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. Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works. Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
In the 1990s, neuroscientists made a major breakthrough in understanding personal space with the discovery of a network of neurons in the brain that keeps track of nearby objects. Sometimes called peripersonal neurons, these individual brain cells fire off bursts of activity when objects loom near the body. In my own experiments, I came to call them bubble-wrap neurons. They monitor invisible bubbles of space, especially around the head and torso, and when they rev up, they trigger defensive and withdrawal reflexes.
In the past 10 years, these networks in the human cerebral cortex have been linked to social behavior. They coordinate the unconscious, hidden dance of personal space, computing a margin of safety and nuancing our movements and reactions to others. The mechanism works so smoothly that we don’t usually notice it. Just like ants instinctively feel each other with their antennae to communicate and maintain the larger social order, so we rub personal buffer zones and exchange information at a deep, unconscious level.
To someone like myself, a nerd who has spent decades studying personal space, I can’t help noticing a recent, radical change. As social life migrates online, the old social scaffold of physical space around a human body becomes less relevant. Twitter, Facebook, and texting are lifted out of the face-to-face, spatial framework. Instead, we interact as formless entities, bundles of information in a domain with no Euclidean distance metric. Not all online interactions lose their spatial scaffold—immersive video games maintain a sense of space and distance—but many people now spend an appreciable part of the day in a cyberspace with no real, face-to-face interactions. The human social dance is being restructured at a fundamental level.
At first, I thought this development must be a disaster. Our social skills evolved over millions of years to piggyback off of personal space, and removing that scaffold could muck up our social development. We could lose the ability to connect at a deeper, instinctive level. The cyber-troll phenomenon, for example, is arguably social behavior deranged and disinhibited by the removal of face-to-face, three-dimensional space. And the internet has certainly enabled a vast, dark world of cyberbullying, public shaming, cyber-stalking, and crime.
But I do see at least one hopeful side to our brave new social world. I wonder if #MeToo or #TimesUp could ever have happened otherwise. One longstanding avenue for sexism is the exploitation of personal space for bullying. It’s men looming in or getting handsy, pretending to own a woman’s personal space, asserting dominance. As social media has been taking personal space out of more human interactions, it may at least be giving women more room to be heard.
The Unconscious Rules of Personal Space
Abandoning a restrictive and linear conception of time has potentially radical implications. It means the future need not necessarily lead on from the past in an ordered fashion. It might, for instance, give us space to explore economic options that are not tied to the male breadwinner models we have inherited from the post-war period, or to the need for constant growth. It might allow us to revisit abandoned ideas, such as workers’ control of industry, or nationalisation, without fears of going ‘back to the 1970s’. In terms of social change, there is no reason to think that abandoning the logic of progress means giving up on its benefits. It simply means challenging racism, sexism, ableism and heterosexism head on, rather than invoking abstract historical forces to make our case for us. It is not good enough simply to declare that ‘in this day and age’ certain attitudes are appropriate and others are not; it is not surprising that such arguments lead to alienation and resentment. Framing this as a debate about the common good in the present, rather than as an encounter with the impersonal and inevitable ‘forces of progress’, could enable a different kind of political conversation. It might even create space for something genuinely new.
Progressivism
Forward thinking: Rather than marching ahead, assuming progress is linear and others are following, we must stop to make the case for change
….“And that’s the underlying concept here… none of us can really master interactivity, architecture, new materials, the science of communication, all of that. We can’t master that individually, but we can master that as a group.”
We know that the design process is essentially a collaborative process. And this 15th principle explains why we want to work in Studio Teams that include as many disciplines as possible — whatever it takes to master our complex new reality. We want to give our process the kind of collaborative engine it needs to keep running at full speed, because that’s the pace of innovation in the world around us.
