Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
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.’
“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon
Content
Quotes:
Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
AI pioneer Geoff Hinton: Deep learning is going to be able to do everything
Grin and Bear It - On the rise and rise of neo-Stoicism
Cornel West: We Must Fight the Commodification of Everybody and Everything
Articles:
The World’s Most Influential Values, In One Graphic
Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar
Amazon Argues Users Don't Actually Own Purchased Prime Video Content
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
AI has cracked a key mathematical puzzle for understanding our world
An $11 trillion global hydrogen energy boom is coming. Here’s what could trigger it
Researchers discover a new way to produce hydrogen using microwaves
New way of cooking rice removes arsenic and retains mineral nutrients, study shows
‘Phallacy’ deflates myths about the penises of the animal kingdom
“I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ‘machine learning’ field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.”
Today, I’d like to expand on that. Let’s talk about what machine learning is: it’s a statistical inference tool. That means that it analyzes training data to uncover correlations between different phenomena. Your phone observes that every time you type “hey,” you usually follow it with “darling” and it learns to autosuggest this the next time you type “hey.” It’s not sorcery, it’s “magic” – in the sense of being a parlor trick, something that seems baffling until you learn the underlying method, whereupon it becomes banal.
Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
A lot of the people in the field believe that common sense is the next big capability to tackle. Do you agree?
I agree that that’s one of the very important things. I also think motor control is very important, and deep neural nets are now getting good at that. In particular, some recent work at Google has shown that you can do fine motor control and combine that with language, so that you can open a drawer and take out a block, and the system can tell you in natural language what it’s doing.
For things like GPT-3, which generates this wonderful text, it’s clear it must understand a lot to generate that text, but it’s not quite clear how much it understands. But if something opens the drawer and takes out a block and says, “I just opened a drawer and took out a block,” it’s hard to say it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.
AI pioneer Geoff Hinton: Deep learning is going to be able to do everything
That anger can be productive, however, is something Black and feminist philosophers have long understood, formulating their own reading of emotion in opposition to this liberal Stoic tradition. Feelings can be generative and have material effects. When “focused with precision,” Audre Lorde said, anger can become “a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” and a “liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” Framing difficult emotions as instances of cognitive distortion best corrected through self-discipline leaves little space to consider the way affective social movements might legitimately change existing institutions, or that those institutions may be to blame for the persistence of negative emotions in the first place. Anger is not only a source of energy, but a potentially elucidating force that allows its bearer to see clearly what is wrong with the world, and to act upon it.
Coding reason as good and anger bad affirms the moral superiority of a worldview that claims politics as the purview of select committees, government inquiries, and elections. It blinds believers to political movements that take shape outside of these formal processes, and the reasons why they do so. Self-discipline, civility, and reason: these Stoic practices may allow us to live more easily in the world as it is. But politics is as much about conflict as consensus, and depends, at least in part, upon people getting angry.
Grin and Bear It - On the rise and rise of neo-Stoicism
We as human beings can govern ourselves at the workplace. We don’t need the bosses. We can have workers’ councils. We can have democratic deliberation. We can have democratic cultures in which we learn from each other in terms of jazz, hip hop, on the one hand, flamenco on the other, rebetiko on the other; the folk songs that moved Wordsworth in his early radical years, Robert Burns in Scotland. We haven’t even got to the Irish yet. But to have that kind of deep human coming together that doesn’t homogenize our specificity, but it uses our differences as a way of deepening communion and community, rather than deepening domination and subordination.
And there you see the hypocrisy. Because the liberals come along and say, “We are so concerned about the concentration of power within the political sphere. We’ve had monarchs and kings and queens. We must have rights and liberties. We must have equality under the law.”
Well, what about the concentration of power in the economy? With the oligarchs, with the monopolies, the oligopolies? They are just as dictatorial. So yes, we’re with the liberals in terms of making sure we don’t have kings and queens and unaccountable power in the political field. But you end up with these monarch-like entities in the economy, globally and nationally and regionally.
Cornel West: We Must Fight the Commodification of Everybody and Everything
This is an amazing infographic on how we value our values around the world - well worth the view.
The World’s Most Influential Values, In One Graphic
Our basic values can inform ideals, interests, political preferences, environmental views, and even career choices.
With sweeping data covering half a million surveys in 152 languages, Valuegraphics identifies 56 values that influence human behavior. It uncovers what people care most about around the world, through a contextualized dataset.
The 10 Most Important Values
Individual motivations and values are universally organized. That said, research shows that the hierarchy of these values varies significantly.
This is an interesting signal - does it have to be? Or like books - which basically all look the same - websites are closing in on basic technological path dependencies?
We ended up using the websites of the Russell 1000, the top U.S. businesses by market capitalization, which we hoped would be representative of trends in mainstream, corporate web design. We also studied two other sets of sites, one with Alexa’s 500 most trafficked sites, and another with sites nominated for Webby Awards.
Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar
Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: “Why are all websites starting to look the same?”
These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from.
