In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Climate Change’s New Ally: Big Finance
‘This Is a New Phase’: Europe Shifts Tactics to Limit Tech’s Power
Articles:
Stephanie Kelton: The Public Purse
Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally – Reply to Ben Arc
A Sick Sous-Vide Has Been Bricked by Mandatory Subscriptions
Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters
This Tool Could Protect Your Photos From Facial Recognition
Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis.
Metal-breathing bacteria could transform electronics, biosensors, and more
Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100 million years old, from beneath the sea
Geothermal energy is surging — battered oil and gas companies should take advantage
Deutsche Bank Immediately Ends Funding For Oil Sands And Arctic Oil Projects
Total writes off $9.3B in oilsands assets, cancels Canadian oil lobby membership
Google Earth Engine and Google Earth Timelapse
Engineers detect health markers in thread-based, wearable sweat sensors
A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: Synergy Increases Free Energy While Decreasing Entropy
In 2014 a trio of economists found that the key players in the U.S. airline industry compete less with one another as a result of being all partially owned by the same institutional investors. In a two-year period, the same 7 shareholders who controlled 50 percent of American Airlines’s stock also had large ownership shares in American’s competitors. This “common ownership” was found to result in higher ticket prices. Since then, similar anti-competitive effects have been found in the banking, pharmaceutical, seed, and even cereal industries.
Institutional investors, of course, deny that they help the firms within their portfolios collude. They insist that they lack the power to influence specific supply and pricing decisions made within firms. When it comes to issues of “corporate social responsibility,” however, these same investors are much more willing to trumpet their expectations and influence. At a Federal Trade Commission hearing on common ownership’s anti-competitive effects in 2018, BlackRock co-founder Barbara Novick discussed the investor’s “engagements” with firms on topics ranging from women’s representation on boards, to the opioid epidemic, and climate change, but emphasized that discussions were “never about product pricing.” But these interventions can, and do, influence supply and pricing in much the same way as collusive anti-competitive behavior would. The same market power that enables the jacking of airline tickets is key toward making emission reductions happen.
Pressuring only one or two oil producers to slash supply is unlikely to have much of an effect on total emissions; their competitors will step in to fill the supply gap. But Climate Action 100+ is targeting, simultaneously, all publicly owned producers and major consumers of fossil products, including auto manufactures and construction companies. And the group is very coordinated in its efforts: individual investor signatories of Climate Action 100+ are tasked with specific companies to pressure, so they share the costs of economy-wide engagement across their membership.
We should question the desirability of a democratically unaccountable financial behemoth making centralized resource allocation decisions.
Consolidation in the asset management industry shows no signs of slowing, leading some to caution that eventually just twelve funds will control nearly all of corporate America. As corporate governance scholars and activists fight against the Trump administration’s attempts to weaken institutional investor oversight of corporate managers, we should think harder about the question of who oversees the overseers.
Climate Change’s New Ally: Big Finance
Europe’s lawmakers and regulators have shifted to a new stage in their battle to limit the power of the world’s biggest tech companies. While the region has long been at the forefront of using existing antitrust laws and levying multibillion dollar penalties against the tech giants, officials now say that those tactics have not gone far enough in altering the behavior of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.
So authorities in Brussels and other European capitals are pursuing at least half a dozen new laws and regulations that directly target the heart of how those tech companies’ businesses work. If enacted, the policies could lead to a major overhaul of Europe’s digital economy, where there are more than 500 million consumers, by regulating the tech companies more like traditional industries such as telecommunications and finance.
“This is a new phase,” Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president who is leading the effort in Brussels to write new laws, said in an interview.
Ms. Vestager said the proposed laws would lower hurdles to force the tech companies to change and even restrict them from moving into new product areas. “At stake is whether or not these markets will be open and contestable and innovative, or if they will just be governed by these walled gardens of de facto monopolies,” she said.
‘This Is a New Phase’: Europe Shifts Tactics to Limit Tech’s Power
This is a Must View 1.5 hour video explaining Modern Monetary Theory by Stephanie Kelton - Rethinking how public value is created, nurtured and evaluated. We must become literate in the power of our federal governments to issue currency to balance the economy - rather than thinking like a household that has to balance its budget - Governments are currency issuers and families are currency users.
