Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) 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 will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Sometimes a metaphor settles into everyday use so comfortably, it can be picked back up to extend its meaning away from what it now describes — a metaphor doing metaphorical service. Platform has certainly done that.
…..in 2010, social media companies like YouTube and Facebook were beginning to use the term to describe their Web 2.0 services, to their users, to advertisers and investors, and to themselves. Now social media companies have embraced the term fully, extending it to services that broker the exchange not just of content or sociality but rides (Uber), apartments (Airbnb), and labor (TaskRabbit). The term so comfortably describes these services that critics and commentators can draw on it to extend out for the purposes of argument.
The past few years have witnessed a “platform revolution,” the rise of “platform capitalism,” driven by “platform strategy,” with the possibility of “platform cooperativism,” all part of “the platform society.” These books need not even be referring to the same platforms (they all have their favorite examples, somewhat overlapping) — their readers know what they’re referring to.
Is “platform” the right metaphor for tech companies dominating digital media?
Recent debates about the future of jobs have mainly focused on whether or not they are at risk of automation. Studies have generally minimised the potential effects of automation on job creation, and have tended to ignore other relevant trends, including globalisation, population ageing, urbanisation, and the rise of the green economy.
In this study we use a novel and comprehensive method to map out how employment is likely to change, and the implications for skills. We show both what we can expect, and where we should be uncertain. We also show likely dynamics in different parts of the labour market — from sectors like food and health to manufacturing. We find that education, health care, and wider public sector occupations are likely to grow. We also explain why some low-skilled jobs, in fields like construction and agriculture, are less likely to suffer poor labour market outcomes than has been assumed in the past.
More generally, we shine a light on the skills that are likely to be in greater demand, including interpersonal skills, higher-order cognitive skills, and systems skills. Unlike other recent studies, the method also makes it possible to predict with some confidence what kinds of new jobs may come into existence.
The study challenges the false alarmism that contributes to a culture of risk aversion and holds back technology adoption, innovation, and growth; this matters particularly to countries like the US and the UK, which already face structural productivity problems . Crucially, through the report, we point to the actions that educators, policymakers and individuals can take to better prepare themselves for the future.
Pearson-Nesta-Oxford Martin School
THE FUTURE OF SKILLS EMPLOYMENT IN 2030
A stormy weekend led to free electricity in Germany as wind generation reached a record, forcing power producers to pay customers the most since Christmas 2012 to use electricity. Power prices turned negative as wind output reached 39,409 megawatts on Saturday, equivalent to the output of about 40 nuclear reactors. To keep the grid supply and demand in balance, negative prices encourage producers to either shut power stations or else pay consumers to take the extra electricity off the network.
So Much Wind Power In Germany This Weekend, Energy was Free
This is another of a growing number of signals concerning an emerging new economic paradigm - including the transition toward a universal basic income. This signal arises from an understanding of complexity.
"We need a very measured, but definite shift in direction that will address the economic problems and also address economic inequality problems," Yaneer Bar-Yam, a physicist and the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, told me. "We went too far with Reaganomics and now we have to go back in order to have healthy economic growth."
"Consumers have a huge amount of debt and that's a huge barrier to spending money," Bar-Yam said. "We can talk about raising the minimum wage, the relief of debt, proposals to eliminate education debt—basically anything that will shift that balance is going to do the right thing right now."
Math Suggests Inequality Can Be Fixed With Wealth Redistribution, Not Tax Cuts
A new report from the Complex Systems Institute justifies wealth redistribution with mathematics.
In the last 30 years, income inequality has grown at a rate that hasn't been seen since just prior to the Great Depression. As Occupy Wall Street sought to remind us, the top 1 percent of the US earns 40 times more than the bottom 90 percent on average.
Although both sides of the political spectrum agree that wealth inequality in the US is real, neither can agree on the best solution to this problem. But what if there was a non-partisan, objective way to assess the causes of inequality and propose a potential solution? A solution based on something like, say, math?
According to a new report published today by the New England Complex Systems Institute, mathematics can indeed be used to find a solution to income inequality. And as it turns out, the math points to targeted programs that redistribute wealth to the poor as the way to close the inequality gap and improve the health of the economy as a whole.
