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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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the more threatening truth that what must shift is ownership. As long as the structural forces of current corporate ownership remain in place – where only shareholders vote for the board, where shareholders are predominantly the wealthy, where companies define success as a rising share price and pay executives handsomely for achieving it – there is no amount of rhetoric or external regulation that can turn companies away from their existing mandate: to create more wealth for the wealthy, with all possible speed.
What must change is the structural design and ownership of the corporation itself. We need to envisage and create an entirely new concept of the company – a just firm – designed from the inside out for a new mandate: to serve broad wellbeing and the public good. The just firm is the only kind that should ultimately be permitted to exist. The time is coming when society must end the corporation as we know it.
This task may seem today unimaginable.
The End of the Corporation?
I love the metaphor that Philip Stark — a statistician at Berkeley — uses. He’s the inventor and promulgator of risk-limiting audits. He says that if you want to test if a big pot of soup is too salty, you don’t need to test all of the soup to see if it’s salty everywhere. Instead, you stir it up nicely, take a spoonful, and see if that spoonful is too salty. We’re talking about something similar. If the sample you take is representative of the whole population, then it suffices.
Cryptography Pioneer Seeks Secure Elections the Low-Tech Way
These types of microorganism were once considered ‘extreme’ forms of life, but research over the past couple of decades has shown that as much as 70% of all microbes on Earth live in similarly harsh environments. Other studies have shown that life is abundant in places long deemed inhospitable, such as deep sediments under the oceans, the cold deserts of Antarctica and even the stratosphere.
And these scavenging microbes have evolved diverse ways to survive the challenges their habitats present. Some are able to breathe metals, even radioactive ones such as uranium. Some capture nutrients from trace gases in the air. And others, like those found buried deep in the sludgy ocean floor, live so incredibly slowly that they might survive to be hundreds or thousands of years old, eating and reproducing infrequently.
These microbial communities have learned to live at Earth’s most extreme reaches
Nobody knew anything in 1918. The germ theory of disease, a few decades old, was as controversial then as climate change is now. “Virus” was a medical buzzword for “something we can’t see in a microscope that must be causing this or that disease.”
Even the word “influenza” was a hand-me-down from the Middle Ages, when the diagnosis for many ailments was the “influence” of the stars. The 19th century had seen many outbreaks of a respiratory disease called influenza, including the “Russian flu” of 1890 that had killed a million people. Less fatal flu outbreaks occurred yearly, as they continue to do.
Pandemics, Politics and the Spanish Flu
In using the term ‘soul’ to refer to them, we don’t have to think of ourselves as ghostly immaterial substances. We can think of ‘soul’ as referring, instead, to a set of attributes – of cognition, feeling and reflective awareness – that might depend on the biological processes that underpin them, and yet enable us to enter a world of meaning and value that transcends our biological nature.
Entering this world requires distinctively human qualities of thought and rationality. But we’re not abstract intellects, detached from the physical world, contemplating it and manipulating it from a distance. To realise what makes us most fully human, we need to pay attention to the richness and depth of the emotional responses that connect us to the world. Bringing our emotional lives into harmony with our rationally chosen goals and projects is a vital part of the healing and integration of the human soul.
The search for ways to express the longing for a deeper meaning in our lives seems to be an ineradicable part of our nature, whether we identify as religious believers or not. If we were content to structure our lives wholly within a fixed and unquestioned set of parameters, we would cease to be truly human. There is something within us that is always reaching forward, that refuses to rest content with the utilitarian routines of our daily existence, and yearns for something not yet achieved that will bring healing and completion.
...But this core self that we seek to understand, and whose growth and maturity we seek to foster in ourselves and encourage in others, is not a static or closed phenomenon. Each of us is on a journey, to grow and to learn, and to reach towards the best that we can become. So the terminology of ‘soul’ is not just descriptive, but is what philosophers sometimes call ‘normative’: using the language of ‘soul’ alerts us not just to the way we happen to be at present, but to the better selves we have it in our power to become.
What is the soul if not a better version of ourselves?
