Friday Thinking: Friday Thinking 31 July 2020

the banality of evil can perhaps best be defined as unfettered self-interest. Banal because everyone has self-interest, and because American culture expects and even celebrates its most gratuitous pursuits and expressions. Evil because, when unchecked, self-interest leads not only to intolerable disparities in wealth and power, but eventually the erosion of democratic norms.

American culture has historically found ways to limit individual self-interest. Particularly during times of calamity and instability, it has created expectations of sacrifice for the common good that pressure political leaders to limit their excesses.

For example, during and after the American Revolution, the concept of republican virtue advanced the notion of self-sacrifice to safeguard and develop the fragile new nation and its untested, grandiose, halting experiment in democratic self-rule. Military service in local and state militias was the core of national defense and a standard obligation of male citizens. Elites eligible for political service (most commoners initially could not vote, much less hold office) were expected to sacrifice their personal self interest, forgoing their business and commercial pursuits to temporarily serve the public interest before returning to private life.

The point is not that everyone lived up to these expectation. Many did not. Rather, it’s that the expectations existed, and they helped temper runaway self-interest. Overt selfishness at the expense of a then narrowly-defined polity was hardly eliminated, but it was discouraged, criticized, and sometimes even censured.

….During the 1930s, the shared misery of economic calamity thwarted self-interest as opportunities for individual advancement dried up like never before. For many, mere economic survival was the pressing concern. And the depression transitioned almost seamlessly into the shared sacrifices required for victory in World War II.

After sixteen years of profound struggle and ultimate success, the Great Depression/WWII generations emerged deeply patriotic and with a strong sense of limited self-interest. Paramount was protecting the nation and government that had aided them in times of misery and beaten back fascism.

The Banality Of Trump

today, authoritarianism works differently: it keeps a veneer of democracy, allowing (and then rigging) elections; it keeps a pocket of opposition; it may not use much physical violence, opting for threat and legal harassment, as Viktor Orbán does in Hungary. I call this “new authoritarianism,” others call it “electoral authoritarianism,” or, Orbán’s own self-serving term, “illiberal democracy.” We are still searching for a language to describe what is unfolding.

Histories of Violence: America Is Not a Fascist State — It’s an Authoritarian One

He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.

– From Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez

Coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, ‘nostalgia’ referred to a medical condition – homesickness – characterised by an incapacitating longing for one’s motherland. Hofer favoured the term because it combined two essential features of the illness: the desire to return home (nostos) and the pain (algos) of being unable to do so. Nostalgia’s symptomatology was imprecise – it included rumination, melancholia, insomnia, anxiety and lack of appetite – and was thought to affect primarily soldiers and sailors. Physicians also disagreed about its cause. Hofer thought that nostalgia was caused by nerve vibrations where traces of ideas of the motherland ‘still cling’, whereas others, noticing that it was found predominantly among Swiss soldiers fighting at lower altitudes, proposed instead that nostalgia was caused by changes in atmospheric pressure, or eardrum damage from the clanging of Swiss cowbells. Once nostalgia was identified among soldiers from various nationalities, the idea that it was geographically specific was abandoned.

Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn’t actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’.

How can we make sense of the fact that people feel nostalgia not only for past experiences but also for generic time periods? My suggestion, inspired by recent evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is that the variety of nostalgia’s objects is explained by the fact that its cognitive component is not an autobiographical memory, but a mental simulation – an imagination, if you will – of which episodic recollections are a sub-class. To support this claim, I need first to discuss some developments in the science of memory and imagination.

Nostalgia reimagined

This is a great read discussing Covid-19 as the world’s first complexity crisis (I’m not sure that is true - but it is the first global complexity crisis of the 21st Century). The authors are from the Santa Fe Institute.

A city of a million will double the number of COVID cases in half the time as a city of 10,000.

Cities are machines we evolved to accelerate socio-biological interactions. The larger the city, the more the average individual interacts with other people in a multiplicative positive feedback process. It has recently been observed that high-density urban settings are associated with the super-linear scaling of a large number of biological and social variables. This means that a doubling in city size leads to more than twofold increase in these variables which include economic productivity, rates of innovation, crime, and disease.

A key insight from complexity science is that complex systems function by the continuous tradeoff between robustness and evolvability.

Robustness describes the ability of a system to withstand a critical perturbation without a significant loss of function.

Evolvability describes a mechanism that allows for the efficient exploration of adjacent novelties, whereby small changes to a mechanism or structure can engender new functions.

The Damage We’re Not Attending To

Scientists who study complex systems offer solutions to the pandemic.

The damage we are not attending to is the deeper nature of the crisis—the collapse of multiple coupled complex systems.

