Thursday, November 5, 2020

Friday Thinking 6 Nov 2020

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.’

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9





Thinking of parts of organisms as agents, detecting opportunities and trying to accomplish missions is risky, but the payoff in insight can be large. Suppose you interfere with a cell or cell assembly during development, moving it or cutting it off from its usual neighbours, to see if it can recover and perform its normal role. Does it know where it is? Does it try to find its neighbours, or perform its usual task wherever it has now landed, or does it find some other work to do? The more adaptive the agent is to your interference, the more competence it demonstrates. When it ‘makes a mistake’, what mistake does it make? Can you ‘trick’ it into acting too early or too late? Such experiments at the tissue and organ level are the counterparts of the thousands of experiments in cognitive science that induce bizarre illusions or distortions or local blindness by inducing pathology, which provide clues about how the ‘magic’ is accomplished, but only if you keep track of what the agents know and want.

Here’s another simple way to think about the problem. Once the individual early cells – stem cells, for instance – are born, they apparently take care of their own further development, shaping both themselves and their local environments without any further instruction from their parents. They become rather autonomous, unlike the mindless gears and pistons in an intelligently designed engine. They find their way. What could possibly explain this? Something like a trail of breadcrumbs? Yes, in some cases, but the cells have to be smart enough to detect and follow them. We might hope for some relatively simple physical explanation.

The cooperation problem and the problem of the origin of unified minds embodied in a swarm (of cells, of ants, etc) are highly related. The key dynamic that evolution discovered is a special kind of communication allowing privileged access of agents to the same information pool, which in turn made it possible to scale selves. This kickstarted the continuum of increasing agency. This even has medical implications: preventing this physiological communication within the body – by shutting down gap junctions or simply inserting pieces of plastic between tissues – initiates cancer, a localised reversion to an ancient, unicellular state in which the boundary of the self is just the surface of a single cell and the rest of the body is just ‘environment’ from its perspective, to be exploited selfishly. And we now know that artificially forcing cells back into bioelectrical connection with their neighbours can normalise such cancer cells, pushing them back into the collective goal of tissue upkeep and maintenance.

Cognition all the way down





In 1920, a reflective director of industrial research at Eastman Kodak acknowledged the reality and value of genius, though he doubted that any company could expect to secure an adequate supply of such exceptional people. No matter: scientific workers who were well-trained and well-motivated could make valuable contributions even though they were ‘entirely untouched by anything that might be considered as the fire of genius’. At mid-century, corporate and bureaucratic employers varied in their opinions about whether the organisational difficulties attending genius were worth putting up with; some insisted that they were; others thought that the disruption caused by genius was too big a price to pay; and still others reckoned that a properly organised team of people of average abilities might constitute ‘a very good substitute for genius’.

Organisations should be designed to induce scientists from different disciplines to focus on a common project; to keep them talking to each other while maintaining ties with their home academic disciplines; and to get them to concentrate on commercially relevant projects while permitting enough freedom to ‘stare out the window’ and to think ‘blue sky’ thoughts. If you want profits, then – it was widely conceded – one price you pay is a significant amount of intellectual freedom, allowing the scientific workers to do just what they wanted to do, at least some of the time. The one-day-a-week-for-free-thought notion is not the recent invention of Google; it goes back practically forever in industrial research labs, and its justification was always hard-headed.

The rise and rise of creativity





We need others’ help to figure out what and how to think. Many issues are just too complex for us to tackle on our own. They’re often the subject of bewildering and vociferous debate, and it’s not always easy to know whom to turn to as a guide. We have to make difficult decisions about who should influence our thinking. Given these circumstances, it helps to have an idea of the kind of person we should allow to aid our deliberations. That’s where philosophy comes in handy, as it helps us to establish a set of heuristics for whom to trust with our intellectual lives.

Think about any complex issue you’ve recently considered. Perhaps you’ve been thinking through where you land on the antiracism protests, on reopening the economy after the pandemic, or on the presidential election in the United States. You’re almost certainly not considering any of this in an isolated vacuum. You’re depending on others, for better or worse.

expertise alone can rarely settle the questions that matter to us. This is because settling these issues isn’t just about making a list of facts. It’s about deliberating about these facts in light of our values and objectives. We have to figure out what we, in our particular situation, should do about the facts. And we can’t figure that out without moral clarity and knowledge of ourselves.

