Content
Quotes
Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work
Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly
The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy
Articles:
A chat with Riel Miller: Futures Literacy and Futures & Foresight compared
Spain is about to bring in a basic income scheme which the government thinks will 'stay forever'
We Should Own the Internet—Not Silicon Valley Oligarchs
Can United States intelligence community analysts telework?
A new artificial eye mimics and may outperform human eyes
Once a coronavirus vaccine exists, this researcher's mailable patch could deliver it to millions
Exterminate! UV robot sent to Singapore mall to zap coronavirus
Bumblebees Bite Plants to Force Them to Flower (Seriously)
Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine
Swarm probes weakening of Earth's magnetic field
A system for robust and efficient wireless power transfer
The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods. We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” and there’s a huge round of applause. That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. We as academics and administrators have lost the script. It’s not true of everyone. The chancellor at Berkeley is working hard to expand seats. I think the University of California and the University of Texas both see that it’s important that those seats expand as the population grows.
But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply. Birkin bags are $12,000 because they create the illusion of scarcity. I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education.
What drives those margins?
Not education. It’s credentialing. The most value-added part of a university is not the professors; it’s the admissions department. They have done a fantastic job creating the most thorough and arduous job-interview process in modern history, between the testing, the anxiety, the review of your life up until that point, the references you need. If I’m applying for a job at New York Magazine, I’d give you a list of references and you’d call them. You don’t ask the references to write a two-page letter. Universities now do background checks to see if you’ve ever had a DUI or been accused of a crime. They look at your social media to see if you’re abusing alcohol or if you’ve made racist or bigoted statements. We’re screening people like crazy.
The Coming Disruption Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education
Working humans are so much more than “resources”. This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the Covid-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged.
How to avoid this unacceptable situation? By involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace – by democratising firms. By decommodifying work – by collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all. As we face the monstrous risk of pandemic and environmental collapse, making these strategic changes would allow us to ensure the dignity of all citizens while marshalling the collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet.
To the question of how firms and how society as a whole might recognise the contributions of their employees in times of crisis, democracy is the answer. Certainly, we must close the yawning chasm of income inequality and raise the income floor – but that alone is not enough. After the two world wars, women’s undeniable contribution to society helped win them the right to vote. By the same token, it is time to enfranchise workers.
Our health and lives cannot be ruled by market forces alone. Now thousands of scholars are calling for a way out of the crisis
Nancy Fraser, Susan Neiman , Chantal Mouffe, Saskia Sassen, Jan-Werner Müller, Dani Rodrik, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, Ha-Joon Chang, and many others….
Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work
Until a COVID-19 vaccine is available, and accessible, which is not guaranteed, the way out of this crisis will be built on the established public health practices of testing, contact tracing, quarantine of contacts, and isolation of cases. The success of these practices is largely dependent on public trust, solidarity, and addressing—not entrenching—the inequities and injustices that contributed to this outbreak becoming a pandemic. - The Lancet
COVID-19 immunity passports and vaccination certificates: scientific, equitable, and legal challenges
there are always individuals that don’t participate in the collective behavior — the odd bird or insect or mammal that remains just a little out of sync with the rest; the stray cell or bacterium that seems to have missed some call to arms. Researchers usually pay them little heed, dismissing them as insignificant outliers.
But a handful of scientists have started to suspect otherwise. Their hunch is that these individuals are signs of something deeper, a broader evolutionary strategy at work. Now, new research validating that hypothesis has opened up a very different way of thinking about the study of collective behavior.
The aggregated cell body comes with its own risks: It could get eaten by a predator or be overrun by “cheater” cells that take advantage of the slime mold’s collective behavior for their own selfish gain. And if nutrients return abruptly to the environment, the amoebas can’t reverse the aggregation process to access that food.
The loner cells might therefore serve as a form of insurance in case any of those situations transpire. By staying out of the group, “you leave behind these seeds,” Tarnita said — seeds that could regenerate the population and its multicellular dynamics all on their own.
bet hedging they observed occurs at the level of the collective. “Each cell is not making the decision to become a loner in isolation,” she said. “It’s actually a social decision in some sense. It’s a decision that depends on the rest of the world” — on the chatter of surrounding cells and the physical nature of the environment.
Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly
This article argues that the constitutionally-inflected conflict that we now face is, in no small part, attributable to a core failure of our system of intellectual property to address, definitively, the boundaries of software protection and the implications for source code secrecy. In a world of privatized decisionmaking, the largely consistent move towards closed code in software sectors, has a number of deleterious results for the public, particularly in the age of algorithmic dominance.
