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:
“For a long time, people thought of the immune system as basically what’s in your blood,” Haniffa said. “Then they realized that your immune system doesn’t just exist in your blood, it exists in every tissue.” Moreover, the immune system cells embedded in tissues and even among your microbiota are in communication. The cells in the brain called microglia have traditionally not been recognized as part of the immune system, but they consume cellular debris like macrophages. They have also been shown to respond to signals from gut microbiota. “We should view the immune system as a bit like a matrix that exists in the entire body,”
You can think of immune cells as one of the major sensing systems in the body along with the nervous system, she said: “We often thought of [immune cells] in narrower functional terms, but we increasingly realize that their roles are broader.”
Immune Cell Assassins Reveal Their Nurturing Side
Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?
Cultural institutions are also a kind of technology – a social technology. Just as physical technologies – agriculture, the wheel or computers – are tools for transforming matter, energy or information in pursuit of our goals, social technologies are tools for organising people in pursuit of our goals. Laws, moral values and money are social technologies, as are ways of organising an army, a religion, a government or a retail business.
Our values, laws and political organisations define and shape our identities. We often regard those who use different social technologies – people from different cultures, regions, nations, religions or those with different values and beliefs – as ‘others’. When social technologies change too quickly, we experience a loss of identity, a collective confusion about who we are and how we distinguish ourselves from others. But when social technologies change too slowly, this can create tensions too – for example, when political institutions fail to keep pace with wider changes in society.
Physical and social technologies co-evolve all the time, pushing and pulling on each other. The influence is in both directions. Physical and social technologies are so entangled that it can be hard to separate them.
Collaborators in creation
"In the first quantum revolution people discovered the world around them was governed fundamentally by laws of quantum physics. That discovery led to an understanding of the periodic table, how materials behave and helped in the development of transistors, computers, MRI scanners and information technology.
"Now in the 21st century, we're looking at all the strange predictions of quantum physics and turning them around and using them. When you talk about applications, we're thinking about quantum computing, quantum teleportation, quantum communications, quantum sensing—ideas that use properties of the quantum nature of matter that were ignored before."
Study uncovers new electronic state of matter
This is a signal of an inevitable effort. The key questions involve in who represents who? We do need an global body to oversee the global internet - but it should prioritize the needs of citizens to enable human rights and a global communication commons. Corporations have made significant strides in colonizing and enacting an enclosure movement to privateer the commons as private property.
Create a WTO-equivalent to oversee the internet, recommends new report
The internet needs an international World Trade Organization (WTO)-style body to protect and grow it as one of the world's unique shared resources: a communications infrastructure that is open, free, safe and reliable, concludes a new report published today.
The findings, which have been published by the UK-China Global Issues Dialogue Centre at Jesus College Cambridge, draw on a conference attended by international experts including former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and representatives from Google, Facebook, Huawei, Alibaba, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the ITU, and OECD.
The global communications system—including the internet, smartphone access, and the Internet of Things—allows near-universal communication and supports almost every aspect of the modern economy. The report argues that just as the capabilities of communications infrastructures are being amplified by artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies, we are becoming more aware of the risks of direct attacks and splintering, and the threat of distrust.
Getting a political regulatory grip on the emerging digital environment is ever more pressing. I still think David Brin’s “Transparent Society” provides the best discussion of what privacy is and what may be the best options for life in the 21st Century.
Is a supermarket discount coupon worth giving away your privacy?
Most large companies doing business in California are required by the state’s new privacy law to disclose what they know about customers and how that information is used.
This resulted in fairly straightforward announcements by many businesses.
Then there’s Ralphs, the supermarket chain owned by Kroger.
Ralphs’ form opens by highlighting the benefits of a Ralphs Rewards card. These include “exclusive members-only specials and sales,” personalized coupons and points that can be applied to gasoline purchases.
the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs “may collect” information such as “your level of education, type of employment, information about your health and information about insurance coverage you might carry.”
It says Ralphs may pry into “financial and payment information like your bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history.”
Wait, it gets even better.
Ralphs says it’s gathering “behavioral information” such as “your purchase and transaction histories” and “geolocation data,” which could mean the specific Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.
Ralphs also reserves the right to go after “information about what you do online” and says it will make “inferences” about your interests “based on analysis of other information we have collected.”
Another signal of the ever increasing transparency of our behavior to the platforms of power. Would it be better if everyone could see who’s watching. Who better to watch the watchers than the watched?