That’s why we often turn to people we trust for guidance. We look at what they’re saying, in light of the broader public discussion. We ask them questions. We share our current, precarious thoughts with them in the hopes that they might help us firm them up. We build up our knowledge of the world within our own personal networks of intellectual dependence.

What we need within these networks is intellectually dependable people. It’s these people – and their opposites – that this guide is all about. Below, we’ll map out five of the virtues of intellectually dependable people, and contrast each of these with the vices of their undependable counterparts. Looking out for these signs of intellectual trustworthiness can help us do a better job, as we think through, together, the issues that matter to us.

How to know who’s trustworthy






This is an important signal in terms of the particulars - but more importantly of the encroachment of corporate agendas to enclose the public commons nature of knowledge, creativity, and the grasping of innovative affordances. Plus - the public being able enact their own citizen based agencies. Patents, copyrights should also work to protect the common access for creating value through recombining the original debt we all own to former creations.

This is a very good example of ‘institutions’ fighting to preserve the problems to which they are the answer. In this case it is the centralized control of media and creative productions 

Where is Canada’s News Media Lobby Promoting Its Link Licensing Plan for Facebook? On Facebook

Last week, News Media Canada, the lobby group representing the major Canadian news media publishers, released a report calling for the creation of a government digital media regulatory agency that would have the power to establish mandated payments for linking to news articles on social media site, establish what content is prioritized on those sites, and potentially issue fines in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As I noted in my review of the report, it inaccurately describes the proposed Australian approach upon which it is modelled, avoids acknowledging that payments would be for links, and would open the door to hundreds of millions on tariff retaliation by the US under the USMCA.

The report was widely covered by the publishers promoting it: the National Post devoted its front page to the report, the other Postmedia papers all found time to cover the release, and the Toronto Star ran multiple articles and opinion pieces on it. In addition to the front page of some newspapers, the papers themselves posted the stories on Facebook, often multiple times. For example, the National Post front page story was posted 11 times by Postmedia papers including posts from the National Post (twice), Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, Windsor Star, London Free Press, Vancouver Sun, Regina Leader-Post, and Saskatchewan StarPhoenix. The National Post also ran a story in the Financial Post on the report which posted on Facebook, a Diane Francis opinion piece on the report which it posted on Facebook, and a story on what happens when a local newspaper dies, which it posted twice on Facebook. In fact, just this morning, there is yet another op-ed in support of the report by Jerry Dias, which appears in both the National Post and Ottawa Citizen, with both immediately posting to Facebook.

What is notable about the self-interested media campaign is not just the power of large Canadian publishers to re-use the same coverage in markets across Canada both big and small, but that under  their proposal, they argue that Facebook should be required to pay them for including links to their articles that they themselves have posted. In fact, the lobby group also demands that their original content should be prioritized on Facebook (with a regulator to determine what is entitled to priority), even though the same, original content is repeated again and again across multiple papers and in dozens of Facebook posts. Canadian Heritage Minister has described Facebook as “immoral” for linking to content without payment, but in light of what actually takes place, the comment might be better directed at lobbying campaigns that demand payments for content that the media lobby posts itself to social media.


The age of complexity also harkens the age of uncertainty - which in turn can foster anxiety - which can lead to despair. A signal for the times.

‘Deaths of despair’ are rising. It’s time to define despair

Scientists investigate whether despair is distinct from mental disorders
As 2015 wound down, a foreboding but catchy phrase from a scientific paper blew across the cultural landscape with unexpected force.

The expression “deaths of despair” was born after Princeton University economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton — Case’s colleague, husband and a Nobel laureate in economics — dug into U.S. death statistics and found that, during the 1900s, people’s life spans had generally lengthened from roughly 50 years to nearly 80. But then, near the end of the century, one segment of the population took a U-turn. Since the 1990s, mortality had risen sharply among middle-aged, non-Hispanic white people, especially those without a college degree, Case and Deaton reported in December 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The reason, to a large extent: White, working-class people ages 45 to 54 were drinking themselves to death with alcohol, accidentally overdosing on opioids and other drugs, and killing themselves, often by shooting or hanging. Vanishing jobs, disintegrating families and other social stressors had unleashed a rising tide of fatal despair, Case and Deaton concluded. This disturbing trend mirrored what had previously occurred among inner-city Black people in the 1970s and 1980s, Case and Deaton now say. As low-skilled jobs vanished and families broke apart, Black victims of crack cocaine and the AIDS epidemic represented an early wave of deaths of despair. Even today, mortality rates for Black people still exceed those of white people in the United States for a variety of reasons, with Black overdose deaths on the rise over the last few years.