While the new age of virtual money has only just begun and the long-term consequences are as yet entirely unclear, we can already say one or two things. The first is that a movement towards virtual money is not in itself, necessarily, an insidious effect of capitalism. In fact, it might well mean exactly the opposite. For much of human history, systems of virtual money were designed and regulated to ensure that nothing like capitalism could ever emerge to begin with – at least not as it appears in its present form, with most of the world’s population placed in a condition that would in many other periods of history be considered tantamount to slavery. The second point is to underline the absolutely crucial role of violence in defining the very terms by which we imagine both “society” and “markets” – in fact, many of our most elementary ideas of freedom. A world less entirely pervaded by violence would rapidly begin to develop other institutions. Finally, thinking about debt outside the twin intellectual straitjackets of state and market opens up exciting possibilities. For instance, we can ask: in a society in which that foundation of violence had finally been yanked away, what exactly would free men and women owe each other? What sort of promises and commitments should they make to each other?
Debt: The first five thousand years
A very good signal of the progress being made toward a functional quantum computing paradigm. It also signals the eternal utility of serendipity.
"Performing magnetic resonance is like trying to move a particular ball on a billiard table by lifting and shaking the whole table," he says. "We'll move the intended ball, but we'll also move all the others."
"The breakthrough of electric resonance is like being handed an actual billiards stick to hit the ball exactly where you want it."
"I have worked on spin resonance for 20 years of my life, but honestly, I had never heard of this idea of nuclear electric resonance," Prof Morello says. "We 'rediscovered' this effect by complete accident—it would never have occurred to me to look for it. The whole field of nuclear electric resonance has been almost dormant for more than half a century, after the first attempts to demonstrate it proved too challenging."
Engineers crack 58-year-old puzzle on way to quantum breakthrough
A happy accident in the laboratory has led to a breakthrough discovery that not only solved a problem that stood for more than half a century, but has major implications for the development of quantum computers and sensors.In a study published today in Nature, a team of engineers at UNSW Sydney has done what a celebrated scientist first suggested in 1961 was possible, but has eluded everyone since: controlling the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields.
"This discovery means that we now have a pathway to build quantum computers using single-atom spins without the need for any oscillating magnetic field for their operation," says UNSW's Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering Andrea Morello. "Moreover, we can use these nuclei as exquisitely precise sensors of electric and magnetic fields, or to answer fundamental questions in quantum science."
The future of conflict in a world facing pandemics and climate change needs different approaches and weapons.
The end of high-tech war
an excerpt from his new book, The Dragons and the Snakes, a leading military strategist explains how the West is losing its technological edge over guerrilla insurgencies
One of the fundamental changes that has taken place since the end of the Cold War is the spread of smart, handheld consumer electronic systems.
Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, so central to virtually every aspect of modern life worldwide, are a constellation of US military space platforms, while Google Earth, originally known as “Keyhole Viewer” in a coy reference to the special security system for US spy satellites, was created with CIA funding in 2001 before being acquired by Google in 2004. By 2011, Google Earth had been downloaded a billion times and was running on laptops, iPads, Android and iOS smartphones, and a host of other devices around the globe. By 2017, there were more than five billion global navigation system satellite (GNSS) devices worldwide, and that number was expected to grow to eight billion by 2020.
This is a very important discussion of the complex issues and signals of the future of both warfare and energy geopolitics. Worth the read.
The Complex Policy Questions Raised by Nuclear Energy’s Role in the Future of Warfare
The United States military, as well as other militaries around the world, are racing to develop high-energy weapons—lasers, high-powered microwaves, and electromagnetic rail guns—in order to compete with near-peer competitors on the next generation of military technologies. But the electricity to power these systems will need to derive from somewhere, and so military planners are eyeing a new generation of energy-dense nuclear reactors, despite potential policy and legal challenges to doing so.
The Pentagon’s high-energy weapons efforts include the Navy’s planned deployment of a 60-kilowatt (kW) laser on a destroyer; the Army’s plans to field-test a 50-kW vehicle-mounted laser next year and an anti-cruise-missile 250- to 300-kW fixed system by 2024; and the Air Force test last May that shot down incoming anti-air missiles with lasers. The Navy and the Army are both working on electromagnetic rail guns, while the Missile Defense Agency is eyeing megawatt-class lasers for ballistic missile defense. Efforts abroad include Russia’s mysterious Peresvet laser weapon, deployed last year; and China’s efforts to build ground- and ship-based lasers. Both countries are also believed to be building ground-based anti-satellite lasers. China, which tested a railgun at sea in 2018, may be the first nation to deploy an operational version of that technology.
