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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
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
A continuation of austerity and the obsession with government deficits will deepen discontent among the disenchanted, and the winners will likely be right-wing anti-EU politicians, notably in Italy and France. While the last crisis helped right-wing populists move to the forefront of European and national politics, another crisis and another failure to respond might put them in the driving seat in several key Eurozone economies. A rethinking in Berlin and Brussels of its approach to economic policymaking will therefore be paramount to preventing a disintegration of the monetary union.
Coronavirus crisis: There is no way back to business as usual in the EU
The tendency in economics now—as well as in a great deal of public discussion—is to view the economy as a natural force, existing independently from our ideas about what it is and how it ought to work. This book systematically demolishes that self-serving conceit by charting in extensive detail how differently it has operated at different periods of time, and how its operation is conditioned by the ideologies with which it co-develops. “The market and competition, profits and wages, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitiveness—none of these things exist as such,” Piketty insists. “All are social and historical constructs” that “depend entirely” on the “systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with.”
“Every human society must justify its inequalities,” the book begins. What follows is a comprehensive investigation of how different societies have done precisely that, ranging through what the book terms various “inequality regimes.”
One of the revelatory aspects of Capital and Ideology is that it grabs hold of the concept of ideology … The word makes it into the title, after all, and it serves as a crucial component of his analysis of transitions between inequality regimes, correcting the tendency to view inequality as a natural fact rather than a policy choice. “Inequality is neither economic nor technological,” he writes. “It is ideological and political.” The notion of ideology is the essential tool in the book’s overarching project of demystification.
“Like left-wing parties in France,” he writes, “the Democratic Party in the United States transitioned over half a century from the workers’ party to the party of the highly educated.” Elites’ distance from working-class interest, he contends, led the Democratic party and its ideological counterparts abroad to accede to a policy program betraying the values of social democracy: regressive taxation, elite domination of higher education systems, and forms of globalization that enabled the wealthy to hide their assets from tax authorities and trade agreements that facilitated outsourcing. The culmination of this trend, Piketty argues, is especially apparent in the “progressive” coalition of Brahmin Left and Merchant Right….
from the reality of access to education and wealth for society’s least favored classes. The discourse of meritocracy and entrepreneurship often seems to serve primarily as a way for the winners in today’s economy to justify any level of inequality whatsoever while peremptorily blaming the losers for lacking talent, virtue, and diligence.
“The broadly social-democratic redistributive coalitions that arose in the mid-twentieth century,” he writes, “were not just electoral or institutional or party coalitions but also intellectual and ideological. The battle was fought and won above all on the battleground of ideas.” Unfortunately, saying, and even proving, that such a revolution is urgently necessary is not the same thing as making one happen, and on the latter count, there is little to be optimistic about.
Thomas Piketty Takes On the Ideology of Inequality
Some believe that we are on the cusp of a new age. The day is coming when practically anything that a human can do—at least anything that the labor market is willing to pay a human being a decent wage to do—will soon be doable more efficiently and cost effectively by some AI-driven automated device. If and when that day does arrive, those who own the means of production will feel ever increasing pressure to discard human workers in favor of an artificially intelligent work force. They are likely to do so as unhesitatingly as they have always set aside outmoded technology in the past.
The Robots Are Coming
Is a marriage apocalypse coming? Looking at current trends, it’s already here. Modernity, as destructive and unexpected as an asteroid, has ravaged societal norms. The hegemony of formal marriage over relationships is ending. Yet, like the dinosaurs evolving into birds, formal marriage persists, just transformed and more marginal. In its formal place, a zoo of new relationships is appearing. There’s casual cohabitation for couples testing the waters. There are registered unions for those unwilling to sign the big contract. And there’s a fieldguide of lesser-known arrangements, from living apart together (when longterm partners keep separate addresses) to kitchen-table polyamory (when a tangle of nonmonogamous partners are intimate enough to have breakfast together).
Marriage is weakening. It’s diversifying. But it won’t disappear any time soon.
Is marriage over?
With one breath, the friends of power told us that global capitalism was a dynamic, disruptive force, the source of constant innovation and change. With the next, they told us it had brought about the end of history: permanent stability and peace. There was no attempt to resolve this contradiction. Or any other.