Google's Sensorvault Can Tell Police Where You've Been
Do you know where you were five years ago? Did you have an Android phone at the time? It turns out Google might know—and it might be telling law enforcement.
a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”
The data Google is turning over to law enforcement is so precise that one deputy police chief said it “shows the whole pattern of life.” It’s collected even when people aren’t making calls or using apps, which means it can be even more detailed than data generated by cell towers.
And the transparency of our email - may be shocking.
How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails
Multiple confidential documents obtained by Motherboard show the sort of companies that want to buy data derived from scraping the contents of your email inbox.
The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users' email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users' inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.
On its website Edison says that it does "process" users' emails, but some users did not know that when using the Edison app the company scrapes their inbox for profit. Motherboard has also obtained documentation that provides more specifics about how two other popular apps—Cleanfox and Slice—sell products based on users' emails to corporate clients.
"They could definitely be a bit more upfront about their commercial intents," Seb Insua, a Edison user who said they were unaware of the data selling, told Motherboard. "Their website is all like 'No Ads' and 'Privacy First'," he added (the company's website says "Edison Trends practices privacy by design."
A final signal for this Friday Thinking on the emerging transparency of the digital environment.
Report: Out of control
In this report, we demonstrate how every time we use our phones, a large number of shadowy entities that are virtually unknown to consumers are receiving personal data about our interests, habits, and behaviour.
As we move around on the internet and in the real world, we are being continually tracked and profiled for the purpose of showing targeted advertising. In this report, we demonstrate how every time we use our phones, a large number of shadowy entities that are virtually unknown to consumers are receiving personal data about our interests, habits, and behaviour.
The actors, who are part of what we call the digital marketing and adtech industry, use this information to track us over time and across devices, in order to create comprehensive profiles about individual consumers. In turn, these profiles and groups can be used to personalize and target advertising, but also for other purposes such as discrimination, manipulation, and exploitation. Although the adtech industry operates across different media such as websites, smart devices, and mobile apps, we chose to focus on adtech in apps.
In order to expose how large parts of this vast industry works, we commissioned the cybersecurity company Mnemonic to perform a technical analysis of the data traffic from ten popular mobile apps. Because of the scope of tests, size of the third parties that were observed receiving data, and popularity of the apps, we regard the findings from these tests to be representative of widespread practices in the adtech industry.
This is a weak but hopeful signal of the phase transition in global energy geopolitics.
emissions broke even thanks to declines in some regions offsetting growth in others. The US recorded the largest emissions decline of any individual country, dropping by 140 million tonnes. The European Union fell by 160 million tonnes, while Japan cut emissions by 45 million tonnes. These promising declines were offset, however, by the rest of the world, where emissions grew by as much as 400 million tonnes. Almost 80 percent of that, the report says, came from countries in Asia.
New report reveals pause in rise of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019
According to the latest report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2019 global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions stayed steady from the previous year. That’s cause for some cautious optimism, as it’s better than continued growth, of course, but this could still be just a pause rather than the start of the long-term downward trend that we need.
A rise of 2° C (3.6° F) above pre-industrial levels was set as the safe limit, which would require CO2 emissions be kept to under 42 gigatons in 2030. Sadly, we currently look primed to shoot way past that, sending us towards a rise of as much as 3.4° C (6.12° F) by the end of the century.
And yet, even knowing this full-well, global emissions have continued to rise year over year. That means that not only have we not begun to solve the problem, on the whole we’re still actively making it worse.
However, there is a small glimmer of hope in the latest IEA report. The agency says that in 2019, global emissions stayed on 33 gigatons, the same as in 2018. This is a nice change of pace, after solid growth in the previous two years.
Overall, a pause in the rise of emissions is at least on the right track towards being good news, but on its own it’s hardly enough. Single-year pauses have happened in the past, before emissions go right on rising the following year. Still, it’s encouraging to see that our efforts in curbing emissions can have a positive effect.
This is a weak signal of what could become a more pervasive approach to re-owning our water and re-instituting ubiquitous public access to drinking water.
"I was jolted to the core to realize the depth and breadth and magnitude of how they have lawyered up in these small towns to take advantage of water rights," the Democrat said. "The fact that we have incredibly loose, if virtually nonexistent, policy guidelines around this is shocking and a categorical failure."
"The Washington state bill is groundbreaking," said Mary Grant, a water policy specialist with the environmental group Food and Water Watch. "As water scarcity is becoming a deeper crisis, you want to protect your local water supply so it goes for local purposes. (Bottled water) is not an industry that needs to exist."
nearly two-thirds of the bottled water sold in the United States comes from municipal tap water, according to Food and Water Watch.