A fascinating signal of the potential for AI to enhance our olfactory senses.
An AI that mimics how mammals smell recognizes scents better than other AI
This kind of algorithm could be used in testing air quality or diagnosing medical conditions
When it comes to identifying scents, a “neuromorphic” artificial intelligence beats other AI by more than a nose.
The new AI learns to recognize smells more efficiently and reliably than other algorithms. And unlike other AI, this system can keep learning new aromas without forgetting others, researchers report online in Nature Machine Intelligence. The key to the program’s success is its neuromorphic structure, which resembles the neural circuitry in mammalian brains more than other AI designs.
This kind of algorithm, which excels at detecting faint signals amidst background noise and continually learning on the job, could someday be used for air quality monitoring, toxic waste detection or medical diagnoses.
The new AI is an artificial neural network, composed of many computing elements that mimic nerve cells to process scent information. The AI “sniffs” by taking in electrical voltage readouts from chemical sensors in a wind tunnel that were exposed to plumes of different scents, such as methane or ammonia. When the AI whiffs a new smell, that triggers a cascade of electrical activity among its nerve cells, or neurons, which the system remembers and can recognize in the future.
Fundamental in the struggle to meet the challenges of climate change is the need to re-imagine the human-environment relationship beyond the nature-nurture and the artificial-natural dualities. Words are important in creating the language of our understanding. This is a very interesting article about language with which we seek to meet the challenges of our world.
For Nietzsche, truths are created, not discovered, invented, not found – and language is the fundamental condition of their formation. He asks us to create new ways of becoming with/in the world.
“Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting. The forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do, in part because we are able to modify the conditions themselves.”
Under What Conditions Will Clean Energy Become The Norm?
Even as renewables become a more common energy source around the world, they still face major obstacles. Some barriers are inherent with all new technologies; others are the result of skewed regulatory frameworks and marketplaces. Through what confluence of conditions will clean energy become the norm?
The Union of Concerned Scientists states that wind and solar already have overcome numerous barriers to become competitive with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. The shift towards the adoption of renewable energy is not mainly driven by the federal government, but by state governments, private corporations, and community initiatives. The growth rates of various energy sources, the flows of clean energy investment, and the world’s progress on its sustainability goals are solid beginning points.
But, in a world driven by corporate, political, and media influences, under what conditions can clean energy as a normal be possible? Thinking through the conditions that enable and constrain agency and action helps us better understand precisely how individuals and collectives set social changes into motion and can point us toward a clean energy world.
That’s the gist behind research from the University of Minnesota which invites us to extend and consider how social change precedes and provokes transformations of many kinds: technological, ecological, economic, political, legal, ethical, cultural, ideological, and intellectual.
A signal of the future of disease prevention and mitigation.
Not to worry — the subdermal sensor doesn't actually collect or transmit any data without a component above the skin. If you can get over the initial conceptual discomfort, the idea could have promise.
Injecting this sensor under your skin could prevent future pandemics
One of the scariest parts of the coronavirus is its dormant period: An infected person could be walking around further spreading the disease for up to two weeks before they even show any symptoms that they're sick.
But what if there were a way to know whether a person was sick before the fever and coughing start?
As spotted by Nextgov, biotech company Profusa announced Tuesday that it was initiating a DARPA-funded study to see whether its biosensor that it injects under the skin can help detect the flu up to three weeks early. The hope is that it could eventually be used to root out pandemics or bio-attacks in the future, too.
Early detection for the flu or, ya know, bio-terrorism, sounds great. But an injectable subdermal sensor that's paid for by the U.S. military (DARPA is the research arm of the Department of Defense) sounds a bit too dystopian for our current moment of mass surveillance and rising totalitarianism around the globe.
A great signal of the future of collective transdisciplinary approach to complex issues. And for better health security.