“The most meaningful dividing line [for being at risk of deaths of despair] is whether or not you have a four-year college degree,” Deaton says.


This is one of the weak signals that seem forever weak - until it isn’t. 

Quantum-computing pioneer warns of complacency over Internet security

Nature talks to Peter Shor 25 years after he showed how to make quantum computations feasible — and how they could endanger our data.
When physicists first thought up quantum computers in the 1980s, they sounded like a nice theoretical idea, but one probably destined to remain on paper. Then in 1995, 25 years ago this month, applied mathematician Peter Shor published a paper1 that changed that perception.

Shor’s paper showed how quantum computers could overcome a crucial problem. The machines would process information as qubits — quantum versions of ordinary bits that can simultaneously be ‘0’ and ‘1’. But quantum states are notoriously vulnerable to noise, leading to loss of information. His error-correction technique — which detects errors caused by noise — showed how to make quantum information more robust.

Shor, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and is also a published poet, had shocked the physics and computer-science worlds the previous year, when he found the first potentially useful — but ominous — way to use a hypothetical quantum computer. He’d written an algorithm that would allow a quantum computer to factor integer numbers into prime factors at lightning speed. Most Internet traffic today is secured by encryption techniques based on large prime numbers. Cracking those codes is hard because classical computers are slow at factoring large products.

Quantum computers are now a reality, although they are still too rudimentary to factor numbers of more than two digits. But it is only a matter of time until quantum computers threaten Internet encryption.


A good signal of new paradigms of delivering access to the digital environment - including an internet of sensors. Worth the read as a brief account of the project. 

Loon balloon breaks record for stratospheric flight duration—stays aloft for 312 days

Google parent Alphabet has announced that its Loon team has broken the record for the longest stratospheric flight duration, staying aloft for 312 consecutive days. The announcement was posted on the Loon blog, where the team also outlined the history of the project and its goals for the future.

The Loon project was started back in 2013 with the ambitious goal of providing cellphone service to people in remote areas by using balloons as cell towers. Since that time, the team has spent a considerable amount of time perfecting very high-altitude balloon flight. On their blog post, they note that they have focused their efforts on improving sustained flight—their first balloons flew for just a few days. They note also that all of their balloons are the same in one way: They carry technology to transmit two-way communications with ground-based users.


Then again - a sign of the times - in context

Benjamin H. Bratton

@bratton

FWIW Last year I explained the White Pages phone book to my undergraduate students as a hypothetical example of a personal data privacy scenario and 16 out of 26 thought it would be/ was ethically unacceptable.


This is a longish article about the deeply fascinating world of what combinations of ingredients are necessary for safe, effective vaccines - and it signals the vast opportunity spaces of all manner of combinations bring unknowable benefits or harms. A metaphor for the information economy.

The strange ingredients found in vaccines

Scientists add some bizarre things to vaccines, such as aluminium and extracts from shark livers. Many vaccines simply don’t work without them – but no one knows why.
In 1925, Gaston Ramon embarked upon an experiment that even he described as… “interesting”.

A few years earlier, the French veterinarian had been trying out a new diphtheria vaccine on horses, when he made an accidental discovery: some animals reacted by developing nasty abscesses at the injection site, and these ones also tended to develop stronger immune responses. This got him thinking – what else could he add to the vaccine, to encourage this to happen?

Over the next year, Ramon tested a bizarre smorgasbord of ingredients, seemingly based on what he happened to have in his kitchen cupboards. Together with the diphtheria vaccine, his unfortunate patients were injected with tapioca, starch, agar, lecithin – an emulsion of oil, commonly found in chocolate – and even breadcrumbs.

The experiments were a success. Animals which had been given vaccines that included Ramon’s concoctions produced significantly more antibodies than those which didn’t, suggesting that they would be better protected against diphtheria.

And thus the field of “adjuvants” was born. Named after the Latin word “adjuvare”, meaning “to help” or “aid”, these are substances which can be added to vaccines to make them more effective. They’re widely used to this day – and they’re no less weird than they were to begin with.