Stephanie Kelton: The Public Purse
Drawing on her experience as the Chief Economist on the US Senate Budget Committee, Stephanie Kelton gives a beginner’s class on public deficits and what (almost) everyone is missing in the debate over the government’s budget. Is the government’s budget really just like a family budget? (Teaser: It’s not!) What is the purpose of budgeting anyway? Is it to balance spending and revenue, or is targeting a balanced budget the wrong goal altogether? Is the British government living beyond its means?
Stephanie outlines a new way of understanding deficits, debt, taxes, the relationship between the public and private sectors, and what our economy could look like. Turning the public budget into a participatory, mission-oriented endeavor is critical to restructuring public services and public investment and building the kind of economy that will deliver a cleaner, safer, more secure future for all.
Rethinking Public Value and Public Purpose in 21st Century Capitalism is a lecture series presented by UCL’s new Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in collaboration with the British Library.
This is an excellent and brief account of how bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are not the future for a democratic society - while also making the claim for the role of ‘blockchain’ and distributed ledger technologies as essential.
Why Bitcoin is not a socialist’s ally – Reply to Ben Arc
On 15th July, Ben Arc published in Bitcoin Magazine an open letter addressed to me in a bid to convince me that I should re-assess my rejection of Bitcoin as a force for good; as a bulwark for democratising capitalism and paving the ground for socialism. Here is my reply:
I am one of those who, back in 2011, were genuinely intrigued, fascinated even, by the remarkable blockchain algorithm. The prospect of a decentralised ledger controlled by its community of users was mesmerising.
As you also know, I was unimpressed by Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat money that is either likely, or indeed desirable, under our current capitalist predicament.
Having read your open letter, I remain as enthusiastic on blockchain’s capacities and as unimpressed by Bitcoin’s ability to help us either civilise or (as any socialist dreams of) transcend capitalism.
Two propositions support this view. In the hypothetical case where Bitcoin were, under presently-existing capitalism, to replace fiat money: (1) It would lack the mechanism necessary to stop capitalist crises from yielding depressions that benefit only the ultra-right; and, (2) Its community-based, democratic protocols would do little to democratise economic life.
This is another signal of the need to ensure the digital environment remains and becomes even more of a ‘commons’ than becoming colonized by an enclosure movement led by privateers.
Tacking on a $50 tax just to use a product’s best features seems just outrageous enough to set loyal users to a temperature just below boiling for two to three hours, resulting in delicately cooked—and angry—fans.
A Sick Sous-Vide Has Been Bricked by Mandatory Subscriptions
The Mellow Sous-Vide machine-made soft, gentle, susurrating waves when it first launched in 2014. Designed to keep and cook foods at a specific temperature, it featured an elegant design and an integrated tub that ensured uniform heating and cooling.
Fast forward a few years and it looks like the Mellow team has finally figured out that selling hardware is hard. In a move that is actively angering early backers, the company has added a mandatory subscription fee to use the device’s best features.
Mellow’s app was simple: you picked a recipe and told it when you wanted it done. Pork took an hour or so, beef a little longer. Now, however, if you want access to those so-called recipes the app requires a payment of $6 a month or $48 yearly.
Manual mode still works, allowing you to set a temperature and time, although the recipes were useful for set-it-and-forget-it sous-vide.
To elaborate many implications of this sort of enclosure and colonization Cory Doctorow has a great short story.
Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters
Cory Doctorow's book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here's an excerpt.
"Unauthorized Bread"—a tale of jailbreaking refugees versus IoT appliances—is the lead novella in author Cory Doctorow's Radicalized, which has just been named a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national book award, the Canada Reads prize. "Unauthorized Bread" is also in development for television with Topic, parent company of The Intercept; and for a graphic novel adaptation by First Second Books, in collaboration with the artist and comics creator JR Doyle. It appears below with permission from the author.
The fear of an AI revolution taking over the world has often overlooked that all AIs exist now and will exist in an ecology of other AIs - viruses - and other forms of countering. This is an interesting signal to that possibility.