What kind of people do we want to include on our Renaissance teams? Bruce put together this list of seven essential qualifications for Renaissance Team membership:
1 Expertise – each person must have deep knowledge in the field they represent.
2 Curiosity – a Renaissance Team player WANTS to know about other things.
3 Empathy – they must know how to listen, be respectful of other people, and have the ability and willingness to imagine other experiences and perspectives.
4 Confidence – each member of the team must be willing to lead. Depending on the solution the team designs, it may make more sense for one expert to lead it into execution (i.e., the digital expert, or the data guy, or the film producer).
5 Humility – each member of the team must be willing to follow. Don’t assume everyone has this skill.
6 Independence – each expert must have a mind and voice of their own and the ability to offer an outlier’s perspective, even a critical one.
7 Courage – members must be willing to share imaginative, even crazy ideas and trust the team and the iterative design process.
Designing with Renaissance Teams
Because blockchain relies on a distributed ledger system that is decentralized and immutable, it's intended to be a permanent, tamper-proof record that sits outside the control of any one governing authority. This is what makes it such an attractive and useful technology. But because data stored on the blockchain, including personal data, can't be deleted, there is no way to exercise the right to erasure that people are granted under GDPR. Blockchain is not designed to be GDPR-compatible. Or rather, GDPR is not blockchain-compatible the way it is written today.
While European policymakers were debating and finalizing aspects of GDPR, blockchain wasn’t on most people’s radar. This is yet another example of where regulation is addressing a problem in the rear view mirror rather than looking at the road ahead. This is the nature of most traditional regulation and illustrates how quickly technology shifts, pivots and morphs at a speed much greater than laws and regulations are designed to move. In this case, while we wait for the rules to play catch up, the question we have to ask is whether existing blockchain applications that store personal data are now rendered illegal in Europe until this is sorted.
Government regulation has a critical role to play in creating accountability, ensuring responsible use of data and providing enforcement mechanisms to penalize bad actors. I am not arguing against regulation, nor am I arguing against GDPR. I am arguing instead for a layered and cooperative approach to policy making. We need future-flexible frameworks for governance that allow us to realize the benefits of data and technology while minimizing harms. This is much easier to say than to do.
Will GDPR block Blockchain?
This is a must read strong signal of the looming phase transition in energy geopolitics -as renewable energy technology become more widely adopted they become cheaper to implement and of course provide near zero marginal cost energy.
"Until now, observers mostly paid attention to the likely effectiveness of climate policies, but not to the ongoing and effectively irreversible technological transition,"
The authors argue that initial actions should include the diversifying of energy supplies as well as investment portfolios. "Divestment from fossil fuels is both a prudential and necessary thing to do," said Mercure. "Investment and pension funds need to evaluate how much of their money is in fossil fuel assets and reassess the risk they are taking."
'Carbon bubble' coming that could wipe trillions from the global economy: study
...new research suggests that the momentum behind technological change in the global power and transportation sectors will lead to a dramatic decline in demand for fossil fuels in the near future.
The study indicates that this will now happen regardless of apparent market certainty or the adoption of climate policies—or lack thereof—by major nations.
Detailed simulations produced by an international team of economists and policy experts show this fall in demand has the potential to leave vast reserves of fossil fuels as "stranded assets": abruptly shifting from high to low value sometime before 2035.
Such a sharp slump in fossil fuel price could cause a huge "carbon bubble" built on long-term investments to burst. According to the study, the equivalent of between one and four trillion US dollars could be wiped off the global economy in fossil fuel assets alone. A loss of US$0.25 trillion triggered the crash of 2008 by comparison.
Publishing their findings today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers from Cambridge University (UK), Radboud University (NL), the Open University (UK), Macau University, and Cambridge Econometrics, argue that there will be clear economic winners and losers as a consequence.
Many weak signal are sent weekly about fundamental science - science that is as profound in implications as Einstein’s fabric of Space-Time. Looming on the horizon of the next few decades is the question of mind and consciousness.
Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics
The question is no longer whether quantum theory is correct, but what it means
For almost a century, physicists have wondered whether the most counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics (QM) could actually be true. Only in recent years has the technology necessary for answering this question become accessible, enabling a string of experimental results—including startling ones reported in 2007 and 2010, and culminating now with a remarkable test reported in May—that show that key predictions of QM are indeed correct. Taken together, these experiments indicate that the everyday world we perceive does not exist until observed, which in turn suggests—as we shall argue in this essay—a primary role for mind in nature. It is thus high time the scientific community at large—not only those involved in foundations of QM—faced up to the counterintuitive implications of QM’s most controversial predictions.
Over the years, we have written extensively about why QM seems to imply that the world is essentially mental. We are often misinterpreted—and misrepresented—as espousing solipsism or some form of “quantum mysticism,” so let us be clear: our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche.
The claim is thus that the dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to transpersonal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity—which is also made of matter—corresponds to personal mentation. This notion eliminates arbitrary discontinuities and provides the missing inner essence of the physical world: all matter—not only that in living brains—is the outer appearance of inner experience, different configurations of matter reflecting different patterns or modes of mental activity.
This is a very strong signal of the inevitable trajectory of digital currency and the institutions of currency - and this isn’t even about cryptocurrencies.
The infographics are well worth the view.
Alipay and WeChat have since swelled in popularity, boasting 520 million and 1 billion monthly active users, respectively. Consumers sent more than $2.9 trillion inside the two systems in 2016, equivalent to about half of all consumer goods sold in China, according to the payments consultancy Aite Group.
Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares
Wandering the streets of Shanghai to admire the architecture, the head of one of the largest U.S. consumer banks recently found himself surrounded by a gaggle of teenagers.
Entranced by their phones, they hardly made way for the banker. The teens were messaging, shopping and sending money back and forth, all without cash. Instead, they were using Alipay and WeChat.
The scary thing for the American: Banks never got a cut.
The future of consumer payments may not be designed in New York or London but in China. There, money flows mainly through a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking—all run by two of the world’s most valuable companies. That contrasts with the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments. Western bankers and credit-card executives who travel to China keep returning with the same anxiety: Payments can happen cheaply and easily without them.
Net neutrality and the transformation of the Internet as a public infrastructure is increasingly important in order to make the phase transition into the 21st century. And of course many other institutional innovations will be required. This is a strong signal of the trajectory of the Digital Environment.
Average Data Consumption in India Per Subscriber Hit 1.6GB in September 2017
The average monthly data consumption in June 2014 was 70.10MB per user
This rose to 1.6GB per month by September 2017
The total Internet subscriber base also grew from 259.14 million in June 2014 to 429.23 million (including 129.41 million in rural areas) in September 2017
This is a fascinating 12 min TED Talk about words and consciousness - well worth the view for anyone interested in cognition, language, health and knowledge and of course knowledge management.
Your words may predict your future mental health
Can the way you speak and write today predict your future mental state, even the onset of psychosis? In this fascinating talk, neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reflects on ancient Greece and the origins of introspection to investigate how our words hint at our inner lives and details a word-mapping algorithm that could predict the development of schizophrenia. "We may be seeing in the future a very different form of mental health," Sigman says, "based on objective, quantitative and automated analysis of the words we write, of the words we say."
This may be of interest to anyone working with lots of data and wants to make the data ‘speak an interesting story’. This is a site developed by Cesar Hidalgo (of the Observatory of Economic Complexity) at MIT.
Datawheel
Datawheel is a small but mighty crew of programmers and designers who are here to make sense of the world’s vast amount of data. We know how to turn any client’s raw data into an interactive interface that is clear, accessible and beautiful.
This is a larger site also associated with Cesar Hidalgo and others at MIT. The site provides links to the Observatory of Economic Complexity as well as to other powerful tools.
