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
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
The conversion from movement into meaning is both seamless and direct, because we are endowed with the capacity to speak without talking and comprehend without hearing. We can direct attention by pointing, enhance narrative by miming, emphasize with rhythmic strokes and convey entire responses with a simple combination of fingers.
The tendency to supplement communication with motion is universal, though the nuances of delivery vary slightly. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, people point with their noses and heads, while in Laos they sometimes use their lips. In Ghana, left-handed pointing can be taboo, while in Greece or Turkey forming a ring with your index finger and thumb to indicate everything is A-OK could get you in trouble.
Despite their variety, gestures can be loosely defined as movements used to reiterate or emphasize a message — whether that message is explicitly spoken or not. A gesture is a movement that “represents action,” but it can also convey abstract or metaphorical information. It is a tool we carry from a very young age, if not from birth; even children who are congenitally blind naturally gesture to some degree during speech.
Gestures may be simple actions, but they don’t function in isolation. Research shows that gesture not only augments language, but also aids in its acquisition. In fact, the two may share some of the same neural systems. Acquiring gesture experience over the course of a lifetime may also help us intuit meaning from others’ motions.
How the Brain Links Gestures, Perception and Meaning
One of the significant battles we face at the moment is a war between music from nowhere, and music from somewhere. Music designed for instantaneous engagement, and instantaneous dismissal, and music that communicates with an archive.
The archive is collapsing, and who will preserve it? More magazines will go under. Many that are hanging on do so due to clever side business models that don’t depend on journalism turning a profit. The role of the critic has been under threat some for time, and will continue to lose influence to algorithmic populism, and the kind of process-hack algorithmic manipulation that makes stars on Instagram and Youtube. Spotify and Apple are already hiring journalists to cover the work they promote on their platform, so we will see more hagiographical journalism feeding that system, and the traditional idea of the critic as arbiter of taste, and gatekeeper of the archive, will continue to be eroded. Other gatekeepers, such as labels and niche festivals, will continue to lose prominence over time unless they radically reconsider their value propositions. The end of history? Nope, but the end of an era for sure. Another cold-light-of-day re-reading of the surge of poptimism in the press over the past decade is to see it as the bargaining stage of grief over the seemingly inexorable charge of bot-like popular figures who hoover up ideas from the margins and deploy significant resources to capture a moment with music fortified from any potentially critical angle one might level at it.::
Pop stars are better understood as monarchic CEO’s of content production studios atop a feudal, trickle up, creative economy. They have adapted to the online ecosystem far faster than the critical systems that might have one day raised objection to them. For many, the only thing to do now is to sit back and commentate, like a formula one spectator, as these fast & furious culture scanning vehicles whizz past everyone.
On the other hand, we have organisations like RBMA and Boiler Room, who have found ways to leverage brand money to keep things visible and accessible. Archiving, as far as I can tell, is a big part of their model. They are cartographic entities, in much the same way that Google is cartographic. Google created maps of the web, and RBMA and Boiler Room have been busy creating maps of culture. Maps are valuable, as they allow for the establishment of trade routes. On the one hand, RBMA and Boiler Room are doing a great job, as their models are predicated on the primacy of the kind of cultures that are under threat by the algorithmic populism of say, a Spotify or a Youtube.
Contrary to the hackneyed divisions that linger from the past, there really is no “mainstream” or “underground” in this new economy. Under ad-driven platform capitalism, there are either fertile pathways to sell people stuff, or barren and quantified pathways to sell people stuff. It’s a map. I’ve said a million times, in this economy, unique niches (or unexplored corners) are highly valuable.
narrative elements become the main source of value when competing with art of similar formal characteristics
Options to say no. Options to do wild, and risky things. Who has those options today? Where would the money come from?
Amazon can produce your product cheaper than you can, and strong arm you out of business unless you work with them. Facebook can acquire any competitor before they become dangerous. Pop music can appropriate and spit out your micro-scene before it has any ability to generate its own momentum, or it’s own funds.
Protocols: Duty, Despair and Decentralisation transcript
The leader who isolates himself from dissenting opinions is bound to make disastrous decisions. The failures in communication in Vietnam continued in Iraq. According to researchers, Donald Rumsfeld and his immediate subordinates made dissent extremely difficult during the first years of the war. It is normal, but costly in corporations and disastrous in politics to filter out information that contradicts preconceptions. Failures of leadership are very often a result from failures in communication.