This Tool Could Protect Your Photos From Facial Recognition
Researchers at the University of Chicago want you to be able to post selfies without worrying that the next Clearview AI will use them to identify you.
In recent years, companies have been prowling the web for public photos associated with people’s names that they can use to build enormous databases of faces and improve their facial recognition systems, adding to a growing sense that personal privacy is being lost, bit by digital bit.
A start-up called Clearview AI, for example, scraped billions of online photos to build a tool for the police that could lead them from a face to a Facebook account, revealing a person’s identity.
Now researchers are trying to foil those systems. A team of computer engineers at the University of Chicago has developed a tool that disguises photos with pixel-level changes that confuse facial recognition systems.
Named Fawkes in honor of the Guy Fawkes mask favored by protesters worldwide, the software was made available to developers on the researchers’ website last month. After being discovered by Hacker News, it has been downloaded more than 50,000 times. The researchers are working on a free app version for noncoders, which they hope to make available soon.
The software is not intended to be just a one-off tool for privacy-loving individuals. If deployed across millions of images, it would be a broadside against facial recognition systems, poisoning the accuracy of the so-called data sets they gather from the web.
This is a fantastic signal in many different ways - better understanding of photosynthesis - interesting contribution to bio-quantum phenomena that could show how quantum biology deals with noise - insight that could be useful in quantum computing - and creating ever better solar energy technologies. It seems that in living systems - stability (viability) is more important than efficiency - another insight that may better support a more honest and accurate socio-political-economic theories.
“It was extraordinarily impressive, I think, to explain a pattern in biology with an incredibly simple physical model,” said Christopher Duffy, a biophysicist at Queen Mary University of London, who wrote an accompanying commentary on the model for Science. “It was nice to see a theoretically led work that understands and promotes the idea that it is robustness of the system that seems to be the evolutionary driving force.”
Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis.
Plants ignore the most energy-rich part of sunlight because stability matters more than efficiency, according to a new model of photosynthesis.
From large trees in the Amazon jungle to houseplants to seaweed in the ocean, green is the color that reigns over the plant kingdom. Why green, and not blue or magenta or gray? The simple answer is that although plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue regions of the light spectrum, they absorb only about 90% of the green photons. If they absorbed more, they would look black to our eyes. Plants are green because the small amount of light they reflect is that color.
But that seems unsatisfyingly wasteful because most of the energy that the sun radiates is in the green part of the spectrum. When pressed to explain further, biologists have sometimes suggested that the green light might be too powerful for plants to use without harm, but the reason why hasn’t been clear. Even after decades of molecular research on the light-harvesting machinery in plants, scientists could not establish a detailed rationale for plants’ color.
Recently, however, in the pages of Science, scientists finally provided a more complete answer. They built a model to explain why the photosynthetic machinery of plants wastes green light. What they did not expect was that their model would also explain the colors of other photosynthetic forms of life too. Their findings point to an evolutionary principle governing light-harvesting organisms that might apply throughout the universe. They also offer a lesson that — at least sometimes — evolution cares less about making biological systems efficient than about keeping them stable.
Instead, for a safe, steady energy output, the pigments of the photosystem had to be very finely tuned in a certain way. The pigments needed to absorb light at similar wavelengths to reduce the internal noise. But they also needed to absorb light at different rates to buffer against the external noise caused by swings in light intensity. The best light for the pigments to absorb, then, was in the steepest parts of the intensity curve for the solar spectrum — the red and blue parts of the spectrum.
Another interesting signal of progress towards domesticating DNA and the capacity to tailor and harness domesticated bacteria for bio-fabrication.
"This has some serious potential if we can understand this process and control aspects of how the bacteria are making these and other materials," said Shayla Sawyer, an associate professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer.
"Biology has had such a long run of inventing materials through trial and error. The composites and novel structures invented by human scientists are almost a drop in the bucket compared to what biology has been able to do."
Metal-breathing bacteria could transform electronics, biosensors, and more
When the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium "breathes" in certain metal and sulfur compounds anaerobically, the way an aerobic organism would process oxygen, it produces materials that could be used to enhance electronics, electrochemical energy storage, and drug-delivery devices.
