic editing is becoming widespread, and a few artificial organisms have been manually assembled in the past few years—copying the body forms of known animals.
But this research, for the first time ever, "designs completely biological machines from the ground up," the team writes in their new study.
Team builds the first living robots
A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need.
Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide "xenobots" can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut.
"These are novel living machines," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."
The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM—and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University. "We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do," says co-leader Michael Levin who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts, "like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque."
The results of the new research were published January 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is a great signal of the emerging technology of AI-ssistants - augmenting our memory and senses (at least visual and auditory).
Glasses talk, ears focus, in OrCam's tech showcase
OrCam Technologies at this year's CES made a name for itself as solutions bearer for wearable assistive technology. They have developed wearable aides for hearing and for reading. These make use of computer vision and machine learning technologies.
Prof. Amnon Shashua, OrCam Technologies Co-founder and Co-CEO, talked of "wearable, personal AI" and "AI as a companion."
First, there is OrCam's vision device called OrCam MyEye 2. TechCrunch described the OrCam MyEye 2 as a tiny device "for people with visual impairment that you clip on your glasses to help you navigate the world around you."
The device helps guide a person with vision difficulties... say, "what's in front of me?" and the device could tell you, for example, that there was a door.
MyEye 2 was among TIME magazine's Best Inventions for 2019.-The title of the write-up was "Vision Made Audible."
OrCam Hear, for those with hearing impairments, was showcased as a hearing-aid addition that smartens the aids. OrCam Hear can assist the wearer by "identifying and isolating a speaker's voice—from among multiple speakers—and then relaying the clear speech to Bluetooth hearing aids, in real time," said The Jerusalem Post.
The device is worn on clothing .
Another potential innovation for energy storage and reducing energy requirements for heating and cooling.
Geothermal energy storage system to reduce peak electricity demand
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers created a geothermal energy storage system that could reduce peak electricity demand up to 37% in homes while helping balance grid operations.
The system is installed underground and stores excess electricity from renewable resources like solar power as thermal energy through a heat pump. The system comprises underground tanks containing water and phase change materials that absorb and release energy when transitioning between liquid and solid states.
ORNL's design relies on inexpensive materials and is installed at shallow depths to minimize drilling costs. The stored energy can provide hours of heating in the winter or cooling in the summer, shaving peak demand and helping homeowners avoid buying electricity at peak rates.
This sounds awesome and signal the transformation or air conditioning everywhere the 4 min video explains the concept very clearly - well worth the view.
OxiCool: Pure water is refrigerant to help cool homes
An air conditioning system that offers zero emissions, cools the house with water and is powered by natural gas was getting attention this week at CES.
Jenny McGrath, Digital Trends, wrote about the "giant reflective cube" on the show floor. From that cube, coolant is pumped into the module and distributed to wall units throughout the home. In this AC system, pure water is the refrigerant.
"And since it never leaves the sealed operating chamber, there are no emissions connected to the cooling phase whatsoever," said John Raidt at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, in a blog.
The system uses only about 10 percent of the electricity that a vapor compression air conditioner of the same size uses, said Digital Trends.
A very brief summary of signals of progress in bioscience for the next decade.
The Advances that Will Shape Life Sciences in the 2020s
Systems biologist Steven Wiley says advancements in two areas—single-cell biology and CRISPR—are poised to transform research.
The 2010s brought major advancements in every aspect of the life sciences and ushered in an era of collaboration and multidisciplinary approaches. The Scientist spoke with Steven Wiley, a systems biologist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and member of TS’s editorial board, about what he thinks the recent past indicates about the upcoming decade of research.
Single-cell sequencing, single-cell proteomics, single-cell imaging—these are all part of this new area of single-cell biology which is really going to impact a whole slew of different fields. We'll see a lot of breakthroughs driven by that in the next year, but we’ll see the full impact of this playing out over the next decade.
CRISPR technologies—everyone touts them as a way of editing the genome, which is true. But the true power of that, I believe . . . is the fact that it provides a way of tagging endogenous genes. So for example, you see a number of different papers come out in which people have used CRISPR technologies to insert fluorescent markers into genes. You can look at the dynamics and localization and expression of individual genes and individual cells.
