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:
The rise of the bystander as a complicit historical actor
Scientists Find Vital Genes Evolving in Genome’s Junkyard
Articles:
Coronavirus: The Swiss Cheese Strategy
Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech
Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer
FTC says Zoom misled users on its security for meetings
The Future of Intellectual Property
These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2020
What is Arrival? The Electric Vans & Buses of the Future
How would you build an electric vehicle?
Wound-healing biomaterials activate immune system for stronger skin
Protecting the brain from infection may start with a gut reaction
First Alzheimer’s Blood Test Rolled Out for Clinical Use in US
The Booming Call of De-extinction
Plant inspired: Printing self-folding paper structures for future mechatronics
How to Make the World's Best Paper Airplane
TheSpace 4th Annual Winter Vernissage
One of biology’s most enduring dilemmas is how it dances around the issue at the core of such a description: agency, the ability of living entities to alter their environment (and themselves) with purpose to suit an agenda. Typically, discussions of goals and purposes in biology get respectably neutered with scare quotes: cells and bacteria aren’t really ‘trying’ to do anything, just as organisms don’t evolve ‘in order to’ achieve anything (such as running faster to improve their chances of survival). In the end, it’s all meant to boil down to genes and molecules, chemistry and physics – events unfolding with no aim or design, but that trick our narrative-obsessed minds into perceiving these things.
Yet, on the contrary, we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living organisms. A grasp of just what it is that enables an entity to act as an autonomous agent, altering its behaviour and environment to achieve certain ends, should help reconcile biology to the troublesome notions of purpose and function.
In the ordinarily sedate waters of plant biology, for example, a storm is currently raging over whether or not plants have sentience and consciousness. Some things that plants do – such as apparently selecting a direction of growth based on past experience – can look like purposeful and even ‘mindful’ action, especially as they can involve electrical signals reminiscent of those produced by neurons.
But if we break down agency into its constituents, we can see how it might arise even in the absence of a mind that ‘thinks’, at least in the traditional sense. Agency stems from two ingredients: first, an ability to produce different responses to identical (or equivalent) stimuli, and second, to select between them in a goal-directed way. Neither of these capacities is unique to humans, nor to brains in general.
In general, the environment isn’t a static thing, but something that the agent itself affects. So it’s not enough to simply learn about the environment as it is, because, says Still, ‘the agent changes the process to be learned about’.
Life with purpose
‘The expectation of help, the certainty of help, is indeed one of the fundamental experiences of human beings …’
The rise of the bystander as a complicit historical actor
Essential genes are often thought to be frozen in evolutionary time — evolving only very slowly if at all, because changing or dying would lead to the death of the organism. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution separate insects and mammals, but experiments show that the Hox genes guiding the development of the body plans in Drosophila fruit flies and mice can be swapped without a hitch because they are so similar. This remarkable evolutionary conservation is a foundational concept in genome research.
But a new study turns this rationale for genetic conservation on its head. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle reported last week in eLife that a large class of genes in fruit flies are both essential for survival and evolving extremely rapidly. In fact, the scientists’ analysis suggests that the genes’ ability to keep changing is the key to their essential nature. “Not only is this questioning the dogma, it is blowing the dogma out of the water,” said Harmit Malik, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who oversaw the study.
“It’s almost like an arms race happening in the genome, just to preserve an essential function.”
It’s also paradoxical: If new genes are essential, how did previous organisms live without them? Malik sees two possibilities. One is that an ancestral gene ceded its function to a new gene. The other is that the new gene performs a function that ancestral organisms didn’t need. Species today face problems that their ancestors didn’t, and those new problems require new solutions. But “what if it’s actually the evolution of these heterochromatin sequences that created the need for this essential function first?” Malik asked.
“The essential function itself may not be conserved, and that’s a heretical concept,” he continued. “We’re not just saying that the essential genes are not conserved. We are actually saying that it’s possible that the essential functions are not conserved, because it’s all context-specific.”