We were promised unending growth on a finite planet. We were told that a vastly unequal system would remove all differences. Social peace would be delivered by a system based on competition and envy. Democracy would be secured by the power of money. The contradictions were crashingly obvious. The whole package relied on magic.
“to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing”
Why Common Ownership Is a Route to Social Transformation
A signal of the future of work and education?
CAMPUS IS CLOSED, SO COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE REBUILDING THEIR SCHOOLS IN MINECRAFT
Being stuck at home has forced everyone to be creative
The day before University of Pennsylvania students were told that their college commencement would be held online, junior Andrew Guo thought of an alternative to holding the address over Zoom. Students could have a “Hey Day” and graduation inside Minecraft, just as a Japanese elementary school had organized days earlier.
Quickly, “Penncraft” students began to recreate dormitories, food trucks, and local sculptures in-game. Makarios Chung, an early builder, measured buildings’ dimensions and streets positions constantly to ensure their scale was as accurate as possible. The first day of building, students took an hour to decide the placement of one street. Their main goal was to have a completed campus, specifically Locust Street, for graduating seniors to walk down in-game now that COVID-19 ensured they wouldn’t return to campus and complete this UPenn tradition.
Signals of the emerging digital environment - and the flourishing of ubiquitous mixed reality interfaces. But also a signal of the need to ensure that there is public infrastructure and protections in place.
Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won.
We’ve tried all sorts of things to stop us from staring at our devices. Digital detoxes. Abstinence. Now? Bring on the Zoom cocktail hour.
Before the coronavirus, there was something I used to worry about. It was called screen time. Perhaps you remember it.
I thought about it. I wrote about it. A lot. I would try different digital detoxes as if they were fad diets, each working for a week or two before I’d be back on that smooth glowing glass.
Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt. My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering. I want to be covered in screens. If I had a virtual reality headset nearby, I would strap it on.
The screen is my only contact with my parents, whom I miss but can’t visit because I don’t want to accidentally kill them with the virus. It brings me into happy hours with my high school friends and gives me photos of people cooking on Facebook. Was there a time I thought Facebook was bad? An artery of dangerous propaganda flooding the country’s body politic? Maybe. I can’t remember. That was a different time.
A lot of people are coming around.
Another not new signal of the future of work but is becoming ever more salient. Imagine if peer-review could happen in real-time as papers were being written?
“It’s a very different way of writing than the traditional academic science of not putting it out before it’s a finished product.”
“It’s definitely been very, very helpful to be able to show someone, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking so far. Here are some figures; here’s some text. What do you think?’”
Synchronized editing: the future of collaborative writing
A growing suite of tools allows teams of researchers to work collectively to edit scientific documents.
Draft scientific manuscripts are typically confidential. So, when Elana Fertig was asked to take a look at an in-development paper on a functional gene-annotation strategy, she expected to receive the file in a private e-mail. What she got was a public announcement, shared on Twitter.
The paper had been written by Olga Botvinnik, a computational biologist at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, California, who is an advocate of the global movement to make research more accessible. In November 2019, as Botvinnik started preparing her paper, she decided to try this open-science ethos out for herself. “I wanted to walk the walk of open science,” Botvinnik says.
Botvinnik managed her paper as if it were open-source software. She wrote it in a plain-text editor and placed text files alongside data sets and code for generating figures on the code-sharing site GitHub. She invited her four co-authors to submit edits using Git, software that tracks precisely how and when a file has been changed. And she used a dedicated tool called Manubot to render the document as a user-friendly manuscript, which she then published online and tweeted to the world.
Manubot is one of a small but growing number of tools specifically designed for collaborative writing; others include Overleaf, Authorea, Fidus Writer and Manuscripts.io. These tools not only close some of the key feature gaps, but also provide a glimpse of where scientific communication might move next.
Manubot solves problems by cobbling together various open-source tools
One more signal of the future of collaboration everywhere.
Intentional serendipity is a motif at Oberwolfach. The institute works to minimize distractions from math and to remove any barriers to collaboration. No locks, restricted Wi-Fi, and meals served family style with seats assigned at random before lunch and dinner.