My colleagues Bardia Doosti, David Crandall, Norman Su and I were studying the history of the web when we started to notice these posts cropping up. None of the authors had done any sort of empirical study, though. It was more of a hunch they had.
We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.
And if sites are looking more similar because many people are using the same libraries, the large tech companies who maintain those libraries may be gaining a disproportionate power over the visual aesthetics of the internet. While publishing libraries that anyone can use is likely a net benefit for the web over keeping code secret, big tech companies’ design principles are not necessarily right for every site.
This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry – one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.
This is another important signal about the need to re-imagine our business models and property concepts for the digital environment.
"The most relevant agreement here — the Prime Video Terms of Use — is presented to consumers every time they buy digital content on Amazon Prime Video," writes Biderman. "These Terms of Use expressly state that purchasers obtain only a limited license to view video content and that purchased content may become unavailable due to provider license restriction or other reasons."
Amazon Argues Users Don't Actually Own Purchased Prime Video Content
The streamer says its terms of use are clear: What viewers are paying for is a limited license.
When an Amazon Prime Video user buys content on the platform, what they're really paying for is a limited license for “on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time” and they're warned of that in the company's terms of use. That's the company's argument for why a lawsuit over hypothetical future deletions of content should be dismissed.
In April, Amanda Caudel sued Amazon for unfair competition and false advertising. She claims the company "secretly reserves the right" to end consumers' access to content purchased through its Prime Video service. She filed her putative class action on behalf of herself and any California residents who purchased video content from the service from April 25, 2016, to present.
On Monday, Amazon filed a motion to dismiss her complaint arguing that she lacks standing to sue because she hasn't been injured — and noting that she's purchased 13 titles on Prime since filing her complaint.
This is a great signal coming from Canada - one that we should all hope our governments listen to.
2020 Massey Lectures: Renowned tech expert Ronald J. Deibert to explore disturbing impact of social media
Lecture series titled Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society
In the midst of a global pandemic when many of us are spending an increasing amount of time online, this year's Massey Lectures argues that the internet, especially social media, has an increasingly toxic influence in every aspect of life.
Technology and security expert Ronald J. Deibert will deliver the series of lectures, titled Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. The six lectures are also now available as a book by House of Anansi Press.
Drawing from his work as the director of Citizen Lab, which has made headlines for its cyber espionage research, Deibert will talk about the personal, social, political, economic and ecological implications of social media.
An interesting signal on the evolving relationship between game design - and propaganda - how gamers game the game for gaming. - ARG = Alternate Reality Game
Apophenia is : “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”
QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase.
It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at.
If the ideas are generated by us however, then these are the ideas we defend. If we “create” the ideas in our own minds, they become fused much more intently into our personality. They’re OURS. There is no friction. Guiding people to arrive at YOUR conclusions is a perfect way to get people to accept a new and conflicting ideology.
Now that people are indoctrinated into QAnon, they can continue the game for themselves with very few cues. The game is everywhere.
QAnon is anxious to get into everything! It’s a gathering place. A local pub for conspiracy theories. It’s also a great way to indoctrinate people or “red pill” them.
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
Playing with reality
I am a game designer with experience in a very small niche. I create and research games designed to be played in reality. I’ve worked in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), LARPs, experience fiction, interactive theater, and “serious games”. Stories and games that can start on a computer, and finish in the real world. Fictions designed to feel as real as possible. Games that teach you. Puzzles that come to life all around the players. Games where the deeper you dig, the more you find. Games with rabbit holes that invite you into wonderland and entice you through the looking glass.
When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people. (cue ominous music)
QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. It has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an ARG, online role-play (RP) or LARP before. The similarities are so striking that it has often been referred to as a LARP or ARG. However this beast is very very different from a game.
It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development. QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted.
Change in conditions of change can occur with basic advances in science - including AI. This is an interesting signal of advances that combine AI with new approaches for computation.
AI has cracked a key mathematical puzzle for understanding our world
Partial differential equations can describe everything from planetary motion to plate tectonics, but they’re notoriously hard to solve.
Unless you’re a physicist or an engineer, there really isn’t much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I’ve never used them since in the real world.
Now researchers at Caltech have introduced a new deep-learning technique for solving PDEs that is dramatically more accurate than deep-learning methods developed previously. It’s also much more generalizable, capable of solving entire families of PDEs—such as the Navier-Stokes equation for any type of fluid—without needing retraining. Finally, it is 1,000 times faster than traditional mathematical formulas, which would ease our reliance on supercomputers and increase our computational capacity to model even bigger problems. That’s right. Bring it on.
This is a good signal - as a concept, and for all the players involved - of the inevitable transformation of global energy geopolitics. The article is worth the read for anyone interested in hydrogen and energy storage.
An $11 trillion global hydrogen energy boom is coming. Here’s what could trigger it
Storing fuel in salt caverns isn’t new, but hydrogen’s growing role in decarbonization has revitalized interest in the concept.
