Thursday, November 26, 2020

Friday Thinking 27 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.’

“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon





the puzzlingly irrational narrowness of the rulebook for scientific argument turns out to have an upside, driving determined scientists to produce a great, Nobel Prize-winning experiment.

Such salutary consequences are, I believe, quite general. The rulebook says, in effect, that if you want to make an argument in science – if you want to win an argument in science – then you must undertake complex, involved, sometimes almost interminable projects that most reasonable people, even inveterate truth-seekers, would prefer to avoid. In this way, the narrowness of the rules channels scientific energy and ambition down specific, often rather long and arduous, paths. But it is at the end of just these paths that the most revealing evidence is found, the observable facts that discriminate most clearly between competing theories or that push thinkers, searching for explanations, to devise entirely new ideas.

Keep science irrational





But what is creativity? It turned out that the field of psychology already had an answer. In 1950, J P Guilford, president of the American Psychological Association, had described his dissatisfaction with conventional explanations of human intellectual ability. They focused on convergent thinking: the ability to find and reproduce the right answer, such as 2 + 2 = 4. That’s vital to our lives, but Guilford argued that it’s not all that matters. Our ability to generate many possible answers to a problem is also important – in other words, divergent thinking. If the question is ‘What equals 4?’ there is no single, correct answer. It could be 2 + 2, but it could also be 3 + 1, or even 0.25 + 3.75. Divergent thinking would come to be seen as a hallmark of creativity.

psychologists would come to understand that creativity is not merely a matter of how we think, but also a function of our personalities (some people are inclined to be more open-minded than others) and where we work or learn (some environments are more conducive to creativity than others, for example through encouraging free thinking). When all of these factors are favourably aligned, people are more likely to be able to generate ideas and products that solve problems in new and useful ways.

Recognise the creativity behind crime, then you can thwart it





Another interesting signal - this time from The Lancet - of how gaming can be incorporated to help in all manner of citizen science. Something that could also enable all sorts of people (with support of a Universal Basic Income) create value for society - even if they don’t have a ‘job’.

The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics

Simulation models are of increasing importance within the field of applied epidemiology. However, very little can be done to validate such models or to tailor their use to incorporate important human behaviours. In a recent incident in the virtual world of online gaming, the accidental inclusion of a disease-like phenomenon provided an excellent example of the potential of such systems to alleviate these modelling constraints. We discuss this incident and how appropriate exploitation of these gaming systems could greatly advance the capabilities of applied simulation modelling in infectious disease research.

On Sept 13, 2005, an estimated 4 million players1 of the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine, CA, USA) encountered an unexpected challenge in the game, introduced in a software update released that day: a full-blown epidemic. Players exploring a newly accessible spatial area within the game encountered an extremely virulent, highly contagious disease. Soon, the disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of the fantasy world, causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease (figure 1 and webfigure). These unforeseen effects raised the possibility for valuable scientific content to be gained from this unintentional game error, and it is this possibility that we will examine.


This is a signal of one inevitable result of AI capability - as McLuhan noted when we are facing information overload - we have to shift to pattern re-cognition. And of course this approach enhances our efforts to create more powerful knowledge management tools.
Preliminary testing suggests that the tool helps readers to sort through search results faster than viewing titles and abstracts, especially on mobile phones, he says. “People seem to really like it.”
“I predict that this kind of tool will become a standard feature of scholarly search in the near future. Actually, given the need, I am amazed it has taken this long to see it in practice,” says Jevin West, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who tested the tool at Nature’s request. “It is not perfect, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction,” he says.

tl;dr: this AI sums up research papers in a sentence

Search engine’s tool for summarizing studies promises easier skim-reading.
The creators of a scientific search engine have unveiled software that automatically generates one-sentence summaries of research papers, which they say could help scientists to skim-read papers faster.

The free tool, which creates what the team calls TLDRs (the common Internet acronym for ‘Too long, didn’t read’), was activated this week for search results at Semantic Scholar, a search engine created by the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington. For the moment, the software generates sentences only for the ten million computer-science papers covered by Semantic Scholar, but papers from other disciplines should be getting summaries in the next month or so, once the software has been fine-tuned, says Dan Weld, who manages the Semantic Scholar group at AI2 and led the work.

The TLDR software is not the only scientific summarizing tool: since 2018, the website Paper Digest has offered summaries of papers, but it seems to extract key sentences from text, rather than generate new ones, Weld notes. TLDR can generate a sentence from a paper’s abstract, introduction and conclusion. Its summaries tend to be built from key phrases in the article’s text, so are aimed squarely at experts who already understand a paper’s jargon. But Weld says the team is working on generating summaries for non-expert audiences.