Mathematics as a Team Sport
When 50 mathematicians spend a week in the woods, there’s no telling what will happen. And that’s the point.
In February, before the COVID-19 pandemic locked down cities and closed borders, I spent four days with about 50 mathematicians at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in the Black Forest of southern Germany. Most weeks of the year the institute hosts small gatherings focused on different areas of mathematics. I planned to insinuate myself among the professional mathematicians: break bread with them, take a far-back seat at their lectures, eavesdrop on their hallway conversations, and try to figure out how a close gathering like this one promotes mathematical discovery.
There’s no easy way to get to Oberwolfach. I arrived on a Monday by the recommended route, which is to fly to Frankfurt, then take a two-hour train trip south to the hamlet of Wolfach, then a 30-minute cash-only taxi ride along the river Wolf. Eventually I spied the institute itself, perched midway up a steep hill and backed by an expanse of evergreen forest.
Remoteness is the point.
Hmmm sounds a bit like the AI singularity - where an AI designs its next iteration - and zoom - an exponential evolution of computational capability.
Google trains chips to design themselves
One of the key challenges of computer design is how to pack chips and wiring in the most ergonomic fashion, maintaining power, speed and energy efficiency.
The recipe includes thousands of components that must communicate with one another flawlessly, all on a piece of real estate the size of a fingernail.
The process is known as chip floor planning, similar to what interior decorators do when laying out plans to dress up a room. With digital circuitry, however, instead of using a one-floor plan, designers must consider integrated layouts within multiple floors. As one tech publication referred to it recently, chip floor planning is 3-D Tetris.
The process is time-consuming. And with continual improvement in chip components, laboriously calculated final designs become outdated fast. Chips are generally designed to last between two and five years, but there is constant pressure to shorten the time between upgrades.
Google researchers have just taken a giant leap in floor planning design. In a recent announcement, senior Google research engineers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini said they have designed an algorithm that "learns" how to achieve optimum circuitry placement. It can do so in a fraction of the time currently required for such designing, analyzing potentially millions of possibilities instead of thousands, which is currently the norm. In doing so, it can provide chips that take advantage of the latest developments faster, cheaper and smaller.
This is a signal of the progress toward new medical tools using nanobots and AI.
"For a microrobotic system to work in the human body, it should contain electric energy, sensors, actuators, antennas and microelectronic circuitry," Schmidt explained. "The main objective of our recent work was to make one large step towards this final (and admittedly very ambitious) final goal; still in a simplified way, of course."
A flexible microrobot that can survive almost any deformation
An International research team led by Dr. Oliver Schmidt, working at Chemnitz University of Technology (TU Chemnitz) and Leibniz IFW Dresden has recently developed a microrobitic system with a wide range of possible applications, ranging from completing micro-surgeries to delivering goods to humans. This robot, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, builds on an idea introduced by the same team of researchers almost a decade ago.
"We first started exploring the idea of creating a tiny microrobotic system that is self-propelled by a powerful jet engine and has microelectronic components on board almost ten years ago," Schmidt told TechXplore. "Our initial idea was to build a smart self-propelling microsystem that can interact with single biological cells, which are of similar size to microsystem itself. This system should be able to move around, sense its environment, transport cargo, deliver drugs and carry out micro-surgeries."
A great signal of the future of testing for disease and possibly other conditions. Still in its early days but worth paying attention to.
Detection was better the more advanced the disease was. Overall, cancer was correctly detected in 18% of those with stage I cancer, but in 93% of those with stage IV cancer.
the system correctly identified 63% of those with stage I pancreatic cancer, rising to 100% in stage IV.
The team further found that the system could shed light on the type of cancer. For 96% of samples deemed to show cancer, the test was able to offer a prediction for in which the tissue the cancer originated, with 93% of these predictions found to be correct.
New blood test can detect 50 types of cancer
System uses machine learning to offer new way to screen for hard-to-detect cancers
A new blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer has been revealed by researchers in the latest study to offer hope for early detection.
The test is based on DNA that is shed by tumours and found circulating in the blood. More specifically, it focuses on chemical changes to this DNA, known as methylation patterns.