All organizations are power and communication structures. Very often communication is corrupted just because of power. If you deliver differing views to your boss, it is highly likely that you are not going to be listened to in the future. For ambitious people, this is the worst possible fate. What social tools try to achieve, is subordinates giving truthful information about what is going on, which they don’t do, and bosses listening attentively, which they don’t.
What kind of leaders we need?
This is another good signal of the emerging applications of our domestication of DNA.
Blood vessels built from a patient’s cells could help people on dialysis
Patients did not have immune or other bad reactions to the bioengineered tubes
In clinical trials, these vessels were installed in the arms of dialysis patients and successfully integrated into their circulatory systems, researchers report online March 27 in Science Translational Medicine. The new blood vessels, which eventually host the patient’s own cells after implantation, are designed to be safer and more effective than current options. Traditional implants composed of synthetic polymers or donor tissue are liable to trigger inflammation or immune system rejection.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone require blood vessel implants for dialysis. These bioengineered vessels could help not only those patients, but also people who have lost blood vessels through tumor removal or injury, says Christopher Breuer, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who was not involved in the work.
Heather Prichard, a biomedical engineer at the medical research company Humacyte in Durham, N.C., and colleagues created each blood vessel by seeding a biodegradable polymer tube first with vascular cells from a deceased donor. Inside a bioreactor tank that supplied the vascular cells with nutrients, these cells multiplied and secreted proteins that formed an intercellular network. After eight weeks, the polymer scaffold had broken down, and the researchers stripped the donor cells from the remaining protein tube, leaving no living material behind. The vessel, about 6 millimeters across, was then implanted into the patient, where the patient’s own cells gradually migrated into the tube.
An interesting signal about how certain life forms can propagate themselves around the world.
"Our research suggests that there must be a planet-wide mechanism that ensures the exchange of bacteria between faraway places," says senior researcher, molecular biochemist Konstantin Severinov from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Bacteria Appear to Be Traveling Huge Distances Through an Unknown Airborne Mechanism
We know that bacteria are incredibly stubborn microorganisms, and new research suggests they're also capable of travelling thousands of miles through the air.
It was previously thought that germs needed to hitch a ride on people and animals to make their way around the world, but it seems they're capable of spreading long distances through the air all on their own.
To reach these conclusions, scientists studied the 'memories' logged in bacterial DNA – records left behind by encounters that the bacteria had had with viruses (bacteriophages) in the past. The question is, how those virus records got to where they did.
An amazing signal of the emerging ubiquitous interface with the world - starting with our own prosthetics. The challenge? Designing the systemic interfaces of software as everyware.
DOCTORS WIRED A PROSTHETIC HAND DIRECTLY INTO A WOMAN’S NERVES
In a world first, doctors in Sweden say they’ve wired a prosthetic hand directly into a woman’s nerves, allowing her to move its fingers with her mind and even feel tactile sensations.
The hand is an enormous step up from existing prostheses, which often rely on electrodes placed on the outside of the skin — and it could herald a future in which robotic devices interface seamlessly with our bodies.
This is another signal of Moore’s speed of technological growth - this one is vital for self-driving transportation and other autonomous mobile technologies.
Lumotive Says It’s Got a Solid-State Lidar That Really Works
Fine-tunable liquid crystals steer the beam electronically—with no moving parts
Lumotive, a startup in Bellevue, Wash., says it has a compact, long-range lidar sensor that is at least as capable as the best machines from its rivals but smaller, cheaper to make, and more robust.
The company steers its beam with what it characterizes as a truly solid-state technology, as compared with the conspicuous moving parts of Velodyne, with its rotating rooftop tower; the large mirror-steered beam of Luminar; and even the tiny MEMS mirrors that control the scanning for Innoviz and other companies.
“MEMS-based systems are still mechanical,” argues Lumotive’s cofounder, Gleb Akselrod, who holds a Ph.D. in optics and photonics from MIT. “One, they’re not robust enough in an automotive setting, and two, the mirrors are so small it’s like looking through a straw. They can’t collect a lot of light, and so they can’t see very far.”
But because Lumotive has a wide aperture—25 by 25 millimeters (1 inch square)—it can transmit and receive the light much more easily, making better use of the collected light. The device can thus see far without having to turn up the brightness. That’s important because the sensor works at 905 nanometers, an eye-sensitive wavelength the company chose because it works with silicon. You need exotic compound semiconductors to make and detect laser light at 1,550 nm, a wavelength that’s easier on the eyes.