This is a small signal for what may end up as a relatively invisible transformation of some cosmetic practice - it’s also a small signal of the domestication of DNA

Researchers develop a new way to create a spectrum of natural-looking hair colors

We've long been warned of the risks of dyeing hair at home and in salons. Products used can cause allergies and skin irritation—an estimated 1% of people have an allergy to dye. Furthermore, repeated use of some dyes has been linked to cancer.

But there soon may be a solution for the growing list of salons and hair color enthusiasts searching for natural alternatives to dyes and cosmetics.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new way to create a spectrum of natural-looking hair colors, ranging from blond to black, by using enzymes to catalyze synthetic melanin.

The research will be published Oct. 30 in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

The paper identifies four key advantages to using synthetic melanin instead of traditional dyes:
Synthetic melanin avoids the use of ammonia as a base layer.
The precursors to treating hair with melanin are less toxic.
The process uses safer, more scalable chemicals.
There is vast potential in future cosmetic translations of synthetic melanin.


This is a good small signal of one way to mitigate certain plastics - it is also a small signal of the growing focus on creating a more metabolic approach to our economies.

Flash graphene rocks strategy for plastic waste

Plastic waste comes back in black as pristine graphene, thanks to ACDC.

That's what Rice University scientists call the process they employed to make efficient use of waste plastic that would otherwise add to the planet's environmental woes. In this instance, the lab of Rice chemist James Tour modified its method to make flash graphene to enhance it for recycling plastic into graphene.

The lab's study appears in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

Simply, instead of raising the temperature of a carbon source with direct current, as in the original process, the lab first exposes plastic waste to around eight seconds of high-intensity alternating current, followed by the DC jolt.

The products are high-quality turbostratic graphene, a valuable and soluble substance that can be used to enhance electronics, composites, concrete and other materials, and carbon oligomers, molecules that can be vented away from the graphene for use in other applications.

at industrial scale, the ACDC process could produce graphene for about $125 in electricity costs per ton of plastic waste.


A small signal of an emerging capability to harness energy from all manner of micro-turbulences in living bodies and environments - for powering personal devices and sensors.

Energy scavenging nanogenerator finds power all around us

Imagine a mobile phone charger that doesn't need a wireless or mains power source. Or a pacemaker with inbuilt organic energy sources within the human body.

Australian researchers led by Flinders University are picking up the challenge of "scavenging" invisible power from low-frequency vibrations in the surrounding environment, including wind, air or even contact-separation energy (static electricity).
"These so-called triboelectric nanogenerators (or TENGs) can be made at low cost in different configurations, making them suitable for driving small electronics such as personal electronics (mobile phones), biomechanics devices (pacemakers), sensors (temperature/pressure/chemical sensors), and more," says Professor Youhong Tang, from Flinders University's College of Science and Engineering.

Further research aims to further develop this renewable form of energy harvesting by designing simple fabrication from cheap and sustainable materials, with high efficiency.


This is a small signal indicating a next computational paradigm - toward the ‘lots of room all the way down’ end of the spectrum.

Breakthrough quantum-dot transistors create a flexible alternative to conventional electronics

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and their collaborators from the University of California, Irvine have created fundamental electronic building blocks out of tiny structures known as quantum dots and used them to assemble functional logic circuits. The innovation promises a cheaper and manufacturing-friendly approach to complex electronic devices that can be fabricated in a chemistry laboratory via simple, solution-based techniques, and offer long-sought components for a host of innovative devices.

"Potential applications of the new approach to electronic devices based on non-toxic quantum dots include printable circuits, flexible displays, lab-on-a-chip diagnostics, wearable devices, medical testing, smart implants, and biometrics," said Victor Klimov, a physicist specializing in semiconductor nanocrystals at Los Alamos and lead author on a paper announcing the new results in the October 19 issue of Nature Communications.




#micropoem

One can estimate -
probability of throwing 1 -
when tossing 6-sided die -
 
can anyone estimate -
probability of what -
tossing a 1 will mean -
to a living system?
 
Is the range and/or logic -
of possible meanings -
attributed to-
throwing 1 enumerable?
 

Roll a 1 on one 6-sided die -
Signals -
Win everything -
Loose everything -
Nothing changes -
Paint my car red -
blue - green - black ….
Clip my nails -
Do the laundry - 
Eat bread and cheese -
buy a house -
kiss my love -
 
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