Societies the world over are experiencing what might be called the first complexity crisis in history. We should not have been surprised that a random mutation of a virus in a far-off city in China could lead in just a few short months to the crash of financial markets worldwide, the end of football in Spain, a shortage of flour in the United Kingdom, the bankruptcy of Hertz and Niemann-Marcus in the United States, the collapse of travel, and to so much more.

As scientists who study complex systems, we conceive of a complexity crisis as a twofold event. First, it is the failure of multiple coupled systems—our physical bodies, cities, societies, economies, and ecosystems. Second, it involves solutions, such as social distancing, that involve unavoidable tradeoffs, some of which amplify the primary failures. In other words, the way we respond to failing systems can accelerate their decline.

We and our colleagues in the Santa Fe Institute Transmission Project believe there are some non-obvious insights and solutions to this crisis that can be gleaned from studying complex systems and their universal properties. One useful way to think about a complexity crisis is in terms of the strategic tradeoffs that need to be managed and the complex mechanisms that these tradeoffs involve. These mechanisms include ideas of contagion, epidemic cycles, super-spreading events, critical phenomena, scaling, and path dependence.

2020 - will undoubtedly be seen in history as a massive turning point in the human project of the 21st century (perhaps more transformative as the two world wars and depression of the 20th century) - This is an important signal of how little we know about the change agent that is Covid-19

“There is evidence now that the virus can directly attack heart muscle cells, and there’s also evidence that the cytokine storm that the virus triggers in the body not only damages the lungs, but can damage the heart,” says Swartzberg, who did not work on either of these new studies. “We don’t know what the long-term effects of that may be, but it could be that we will have a population of people who survive COVID-19 only to go on and have chronic cardiac problems.”

Study detects heart damage in majority of recovered COVID-19 patients

A pair of newly published studies in the journal JAMA Cardiology highlight the potential for long-term heart complications in recovered COVID-19 patients. The research suggests the virus can directly damage cardiovascular muscles with ongoing inflammation detectable months after recovery, even in patients originally suffering a mild form of the disease.

While much attention has been focused on the volume of deaths caused by COVID-19, now that we are six months into this global pandemic researchers are beginning to see signs of chronic health problems in recovered patients. Only now are clinicians starting to get a glimpse at the potential persistent health consequences of this new virus, and two new studies offer insights into the cardiovascular impact of COVID-19.

Back in March it was quickly apparent that patients with underlying cardiovascular disease were more likely to suffer a fatal outcome from COVID-19. However, it was unclear whether the virus was directly damaging myocardial cells, or whether there was longer-term cardiovascular damage following recovery.

The migration of the ARPANet to TCP/IP was officially completed on January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated. Most of the world couldn’t imagine what that would mean even 10 years later with the invention of HTTP and the web - and the rise of a connected world.

This is a signal of one dimension of the next stage of the digital environment.

Quantum loop: US unveils blueprint for 'virtually unhackable' internet

US officials and scientists have begun laying the groundwork for a more secure "virtually unhackable" internet based on quantum computing technology.

At a presentation Thursday, Department of Energy (DOE) officials issued a report that lays out a blueprint strategy for the development of a national quantum internet, using laws of quantum mechanics to transmit information more securely than on existing networks.

The agency is working with universities and industry researchers on the engineering for the initiative with the aim of creating a prototype within a decade.

In February, scientists from DOE's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago created a 52-mile (83-kilometer) "quantum loop" in the Chicago suburbs, establishing one of the longest land-based quantum networks in the nation.

The aim is to create a parallel, more secure network based on quantum "entanglement," or the transmission of sub-atomic particles.

This is also a very fascinating signal of not just the devices and energy-use - but also of a way of life with precise data about our behavior - the are many assumption being made - but it is worth the time to let yourself imagine what this could enable - good-bad-indifferent

"Imagine firefighters in the field fighting a brush fire near Los Angeles," she says. "If they were equipped with a device like this, we could tell very easily what each firefighter is doing and if they're moving. We could do so far better than we can with external cameras, which might be limited by smoke or the terrain."

Next generation of wearable devices will stay charged longer and track movements better

What if your belt did more than hold up your pants? What if it also listened to your FitBit, smart glasses, and smart jewelry to better recognize what activities you were engaged in while using far less power than anything currently on the market?

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering demonstrated how magnetic induction might one day power the next generation of wearable devices.

In the near future, wearable devices will be doing a lot more than counting our steps. They'll be used in conjunction with other wearables to monitor the vitals of hospital patients or track the location of firefighters and first responders, among other applications.