Moore’s Law like progress is not just related to computers - but many sorts of technology. This is an important signal for the Internet of Things and even for Mesh Networks.
Teeny-Tiny Bluetooth Transmitter Runs on Less Than 1 Milliwatt
Bluetooth Low Energy data packets can now be sent by millimeter-size IoT motes
Engineers at the University of Michigan have now built the first millimeter-scale stand-alone device that speaks BLE. Consuming just 0.6 milliwatts during transmission, it would broadcast for 11 years using a typical 5.8-millimeter coin battery. Such a millimeter-scale BLE radio would allow these ant-size sensors to communicate with ordinary equipment, even a smartphone.
The transmitter chip, which debuted last month at IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, had to solve two problems, explains David Wentzloff, the Michigan associate professor who led the research. The first is power consumption, and the second is the size of the antenna. “The size of the antenna is typically physics-based, and you can’t cheat physics,” says Wentzloff. The group’s solution touched on both problems.
This is a weak signal but highly important - the world of DNA computation may well be part of our domestication of DNA and a post-human future.
DNA Computer Shows Programmable Chemical Machines Are Possible
Caltech crew’s computer runs dozens of programs using a few hundred chemical instructions
Probably the most masterful and mysterious act of chemical computation is when a single cell uses its DNA to divide, multiply, and specialize to produce a fully developed organism. In research reported this week in Nature, computer scientists took a small but important step toward harnessing the potential of chemical computation by constructing the first broadly programmable DNA computer.
The system executes a wide variety of 6-bit programs using a set of instructions written in DNA. The researchers used it to perform 21 test programs, though the system is capable of many more. Previous DNA computer schemes were essentially bespoke systems, only capable of solving the single problem they were designed for.
The new system, which is made of just DNA and salt water, is unlikely to find a technological application itself. But it is a step toward developing self-assembling programmable matter, where chemical software automatically directs the construction of materials with complex, programmable nanometer-scale features. Its creators were “trying to understand how to embed computational behaviors within chemistry in order control what chemistry does,” explains Erik Winfree, the professor of computer science and bioengineering who led the research, which was mostly conducted at Caltech.
Here is a great signal of the advancing emergence of automation - agricultural robotics. The questions includes what will their impact be on migrant labour?
Abundant’s apple harvesting robots get their first commercial deployment
“Developing an automated apple harvester requires solving a number of complex technical problems in parallel, from visually identifying harvestable fruit and physically manipulating it to pick without bruising, to safely navigating the orchard itself,” Abundant CEO Dan Steere said in a press release tied to the announcement. “Our relationship with growers and access to real-world conditions on partner orchards through the development and testing process has been key to getting the technology to the point where it is now commercially viable.”
Abundant’s been piloting its technology on a smaller scale for a while now, but the T&G deal marks the company’s first commercial deployment. To date, the Bay Area-based company has raised $12 million, including a $10 million Series A led by GV (Google Ventures) back in 2017. It’s a small but important start for robotic technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the way food is harvested around the globe.
This is a very short article with a 1.5 min video (worth the watch) about new warehouse robots moving and stacking objects. Still not quite ready for prime time - but impressive.
Watching Boston Dynamics’ new robot stack boxes is weirdly mesmerizing
The video shows two robots moving cardboard boxes from a pallet onto a conveyor belt.
The robots are an updated version of Boston Dynamics’s “Handle” bot, first unveiled in 2017.
About “Handle”: It’s a “mobile manipulation robot” designed for the logistics sector. It can autonomously stack and unstack boxes onto and off pallets, and shift them onto conveyor belts. It uses an onboard vision system to track which objects go where, and to judge how to grasp and place each box. It uses a robotic technique called “force control” to nestle each box up against its neighbors. It can handle (excuse the pun) weights of up to 15 kilograms (33 pounds.)
A caveat: Although the technology is impressive, we’re still a long way from it being deployed in an actual warehouse, especially around humans. That would involve a level of complexity that robots haven’t yet mastered. And while the Boston Dynamics videos are always fun, they’re not quite as effortless as they seem. Each one is created with carefully pre-programmed movements and will take many, many takes to get right before it’s shared.