However, this Article argues that source code also carries a paradoxical character that is peculiar to software: the very substance of what is secluded often stems from the most public of origins, and often produces the most public of implications. And it is the failures of intellectual property law that has made this possible. First, as I show, courts have shifted the boundaries of protection for software under both copyright and patent law, further amplifying the attractiveness of trade secrecy.
Second, the law has been willing to entertain an unique – and paradoxical-- overlap between copyright, patent, and trade secrecy, even though the three regimes have opposing public goals. Copyright and patent law are oriented towards disclosure, trade secrecy the opposite. While this overlap of protection in software seemed, at first glance, to be a good thing for innovation policy, it has proven deleterious for the larger public, particularly criminal defendants and lower income populations, who are now increasingly governed by an invisible hand that they can no longer investigate or question. But, as I argue, it may also be deleterious for other innovators, as well. The Article concludes with a brief discussion of ways to offer greater transparency through a "controlled disclosure regime," offering areas of reform in intellectual property, contract law, and discovery.
The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy
Size-distributions of floods, forest fires, earthquakes, wars, terrorist attacks, crimes, and IT investments, e.g., have no population mean, or the mean is ill defined due to infinite variance. In other words, mean and/or variance do not exist. Regression to the mean is a meaningless concept for such distributions, whereas what one might call "regression to the tail" is meaningful and consequential.
Regression to the tail applies to any distribution with non-vanishing probability density towards infinity. The frequency of new extremes and how much they exceed previous records is decisive for how fat-tailed a distribution will be, e.g., whether it will have infinite variance and mean. Above a certain frequency and size of extremes, the mean increases with more events measured, with the mean eventually approaching infinity instead of converging. In this case, regression to the mean means regression to infinity, i.e., a non-existent mean. Deep disasters – e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, and wars – tend to follow this type of distribution.
The law of regression to the tail says there will always be an event even more extreme than the most extreme to date. It is only a matter of time until it appears.
Prudent decision makers will not count on luck – or on conventional Gaussian risk management, which is worse than counting on luck, because it gives a false sense of security – when faced with risks that follow the law of regression to the tail. Instead, decision makers will want to do two things: (a) "cut the tail," to reduce risk by mitigation, and (b) practice the "precautionary principle," i.e., avoid tail-risk altogether by overcaution.
First, everyone needs to be honest about, and keep in mind, that there will be more pandemics in the future, and that one of these will be worse than the covid-19 pandemic. This uncomfortable fact follows directly from the power-law distribution of pandemics and the associated law of regression to the tail.
Four effective mitigation measures exist: (a) cutting the tail, (b) using the precautionary principle, (c) making sure the necessary contingencies are in place, and (d) taking action immediately, at speed, and at scale. These are the four basic principles for mitigating risk in the age of regression to the tail.
Covid-19 may end up being a mere dress rehearsal for the biggest and most urgent tail risk we face today: climate change
The Law of Regression to the Tail: How to Mitigate Covid-19, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophic Risks
This is a great discussion about futures literacy by Riel Miller - one of Canada’s great futurists.
A chat with Riel Miller: Futures Literacy and Futures & Foresight compared
This video captures a discussion between Alessandro Fergnani and Riel Miller about Futures Literacy. During their conversation they dive into a number of different questions, such as:
Are there different degrees of Futures Literacy?
What are the most effective ways to acquire Futures Literacy?
Is Futures Literacy an individual or social competency?
What is the relationship between Futures Literacy and creativity?
Do futures literacy and Futures & Foresight overlap?
What future research directions are there in Futures Literacy?
Well if Spain is going to do this - does it signal a global shift - I think we should very seriously enact our own versions.
Spain is about to bring in a basic income scheme which the government thinks will 'stay forever'
The Spanish government will next week approve a basic income programme which will provide a guaranteed income for poorer Spaniards.
The scheme's introduction has been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, which could trigger the deepest global recession on record.
Up to 1 million families will receive the new benefit, which is expected to cost Spain between 3 billion ($3.24 billion) and 3.5 billion euros ($3.78 billion) annually.
Spain's Economy Minister said that, if the scheme proves effective, the government hopes that it 'stays forever, that it becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument.'
This is another signal - for a growing awareness of the vital role the digital environment now plays in our societies and for enabling citizens a fuller participation in both their self-governance, their economic, physical and psychological wellness.
We Should Own the Internet—Not Silicon Valley Oligarchs
It’s time to stop treating high-speed internet as a luxury commodity and instead place it under democratic and public control.
