Thursday, July 1, 2021

Friday Thinking 2 July, 2021

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




In Varela’s narrative, cognitive science originated from Cybernetics. The first phase which he describes as Cognitivism is based on the notion of cognition as information processing. The second phase is the notion of cognition as a dynamical system with emergent properties. The final phase is that of an enactive system where agents deriving semantics through its coupling with its environment. Varela’s paper argues for a progression from Cybernetics into a more enlightened Enactive approach. This progress is related to the progression across the fields of AI, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics and philosophy. The chart above is two dimensional in that it locates researchers that straddle between pairs of these fields.

the notion of levels of complexity is shared across fields of inquiry. However, the methodology to deal with complexity will eventually be shared in common between different fields. It is just an unfortunate situation today that knowledge of complex adaptive systems is noticeably absent in the various disciplines of cognitive science.

Francisco Varela who noticed that when one finds a dichotomy, one can find a relationship between the two conflicting concepts via a part-whole relationship. In a part-whole relationship, we can find an emergent phenomenon as a consequence of the interactions of the parts. 

Even in quantum mechanics, we have a dichotomy revealed in the wave-particle duality. The wave is dispersed like the whole and the particle is localized like the part. They are however paradoxically the same thing. This mirrors the representation and anti-representation debate. One could argue that representation implies localized signs while non-representation implies distributed signs. We are all too often hindered by dualistic thinking and ignore triadic thinking.

A Map of Doctrines in AGI Research




getting any machine to learn same-different distinctions will require a breakthrough in the understanding of learning itself. Kids understand the rules of “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other” after a single Sesame Street episode, not extensive training. Birds, bees and people can all learn that way — not just when learning to tell “same” from “different,” but for a variety of cognitive tasks. “I think that until we figure out how you can learn from a few examples and novel objects, we’re pretty much screwed,”

Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks




Different types of corruption harm countries in different ways. Petty theft and grand theft are like toxic drugs; they directly and unambiguously hurt the economy by draining public and private wealth while delivering no benefits in return. Speed money is akin to painkillers; it may relieve a headache but doesn’t improve one’s strength. Access money, on the other hand, is like steroids. It spurs muscle growth and allows one to perform superhuman feats, but it comes with serious side effects, including the possibility of a complete meltdown.

The Robber Barons of Beijing




The most basic tenet undergirding neoliberal economics is that free market capitalism—or at least some close approximation to it—is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. On this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes: big government spending and heavy regulations are simply less effective.

This neoliberal ascendency has been undergirded by the full-throated support of the overwhelming majority of professional economists, including such luminaries as Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

In reality neoliberalism has depended on huge levels of government support for its entire existence. The global neoliberal economic order could easily have collapsed into a 1930s-level Great Depression multiple times over in the absence of massive government interventions. Especially central to its survival have been government bailouts, including emergency government spending injections financed by borrowing—that is, deficit spending—as well as central bank actions to prop up financial institutions and markets teetering on the verge of ruin.

As bailouts have prevented full-scale market crashes—and thereby allowed market speculators to escape the full consequences of their excesses—financial institutions and market trading have, accordingly, grown exponentially under neoliberalism. 

Neoliberalism’s Bailout Problem




No super intelligent AI is going to bother with a task that is harder than hacking its reward function.

Fooled by the Ungameable Objective






I have now had both shots - and feel great. This may help anyone with vaccine hesitancy feel better about getting vaccinated.

Why COVID-19 vaccines can provide stronger immunity than natural infection

A recent preprint study, led by scientists from the University of Oxford, offers the most thorough account of immune responses in recovered COVID-19 patients to date. Nearly 80 healthcare worked were closely followed for six months post-infection and the researchers used a novel machine-learning approach to analyze immune biomarkers.

“We found that individuals showed very different immune responses from each other following COVID-19, with some people from both the symptomatic and asymptomatic groups showing no evidence of immune memory six months after infection or even sooner,” explains study author Christina Dold.

In general the research saw a correlation between disease severity and lasting immune response. Over 90 percent of asymptomatic cases showed no measurable immune response six months later. A quarter of symptomatic cases lacked lasting immunity six months after infection.

A little more worrying, however, was the finding that very few serum samples from infected subjects mounted antibody responses against newer variants of the virus. Dold says this seems to suggest those infected with the original SARS-CoV-2 strain in 2020 may have little protection from some of the newer variants beginning to circulate.

“Our concern is that these people may be at risk of contracting COVID-19 for a second time, especially with new variants circulating,” says Dold. “This means that it is very important that we all get the COVID vaccine.”