An amazing signal for cheap heating and maybe many more uses - but also important in signaling new ways to create new matter.
the ultrathin design reduces the amount of material used, which enables it to heat up rapidly. "This is why the device can heat from 300C to 1500C in 30 seconds, he says." Furthermore, the ultrathin property allows easy heat transfer from the metamaterial to the material needed to be heated, such as water, and so could be used to desalinate seawater, for instance.
Graphene Device Sops Up Sunlight, Heats to 160 Degrees Celsius in Seconds
A new class of ultrathin light absorbent material could harvest solar energy, boil water, and work as an infrared detector
Researchers from three Australian universities have collaborated to develop a light-absorbing device using a new graphene-based film that can absorb unpolarized incident light striking it over a wide range of angles up to 60 degrees.
The 90-nm ultra-thin metamaterial can rapidly heat up to as high as 1600C under sunlight in an open environment. The researchers believe the characteristics of this new class of optical material make it suitable for a wide variety of uses, including desalination of seawater, color displays, photodetectors, and optical components for communication devices.
"Graphene has unique properties," says Han Lin, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Micro-Photonics, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. "It can absorb any wavelength of light from UV to microwaves." Other absorbents, including various engineered metamaterials all have drawbacks by comparison, he says. "Carbon nanotubes, for instance, are tens to hundreds of micrometers thicker, which impedes device integration."
Lin, first author of a paper on the prototype device published this month in Nature Photonics, notes that attempts to produce practical graphene absorbent devices have been made using multilayer structures, but these approaches have been limited to single polarization, while fabricating them has proved difficult.
"On the other hand, the device we've fabricated with the new graphene based film is polarization insensitive," he says. "That's because it's constructed to lower the effective permittivity to achieve absorption of both transverse electric [TE] and transverse magnetic [TM] polarizations. It is also simple to fabricate."
A weak signal - but one to watch for the transformation of energy geopolitics.
Maybe also a weak signal of 21st Century alchemy?
“Nuclear energy is maybe the best candidate for the future, but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk,” he said. “The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don’t have the problem of radioactivity. What you have to do is to change the makeup of the nucleus.”
Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest
Gerard Mourou—one of the three winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics—claims that the lifespan of radioactive waste could potentially be cut to minutes from thousands of years. Although Mourou, 74, is quick to say that the laser option for nuclear waste that he and Irvine, California-based Professor Toshiki Tajima are working on may be years away, its promise has created a flurry of excitement for the sector in France.
The process he and Tajima are working on is called transmutation, which involves changing the composition of an atom’s nucleus by bombarding it with a laser. “It’s like karate—you deliver a very strong force in a very, very brief moment,” said Mourou, wearing the golden pin of the Nobel Prize on his lapel.
This is a great signal not just of gravitational wave detection but of emerging advances in fundamental science - and also of the advantages of opening science research results to all.
Gravitational-wave hunt restarts — with a quantum boost
Detailed data on space-time ripples are set to pour in from LIGO and Virgo’s upgraded detectors.
The hunt for gravitational waves is on again — this time assisted by the quirks of quantum mechanics.
Three massive detectors — the two in the United States called LIGO and one in Italy known as Virgo — officially resumed collecting data on 1 April, after a 19-month shutdown for upgrades. Thanks in part to a quantum phenomenon known as light squeezing, the machines promise not only to spot more gravitational waves — ripples in space-time that can reveal a wealth of information about the cosmos — but also to make more detailed detections. Researchers hope to observe as-yet undetected events, such as a supernova or the merging of a black hole with a neutron star.
The run, which will last until next March, also marks a major change in how gravitational-wave astronomy is done. For the first time, LIGO and Virgo will send out public, real-time alerts on wave detections to tip off other observatories — and anyone with a telescope — on how to find the events, so that they can be studied with traditional techniques, from radio- to space-based X-ray telescopes. The alerts will also be available through a smartphone app. “Astronomers are really hungry,” says David Reitze, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which made the first historic detection of gravitational waves in 2015.
in previous runs, teams of astronomers that wanted to do such follow-ups had to sign memoranda of understanding with the LIGO–Virgo collaboration to receive confidential alerts; researchers also had to observe an embargo period. Starting with this run, that will no longer be the case. “If they follow it up and see a counterpart, they can do what they want. There is no restriction on what they publish, or when,” Reitze says. “That’s a big change.”
Meanwhile, researchers at the newly built KAGRA gravitational-wave observatory in Japan are rushing to tune up their detector in time to join the network in early 2020. Having a fourth detector will be especially helpful to locate the position of an event in the sky with greater precision.