Collective Learning Transforming data into knowledge
The Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab focuses on how teams, organizations, cities, and nations learn. Our research addresses both the study of knowledge + knowhow accumulated in social groups and the creation of tools that democratize data analysis and facilitate collective learning.
Established as the Macro Connections group in 2010, it was renamed as Collective Learning in 2017. The group has pioneered the study of collective learning in economies–by advancing the theory and practice of economic complexity, and in history–by creating the largest structured dataset on biographical records. The work has also encompassed extensive mapping of urban perceptions and innovative tools for predicting urban change.
The group is renowned for the development of large data visualization engines, which are tools that algorithmically transform data into stories. These visualization engines receive millions of visitors every year
This next few entries are important signals of some complex innovations that are on the near term horizon for surveillance, health monitoring, creative film making, fake news and much more. But it is also an interesting chronology of research (2014-2017). There are a number of other papers and videos that are well worth the view.
This is a must see 5 min video that will increase your paranoia about surveillance.
The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video
The video lead me to his home page HERE
The first publication is a must see 7 min video and using AI to bring a whole new dimension to video editing enabled by making editing much less tedious.
Computational Video Editing for Dialogue-Driven Scenes
We present a system for efficiently editing video of dialogue-driven scenes. The input to our system is a standard film script and multiple video takes, each capturing a different camera framing or performance of the complete scene. Our system then automatically selects the most appropriate clip from one of the input takes, for each line of dialogue, based on a user-specified set of film-editing idioms. Our system starts by segmenting the input script into lines of dialogue and then splitting each input take into a sequence of clips time-aligned with each line. Next it labels the script and the clips with high-level structural information (e.g., emotional sentiment of dialogue, camera framing of clip, etc.). After this pre-process, our interface offers a set of basic idioms that users can combine in a variety of ways to build custom editing styles. Our system encodes each basic idiom as a Hidden Markov Model that relates editing decisions to the labels extracted in the pre-process. For short scenes (< 2 minutes, 8-16 takes, 6-27 lines of dialogue) applying the user-specified combination of idioms to the pre-processed inputs generates an edited sequence in 2-3 seconds. We show that this is significantly faster than the hours of user time skilled editors typically require to produce such edits and that the quick feedback lets users iteratively explore the space of edit designs.
Finally back to surveillance - but also health monitoring his 17 TED Talk is a must see. Lots of powerful positive uses and some very scary uses can come from this.
New video technology that reveals an object's hidden properties
Subtle motion happens around us all the time, including tiny vibrations caused by sound. New technology shows that we can pick up on these vibrations and actually re-create sound and conversations just from a video of a seemingly still object. But now Abe Davis takes it one step further: Watch him demo software that lets anyone interact with these hidden properties, just from a simple video.
This is a 2014 TED Talk using much the same technology applied to ‘seeing’ processes that generally require the sense of touch to perceive.
See invisible motion, hear silent sounds
Another AI captures the unique minute variations of your gait - the way you walk - and while not in this article - similar AI can identify you simply by the way you handle your mobile.
“Each human has approximately 24 different factors and movements when walking, resulting in every individual person having a unique, singular walking pattern,” Omar Costilla Reyes, the lead author of the new study and a computer scientist at the University of Manchester, said in a statement.
This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk
Our individual walking styles, much like snowflakes, are unique. With this in mind, computer scientists have developed a powerful new footstep-recognition system using AI, and it could theoretically replace retinal scanners and fingerprinting at security checkpoints, including airports.
Neural networks can find telltale patterns in a person’s gait that can be used to recognize and identify them with almost perfect accuracy, according to new research published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. The new system, called SfootBD, is nearly 380 times more accurate than previous methods, and it doesn’t require a person to go barefoot in order to work. It’s less invasive than other behavioral biometric verification systems, such as retinal scanners or fingerprinting, but its passive nature could make it a bigger privacy concern, since it could be used covertly.