In early May, the New York Times published a photo of Beth Revis, a fiction writer in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, scrunched into the back of a small vehicle in a parking lot. There, she was using her smartphone to try to teach a class, using the only reliable internet connection she had access to—the free Wi-Fi signal emanating from inside a local public elementary school.
As schools shut down and workplaces go remote as the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of millions of Americans like Revis have become increasingly reliant on internet access for their jobs, education and social interactions.
This crisis has clearly illustrated how digital infrastructure—the core assets and services on which a vast array of information technologies rely—has become critical to the functioning of our economy and society. It is, in a sense, the modern equivalent of the interstate highways, railway tracks, telephone networks and electricity systems that formed the backbones of the 20th-century economy.
However, in the United States, market-led deployment of this critical infrastructure—along with service provision dominated by a small oligopoly of giant telecommunications corporations—has led to inadequate development and severe inequities. For instance, according to the Federal Communication Commission’s estimates (which many experts think are highly understated), more than 21 million Americans don’t have access to even a minimal high-speed broadband connection of at least 25 mbps. Internet access in the United States is also generally far slower and more expensive than in most other advanced countries.
The ‘interesting times’ we live in includes some significant challenges to the security community. How to practice physical distancing and working in secure environments.
Can United States intelligence community analysts telework?
ABSTRACT
This article argues that United States Intelligence Community analysts can and should periodically telework as routine professional development and as a research supplement to traditional all-source intelligence analysis. We offer four key benefits to tapping into this reservoir of unclassified information that would improve the quality of the intelligence product, enable better liaison and academic exchange, and steward the profession. We conclude that an overdue rebalancing of classified and publicly available sources could be aided by telework, but only once analysts break free from ‘the cult of the SCIF’ will publicly available information receive the analytical attention that it deserves.
This is an amazing signal of the inevitable emergence of post-human-cyborg capabilities. Still far away (how far is far today - will be different tomorrow).
A new artificial eye mimics and may outperform human eyes
The high-tech device boasts a field of view and reaction time similar to that of real eyes
Scientists can’t yet rebuild someone with bionic body parts. They don’t have the technology. But a new artificial eye brings cyborgs one step closer to reality.
This device, which mimics the human eye’s structure, is about as sensitive to light and has a faster reaction time than a real eyeball. It may not come with the telescopic or night vision capabilities that Steve Austin had in The Six Million Dollar Man television show, but this electronic eyepiece does have the potential for sharper vision than human eyes, researchers report in the May 21 Nature.
“In the future, we can use this for better vision prostheses and humanoid robotics,” says engineer and materials scientist Zhiyong Fan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The human eye owes its wide field of view and high-resolution eyesight to the dome-shaped retina — an area at the back of the eyeball covered in light-detecting cells. Fan and colleagues used a curved aluminum oxide membrane, studded with nanosize sensors made of a light-sensitive material called a perovskite, to mimic that architecture in their synthetic eyeball. Wires attached to the artificial retina send readouts from those sensors to external circuitry for processing, just as nerve fibers relay signals from a real eyeball to the brain.
Another amazing signal - not only for the vaccine we are all hoping for - but for all manner of therapeutics.
Once a coronavirus vaccine exists, this researcher's mailable patch could deliver it to millions
Someday, hundreds of millions of vaccinations against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 could show up in people's mailboxes and be applied as simply as slapping on a Band-Aid.
That's the vision of Guizhi "Julian" Zhu, Ph.D., at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy.
Zhu, an assistant professor in the school's Department of Pharmaceutics, is researching a way to use tiny needles embedded in a small patch to give vaccinations.
"People, no matter who they are, can apply the patch to their own arm," Zhu said. "And that's it. People are vaccinated."
Laboratories and governments around the world are racing to find and test a vaccine to protect against the deadly coronavirus—a process that most experts say will take at least a year.
But even when a vaccine is ready, another enormous hurdle will remain: delivering that vaccine to millions or even billions of people.
If successful, his design for a vaccine patch offers a number of advantages over standard vaccinations, Zhu said.
This is a great signal of the future of hygiene and disease prevention through the use of robots, AI and ubiquitous sensors.
Exterminate! UV robot sent to Singapore mall to zap coronavirus
A shopping mall in Singapore is deploying a newly developed smart robot to fight the novel coronavirus, not with chemicals - but with light.
While spraying has become the norm in many places around the world, the robot uses ultraviolet lamps to disinfectant not only surfaces, but tricky-to-reach crevices and even the air.
According to Derrick Yap, whose firm, PBA Group, developed the Sunburst UV Bot, the novel coronavirus pandemic presented an opportunity to test out a robot for a role that was “dangerous, dull and dirty”.