The second thing that CRISPR is really good at is perturbations, being able to turn up genes and down genes, altering the expression of individual genes up and down in a cell with incredible specificity. For example, [with] a genetic disease or in cancer, most of the really significant impactful genetic changes are at the level of increased expression or decreased expression. So the way we think about changing gene expression is: [in] one cell type, the gene is off, [and in] another cell type, the gene is on. But that’s not actually true. There are subtle changes in abundance and localization and disposition of individual genes that have enormous regulatory impact on the cells. But we’ve lacked good tools to [investigate] that.
This is a great signal of the emerging transformation of food production - advancing technologies expand the carrying capacity of our environment.
Saving Our Bacon
Farmfree foods might be the only thing that gets us – and much of the rest of the living world – through this century.
It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turning water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes, and squirted onto heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.
This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some. I asked them, filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow, to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.
But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified, they will create the specific proteins needed for cultured meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids: hello cultured fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.
The hydrogen pathway is around ten times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats, the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts.
A great signal of many advances in science and our understanding of the very small.
Randomness opens the gates to the land of attophotography
One of the last obstacles hindering the photography and filming of processes occurring on a scale of attoseconds, i.e. billionths of a billionth of a second, has disappeared. The key to its removal lies in the random nature of the processes responsible for the formation of X-ray laser pulses.
There are only a few X-ray lasers in the world today. These sophisticated devices can be used to record even extremely fast processes such as the changes in the electron states of atoms. The pulses generated by modern X-ray lasers are already short enough to be able to consider taking attophotos or even attofilms. However, what remained a problem was the X-ray optics itself. When an ultra-short X-ray pulse leaves the laser in which it was created, it can be extended in time over a dozen-fold.
An international group of physicists under the supervision of Dr. Jakub Szlachetko and Dr. Joanna Czapla-Masztafiak from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow and Dr. Yves Kayser of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin has proved in Nature Communications that X-ray optics should no longer be an obstacle. The publication is the result of research conducted at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.
This is still a weak signal showing progress in our domestication of DNA and other biological processes.
Universal flu vaccine with nanoparticles that protects against six different influenza viruses in mice
A novel nanoparticle vaccine that combines two major influenza proteins is effective in providing broad, long-lasting protection against influenza virus in mice, showing promise as a universal flu vaccine, according to a study by the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.
The double-layered nanoparticle vaccine contains the influenza virus proteins matrix protein 2 ectodomain (M2e) and neuraminidase (NA). Mice were immunized with the nanoparticle vaccine before being exposed to influenza virus, and they were protected against six different strains of the virus.
The findings, which suggest this unique vaccine combination has potential as a universal influenza vaccine or component of such vaccines, are published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
"This nanoparticle antigen combination conferred mice with strong cross protection," said Ye Wang, first author of the study and a biology Ph.D. student working in Dr. Bao-Zhong Wang's lab in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences. "It can protect mice from different strains of influenza virus. Each season, we have different flu strains that affect us. By using this approach, we hope this nanoparticle vaccine can protect humans from different strains of influenza virus."
And another signal of innovation in our efforts to develop more effective antibacterial tools.
Bacteria shredding tech to fight drug-resistant superbugs
Researchers have used liquid metals to develop new bacteria-destroying technology that could be the answer to the deadly problem of antibiotic resistance.
The technology uses nano-sized particles of magnetic liquid metal to shred bacteria and bacterial biofilm—the protective "house" that bacteria thrive in—without harming good cells.
Published in ACS Nano, the research led by RMIT University offers a groundbreaking new direction in the search for better bacteria-fighting technologies.
The RMIT team behind the technology is the only group in the world investigating the antibacterial potential of magnetic liquid metal nanoparticles.
When exposed to a low-intensity magnetic field, these nano-sized droplets change shape and develop sharp edges.
When the droplets are placed in contact with a bacterial biofilm, their movements and nano-sharp edges break down the biofilm and physically rupture the bacterial cells.
In the new study, the team tested the effectiveness of the technology against two types of bacterial biofilms (Gram-positive and Gram-negative).
After 90 minutes of exposure to the liquid metal nanoparticles, both biofilms were destroyed and 99 percent of the bacteria were dead. Importantly, laboratory tests showed the bacteria-destroying droplets did not affect human cells.
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