Here’s a great signal of the potential of renewable energy to change the paradigm - in a way that is consistent with near zero marginal cost energy. America would not have become electrified if it wasn’t for the energy cooperatives that sprung up to provide energy where private companies didn’t want to invest. This article is only part way there.
California, New York, and Puerto Rico are all in the process of soliciting unconventional grid solutions to “defer or avoid conventional infrastructure investments.” An unconventional method has yet to be done at scale, however, and Federal regulators have declined to sign off, citing the need to study the issue further.
Companies are using California homes as batteries to power the grid
Every new home in California is going solar by 2020. If solar-energy companies have their way, those homes also will come with batteries.
Companies like Tesla and SunRun are starting to bid on utility contracts that would allow them to string together dozens or hundreds of systems that act as an enormous reserve to balance the flow of electricity on the grid. Doing so would accelerate the grid’s transformation from 20th century hub-and-spoke architecture to a transmission network moving electricity among thousands or millions of customers who generate and store their own power. “It’s less like broadcast and more like the internet,” says Haresh Kamath at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
In theory, networked home-solar-and-battery systems, acting in coordination over a single geographical area, could replace things like natural gas “peaker” plants need to help support the grid on a moment’s notice. But it’s an open question whether it makes financial sense.
As oil prices are being driven higher - this provides greater incentives to accelerate the development and implementation of electric powered transportation - perhaps even more than subsidies do.
Unlike most current electric ferries on the water, like the two massive ferries that became the biggest all-electric ships in the world last year, the fleet will not be electric conversions of current ships, but they will instead be designed from the ground up to be electric.
A new fleet of all-electric ferries with massive battery packs is going into production
Several recent projects seem to indicate that maritime transport is well on its way to go electric and ferries are at the forefront.
The Havyard shipyard announced that it received a contract to build seven battery-powered ferries for Fjord1, Norwegian transport conglomerate.
The news comes after the operators of the first all-electric ferry in Norway, the ‘Ampere’, reported some impressive statistics after operating the ship for over 2 years.
They claim that the all-electric ferry cuts emissions by 95% and costs by 80%.
Unsurprisingly, the potential cost savings are attracting a lot of orders for new electric ferries and for the conversion of existing diesel-powered ferries.
And even more radical.
“Imagine shifting some of infrastructure services that usually take place during the day on the road — deliveries, garbage management, waste management — to the middle of the night, on the water, using a fleet of autonomous boats,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, co-author on a paper describing the technology that’s being presented at this week’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
Fleet of autonomous boats could service some cities, reducing road traffic
Researchers design 3-D-printed, driverless boats that can provide transport and self-assemble into other floating structures.
The future of transportation in waterway-rich cities such as Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Venice — where canals run alongside and under bustling streets and bridges — may include autonomous boats that ferry goods and people, helping clear up road congestion.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), have taken a step toward that future by designing a fleet of autonomous boats that offer high maneuverability and precise control. The boats can also be rapidly 3-D printed using a low-cost printer, making mass manufacturing more feasible.
The boats could be used to taxi people around and to deliver goods, easing street traffic. In the future, the researchers also envision the driverless boats being adapted to perform city services overnight, instead of during busy daylight hours, further reducing congestion on both roads and canals.
This is a very interesting Canadian story - of integrating automation in a traditional and human intensive occupation. Worth the read.
With Its Way Of Life At Risk, This Remote Oyster-Growing Region Called In Robots
The revolution is coming to rural New Brunswick.
When the harbors aren’t frozen, Maxime Daigle and his older brother Jean-Francois often take to the cold waters off New Brunswick in one of their family’s flat-bottomed boats to harvest oysters. The siblings are among hundreds of producers along this rocky coast who grow oysters for La Maison BeauSoleil in the company’s distinctive floating bags.
For the Daigles this is a family business. Maxime’s father, Maurice, co-owns La Maison BeauSoleil, an oyster grower, packer and distributor that he runs with his business partner, Amédée Savoie, whose son, Allain Savoie, also works in the company.