Scientists Find Vital Genes Evolving in Genome’s Junkyard
This is one of the most comprehensive accounts of how to manage-navigate the Covid-19 pandemic. It has several short and very clear videos as well.
Coronavirus: The Swiss Cheese Strategy
How Any Country Can Learn to Dance and Stop the Coronavirus
Our Coronavirus articles have been read more than 60 million times. Translations available in German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Ukrainian. More welcome!
In this article, you’ll learn:
- How the US and the EU failed to control the virus, and how comparable countries succeeded.
- How you can make sense of all the necessary measures with one simple idea.
- Why the West’s testing and contact tracing is largely useless — and what they can do about it.
- The questions that journalists and the People must ask politicians to keep them accountable.
- How you can stop the virus in your own community, without the need of your government.
And much more! Alright, here we go.
- How the US and the EU failed to control the virus, and how comparable countries succeeded.
- How you can make sense of all the necessary measures with one simple idea.
- Why the West’s testing and contact tracing is largely useless — and what they can do about it.
- The questions that journalists and the People must ask politicians to keep them accountable.
- How you can stop the virus in your own community, without the need of your government.
And much more! Alright, here we go.
This is one more signal of the need to rethink how we can create and protect a fair, open and public digital environment.
Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech
A new policy perfectly illustrates a core issue across the industry
After five years of Google Photos offering unlimited, free storage of “high-quality” compressed images, Google announced on Wednesday that its policy is changing. Starting next June, any new photos you upload will count toward the 15 gigabytes of free storage offered to every Google account. (Your old photos won’t.) After that, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee for Google One, its cloud storage service.
In one sense, that’s a totally reasonable policy change for a product that has become wildly popular since the initial free-storage offer. Storage isn’t really free or unlimited, after all, and 15 gigabytes is still a lot of space. Some even argue that paying Google directly for services such as Google Photos represents a healthier business relationship long-term than paying with your data or attention.
What was once a hotly competitive and innovative space is now largely controlled by Google and a few other giants, such as Apple. And this points to another set of losers, albeit a nebulous one: everyone who might have benefited from the new ideas and fresh features that were never developed because startups didn’t stand a chance against Google.
the serious proposals on the table to “break up Big Tech” aren’t about vengefully smashing the companies to bits as I explained in August. They’re about restricting the largest platforms’ free rein to leverage their power across different business lines.
We need new antitrust laws for Big Tech not because big tech firms are evil but because they can’t help themselves. They’re playing on the playing field they’ve been given. And if it’s all downhill from their side, then the answer is not to blame and shame them but to fix the field.
One key ‘inevitable’ trend is to ‘cognify’ everything - that is add AI and software to every physical product. It’s not just the ‘big platforms’ by themselves but it’s the enclosure of the commons - the freedom to repair or to use third party competition to fix our ‘stuff’. This is a very important signal for the future of real personal agency in innovation and ownership. A signal of the ‘dark side’ of the ‘access economy’.
When your customers reject your products, you can always win their business back by depriving them of the choice to patronize a competitor. Printer cartridges soon bristled with "security chips"
we see the beautiful synergy of anti-user engineering and anti-competition lawyering. It's really heartwarming to see these two traditional rival camps in large companies cease hostilities and join forces.
From Apple to John Deere to GM to Tesla to Medtronic, the legal fiction that you don't own anything is used to force you to arrange your affairs to benefit corporate shareholders at your own expense.
Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer
Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a "deal" and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.
The company's just beat its own record, converting its "Free ink for life" plan into a "Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working" plan.
Plenty of businesses offer some of their products on the cheap in the hopes of stimulating sales of their higher-margin items: you've probably heard of the "razors and blades" model (falsely) attributed to Gillette, but the same goes for cheap Vegas hotel rooms and buffets that you can only reach by running a gauntlet of casino "games," and cheap cell phones that come locked into a punishing, eternally recurring monthly plan.