For every foresight practitioner - and we all do foresight when ever we take a mortgage, embark on a course of studies, have a child - this ask people to participate in providing your best assessment to some longer term questions. Anyone could become a superforcaster.

The World Ahead: What If?

CLOSING
Oct 1, 2021 03:01AM
The World Ahead: What If? is The Economist’s annual collection of speculative scenarios in the fields of politics, business, science and technology, and history.
In this associated Challenge, we’re asking you to share your predictions on these forward-looking questions. Not all of them will come to pass, but thinking about possible futures can help us understand the present and catch glimpses of the world ahead.

Join this Challenge to share your perspective on the world ahead and help answer the question, “What If?”


This is a good signal of the shift in recognition that all breakthroughs in science come as a result of either an combinations of teams or assembling the work of others in useful ways - perhaps our schools should also expand their focus and grading collective team work - to enhance collective intelligence.
The new scheme is part of Utrecht’s Open Science programme, a multi-track effort to make research more transparent and cooperative. Open-science fellows embedded within each department will assess progress towards open-access publishing, public engagement and data sharing.

Impact factor abandoned by Dutch university in hiring and promotion decisions

Faculty and staff members at Utrecht University will be evaluated by their commitment to open science.
A Dutch university says it is formally abandoning the impact factor — a standard measure of scientific success — in all hiring and promotion decisions. By early 2022, every department at Utrecht University in the Netherlands will judge its scholars by other standards, including their commitment to teamwork and their efforts to promote open science, says Paul Boselie, a governance researcher and the project leader for the university’s new Recognition and Rewards scheme. “Impact factors don’t really reflect the quality of an individual researcher or academic,” he says. “We have a strong belief that something has to change, and abandoning the impact factor is one of those changes.”

A scientist’s impact factor is a score that takes into account the number of publications and the citation rate of the journals where those papers are published. In this system, articles in highly cited journals such as Science, Nature or Cell count for more than articles in journals whose content is cited less frequently. Boselie says that impact factors — as well as a related measure called the h-index — contribute to a ‘product-ification’ of science that values sheer output over good research. “It has become a very sick model that goes beyond what is really relevant for science and putting science forward,” he says.

A 2018 report called the impact factor “an inadequate measure for assessing the impact of scientists” and concluded that failure to modify the current assessment system is likely to lead to “continued bandwagon behaviour that has not always resulted in positive societal behaviour”


This is a good signal adding support for the emerging exploration into how quantum phenomena have been incorporated into biological systems. 

A proposed ‘quantum compass’ for songbirds just got more plausible

A protein in European robins’ retinas showed sensitivity to magnetic
Scientists could be a step closer to understanding how some birds might exploit quantum physics to navigate.

Researchers suspect that some songbirds use a “quantum compass” that senses the Earth’s magnetic field, helping them tell north from south during their annual migrations. New measurements support the idea that a protein in birds’ eyes called cryptochrome 4, or CRY4, could serve as a magnetic sensor. That protein’s magnetic sensitivity is thought to rely on quantum mechanics, the math that describes physical processes on the scale of atoms and electrons. If the idea is shown to be correct, it would be a step forward for biophysicists who want to understand how and when quantum principles can become important in various biological processes.

In laboratory experiments, the type of CRY4 in retinas of European robins (Erithacus rubecula) responded to magnetic fields, researchers report in the June 24 Nature. That’s a crucial property for it to serve as a compass. “This is the first paper that actually shows that birds’ cryptochrome 4 is magnetically sensitive,” says sensory biologist Rachel Muheim of Lund University in Sweden, who was not involved with the research.


Another small signal of an emerging new agricultural framework for providing our food in the future.
they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.

Growing food with air and solar power: More efficient than planting crops

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Naples Federico II, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has found that making food from air would be far more efficient than growing crops. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis and comparison of the efficiency of growing crops (soybeans) and using a food-from-air technique.

For several years, researchers around the world have been looking into the idea of growing "food from air," combining a renewable fuel resource with carbon from the air to create food for a type of bacteria that create edible protein. One such project is Solar Foods in Finland, where researchers have the goal of building a demonstration plant by 2023. In this new effort, the researchers sought to compare the efficiency of growing a staple crop, soybeans, with growing food from air.


While renewable energy is definitely the future - other forms of non-carbon energy may be required - this is a good signal of one of those possibilities.
it becomes sort of energy on demand. If the customer wants either heat or electricity, they can get it within a couple of months, or even weeks, and then it's plug and play. This machine arrives on the site, and just a few days later, you start getting your energy. So, it's a product, it's not a project.