When the business started growing and selling oysters from the coastal village of Neguac, at the southern end of the Acadian Peninsula, each wooden box was painstakingly packed by hand.
That was 18 years ago. La Maison BeauSoleil ― called simply BeauSoleil within the seafood business ― has since become Canada’s largest producer of cocktail-sized oysters. Demand for its tasty, teardrop-shaped product is at an all-time high. While the company is working hard to keep up, business as usual isn’t cutting it.
So a new generation of robots is coming.
A very significant signal of the emerging phase transition in medical treatment via 3D printing and domestication of DNA. There is a 1 min video
Scientists create the first 3D-printed human corneas using 'bio-ink'
The future of 3D printing and medicine is coming into focus.
Scientists at Newcastle University in the UK say they've created the first 3D-printed human corneas. Using a combination of their unique "bio-ink" and cornea stem cells, they can print the corneas in under ten minutes.
If their methods gain medical approval, 3D-printed corneas could greatly benefit the millions of people in need of corneal transplants and those suffering from vision impairment due to corneal injury.
And even more.
"If we carefully tailor these changes, we can adjust the corneal curvature and thus change the refractive power of the eye," says Vukelic. "This is a fundamental departure from the mainstream ultrafast laser treatment that is currently applied in both research and clinical settings and relies on the optical breakdown of the target materials and subsequent cavitation bubble formation."
Engineers invent a noninvasive technique to correct vision
Columbia Engineering researcher Sinisa Vukelic, Ph.D., has developed a new non-invasive approach for permanently correcting myopia (nearsightedness), replacing glasses and invasive corneal refractive surgery.* The non-surgical method uses a “femtosecond oscillator” — an ultrafast laser that delivers pulses of very low energy at high repetition rate to modify the tissue’s shape.
The method has fewer side effects and limitations than those seen in refractive surgeries, according to Vukelic. For instance, patients with thin corneas, dry eyes, and other abnormalities cannot undergo refractive surgery.** The study could lead to treatment for myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, and irregular astigmatism. So far, it’s shown promise in preclinical models.
This is a great signal of how AI+Robots may take some ‘jobs’ away but in return help to accelerate scientific knowledge - Techne = knowledge :: Technology = Embodied Knowledge
“Ordinarily, just setting up an experiment of this magnitude would take a researcher all day, while the robot can do it in 20 minutes,” said researcher Benjamin Freedman in a press release. He went on to describe how automating the more tedious parts of biomedical research in this way will prevent people from ruining an experiment with careless errors or accidents.
Robots Can Grow Humanoid Mini-Organs From Stem Cells Faster And Better Than People
Automated robots now have the tools to grow imitation, simplified human organs out of stem cells. Thankfully, we weren’t transported to a sci-fi dystopia where the machines have risen up and started to farm humans, but rather a world where pharmaceutical and other biomedical research just became much easier and faster.
Give these robots some pluripotent stem cells (stem cells that can become any type of cell), and 21 days later they’ll have finished a complicated experiment testing out the effects of a drug or genetic manipulation on some human-like, lab-grown kidneys. According to research published yesterday, May 17, in Cell: Stem Cell, the process is much faster and more reliable than when humans grow the same mini-organs.
A disruption of the petro-chemical industrial agriculture by robotics + AI seems strange - but this could be part of an emerging phase transition in the global bio-economy.
“Some of the profit pools that are now in the hands of the big agrochemical companies will shift, partly to the farmer and partly to the equipment manufacturers,” said Cedric Lecamp, who runs the $1 billion Pictet-Nutrition fund that invests in companies along the food supply chain.
Now, non-selective weedkillers such as Monsanto’s Roundup are sprayed on vast tracts of land planted with tolerant GM seeds, driving one of the most lucrative business models in the industry.