I would estimate that well over 2 billion people have in some form or another experienced what China is beginning to enact - embedded, embodied immersion in a form of moral accounting. Massive Multi-player Online Games, Facebook, and the increasing number of massive social media platforms - where ‘likes’ and ratings have become ubiquitous. And what important to realize is that our moral fabric has always been a form of transparent ‘rating’.
Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens
The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents
On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called "Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System". In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?
Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; where you are at any given time; who your friends are and how you interact with them; how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It's not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit. But now imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school - or even just your chances of getting a date.
A futuristic vision of Big Brother out of control? No, it's already getting underway in China, where the government is developing the Social Credit System (SCS) to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance "trust" nationwide and to build a culture of "sincerity". As the policy states, "It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility."
One has to be in awe that the 5th largest website (perhaps the largest non-commercial one) today is Wikipedia - which can be summarized as “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory it’s a total disaster.” Today it has >1.4 Billion unique device visits per month, it has >40 Million articles. It remains an amazing institution of conversation where many areas of controversy and argument find a way to find agreement. The only place where when people become involved they become more reasonable rather than less. This is a great account of the current state and discussion of the possible future of Wikipedia and the future of free knowledge - Well Worth the read. The governance of Wikipedia is also an incredible model of large scale inclusive participatory governance.
Imagine if all the Sciences and Scholarships considered Wikipedia as an open commons for peer-review? No more paywalls creating barriers to research.
Will Wikipedia exist in 20 years?
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, joins Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler for a conversation about the future of Wikipedia and global crowdsourced knowledge.
This is a very interesting discussion on the definition of ‘decentralized’ by the key mind and founder of a leading ‘blockchain’ initiative - Ethereum. This is a good discussion providing insight into the challenges of blockchain technologies and ‘institutions’.
The Meaning of Decentralization
“Decentralization” is one of the words that is used in the cryptoeconomics space the most frequently, and is often even viewed as a blockchain’s entire raison d’être, but it is also one of the words that is perhaps defined the most poorly. Thousands of hours of research, and billions of dollars of hashpower, have been spent for the sole purpose of attempting to achieve decentralization, and to protect and improve it, and when discussions get rivalrous it is extremely common for proponents of one protocol (or protocol extension) to claim that the opposing proposals are “centralized” as the ultimate knockdown argument….
Three types of Decentralization
When people talk about software decentralization, there are actually three separate axes of centralization/decentralization that they may be talking about. While in some cases it is difficult to see how you can have one without the other, in general they are quite independent of each other. The axes are as follows:
- Architectural (de)centralization — how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time?
- Political (de)centralization — how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?
- Logical (de)centralization— does the interface and data structures that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: if you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully operate as independent units?
The value created on Wikipedia - suggest how there are an increasing number of ways people can create value in the world that is outside of the vehicle of the traditional employment and market vehicles of accessing an income. This is an interesting article from Forbes about the transformation of the traditional workforce.
Are We Ready For A Workforce That is 50% Freelance?
If freelancing continues to grow at its current rate, the majority of U.S. workers will be freelancing by 2027, according to projections in the Freelancing in America Survey, released today by the Freelancers Union and the giant freelance platform Upwork. The survey found that 50.9% of the U.S. population will be freelancing in 10 years if a current uptick in freelancing continues at its current pace.
The number of U.S. freelancers hit 57.3 million this year, from 53 million in 2014—an 8.1 percent increase, according to the survey. That means 36% of the U.S. workforce has freelanced this year. Meanwhile, the U.S. workforce grew from 156 million to 160 million in the same timeframe, reflecting just 2.6% growth.
“The growth of the freelance workforce is three times faster than the traditional workforce,” noted Stephane Kasriel, CEO of Upwork, in an interview. And in a sign of just how much freelancing could grow, 47% of working millennials now say they freelance in some capacity, the survey found.
The new workforce is definitely on the threshold of a phase transition - in the next two decades - what will the workforce look like?
Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores
Walmart is rolling out robots to 50 more stores.
The robots go up and down the aisles, scanning for out-of-stock items, incorrect prices, and wrong or missing labels.
Its part of Walmart's plan to make stores more efficient and easier for customers to shop.
The retailer has been testing the robots in a small number of stores in Arkansas and California. It is now expanding the program and will have robots in 50 stores by the end of January.
AI is headed to a legal firm near you.
The robot lawyers are here - and they’re winning
…. a fascinating contest that took place last month. It pitched over 100 lawyers from many of London's ritziest firms against an artificial intelligence program called Case Cruncher Alpha.