Why 'nuclear batteries' offer a new approach to carbon-free energy

We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering. Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers gave way to the widely distributed PCs of today, a new generation of relatively tiny and inexpensive factory-built reactors, designed for autonomous plug-and-play operation similar to plugging in an oversized battery, is on the horizon, they say.

These proposed systems could provide heat for industrial processes or electricity for a military base or a neighborhood, run unattended for five to 10 years, and then be trucked back to the factory for refurbishment. The authors—Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT's TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering; Robert Frida, a founder of GenH; Steven Aumeier of the Idaho National Laboratory; and Kevin Chilton, retired commander of the U.S. Strategic Command—have dubbed these small power plants "nuclear batteries." Because of their simplicity of operation, they could play a significant role in decarbonizing the world's electricity systems to avert catastrophic climate change, the researchers say. MIT News asked Buongiorno to describe his group's proposal.

NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory have done a similar demonstration project, which they called a microreactor, for space applications. It took them just three years from the start of design to fabrication and testing. And it cost them $20 million. It was orders of magnitude smaller than traditional large nuclear plants that easily cost a billion-plus and take a decade or more to build.


As we domestic matter the ability to assemble-manufacture new materials at the nanoscale level is emerging. 
A nanoarchitected material consists of patterned nanometer-scale structures that, depending on how they are arranged, can give materials unique properties such as exceptional lightness and resilience. As such, nanoarchitected materials are seen as potentially lighter, tougher impact-resistant materials.

Ultralight material withstands supersonic microparticle impacts

A new study by engineers at MIT, Caltech, and ETH Zürich shows that "nanoarchitected" materials—materials designed from precisely patterned nanoscale structures—may be a promising route to lightweight armor, protective coatings, blast shields, and other impact-resistant materials.

The researchers have fabricated an ultralight material made from nanometer-scale carbon struts that give the material toughness and mechanical robustness. The team tested the material's resilience by shooting it with microparticles at supersonic speeds, and found that the material, which is thinner than the width of a human hair, prevented the miniature projectiles from tearing through it.

The researchers calculate that compared with steel, Kevlar, aluminum, and other impact-resistant materials of comparable weight, the new material is more efficient at absorbing impacts.


This is an important signal - emulating explorations of nature for new forms of life, new types of chemical, proteins and other ‘stuff’ for medicine, manufacturing and other purposes. It also signals how some microbes can evolve very quickly.
About four years ago, Nueno-Palop and her colleagues conducted an experiment in which they brewed 33 beers that were all basically identical – save for the yeast. The team chose a different strain for each beer and began by analysing the strains' DNA, which turned out to be unexpectedly diverse.
The resulting beers also varied greatly in terms of their flavour profiles.
This idea, that historic yeasts can impart heritage as well as interesting flavours, is catching on outside of the beer world. Alan Bishop has the title of alchemist and lead distiller at Spirits of French Lick, a distillery in Indiana, in the US. The company makes a range of boutique spirits, including bourbon, apple brandy, rum and gin.

The treasure inside beer lost in a shipwreck 120 years ago

Long-forgotten yeast strains are being sought out from shipwrecks, abandoned breweries and other locations in the hope they could be put to good use if resurrected.
Since he began diving to the Wallachia in the 1980s, Hickman has retrieved dozens of bottles containing whisky, gin and beer. But his recent visit, a team effort with several companion divers, led to something unusual. The bottles they retrieved were handed to scientists at a research firm called Brewlab, who, along with colleagues from the University of Sunderland, were able to extract live yeast from the liquid inside three of the bottles. They then used that yeast in an attempt to recreate the original beer.

In 2018, a similar project in Tasmania used yeast from 220-year-old beer bottles found on a shipwreck to approximate a beverage from the 1700s. But the study of the Wallachia yeast revealed a surprise. Those beers contained an unusual type of yeast and the team behind the work is now evaluating whether this long-lost strain could have applications in modern brewing or could even improve beers today.

It is just one example of a growing field of research among brewers and other fermenters of liquids who are seeking forgotten strains of yeast in the hope they can be put to good use. That means hunting for them in old bottles found on shipwrecks, scouring ancient pots, and collecting samples from ruined distilleries where fabled strains may yet linger. This kind of search is called bioprospecting and resurrecting historic yeasts could have many applications, from cleaning up pollution to assisting in the production of aromas for the perfume industry.



#micropoem



ooo - 
yah i hear - but i don’t listen - 
or - 
yah i listen - but i don’t hear - 

however you understand it - 
it pretty well nails it - 


what’s fascinating -
about attractors - 
is groundhog day -
is never identical -
but is always the same -


Any moment -
we think we can find a ‘solution’ -
 that we comprehend -
the situation - 
is an opening 
for magical reasoning - 

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