Lawmakers open groundwater fight against bottled water companies
Washington state, land of sprawling rainforests and glacier-fed rivers, might soon become the first in the nation to ban water bottling companies from tapping spring-fed sources.
The proposal is one of several efforts at the state and local level to fend off the fast-growing bottled water industry and protect local groundwater. Local activists throughout the country say bottling companies are taking their water virtually for free, depleting springs and aquifers, then packaging it in plastic bottles and shipping it elsewhere for sale.
This is an interesting weak signal of the inherently social nature of life - that the narrative of the isolated, atomistic, selfish individual is at best misleading. What seems to exist at all levels is fractal ecologies of socialities of selves.
mutually beneficial exchange of leaked essential nutrients may be a selfless way to enhance the growth of the whole community of cells.
Leaking away essential resources actually helps cells grow
Experts have been unable to explain why cells, from bacteria to humans, leak essential chemicals necessary for growth into their environment. New mathematical models reveal that leaking metabolites—substances involved in the chemical processes to sustain life with production of complex molecules and energy—may provide cells both selfish and selfless benefits.
Previously, biologists could only say that leaking is an inherent property of cell membranes caused by fundamental rules of chemistry.
"It is in the nature of membranes to leak, but if leaking is undesi
rable, why has evolution not stopped it? This question was never solved," said Professor Kunihiko Kaneko, a theoretical biology expert from the University of Tokyo Research Center for Complex Systems Biology.
"In many cases, if all cells are leaking the same molecule, their environment will become 'polluted.' But if multiple cell types live together, then they can leak one chemical and use a different chemical leaked by the others," said Kaneko.
An interesting signal of the ongoing conflict and collaboration of humans and their microbial ecologies.
"The discovery of these latest antimicrobials forms part of the APC's overall strategy to develop precision biological tools to control harmful bacteria and as such provide efficacious alternatives to antibiotics,"
Alternatives to antibiotics found in sheep poo and on human skin
Scientists at the APC Microbiome Ireland SFI Research Centre have added to their arsenal of new antimicrobials with discoveries of Nisin J, a new antimicrobial produced from staphylococcal bacteria found on human skin and actifensins produced by Actinomycetes isolated from sheep feces.
The researchers, based at University College Cork and Teagasc, have published two papers in the well-known microbiology journal, Journal of Bacteriology, where the actifensin paper is highlighted by the editor as an article of significant interest this month.
The latest antimicrobials fall into a class of small antimicrobial proteins called bacteriocins which represent versatile alternatives to some commonly used antibiotics.
Nisin J, which was isolated from Staphylococcus capitis, a strain of bacteria between the human toes, is a type of nisin, commonly used in the Food industry as a preservative. Nisin has been used since 1952 and was granted generally regarded as safe (GRAS) status in 1988 by the US Food and Drug Administration FDA. It is also approved by the World Health Organisation as a food additive and has the E-number E234.
Another signal in the ongoing efforts to meet the challenges of antibiotic resistance.
Antibiotics discovered that kill bacteria in a new way
A new group of antibiotics with a unique approach to attacking bacteria has been discovered, making it a promising clinical candidate in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.
The newly-found corbomycin and the lesser-known complestatin have a never-before-seen way to kill bacteria, which is achieved by blocking the function of the bacterial cell wall. The discovery comes from a family of antibiotics called glycopeptides that are produced by soil bacteria.
The researchers also demonstrated in mice that these new antibiotics can block infections caused by the drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus which is a group of bacteria that can cause many serious infections.
The findings were published in Nature.
One more signal of progress in the search for antibacterial agents.
"We are exploring Earth's microbiomes, and sometimes unexpected things turn up. These viruses of bacteria are a part of biology, of replicating entities, that we know very little about,"
"These huge phages bridge the gap between non-living bacteriophages, on the one hand, and bacteria and Archaea. There definitely seem to be successful strategies of existence that are hybrids between what we think of as traditional viruses and traditional living organisms."
Huge bacteria-eating viruses close gap between life and non-life
Scientists have discovered hundreds of unusually large, bacteria-killing viruses with capabilities normally associated with living organisms, blurring the line between living microbes and viral machines.
These phages—short for bacteriophages, so-called because they "eat" bacteria—are of a size and complexity considered typical of life, carry numerous genes normally found in bacteria and use these genes against their bacterial hosts.