Both the humans and the AI were given the basic facts of hundreds of PPI (payment protection insurance) mis-selling cases and asked to predict whether the Financial Ombudsman would allow a claim.
In all, they submitted 775 predictions and the computer won hands down, with Case Cruncher getting an accuracy rate of 86.6%, compared with 66.3% for the lawyers.
Quite a triumph then for a tiny start-up business. For Case Cruncher is not the product of a tech giant but the brainchild of four Cambridge law students. They started out with a simple chatbot that answered legal questions - a bit of a gimmick but it caught on.
This is an important signal of not only what happens to old technology - but how to continually repurpose computational capabilities. The future of Cloud, Fog, distributed computational environment increasingly becomes unpredictable.
“You can get decommissioned smartphones at low cost because used phones are inexpensive and no one else wants them,”
Old phones get new life in high-powered computer servers
While most consumers don’t pay much attention to the fate of dead smartphones, Princeton University researchers are envisioning a way to breathe new life into them. Instead of tossing old phones in a junk drawer or burying them in a landfill, the researchers want to turn them into high-powered computer servers.
In a recent paper, graduate student Mohammad Shahrad and David Wentzlaff, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, demonstrated that it is possible to build servers out of ranks of old smartphones. Servers are specialized computers that provide data, storage or computing power to other computers. They are at the heart of the internet, from social media or video streaming to high-security banking.
The research showed that not only are smartphone servers feasible, they are often cheaper to build and operate than conventional high-end servers. In part, this is a result of supply costs.
What everyone has to realize is the ‘Uber’-like transportation if much better enacted as a public infrastructure. Every city (smart-city) should be grasping that they can enact a software that helps citizens and residents augment public transit with ‘near zero-marginal cost’ capacity to enable citizens-residents self-organize some aspects of transportation.
The LA Metro wants tech firms to help it launch a new kind of transit
MicroTransit would involve virtual stops and routes that change based on demand.
The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority is soliciting proposals from tech companies to help it build a software-driven ridesharing service called MicroTransit that would augment its existing network of trains and buses. The service would feature shuttle-like vehicles smaller than buses but larger than private automobiles, and it would aim to offer a more accessible and potentially lower-cost alternative to private services like Lyft and Uber.
In a townhall with press on Monday, Metro Chief Innovation Officer Joshua Schank laid out the details of the pilot program and its RFP (which will become public later this week) for LA citizens and other interested parties. To frame the service, he said, "There are many people who need better public transit in Los Angeles, that we cannot adequately serve with our existing scheduled bus network or our existing rail network, that would perhaps be better served by this dynamic service." He said that he believes the private sector partner is key, as private tech and transportation companies would know better than the city how best to implement many aspects of the service.
It seems like new breakthroughs in quantum computing are announced every week - this may not be surprising given the huge efforts and resources currently dedicated to developing a true quantum computer. This is more important than a new computational paradigm - this is also the start of an embodiment of a new paradigm in our understanding of reality - a paradigm of paradox (e.g. superposition that displaces the formerly ironclad law of logic of ‘noncontradiction’ and the ‘excluded middle) and the displacement of an understanding of isolated, atomistic parts toward one of universal entanglement.
Researchers Claim They Just Invented The “Ultimate” Method for Quantum Computing
https://futurism.com/researchers-claim-they-just-invented-the-ultimate-method-for-quantum-computing/
A pair of researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed what they're calling the "ultimate" quantum computing method. Unlike today's systems, which can currently only handle dozens of qubits, the pair believes their model will be able to process more than a million.
Today’s working quantum computers are already more powerful than their traditional computing counterparts, but a pair of researchers from the University of Tokyo think they’ve found a way to make these remarkable machines even more powerful. In a research paper published in Physical Review Letters, Akira Furusawa and Shuntaro Takeda detail their novel approach to quantum computing that should allow the machines to perform a far greater number of computations than other quantum computers.
At the center of their new method is a basic optical quantum computing system — a quantum computer that uses photons (light particles) as quantum bits (qubits) — that Furusawa devised in 2013.
This machine occupies a space of roughly 6.3 square meters (67 square feet) and can handle only a single pulse of light, and increasing its capabilities requires the connecting of several of these large units together, so instead of looking into ways to increase its power by expanding the system’s hardware, the researchers devised a way to make one machine accommodate many pulses of light via a loop circuit.