The problem, however, is power and cost. No one wants to charge their smart watch, glasses, wristband or anklet every time they walk out the door,

This system can monitor daily activities, encourage the user to perform specific actions, or help physical therapists in tracking their patients' progress. According to Golestani, the applications go far beyond hospitals and wearables for every-day health, too; they include surveillance and disaster response.

This is a very strong signal of the emerging interface with our digital environment and more.

Yet despite its new tricks, GPT-3 is still prone to spewing hateful sexist and racist language. Fine-tuning the model helped limit this kind of output in GPT-2.

GPT-3’s human-like output and striking versatility are the results of excellent engineering, not genuine smarts. For one thing, the AI still makes ridiculous howlers that reveal a total lack of common sense. But even its successes have a lack of depth to them, reading more like cut-and-paste jobs than original compositions.

OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless

The AI is the largest language model ever created and can generate amazing human-like text on demand but won't bring us closer to true intelligence.

“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI.

OpenAI first described GPT-3 in a research paper published in May. But last week it began drip-feeding the software to selected people who requested access to a private beta. For now, OpenAI wants outside developers to help it explore what GPT-3 can do, but it plans to turn the tool into a commercial product later this year, offering businesses a paid-for subscription to the AI via the cloud.

GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, released last year, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward. The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.

This is a nice account signaling the state of robotics today.

Five incredibly talented robots

Highly flexible, environmentally friendly, with the agility of a human hand or the ability to interact in groups... Portraits of five incredibly talented robots that could soon make a debut in the fields of health, industry, and underwater exploration.

This is a good signal of surveillance and responses emerging from the digital environment.

Many of these anti-drone measures are expensive and complicated. Some are illegal. The most affordable – and legal – way to avoid drone technology is hiding.

How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of ‘ghosting’ in the age of surveillance

Drones of all sizes are being used by environmental advocates to monitor deforestation, by conservationists to track poachers, and by journalists and activists to document large protests. As a political sociologist who studies social movements and drones, I document a wide range of nonviolent and pro-social drone uses in my new book, “The Good Drone.” I show that these efforts have the potential to democratize surveillance.

But when the Department of Homeland Security redirects large, fixed-wing drones from the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor protests, and when towns experiment with using drones to test people for fevers, it’s time to think about how many eyes are in the sky and how to avoid unwanted aerial surveillance. One way that’s within reach of nearly everyone is learning how to simply disappear from view.

This is a very strong signal of the transformation of our energy geopolitics. A longish read signaling change in crime but also change in agricultural practice.

"It's just how opium poppy is farmed now," Mr Brittan tells me. "They drill down 100m (325ft) or so to the ground water, put in an electric pump and wire it up to a few panels and bingo, the water starts flowing."

Take-up of this new technology was very rapid.

Buying diesel to power their ground water pumps used to be the farmers' biggest expense.

"And it isn't just the cost," Dr Mansfield continues. "The diesel in these remote areas is heavily adulterated so pumps and generators keep breaking down. That's a huge problem for farmers."

What does this tell us about solar power?

That is simple.

The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be.

Don't imagine this is some kind of benign "green" technology.

Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world.

What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power

If you have ever doubted whether solar power can be a transformative technology, read on.

This is a story about how it has proved its worth in the toughest environment possible.

The market I'm talking about is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet.

There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change - or any other ethical consideration, for that matter.

This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit.

It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin.

Another good signal of the progress being made in transforming energy geopolitics.

Iter: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase.

After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power.

The £18.2bn (€20bn; $23.5bn) facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France.

Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis.

Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction.

Current nuclear energy relies on fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones.

Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one.

This is a fantastic signal of the next level of research into human wellness and biological complexity.

"This immense catalog is a landmark in microbiome research, and will be an invaluable resource for scientists to start studying and hopefully understanding the role of each bacterial species in the human gut ecosystem,"

Unparalleled inventory of the human gut ecosystem

An international team of scientists has collated all known bacterial genomes from the human gut microbiome into a single large database, allowing researchers to explore the links between bacterial genes and proteins, and their effects on human health.

This project was led by EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and included collaborators from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Trento, the Gladstone Institutes, and the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Their work has been published in Nature Biotechnology.

The scientists have now compiled 200,000 genomes and 170 million protein sequences from more than 4,600 bacterial species in the human gut. Their new databases, the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome collection and the Unified Gastrointestinal Protein catalog, reveal the tremendous diversity in our guts and pave the way for further microbiome research.

The project revealed that more than 70% of the detected bacterial species had never been cultured in the lab—their activity in the body remains unknown.

All the data collected in the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome collection and the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Protein catalog are freely available in MGnify, an EMBL-EBI online resource that allows scientists to analyze their microbial genomic data and make comparisons with existing datasets.

Friday Thinking

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Friday Thinking 31 July 2020