The Advanced Clean Energy Storage project in Utah aims to build the world’s largest storage facility for 1,000 megawatts of clean power, partly by putting hydrogen into underground salt caverns.
The concept is quickly gaining momentum in Europe.
Another signal in the ongoing development of hydrogen-based energy and derivatives.
Researchers discover a new way to produce hydrogen using microwaves
A team of researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has discovered a new method that makes it possible to transform electricity into hydrogen or chemical products solely using microwaves—without cables and without any type of contact with electrodes. This represents a revolution in the field of energy research and a key development for the process of industrial decarbonisation, as well as for the future of the automotive sector and the chemical industry, among many others. The study has been published in the latest edition of Nature Energy, where the discovery is explained.
The technology developed and patented by the UPV and CSIC is based on the phenomenon of the microwave reduction of solid materials. This method makes it possible to carry out electrochemical processes directly without requiring electrodes, which simplifies and significantly cheapens its practical use, as it provides more freedom in the design of the structure of the device and choosing the operation conditions, mainly the temperature."It is a technology with great practical potential, especially for its use in storing energy and producing synthetic fuels and green chemical products. This aspect has significant importance today, as both transportation and industry are immersed in a transition to decarbonise, meaning they have to meet very demanding goals between 2030 and 2040 to decrease the consumption of energy and substances from fossil sources, mainly natural gas and oil," highlights José Manuel Serra, research lecturer of the CSIC at the Chemical Technology Institute.
As simple as cooking rice is - there is concern that rice carries excessive amounts of arsenic - this is a good signal that even ancient methods can be evolved. The graphic in the article provides very easy instructions.
New way of cooking rice removes arsenic and retains mineral nutrients, study shows
A new paper, released today in Science of the Total Environment shows that cooking rice in a certain way removes over 50 percent of the naturally occurring arsenic in brown rice, and 74 percent in white rice. Importantly, this new method does not reduce micronutrients in the rice.
Following previous research from the University of Sheffield that found half of the rice consumed in the UK exceeded European Commission regulations for levels of arsenic in rice meant for the consumption for infants or young children.
This new study tested different ways to cook rice to try and reduce the arsenic content and the team from the Institute for Sustainable Food found that by using a home-friendly way of cooking rice, the "parboiling with absorption method" (PBA), most of the arsenic was removed, while keeping most nutrients in the cooked rice.
The PBA method involves parboiling the rice in pre-boiled water for five minutes before draining and refreshing the water, then cooking it on a lower heat to absorb all the water.
Definitely a signal supporting the deflation of patriarchic epistemologies and the move beyond the pale-o-graphic privileging of male-adapting sex-reductionism. :)
“When scientists do look into a vagina,” Willingham writes, “it’s usually to see if a penis will fit into it and how and nothing more.” In highlighting our culture’s overemphasis on the penis and the relative dismissal of the vagina, Willingham shows how the male domination of science has produced research that has focused on, well, the male parts, and how that leaves out fully half of the story of reproduction.
‘Phallacy’ deflates myths about the penises of the animal kingdom
We humans are kind of penis obsessed. The organ appears in religious texts, laws, daily speech and even in photos sent, often uninvited, to people’s phones. But when we compare our species to the wild diversity of life, the human penis is comparatively un-remarkable, making our infatuation seem even more misplaced.
In Phallacy, biologist and science writer Emily Willingham takes readers on a historical, evolutionary and often hilarious tour of the penises of the planet. “Nothing gets clicks like a story about dicks,” she writes. “Even if it’s about a penis that’s 1.5 millimeters long and millions of years old.” Along the way, she puts the human penis into much-needed perspective.
For a true exploration of the animal kingdom, the word “penis” just won’t suffice. Willingham coins a new term, intromittum, to describe organs that transmit gametes — the eggs or sperm — from one partner to the other.
In addition to looking at the role society plays in how the penis is studied, Phallacy digs into how the penis has been thrust into society. Willingham notes that history, science and culture have overemphasized the role of the member in our lives. Men, Willingham argues, have been reduced to their penises, which are assumed to drive their behavior, their confidence and any efforts men make to compensate for supposed deficiencies. But “the penis is not the throbbing obelisk of all masculinity,” she writes. And to make it one is an insult, both to the penis and to the person who owns it. So Willingham calls for the penis to be put in its place. “It’s time to decenter the organ and focus on the person and their behavior,” she says. The penis is not unimportant. But it also isn’t the measure of a man.
#micropoem
The
pumpkins begins to rot -
with
the moment of light-in -
the
dark -
the
cold breaks the walls -
the
warmth brings collapse -
a
night of glory -
for
a life in compost -
work
-
that
forgets the past
What
would evolve the narrative? -
what sort of new
sensorial-emophysic -
would be outside -
the current ‘visible
spectrum’ -
of the mythoverton -
window?
how
much media -
are
we nudged to swim-in -
we
don’t consume -
we
flow -
throughwith
streams -
sane
in -
a
bore-dom of incurious -
leisure
-
ground
in dust realism -
is it a drive? -
to
play -
or sleep -
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