In theory, multiple light pulses, each carrying information, could go around the circuit indefinitely. This would allow the circuit to perform multiple tasks, switching from one to another by instant manipulation of the light pulses.
Another important signal - not only for developing human-like robots, but an interactive Algorithmic Intelligence getting closer to some sort of consciousness. An AI embodied with sensor which is in turn embodied in a ‘social ecology’ of others. This is certainly a ‘weak signal’ but important enough to pay attention too. This is a long but fascinating read - it is also an epitome of bridging the reality of subjective being in our study and context of intersubjective understanding.
... he can only imagine using conversation with others as a means to better understand himself—and nothing is more pressing than that. He turns to the conversation the two of us are having. “We don’t know how much information we are sharing,” he tells me. “I am always guessing, and you are always guessing, and through our conversation patterns we can believe that we exchange information. But I cannot access your brain directly.
There are entire planets of intimate information, our most interior level of consciousness, that we will never fully be able to share. Our longing to connect, to bridge this divide, is a driving human desire—one that Hiroshi believes will someday be satisfied through humanlike machines.
Love in the Time of Robots
Hiroshi Ishiguro builds androids. Beautiful, realistic, uncannily convincing human replicas. Academically, he is using them to understand the mechanics of person-to-person interaction. But his true quest is to untangle the ineffable nature of connection itself.
IN THE LAST 15 YEARS, Ishiguro has produced some 30 androids, most of them female. They have included replicas of a newscaster, an actress, and a fashion model. These androids have made numerous public appearances—in cafés and department stores, singing in malls, performing in a play. Mostly, though, Ishiguro’s brood of pretty “women” is used for his academic experiments, many of which are conducted at two locations in Japan: the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Nara and the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory on the campus of Osaka University.
Presiding over this disheveled scene is Ishiguro-sensei. He is immediately recognizable, looking just as he does in promotional photos from recent years: perfectly mod in slim-fitting black with matching leather backpack and fanny pack. He wears tinted hexagonal glasses and styles his jet-black hair into a mop top that swoops across his forehead. This is his department: Ishiguro, 54, is a distinguished professor at one of the country’s top universities, with two labs, partnerships with a dozen private companies throughout Japan, a recent $16 million grant from the government (one of its most generous in science and engineering, he says), and seven secretaries to manage it all.
Today, the technical ability to produce a robot that truly looks and moves and speaks like a human remains well beyond our reach. Even further beyond our grasp is the capacity to imbue such a machine with humanness—that ineffable presence the Japanese call sonzai-kan. Because to re-create human presence we need to know more about ourselves than we do—about the accumulation of cues and micromovements that trigger our empathy, put us at ease, and earn our trust. Someday we may crack the problem of creating artificial general intelligence—a machine brain that can intuitively perform any human intellectual task—but why would we choose to interact with it?
The capacity of Robotics and AI is increasing exponentially - here is another signal of how these technologies will transform even high skill work.The gif and 3 min video demonstrate differences in action.
“I really believe that this is the future of surgery,” says study coauthor Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland.
“I believe this will come about first for small sub-functions of surgery and get more and more complex,” Krieger tells IEEE Spectrum, “similarly to autonomous cars, where small features such as brake-assist slowly morphed into more and more autonomy. I absolutely would trust a robot like that for my surgery, once it is fully developed and validated.”
In Flesh-Cutting Task, Autonomous Robot Surgeon Beats Human Surgeons
Imagine that you’re on the operating table, waiting for surgeons to cut a tumor out of your flesh. You want their cuts to be as precise and accurate as possible, leaving behind no tumor fragments that might cause the cancer to recur, yet also not removing too much healthy tissue.
Rather than an expert human surgeon, you might want the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) hovering over you. In a recent set of experiments, STAR’s inventors showed that it makes more precise cuts than expert surgeons, and damages less of the surrounding flesh. The researchers presented their results at the recent robotics conference IROS 2017.
And on the same theme. The Five most ‘gruesome’ videos.
The Most Cringe-Inducing Surgical Robots from IEEE's Intelligent Robots Conference
We’re still sifting through the more than 1,200 presentations at IROS 2017, IEEE’s massive intelligent robots conference held last month in Vancouver. This week we found some terrifying gems: surgical robots that snake up the nose, puncture the breast, and suction intestinal tissue with motions so jarring they will make any patient glad (or longing) to be passed out during the procedure.