Researchers say the test can not only tell whether someone has cancer, but can also shed light on the type of cancer they have.
Dr Geoffrey Oxnard of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, part of Harvard Medical School, said the test was now being explored in clinical trials. “You need to use a test like this in an independent group at risk of cancer to actually show that you can find the cancers, and figure out what to do about it when you find them,” he said.
Writing in the journal Annals of Oncology, the team reveal how the test was developed using a machine learning algorithm – a type of artificial intelligence. Such systems pick up on patterns within data and as a result learn to classify it.
Another significant signal of the transformation of energy geopolitics. This situation deters continued investment in expensive oil (stranded assets). If the price of oil does go up again - that will continue to spur the development and implementation of renewable energy generation and storage.
In a few markets prices have gone negative – sellers will pay you to take the oil, as global storage capacity fills.
Oil wells responsible for almost 1m barrels a day may have already been shut down because the price of oil is now lower than the cost of shipping it, according to US banking giant Goldman Sachs, with the number of wells growing “by the hour”. This is likely to “permanently alter the energy industry and its geopolitics” and “shift the debate around climate change”, said Jeffrey Currie, head of commodities at the bank.
Will the coronavirus kill the oil industry and help save the climate?
Analysts say the coronavirus and a savage price war means the oil and gas sector will never be the same again
The plunging demand for oil wrought by the coronavirus pandemic combined with a savage price war has left the fossil fuel industry broken and in survival mode, according to analysts. It faces the gravest challenge in its 100-year history, they say, one that will permanently alter the industry. With some calling the scene a “hellscape”, the least lurid description is “unprecedented”.
A key question is whether this will permanently alter the course of the climate crisis. Many experts think it might well do so, pulling forward the date at which demand for oil and gas peaks, never to recover, and allowing the atmosphere to gradually heal.
The boldest say peak fossil fuel demand may have been dragged into the here and now, and that 2019 will go down in history as the peak year for carbon emissions. But some take an opposing view: the fossil fuel industry will bounce back as it always has, and bargain basement oil prices will slow the much-needed transition to green energy.
This is a good signal of a shift toward a metabolic economy - where every output must eventually be a designed input to something else. The ultimate goal would be to ban landfill, airfill and waterfill.
"While there are technical challenges to overcome, we hope this research moves us one step closer to the ultimate goal of an integrated, no-waste approach to all our raw materials and by-products."
Making stronger concrete with 'sewage-enhanced' steel slag
Researchers have shown how a by-product of steel making can be used to both treat wastewater and make stronger concrete, in a zero-waste approach to help advance the circular economy.
Produced during the separation of molten steel from impurities, steel slag is often used as a substitute aggregate material for making concrete.
Steel slag can also be used to absorb contaminants like phosphate, magnesium, iron, calcium, silica and aluminum in the wastewater treatment process, but loses its effectiveness over time.
Engineering researchers at RMIT University examined whether slag that had been used to treat wastewater could then be recycled as an aggregate material for concrete.
The concrete made with post-treatment steel slag was about 17% stronger than concrete made with conventional aggregates, and 8% stronger than raw steel slag.
This is a good 3 page summary (pdf) of the transformation of global energy geopolitics. The graphics are simple and clearly illustrate the growing trends.
Renewable capacity highlights
At the end of 2019, global renewable generation capacity amounted to 2 537 GW. Hydropower accounted for the largest share of the global total, with a capacity of 1 190 GW.
Wind and solar energy accounted for most of the remainder, with capacities of 623 GW and 586 GW respectively. Other renewables included 124 GW of bioenergy and 14 GW of geothermal, plus 500 MW of marine energy.
An interesting signal of how evolution evolves.
Scientists discover a new class of taste receptors
Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. "Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists," wrote Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1977, and biologists continue to find this to be true.
Case in point: A team of scientists led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara has discovered that multiple opsin proteins, known for decades to be required for vision, also function as taste receptors. The finding, which appears in Current Biology, represents a light-independent function for opsins, and raises questions about the purpose these proteins served in ancient organisms.
"This is the first example of a role of opsins in taste, or in any form of chemical sensation," said coauthor Craig Montell, a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology.
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