Printers are grifter magnets, and the whole industry has been fighting a cold war with its customers since the first clever entrepreneur got the idea of refilling a cartridge and settling for mere astronomical profits, thus undercutting the manufacturers' truly galactic margins. This prompted an arms race in which the printer manufacturers devote ever more ingenuity to locking third-party refills, chips, and cartridges out of printers, despite the fact that no customer has ever asked for this.
HP's latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there's ink in the cartridges).
We need something better than Zoom - something open source and non-profit.
"Zoom has 'cashed in' on the pandemic," Chopra said in his dissent. "Zoom stands ready to emerge as a tech titan. But we should all be questioning whether Zoom and other tech titans expanded their empires through deception. Zoom could have taken the time to ensure that its security was up to the right standards."
FTC says Zoom misled users on its security for meetings
Federal regulators are requiring Zoom to strengthen its security in a proposed settlement of allegations that the video conferencing service misled users about its level of security for meetings.
The settlement, approved by the Federal Trade Commission in a 3-2 vote, was announced Monday. A complaint filed by the agency accused Zoom of deceiving users over security since at least 2016. It said the company held on to cryptographic keys that allowed it to access content from its customers' meetings, and secured meetings with a lower level of privacy encryption than it promised customers.
Zoom has become a staple during the coronavirus pandemic because it allows people to meet online rather than in person. The company claims some 300 million users, boosted by the tens of millions of workers around the world who were suddenly ordered to work from home in the spring as the virus outbreak shut down wide swaths of the economy.
The FTC alleged that Zoom "engaged in a series of deceptive and unfair practices that undermined the security of its users."
Here’s an interesting signal from Kevin Kelly about the future of intellectual property - a 25 min video.
The Future of Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is a major global commodity more valuable than material economic inputs. For a long time, the protections for this resource were managed by individual countries, but this patchwork system is straining under the complexity of global consumption and creation, plus burgeoning volume. In the next decade or two, we should expect to see a substantial shift toward a truly global law for managing IP. We will lean on artificial intelligence to parse the vast flow of intangibles (some of which will be generated *by* AI). We might look forward to decentralized technologies, being piloted now, that allow attribution and distribution trackers to be deeply embedded in our creations, digital watermarks that bear creators' signatures and interest. But the technical aspects of managing and tracking are not the only challenge. It's actually the balance between attribution and distribution that requires the fine tuning. Authorship must be protected long-enough to make the troubles of creation worthwhile, but not so long that interest and capacity for the next iteration is missed. It's a big transition from our attitude toward protecting ideas as property, but if we accept the evidence that our intangible creations are the drivers of our economic well-being, and we recognize that an idea shared becomes half of the next idea, my hope is that we will soon come to agree that ideas generate the most benefit and wealth when they are shepherded to their place in the Commons as quickly as possible.
This may be a bit premature - for the usual January predictions of the coming year. This is a short term analysis of next year’s techno-developments.
These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2020
A new report reveals the top 10 emerging technologies of 2020. Innovations include microneedles for painless injections, and electric planes.
From electric planes to tech sensors that can “see” around corners, this year’s list is packed with inspiring advances. Experts whittled down scores of nominations to a select group of new developments with the potential to disrupt the status quo and spur real progress.
This is a great signal - of the future of manufacturing - from massive factory assembly lines - toward modular micro-factories. Three short youtube videos that are well worth the watch. I want my next vehicle to be from this company.
What is Arrival? The Electric Vans & Buses of the Future
What is Arrival? The Electric Vans & Buses of the Future. Arrival, the electric vehicle manufacturer founded by Denis Sverdlov in 2015, has recently reached Unicorn status thanks to investment from Hyundai and KIA. But they face competition in the electric vehicle market from Rivian electric bus, Proterra, BYD, Muji Gacha and Einride's logging truck that drives itself.
In this video, we discuss Arrival's electric vans and electric buses that have been seen in London, Paris and beyond to see how Arrival has succeeded where others have failed.
How would you build an electric vehicle?