We previously highlighted 20 of our favorite videos from the conference. Now, with Halloween approaching, we give you: the five most gruesome (maniacal laugh).
Here’s another signal about domesticating DNA and the future of medicine.
Donor organs created by dissolving and rebuilding pig livers
Will we ever be able to grow transplant organs like the heart, lungs and liver on demand? A method that uses pig organs as scaffolding for creating new organs suggests it may be possible.
In an effort to tackle lengthy waiting lists for organ transplants, researchers have been trying several approaches for creating replacement organs. One approach is to grow organs in the lab from stem cells. Another would be to take organs from pigs that have been genetically altered so their cells are more human-like, and less likely to be attacked by a person’s immune system.
Now an in-between method is taking off. The approach starts with an organ from an ordinary pig, but involves dissolving the cells away from it to leave a protein scaffold in the original shape of the organ. This is then reinfused with human cells.
Until now this technique – dubbed “decel/recel” – has been mainly investigated for small or thin structures such as layers of skin because it is hard to dissolve away the inside a large organ. But a new technique is now making that possible, leading a US biotech firm called Miromatrix to announce this month that it has successfully created livers this way.
Hardly anytime has passed since Alpha Go beat the world’s best Go player and now here is another signal of accelerating improvement in AI from two of the key minds at Google.
AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch
The paper introduces AlphaGo Zero, the latest evolution of AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Zero is even more powerful and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.
Previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, it quickly surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by 100 games to 0.
And another signal of AI and the focus on software approaches to continue the “Moore’s Law” like exponential growth of computational power.
IBM's AI shrinks wave forecasting system to run on a Raspberry Pi
Big Blue looks to the deep blue for its latest artificial-intelligence project.
IBM researchers have developed a wave forecasting system that's so lightweight it can run simulations on a Raspberry Pi.
Normally, calculating wind, tides, and the ocean's varying depths to forecast waves might require a supercomputer, but a system developed by scientists at the University of Notre Dame and IBM Research Ireland this summer could pave the way to using cheaper equipment to achieve comparable wave-forecasting accuracy.
The forecasting system they've developed is an emulator of a conventional physics-based model, the Simulating Waves Nearshore or SWAN, a wave-modeling tool developed by Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The researchers used SWAN to generate training data for the deep-learning network, feeding SWAN wave conditions from the NOAA National Data Buoy Center, live ocean current readings, and wind data from IBM-owned The Weather Company.
IBM research scientist Fearghal O'Donncha says the deep-learning model they created can generate forecasts up to 12,000 percent faster than current forecasting systems thanks to its accelerated computational speeds.
That higher performance allows the model to create real-time forecasts of wave conditions and run simulations on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi.
The development of ever new, ever smaller an ever more powerful computational tools continues.
This Doctor Diagnosed His Own Cancer with an iPhone Ultrasound
Can a smartphone-enabled ultrasound machine become medicine’s next stethoscope?
Every marketer wants the perfect story to tell. But if you’re in medicine, you don’t want it to be about yourself.
Earlier this year, vascular surgeon John Martin was testing a pocket-sized ultrasound device developed by Butterfly Network, a startup based in Guilford, Connecticut, that he’d just joined as chief medical officer.
He’d been having an uncomfortable feeling of thickness on his throat. So he oozed out some gel and ran the probe, which is the size and shape of an electric razor, along his neck.
On his smartphone, to which the device is connected, black-and gray images quickly appeared. Martin is not a cancer specialist. But he knew that the dark, three-centimeter mass he saw did not belong there. “I was enough of a doctor to know I was in trouble,” he says. It was squamous-cell cancer.
The device he used, called the Butterfly IQ, is the first solid-state ultrasound machine to reach the market in the U.S. Ultrasound works by shooting sound into the body and capturing the echoes. Usually, the sound waves are generated by a vibrating crystal. But Butterfly’s machine instead uses 9,000 tiny drums etched onto a semiconductor chip.
The article above explores the possibilities of a deep relationship between humans and AI. That may not be far from the intrinsic relationship humans have with pets and plants. This is a fascinating 10 min TED Talk about the sort of sentience of plants.
Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate
Neuroscientist Greg Gage takes sophisticated equipment used to study the brain out of graduate-level labs and brings them to middle- and high-school classrooms (and, sometimes, to the TED stage.) Prepare to be amazed as he hooks up the Mimosa pudica, a plant whose leaves close when touched, and the Venus flytrap to an EKG to show us how plants use electrical signals to convey information, prompt movement and even count.
This has been a long time coming - at least since the early 90s. This is more than a weak signal.
Spinning spider silk into startup gold
The hype over spider silk has been building since 1710. That was the year François Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, president of the Royal Society of Sciences in Montpellier, France, wrote to his colleagues, "You will be surpriz'd to hear, that Spiders make a Silk, as beautiful, strong and glossy, as common Silk." Modern pitches boast that spider silk is five times stronger than steel yet more flexible than rubber. If it could be made into ropes, a macroscale web would be able to snare a jetliner.
The key word is "if." Researchers first cloned a spider silk gene in 1990, in hopes of incorporating it into other organisms to produce the silk. (Spiders can't be farmed like silkworms because they are territorial and cannibalistic.) Today, Escherichia coli bacteria, yeasts, plants, silkworms, and even goats have been genetically engineered to churn out spider silk proteins, though the proteins are often shorter and simpler than the spiders' own. Companies have managed to spin those proteins into enough high-strength thread to produce a few prototype garments, including a running shoe by Adidas and a lightweight parka by The North Face. But so far, companies have struggled to mass produce these supersilks.
Some executives say that may finally be about to change. One Emeryville, California-based startup, Bolt Threads, says it has perfected growing spider silk proteins in yeast and is poised to turn out tons of spider silk thread per year. In Lansing, Michigan, Kraig Biocraft Laboratories says it needs only to finalize negotiations with silkworm farms in Vietnam to produce mass quantities of a combination spider/silkworm silk, which the U.S. Army is now testing for ballistics protection. "There has been huge progress since … the '90s, when both function and commercial scale seemed far away," says My Hedhammar, a biochemist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Keeping up with the accelerating progress in renewable energy is hard. Here’s a great signal highlighting that solar is past the tipping point - only recalcitrant incumbent politics creates barriers now. Who knows how long this record will hold.
“We believe that the $0.03/kWh can be considered as a point of no return for the Middle East area given its big volume and low financing rate,” solar expert Aymen Grira told the magazine. In other words, three cents has become the new ceiling price for solar in the region.
Solar power crushes its own record for cheapest electricity ‘ever, anywhere, by any technology’
The lowest price for solar power last year is the highest price now.
Prices for new solar power projects are falling so fast that the cheapest prices from 2016 have become the ceiling price for solar today.
In April 2016, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reported that the record low unsubsidized solar energy price was 3.6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), in a March 2016 contract in Mexico.
This month, every single bid that Saudi Arabia received for its 300-Megawatt (MW) Sakaka solar project was cheaper than that.
The lowest bid price was 1.79 cents/kWh. For context, the average residential price for electricity in the United States is more than six times that, 12 cents/kWh.
The jaw-dropping price of 1.79 cents is not about to become the new ceiling for solar bids — since the market conditions in Saudi Arabia are fairly unique and it’s not clear the bidder, Masdar (owned by the United Arab Emirates) and its French partner EDF would actually make money at that price.
Here is a signal of a potential change in how people view some of the major social media platforms - certainly a signal indicating that there is a huge market for a new form of platform with a different ‘business model’.
How to quit Facebook (if the time suck, Russian ads or political noise has become too much)
It’s not as impossible as you might think.
There are many valid reasons you might want to quit Facebook. Maybe you spend too much time there. Maybe you’re tired of its cluttered app. Maybe you’re unnerved by all the Russia stuff.
I was an avid Facebook user for more than a decade. But due to a combination of the reasons above, I’ve almost completely quit Facebook over the past three weeks. No surprise, I have been much happier for it.
Whatever your reasons, if you want to quit Facebook, here’s how to do it.
This year - I’ve managed to carve 8 pumpkins - these pumpkins are designed by my son and hand drawn on a pumpkin - and I carve them - speaking only of the carving each pumpkin has taken many hours to do.
The theme this year was inspired by the ‘Bosses’ from the video game “Dark Souls”
Halloween 2017 Pumpkins
Or here on Google+