The ability of this bacterium to produce molybdenum disulfide—a material that is able to transfer electrons easily, like graphene—is the focus of research published in Biointerphases by a team of engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The research was led by James Rees, who is currently a postdoctoral research associate under the Sawyer group in close partnership and with the support of the Jefferson Project at Lake George—a collaboration between Rensselaer, IBM Research, and The FUND for Lake George that is pioneering a new model for environmental monitoring and prediction. This research is an important step toward developing a new generation of nutrient sensors that can be deployed on lakes and other water bodies.
An amazing signal of the weirdness and robustness of life - maybe even increasing the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe.
by showing that life can survive in places biologists once thought uninhabitable, the research speaks to the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System, or elsewhere in the universe. “If the surface of a particular planet does not look promising for life, it may be holding out in the subsurface,”
Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100 million years old, from beneath the sea
Microbes buried beneath the sea floor for more than 100 million years are still alive, a new study reveals. When brought back to the lab and fed, they started to multiply. The microbes are oxygen-loving species that somehow exist on what little of the gas diffuses from the ocean surface deep into the seabed.
The discovery raises the “insane” possibility, as one of the scientists put it, that the microbes have been sitting in the sediment dormant, or at least slowly growing without dividing, for eons.
The new work demonstrates “microbial life is very persistent, and often finds a way to survive,” says Virginia Edgcomb, a microbial ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the work.
A great signal that it is time to ‘smell the coffee’ - renewables are reaching the tipping point in the transformation of global energy geopolitics.
Geothermal energy is surging — battered oil and gas companies should take advantage
Even before the spread of COVID-19 oil investors were running for the exits — dropping holdings in fossil fuel companies and proclaiming the start of a "death-knell phase." In our carbon-constrained future, with viable clean-energy alternatives ready to be deployed, the economics for oil and gas no longer add up. But with the spread of COVID-19 and the abrupt drop in global demand, the sector is now in free-fall — with tens of thousands of American workers bound to bear the brunt of the impact.
It doesn't have to be this way. We already know that just a fraction of oil and gas jobs will return once the economy recovers: The bulk lost in the 2014-'16 crash simply vanished as companies found ways to do more with less. Business-as-usual won't work.
We need to think bigger, to harness this opportunity to launch a bold energy transition, one powered by a ready-to-scale, off-the-shelf solution that will put America's idled oil and gas workforce back into the field almost immediately: clean, abundant and renewable geothermal energy.
The timing for oil and gas firms could not be better: ExxonMobil in September fell outside the top ten largest companies in the S&P 500 for the first time since the list was assembled in 1925. Oil stocks, accounting for more than a tenth of the bellwether index barely a decade ago, now account for just 4% of the S&P 500. BlackRock, the world's largest investment firm, announced that it would begin dropping investments that "present a high sustainability-related risk," namely fossil-fuel investments. Shale production, the engine of the U.S. oil and gas boom, has been especially hard-hit, imploding under a mountain of debt obligations, costly break-even prices, and so much excess oil on the market that you can't pay someone to take a barrel.
And another signal.
Deutsche Bank Immediately Ends Funding For Oil Sands And Arctic Oil Projects
Deutsche Bank is ending financing for new oil and gas projects in the oil sands and the Arctic region effective immediately, becoming the latest major bank to reconsider lending money to fossil fuel projects in sensitive areas.
Deutsche Bank will no longer finance any new projects in the Arctic or the oil sands and will review all its existing business in the oil and gas industry, the bank said in a statement on Monday.
Deutsche Bank unveiled an updated Fossil Fuels Policy to set new limits on financing business activities that involve oil, gas, or coal, and pledged to end its global business activities in coal mining by 2025 at the latest “in order to help drive the transformation to a sustainable economy.”
And another,
Total writes off $9.3B in oilsands assets, cancels Canadian oil lobby membership
It will take writedowns worth $7.3B related to its ownership in the Fort Hills operation
French energy giant Total says it is writing off $9.3-billion worth of oilsands assets in Alberta and cancelling its membership in the Calgary-based Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
Total now considers oil reserves with high production costs that are to be produced more than 20 years in the future to be "stranded" given its carbon reduction targets and because the resource may not be produced by 2050, the Paris-based company said Wednesday.