The question is simple: with our knowledge of material technology, how would we design vehicles to be lighter, less expensive, more durable and fully recyclable?
At Arrival we have the freedom to develop completely new ways of thinking about materials for design. This approach has provided engineers with the means to do things differently, which is fundamental if we are to succeed in bringing about a revolution in sustainable transportation. From nano to macro, we have developed a rich and rewarding material palette for Arrival products. There is no need to compromise on quality: our materials are versatile, sustainable and low-cost.
Inside the R&D Lab | ARRIVAL
Take a look behind the scenes at Arrival's R&D lab in Banbury, UK with Arrival President Avinash Rugoobur.
Here you will see some of the processes Arrival uses that are revolutionary to the automotive industry, which starts with our Microfactory model, including robotic cells and a completely new way of designing materials.
Medical sciences - continue to transform science fiction into science facts.
Wound-healing biomaterials activate immune system for stronger skin
Researchers at Duke University and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a biomaterial that significantly reduces scar formation after wounding, leading to more effective skin healing. This new material, which quickly degrades once the wound has closed, demonstrates that activating an adaptive immune response can trigger regenerative wound healing, leaving behind stronger and healthier healed skin.
This work builds on the team's previous research with hydrogel scaffolds, which create a structure to support tissue growth, accelerating wound healing. In their new study, the team showed that a modified version of this hydrogel activates a regenerative immune response, which can potentially help heal skin injuries like burns, cuts, diabetic ulcers and other wounds that normally heal with significant scars that are more susceptible to reinjury.
This research appears online on November 9, 2020 in the journal Nature Materials.
I am fascinated with the entanglement of our ‘selves’ and our microbial ecologies.
“This was a powerful demonstration of how important the gut could be at determining what is found in the meninges,”
Protecting the brain from infection may start with a gut reaction
In mice, immune cells on the brain’s surface are first trained in the intestines to recognize invaders
Some immune defenses of the brain may have their roots in the gut.
A new study in mice finds that immune cells are first trained in the gut to recognize and launch attacks on pathogens, and then migrate to the brain’s surface to protect it, researchers report online November 4 in Nature. These cells were also found in surgically removed parts of human brains.
Clatworthy’s team found antibody-producing plasma cells in the leathery meninges, which lie between the brain and skull, in both mice and humans. These immune cells produced a class of antibodies called immunoglobulin A, or IgA.
These cells and antibodies are mainly found in the inner lining of the gut and lungs, so the scientists wondered if the cells on the brain had any link to the gut. It turned out that there was: Germ-free mice, which had no microbes in their guts, didn’t have any plasma cells in their meninges either. However, when bacteria from the poop of other mice and humans were transplanted into the mice’s intestines, their gut microbiomes were restored, and the plasma cells then appeared in the meninges.
A good signal for all the aging boomers and their loved ones.
“If you asked me [five or ten] years ago if there would ever be a blood test for Alzheimer’s, I would have been very skeptical,” says Howard Fillit, the executive director and chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, which invested in C2N’s development of the test. “So the fact that this is on the market now is just amazing.”
First Alzheimer’s Blood Test Rolled Out for Clinical Use in US
The test will be a cheaper and more accessible alternative to currently available diagnostic tools, researchers say.
The first blood test designed to assist physicians in determining whether a patient has Alzheimer’s disease is now available in most US states, the company C2N Diagnostics announced October 29. The test measures biomarkers that frequently reflect the presence of amyloid plaques in the brain—a hallmark of Alzheimer’s—as well as the presence of a gene variant that increases the risk of the disease.
“I’m very excited about it,” says Suzanne Schindler, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who was involved in testing an earlier version of the assay but is not connected to C2N. While there are two other tests for Alzheimer’s-associated brain changes, she notes, both have logistical and financial challenges: one that collects biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) requires a spinal tap, while the other, a scan called amyloid PET, involves injecting a radioactive tracer, costs thousands of dollars, and is only performed at specialized centers. “I think patients really like the idea of a blood test,” she says. “And I think that it really has the potential to allow us to do a lot more testing than we have done in the past.”