University of California, Berkeley, researchers and their collaborators found these huge phages by scouring a large database of DNA that they generated from nearly 30 different Earth environments, ranging from the guts of premature infants and pregnant women to a Tibetan hot spring, a South African bioreactor, hospital rooms, oceans, lakes and deep underground.
Altogether they identified 351 different huge phages, all with genomes four or more times larger than the average genomes of viruses that prey on single-celled bacteria.
Aside from providing new insight into the constant warfare between phages and bacteria, the new findings also have implications for human disease. Viruses, in general, carry genes between cells, including genes that confer resistance to antibiotics. And since phages occur wherever bacteria and Archaea live, including the human gut microbiome, they can carry damaging genes into the bacteria that colonize humans.
This is a great signal of just how profoundly social all entities are - evolution isn’t just a population phenomena, not just a species-in-environment phenomena - but rather a species-in-enviromental-ecologies phenomena.
"Bacterial communities are incredibly complex and diverse, and our study shows that how a bacterial species interacts with its community has fundamental repercussions for its evolutionary path.
"Scientists have debated how much of an effect community has on evolution, but our result shows clearly that when we want to understand how species adapt to new environments, the local community cannot be ignored."
A more diverse community meant an individual species would be less likely to evolve and adapt. The team reasoned this was because in a diverse community there were likely to be other species that could already exploit the niche better, such as using a certain resource. In a less diverse community, there would be more opportunity to take on new roles that were not already taken by other species.
For bacteria, your community determines whether you evolve or not
A study of puddles has shown that bacteria evolve and adapt differently depending on the make-up of the community of bacteria they live within.
The findings could have implications for better understanding how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, or for modelling how beneficial communities of bacteria are likely to respond to environmental changes and global heating.
For example, the researchers say that to tackle bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, scientists need to understand not just the bug causing infections, but the whole community that these bacteria live with in a person's body.
Bacteria often live in large communities of hundreds or thousands of different species. These all interact, sometimes negatively, by competing for resources, and sometimes positively, for example when the waste from one species can be used by another.
I have to say - I’ve been waiting for this for the last 10 years.
Simple, solar-powered water desalination
System achieves new level of efficiency in harnessing sunlight to make fresh potable water from seawater
A completely passive solar-powered desalination system could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area. Such systems could potentially serve off-grid arid coastal areas to provide an efficient, low-cost water source.
The system uses multiple layers of flat solar evaporators and condensers, lined up in a vertical array and topped with transparent aerogel insulation. It is described in a paper appearing today in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, authored by MIT doctoral students Lenan Zhang and Lin Zhao, postdoc Zhenyuan Xu, professor of mechanical engineering and department head Evelyn Wang, and eight others at MIT and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
The key to the system's efficiency lies in the way it uses each of the multiple stages to desalinate the water. At each stage, heat released by the previous stage is harnessed instead of wasted. In this way, the team's demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation.
I just had to include this. The first paragraph sounds so much like a science fiction description.
Time crystals and topological superconductors merge
"Powering a topological superconductor using a time crystal gives you more than the sum of its parts," says Jason Alicea, a researcher at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US. The discovery of topological states has bred reams of research revealing new condensed matter and quantum physics, with potential technological applications in spintronics and quantum computing. Similarly, not long after the first observations of topological insulators in the late 2000s, the concepts of time crystals emerged, introducing another fresh arena for exploring new physics that could be exploited in precise timekeeping and quantum technologies.
This is a wonderful signal of new approaches to live theatre with audience participation and integrated technology. I encourage everyone who will be in Ottawa during the performance to join the action. The time is getting close so please register to attend.
Strata Inc.
Dates: March 6, 7, 13, and 14, at 8pm
Location: Rebel.com, 377 Dalhousie Street
Tickets available here:
Written by Megan Piercey Monafu
Sound design by Johnny Wideman
As a teen, Victoria was an infamous hacker. Now a young adult, she has created a powerful virtual reality platform and agreed to work for a giant corporation to bring that platform to a huge audience. As users plunge into, trip over, and run away from the new Internet reality of VR experiences, exploring online privacy, connection, security, and access, Victoria must choose: run the multinational responsible, or escape from her own invention.
Strata Inc. is based on real developments in VR as it intersects with marketing, the world of work, and new outlets for the imagination. Strata Inc. uses individual audience headphones, sound design, and mic’d actors to echo the transportational abilities of VR while creating an in-person communal audio experience.
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