It will take writedowns worth $7.3 billion related to its 24.6 per cent ownership in the Fort Hills oilsands mine operated by partner Suncor Energy Inc., the company said, and its 50 per cent stake in the Surmont thermal oilsands project operated by partner ConocoPhillips.
Total will also write off $2 billion in other oilsands assets, it said, along with $1.07 billion on its liquefied natural gas assets in Australia.
This is an interesting signal of progress in human self-awareness - a new consciousness of not only one planet - but also of how the planet has been changing through time. The visuals are amazing - key is to imagine what other visualization are possible with the ever growing massive ‘big data’ bases.
Google Earth Engine and Google Earth Timelapse
Earth Engine is a platform for scientific analysis and visualization of geospatial datasets, for academic, non-profit, business and government users.
Earth Engine hosts satellite imagery and stores it in a public data archive that includes historical earth images going back more than forty years. The images, ingested on a daily basis, are then made available for global-scale data mining.
Earth Engine also provides APIs and other tools to enable the analysis of large datasets.
Google Earth enables you to travel, explore, and learn about the world by interacting with a virtual globe. You can view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, and much more.
Earth Engine, on the other hand, is a tool for analyzing geospatial information. You can analyze forest and water coverage, land use change, or assess the health of agricultural fields, among many other possible analyses.
While the two tools rely on some of the same data, only some of Google Earth's imagery and data is available for analysis in Earth Engine.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - the digital environment - as a computational ecology - may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence. This is small signal - but one entangled with innumerable other small signals
"The sensor patch that we developed is part of a larger strategy to make completely flexible thread-based electronic devices," said Sameer Sonkusale, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts' School of Engineering and corresponding author of the study. "Flexible devices woven into fabric and acting directly on the skin means that we can track health and performance not only non-invasively, but completely unobtrusively—the wearer may not even feel it or notice it."
Engineers detect health markers in thread-based, wearable sweat sensors
Engineers at Tufts University have created a first-of-its-kind flexible electronic sensing patch that can be sewn into clothing to analyze your sweat for multiple markers. The patch could be used to to diagnose and monitor acute and chronic health conditions or to monitor health during athletic or workplace performance. The device, described today in the journal NPJ Flexible Electronics, consists of special sensing threads, electronic components and wireless connectivity for real time data acquisition, storage and processing.
The patch device created by the Tufts engineers performs real-time measurements of important biomarkers present in sweat including sodium and ammonium ions (electrolytes), lactate (a metabolite) and acidity (pH). The device platform is also versatile enough to incorporate a wide range of sensors cabable of tracking nearly every marker present in sweat. The measurements taken can have useful diagnostic applications. For example, sodium from sweat can indicate the hydration status and electrolyte imbalance in a body; lactate concentration can be an indicator of muscle fatigue; chloride ion levels can be used to diagnosis and monitor cystic fibrosis; and cortisol, a stress hormone, can be used to assess emotional stress as well as metabolic and immune functions.
This is an fascinating weak signal - but of potential importance for the sciences of complexity and living systems that take us beyond traditional physics. This is a non-equation, not-peer-reviewed 2 page paper.
A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: Synergy Increases Free Energy While Decreasing Entropy
Abstract
Synergy, emerges from synchronized reciprocal positive feedback loops between a network of diverse actors. For this process to proceed, compatible information from different sources synchronically coordinates the actions of the actors resulting in a nonlinear increase in the useful work or potential energy the system can manage. In contrast noise is produced when incompatible information is mixed. This synergy produced from the coordination of different agents achieves non-linear gains in free energy and in information (negentropy) that are greater than the sum of the parts. The final product of new synergies is an increase in individual autonomy of an organism that achieves increased emancipation from the environment with increases in productivity, efficiency, capacity for flexibility, self-regulation and self-control of behavior through a synchronized division of ever more specialized labor. Examples that provide quantitative data for this phenomenon are presented. Results show that increases in free energy density require decreases in entropy density. This is proposed as a law of thermodynamics.
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