The price of the test is $1,250, says C2N CEO Joel Braunstein, but patients who qualify for financial assistance will be charged between $25 and $400. Health insurance companies don’t currently pay for the test, he adds, but qualifying for this reimbursement “is a very high priority” for the company.
This is a good signal for the world - and the prevention of HIV infections.
Trial results reveal that long-acting injectable cabotegravir as PrEP is highly effective in preventing HIV acquisition in women
The HIV Prevention Trials Network study (HPTN 084) on the safety and efficacy of the long-acting injectable antiretroviral drug cabotegravir (CAB LA), for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in HIV-uninfected women, was stopped early by the trial Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) as results showed CAB LA to be highly effective in preventing HIV acquisition.
Another weak signal of the domestication of DNA - it’s not Jurassic Park - - yet.
The Booming Call of De-extinction
While efforts are underway to bring back extinct mammals, such as the woolly mammoth and quagga, through cloning, artificial insemination, and a breeding process that aims to revert domesticated species to phenotypes that closely resemble their wild ancestors, birds’ reproductive systems are not as amenable to these techniques.
So scientists are turning to cultured germ cell transmission, a promising technique that has been used to propagate gene-edited domesticated chickens for more than a decade. The idea is that genes from extinct birds could be replicated and introduced into host embryos’ germlines.
While the technique works well in chickens, current cell culture media do not support wild bird primordial germ cells (PGCs), the precursors to sperm and egg. PGCs ferry genetic sequences into a host so they can be passed down through generations. Revive & Restore, an organization weaving biotechnologies into wildlife conservation and backing much of the research into de-extinction, has made it a priority to develop such media. It would enable the large-scale amplification of wild bird PGCs, perhaps including those of endangered birds, and offer a platform for gene modification that could help return extinct species to life.
This is a lovely signal of biomimicry and the future of smart programmable matter.
Plant inspired: Printing self-folding paper structures for future mechatronics
When natural motion comes to mind, plants are most likely at the bottom of most people's list. The truth is that plants can perform complex movements, but they only do so very slowly. The main mechanism behind plant movement is water absorption and release; the cellulose present in plant tissues draws water in and expands, and the underlying arrangement of cellulose fibers guides the motions as needed. Now, what if we drew ideas from this natural phenomenon and used them for future engineering applications?
Surprisingly, it turns out that this type of motion could become the basis to produce new types of robots and mechatronic devices. In a recent study published in Advanced Intelligent Systems, a team of scientists from Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) and Waseda University, Japan, developed a most simple methodology based on this nature-derived concept to make paper fold itself as desired using nothing but a standard inkjet printer. Dr. Hiroki Shigemune from SIT, lead scientist on the study, explains their motivation: "Printing technologies to produce objects rapidly are currently in the spotlight, such as 3-D printing. However, printing functional mechatronic devices remains a huge challenge; we tackled this by finding a convenient method to print self-folding paper structures. Since paper is mostly cellulose, we drew inspiration from plants."
For some fun with our kids - biological ones and inner children.
How to Make the World's Best Paper Airplane
John Collins, also known as 'The Paper Airplane Guy,' teaches us how to fold and fly our very own version of his "world record" paper airplane. John attempts to make the greatest paper airplane on the planet, and takes us along for the ride.
TheSpace 4th Annual Winter Vernissage
TheSpace is
A non-profit social creative studio for individuals with Autism and Intellectual Disabilities
It is hard to believe theSpace will be entering its fifth year. I hope people will visit the website to see how our members continue to flourish and develop their creative works and hopefully continue providing important support.
This year due to Covid our Vernissage will be virtual with an online auction.
Here is a link to our auction site. It is void of any artwork until the morning of. People must sign in with an email address and name to place a bid.
People can visit on Saturday at 3pm when the video feature goes live on our Youtube channel.
Here is the link to the Youtube Channel - for viewing.
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