Our understanding of the future and the past is increasing with the progress being made in AI analysis.

Mapping the genetic relations between ancient populations

New mathematical tools have improved our ability to interpret the information contained in ancient DNA samples. Bioinformaticians have developed a model that can visualise the migrations and gene flows of populations from prehistoric Europe.

Archaeological sites and museum collections are invaluable not only from a cultural perspective, but also for biological purposes. Indeed, they contain ancestral human DNA, as well as precious elements for retracing the history of humankind and the movements of prehistoric populations. Archaeology and anthropology have long surveyed the evidence of this humanity from the past, and have provided a great deal of data regarding its evolution and connection with today’s societies. 

Paleogenomics and bioinformatics have now taken over the analysis of ancient genomes. "Mathematical studies of populations have become an essential complement to biological studies, especially when trying to represent the links between genomes," explains Olivier François, a researcher at the TIMC-Imag laboratory. His research, conducted in collaboration with CNRS researcher Flora Jay from the Laboratory for Computer Science (LRI), recently featured in Nature Communications.


Here’s a signal of the future of the colonoscopy - and maybe other types of internal examinations.

A capsule to explore the intestine

A Paris-based research team has developed a capsule to swallow that will produce images and 3D maps of the intestine. A new era is dawning in colorectal cancer screening.

Undergoing a colonoscopy under anaesthetic is certainly not much fun, so to spare their patients the discomfort, physicians will soon be able to give them a small technological miracle to swallow: an endoscopic capsule equipped with a camera and 3D imaging system. The size of a large olive, this autonomous probe called Cyclope will then travel through the digestive tract, where it will produce a detailed map of the colon and intestine. If abnormalities such as polyps are present, the capsule will be able to detect them.

Cyclope will be equipped with a megapixel camera and LED lighting that will generate high-definition images. Above all, it will contain an imaging system able to map the interior of the colon with an accuracy close to 90%. To achieve this, the capsule will project a laser pattern on the intestinal wall and based on deformation of this pattern by the volume of the digestive tract, it will be able to reconstitute its relief.


Another signal of the power of CRISPR - to treat diseases.

Revolutionary CRISPR-based genome editing system treatment destroys cancer cells

Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have demonstrated that the CRISPR/Cas9 system is very effective in treating metastatic cancers, a significant step on the way to finding a cure for cancer. The researchers developed a novel lipid nanoparticle-based delivery system that specifically targets cancer cells and destroys them by genetic manipulation. The system, called CRISPR-LNPs, carries a genetic messenger (messenger RNA), which encodes for the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 that acts as molecular scissors that cut the cells' DNA.

The revolutionary work was conducted in the laboratory of Prof. Dan Peer, VP for R&D and Head of the Laboratory of Precision Nanomedicine at the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at TAU. The research was conducted by Dr. Daniel Rosenblum together with Ph.D. student Anna Gutkin and colleagues at Prof. Peer's laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Dinorah Friedmann-Morvinski from the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry & Biophysics at TAU; Dr. Zvi R. Cohen, Director of the Neurosurgical Oncology Unit and Vice-Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Sheba Medical Center; Dr. Mark A. Behlke, Chief Scientific Officer at IDT Inc. and his team; and Prof. Judy Lieberman of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The results of the groundbreaking study, which was funded by ICRF (Israel Cancer Research Fund), were published in November 2020 in Science Advances.


Another great signal for about our capacity to meet some of the challenges of clean water and bacterial infections.

Nature's toolkit for killing viruses and bacteria

They burst out of toilet bubbles, swim across drinking water, spread through coughs. Tiny infectious microbes—from the virus that causes COVID-19 to waterborne bacteria—kill millions of people around the world each year. Now engineers are studying how zinc oxide surfaces and natural hydrodynamic churning have the power to kill pathogens first.

"Bacterial contamination of common surfaces and of drinking water have been traditionally the main infection routes for transmission of serious diseases, often leading to mortality," said Abinash Tripathy, a researcher in mechanical and process engineering at ETH Zurich. "Our goal was to design a surface that can address both issues."

His group submerged clean zinc in hot water for 24 hours, which formed a zinc oxide surface covered in sharp nanoneedles. Then they introduced E. coli bacteria.

The surface kills almost all bacteria cultured on top of it very efficiently. And the biggest surprise? When sitting in contaminated water, the surface kills all waterborne E. coli within three hours—even bacteria it didn't touch.

This water disinfection at a distance works because the process generates a reactive oxygen species, which damages the cell walls of bacteria. The group from ETH Zurich, IIT Ropar India, and Empa, Switzerland, presented their initial findings at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.


As if Climate Change isn’t enough (along with everything else) - here’s an important signal that may well challenge the next generation to advance our space capacities.