But ecoRobotix www.ecorobotix.com/en, developer of the Swiss weeder, believes its design could reduce the amount of herbicide farmers use by 20 times. The company said it is close to signing a financing round with investors and is due to go on the market by early 2019.
Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants
In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles.
Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot is one of new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry by reducing the need for universal herbicides and the genetically modified (GM) crops that tolerate them.
Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models.
The stakes are high. Herbicide sales are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall.
Remember the character in Jurassic Park who said - ‘Life always finds a way.”
Evolution is seemingly far more creative than we can imagine.
"Generally, people don't think of microbes being airborne," he tells Astrobiology Magazine. "But there's a saying in microbiology: Everything is everywhere."
Conditions in the stratosphere are brutal – it's a dry, cold, hypobaric (i.e. low pressure), ultraviolet-drenched environment, which is why it serves as an apt analog to life on other worlds with similar conditions.
How stratospheric life is teaching us about the possibility of extreme life on other worlds
The presence of microbial life in Earth's stratosphere is not only opening up a new arena in which to study extremophiles, but is increasing the range of possible environments in which we may find life on other planets. This is the conclusion of a new study that summarizes what we know about stratospheric life so far.
The stratosphere is the atmospheric zone that lies directly above the dynamic troposphere where we live, but it is mostly a mystery when it comes to the life that exists there.
You might not realize it when you're staring out a plane window (we fly through the lowest levels of the stratosphere when we're cruising over 35,000 feet), but there are all kinds of microorganisms out there, according to Professor Shiladitya DasSarma, who is a microbiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, USA , and a co-author on the new study, which is published in the journal Current Opinion in Microbiology.
A very interesting signal that yesterday’s future is becoming today’s near future.
Flying car startup backed by Google founder offers test flights
A flying car project backed by Google co-founder Larry Page was closer to take-off on Wednesday, with a model for test flights by aspiring buyers.
Kitty Hawk, funded by Page, unveiled a "Flyer" model it described as "an exciting first step to sharing the freedom of flight."
"Our immediate priority is to invite small groups of people—customers, influencers, media and community members - to experience the freedom of flight here in our newly opened training facility."
An early version of Flyer was shown off last year.
The electric aircraft had 10 small lift rotors on its wings, making it capable of vertical take-off and landing like a helicopter.
Kitty Hawk said that at 15 meters (50 feet) away, it sounded about as lound as a lawn mower, while from 250 feet away the volume was on par with a loud conversation.
Kitty Hawk said that at 15 meters (50 feet) away, it sounded about as lound as a lawn mower, while from 250 feet away the volume was on par with a loud conversation.
The enclosure movement of the Internet is not separate from the same business models that keep extending patent and copyright protections - in order to profit from rent-seeking rather than incentivize continued creativity and innovation. This is a weak warning signal of an imagined future.
All Rights Reserved: a YA dystopia where every word is copyrighted
In Gregory Scott Katsoulis's All Rights Reserved, we get all the traditional trappings of a first-rate YA dystopia: grotesque wealth disparity leading to a modern caste system, draconian surveillance to effect social control in an inherently unstable state, ad-driven ubiquitous entertainment as the only distraction from environmental collapse -- but with an important difference.
In Katsoulis's world, the super-rich have legitimized their wealth and power -- and the indentured slavery of nearly everyone else -- by claiming ownership over every expressive word that can be spoken and gesture that can be made. From the age of 15, every citizen must wear an arm-cuff (which can't be removed) that monitors all speech and gestures, from your own name to a kiss or a hug -- and bills you according to a floating market for all forms of expression, complete with surge pricing.
This is an interesting signal that seems counter-intuitive in the context of complaints of the increasing fragmentation of social coherence - but the increasing power of platform monopolies.
Increasing similarity of Billboard songs
Popular songs on the Billboard charts always tended to sound similar, but these days they’re sounding even more similar. Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels for The Pudding make the case:
From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 – #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%.
In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.