“It’s dangerous because UVC shouldn’t be deployed when there’s humans around,” he said, referring to the short-wave germicidal type of ultraviolet radiation.
This is an interesting signal - of the entanglement of ecological systems - is there any living system that doesn’t change its environment? Do bees farm flowers? Is the flower the bee’s technology of food production? I the bee the flower’s technology of fertilization?
Bumblebees Bite Plants to Force Them to Flower (Seriously)
The behavior could be an evolutionary adaptation that lets bees forage more easily
Bumblebees are a resourceful bunch: when pollen is scarce and plants near the nest are not yet flowering, workers have developed a way to force them to bloom. Research published on Thursday in Science shows that the insects puncture the plants’ leaves, which causes them to flower, on average, 30 days earlier than they otherwise would. How the technique evolved and why the plants respond to bumblebee bites by blooming remain unclear. But researchers say the discovery of a new behavior in such a familiar creature is remarkable.
“This is one of those really rare studies that observes a natural phenomenon that hadn’t been documented before,” says John Mola, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center in Colorado, who was not involved in the study. The new finding “offers all sorts of questions and potential explanations” about how widespread the behavior is and why it occurs, he says.
Study co-author Consuelo De Moraes, a chemical ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), says she and her colleagues were observing one species of bumblebee in an unrelated laboratory experiment when they noticed the insects were damaging plant leaves and wondered why. “Initially we wanted to see if they were removing the tissue or feeding on the plants or taking [leaf material] to the nest,” she says. And because previous research had shown stress could induce plants to flower, De Moraes and her colleagues also wondered whether the bees might be creating blooms on demand.
To find out, the team placed pollen-deprived bumblebees together with tomato and mustard plants in mesh cages. The bees soon cut several holes in the leaves of each plant using their mandibles and proboscises. As a test, the researchers tried to replicate the bumblebee damage in additional plants with forceps and a razor. Both sets of plants with injured leaves bloomed faster, but the ones punctured by the bees flowered weeks earlier than those cut by the scientists, suggesting that chemicals in the insects’ saliva may be involved as well.
This is a worthwhile signal of the possibilities of a vaccine for COVID-19. Even if it doesn’t accurately describe our current crisis - the future may require serious attention to life in more dense populations.
Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine
Politicians have become more cautious about immunisation prospects. They are right to be
It would be hard to overstate the importance of developing a vaccine to Sars-CoV-2 – it’s seen as the fast track to a return to normal life. That’s why the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the UK was “throwing everything at it”.
But while trials have been launched and manufacturing deals already signed – Oxford University is now recruiting 10,000 volunteers for the next phase of its research – ministers and their advisers have become noticeably more cautious in recent days.
If climate change is not enough this is a good signal building on others of the shifts in the earth’s magnetic field.
From 1970 to 2020, the minimum field strength in this area has dropped from around 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000, while at the same time the area of the anomaly has grown and moved westward at a pace of around 20 km per year. Over the past five years, a second centre of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa—indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.
Swarm probes weakening of Earth's magnetic field
In an area stretching from Africa to South America, Earth's magnetic field is gradually weakening. This strange behaviour has geophysicists puzzled and is causing technical disturbances in satellites orbiting Earth. Scientists are using data from ESA's Swarm constellation to improve our understanding of this area known as the 'South Atlantic Anomaly.'
Earth's magnetic field is vital to life on our planet. It is a complex and dynamic force that protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun. The magnetic field is largely generated by an ocean of superheated, swirling liquid iron that makes up the outer core around 3000 km beneath our feet. Acting as a spinning conductor in a bicycle dynamo, it creates electrical currents, which in turn, generate our continuously changing electromagnetic field.
This field is far from static and varies both in strength and direction. For example, recent studies have shown that the position of the north magnetic pole is changing rapidly.
Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.
I think the original Nikola Tesla dream of this - a weak signal of the future of energy transfer and the powering of our techno-economy.
A system for robust and efficient wireless power transfer
Current methods for charging electronic devices via wireless technology only work if the overall system parameters are set up to match a specific transfer distance. As a result, these methods are limited to stationary power transfer applications, which means that a device that is receiving power needs to maintain a specific distance from the source supplying it in order for the power transfer to be successful.
Researchers at Stanford University have recently developed a new technique that could enable more efficient wireless power transfer regardless of the distance between a device and its power source. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could help to overcome some of the current limitations of existing tools for the wireless charging of elecronic devices.
"The main purpose of our study was to overcome the barrier to dynamic wireless charging," Sid Assawaworrarit, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "Our idea is based on parity-time symmetry (PT symmetry), which concerns systems with balanced gain and loss."