Apophis asteroid might be more likely to strike Earth in 2068 than thought

The asteroid Apophis was first spotted by astronomers back in 2004. Shortly thereafter, researchers worked out its orbital path and found that the 340-meter-wide asteroid would pass near to the Earth in 2029, 2036 and again in 2068. More study showed that there was little chance of the asteroid striking Earth; thus, it was discounted as a threat. More recently, Tholen and his team noted that earlier researchers had not accounted for the Yarkovsky effect by which rays from the sun strikes one side of an asteroid. As the heat radiates away from the asteroid, a small amount of energy pushes back against the asteroid, forcing it to turn slightly. Tholen and his team calculated that the Yarkovsky effect is pushing Apophis to one side enough to force it to drift by approximately 170 meters a year. They next applied that bit of knowledge to the math describing Apophis's orbit and found that the drift is changing the course of the asteroid in a way that will bring it closer to Earth. He notes that thus far, there is no indication that the asteroid will strike the Earth in 2029 and 2036, but 2068 might be another matter. He suggests that astronomers will have to keep an eye on Apophis as its rendezvous date approaches.


On the other hand - this sounds like Star Trek - in another way.
"We can imagine a future where this technology may induce electrical discharge from passing lightning, helping to guide it to safe targets and reduce the risk of catastrophic fires."

New tractor beam has potential to tame lightning

An international team of researchers, including scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and UNSW Canberra, are pioneering laser tractor beam technology that has the potential to control the path and direction of lightning.

Co-researcher Dr. Vladlen Shvedov, from the ANU Research School of Physics, said the team used a laser beam that mirrors the same process as lightning and creates a path that directs electrical discharges to specific targets.

The beam works by trapping and heating graphene microparticles in the ambient air. By heating the graphene microparticles trapped in the beam, the team was able to create the necessary conditions for electric breakdown and transmission along the laser's path using only an ordinary low-intensity laser,


The fabulous marketing of diamonds (as forever) enabled companies to sell diamonds in a way that would more likely keep them off the resale market - even with the advent of artificial diamonds - not they become way more useful even if they become way cheaper.

Scientists make insta-bling at room temperature

An international team of scientists has defied nature to make diamonds in minutes in a laboratory at room temperature—a process that normally requires billions of years, huge amounts of pressure and super-hot temperatures.

The team, led by The Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University, made two types of diamonds: the kind found on an engagement ring and another type of diamond called Lonsdaleite, which is found in nature at the site of meteorite impacts such as Canyon Diablo in the US.

This new unexpected discovery shows both Lonsdaleite and regular diamond can also form at normal room temperatures by just applying high pressures—equivalent to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe.

Lonsdaleite, named after the crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society, has a different crystal structure to regular diamond. It is predicted to be 58% harder.


This is a good signal of an emerging computational paradigm based on the domestication of the nano-scale of matter.
"The scientific holy grail for scaling is going down to a level where a single atom controls the memory function, and this is what we accomplished in the new study,"  

World's smallest atom-memory unit created

Faster, smaller, smarter and more energy-efficient chips for everything from consumer electronics to big data to brain-inspired computing could soon be on the way after engineers at The University of Texas at Austin created the smallest memory device yet. And in the process, they figured out the physics dynamic that unlocks dense memory storage capabilities for these tiny devices.

The research published recently in Nature Nanotechnology builds on a discovery from two years ago, when the researchers created what was then the thinnest memory storage device. In this new work, the researchers reduced the size even further, shrinking the cross section area down to just a single square nanometer.

The race to make smaller chips and components is all about power and convenience. With smaller processors, you can make more compact computers and phones. But shrinking down chips also decreases their energy demands and increases capacity, which means faster, smarter devices that take less power to operate.


A strong signal of the revolution in agriculture, AI, robotics - it’s not just the cities and highways that self-driving vehicles will transform the world.
"This is not about taking away jobs, it's about filling jobs where there currently are no people available to do them. For a while there have been fewer people willing to go out into the fields and harvest fruit and vegetables; this is an autonomous solution to that, and one which is affordable and reliable.

Cutting-edge agricultural robots offers a low-cost lifeline to UK farmers

A low-cost robotic platform which can be fitted with almost any agricultural implement could help farmers across the UK to overcome the lack of available manual labour.

The Robotriks Traction Unit (RTU), created by startup company Robotriks, costs just £7,000—almost a tenth of the cost of most other products on the market.

Powered by batteries which last for 24 hours, it can be built within a few hours and made available for a range of tasks from crop monitoring to harvesting crops like cauliflowers.

Robotriks was co-founded by Jake Shaw-Sutton, Senior Robotics Technician at the University of Plymouth, and Khaian Marsh and is based near St Austell in Cornwall.

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