"It's a first step toward fulfilling the promise of the genomics era to inform how we combat disease,"
"Our method targets the evolving cellular language of the parasites instead of their chemistry," he said. "That's why we'll be able to apply this to bacterial infections, too—it's applicable to any disease-causing organism for which the genome has been sequenced."
Researchers forge a new weapon to fight parasites and other infections
Breakthrough collaborative science by an interdisciplinary team of researchers brought together by computational biology professor David Ardell promises a new approach for treating all types of infections.
Ardell's lab and a team of researchers from two other universities used a novel genomics- and systems-biology-based approach to find chemical compounds—extracted from bacteria harvested from the ocean—that could inhibit enzymes from a broad spectrum of related parasites without affecting human versions of those enzymes.
The team also describes a strategy for administering new drugs to be developed from their technology that should make it harder for parasites to evolve resistance to them.
Another signal of progress being made to respond to antibacterial resistant bacteria.
"This study addresses a growing concern, the emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria known as superbugs," said Alvarez, director of the NEWT Center. "They are projected to cause 10 million annual deaths by 2050.
New nano strategy fights superbugs
It's not enough to take antibiotic-resistant bacteria out of wastewater to eliminate the risks they pose to society. The bits they leave behind have to be destroyed as well.
Researchers at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering have a new strategy for "trapping and zapping" antibiotic resistant genes, the pieces of bacteria that, even though theirs hosts are dead, can find their way into and boost the resistance of other bacteria.
The team led by Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez is using molecular-imprinted graphitic carbon nitride nanosheets to absorb and degrade these genetic remnants in sewage system wastewater before they have the chance to invade and infect other bacteria.
The researchers targeted plasmid-encoded antibiotic-resistant genes (ARG) coding for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM1), known to resist multiple drugs. When mixed in solution with the ARGs and exposed to ultraviolet light, the treated nanosheets proved 37 times better at destroying the genes than graphitic carbon nitride alone.
The work done under the auspices of the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) is detailed in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology.
This is a weak signal of promise in treating residual non biodegradable chemicals - and the possibility of a metabolic economy.
"People knew you could do this but didn't know why," said Bryan Wong, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering and the paper's senior author. "Our simulations define the bigger picture that we can refine to find ways to break down PFAs faster or more efficiently in the future."
A possible end to 'forever' chemicals
Synthetic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyls, or PFAS, contain bonds between carbon and fluorine atoms considered the strongest in organic chemistry. Unfortunately, the widespread use of these nonbiodegradable products since the 1940s has contaminated many water supplies across America.
Engineers at UC Riverside have now shown in modeling experiments that using excess electrons shatters the carbon-fluorine bond of PFAS in water, leaving by-products that might even accelerate the process. The paper is published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.
A great signal of the emergence of a ubiquitous panopticon.
"This new lens could have many interesting applications outside photography such as creating highly efficient illumination for LIDAR that is critical for many autonomous systems, including self-driving cars,"
"The new lens eliminates the need for focusing and allows any camera to keep all the objects in focus simultaneously,"
"This research is a good example of how abandoning traditional notions can enable devices previously considered impossible," said Menon. "It serves as a good reminder to question dictates from the past."
Researchers create focus-free camera with new flat lens
Using a single lens that is about one-thousandth of an inch thick, researchers have created a camera that does not require focusing. The technology offers considerable benefits over traditional cameras such as the ones in most smartphones, which require multiple lenses to form high-quality, in-focus images.
"Our flat lenses can drastically reduce the weight, complexity and cost of cameras and other imaging systems, while increasing their functionality," said research team leader Rajesh Menon from the University of Utah. "Such optics could enable thinner smartphone cameras, improved and smaller cameras for biomedical imaging such as endoscopy, and more compact cameras for automobiles."
In Optica, The Optical Society's (OSA) journal for high impact research, Menon and colleagues describe their new flat lens and show that it can maintain focus for objects that are about 6 meters apart from each other. Flat lenses use nanostructures patterned on a flat surface rather than bulky glass or plastic to achieve the important optical properties that control the way light travels.
"Performing magnetic resonance is like trying to move a particular ball on a billiard table by lifting and shaking the whole table," he says." this quote is everything! I'm gonna use it on my website in the article pool table brands
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