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 first thing we wanted to know was whether men and women respondents rated the rooms differently. Contrary to popular lore, men and women saw the same mess: They rated the clean room as equally clean and the messy room as equally messy.
So if "dirt blindness" isn't to blame, why do women do more housework?
Participants rated the photos differently depending on whether they were told that a woman or a man lived there. Notably, respondents held higher standards of cleanliness for Jennifer than they did for John. When they were told the tidy room belonged to Jennifer, participants—regardless of gender—judged it less clean and more likely to inspire disapproving reactions from guests than when the same exact room was John's.
Interestingly, John's character was rated more negatively than Jennifer's for having a messy home, reflecting the common stereotype that men are lazy. Yet participants did not believe John would be any more likely than Jennifer to suffer negative judgment from visitors, which suggests that the "men are lazy" stereotype does not disadvantage them in a socially meaningful way.
Finally, people were more likely to believe that Jennifer would bear primary responsibility for cleaning, and this difference was especially large in the hypothetical scenario in which she or he is a full-time working parent living with a spouse.
That people attribute greater responsibility for housework to women than men, even regardless of their employment situation, suggests that women get penalized more often for clutter than men do.
Men do see the mess—they just aren't judged for it the way women are
A healthy society balances the collective responsibilities of governments in the public sector with the commercial interests of businesses in the private sector and the communal concerns of citizens in the plural sector—so labelled, instead of “civil society”, to be seen as taking its place alongside the sectors called public and private.
The plural sector is huge, comprising associations that are neither publicly owned by government nor privately owned by investors. Some, often called cooperatives, are owned by their members. The United States has more cooperative memberships than people. Others are owned by no-one, such as NGOs, foundations, religious orders, trusts, and clubs, as well as certain universities and hospitals. Many of these operate in “the commons”, meaning that their services are widely accessible, as are those of Wikipedia. Its size notwithstanding, the plural sector itself is obscure, despite Alexis de Tocqueville’s identification in the 1830s of its “associations” as key to the new Democracy in America.
Donald Trump is not the problem - Part I
"You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means."– Murray Gell-Mann
In simple systems, the properties of the whole can be understood or predicted from the addition or aggregation of its components. In other words, macroscopic properties of a simple system can be deduced from the microscopic properties of its parts. In complex systems, however, the properties of the whole often cannot be understood or predicted from the knowledge of its components because of a phenomenon known as “emergence.” This phenomenon involves diverse mechanisms causing the interaction between components of a system to generate novel information and exhibit non-trivial collective structures and behaviors at larger scales. This fact is usually summarized with the popular phrase the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Examples: a massive amount of air and vapor molecules forming a tornado; multiple cells forming a living organism; billions of neurons in a brain producing consciousness and intelligence.
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."– Theodosius Dobzhansky
Rather than just moving towards a steady state, complex systems are often active and responding to the environment -- the difference between a ball that rolls to the bottom of a hill and stops and a bird that adapts to wind currents while flying. This adaptation can happen at multiple scales: cognitive, through learning and psychological development; social, via sharing information through social ties; or even evolutionary, through genetic variation and natural selection. When the components are damaged or removed, these systems are often able to adapt and recover their previous functionality, and sometimes they become even better than before. This can be achieved by robustness, the ability to withstand perturbations; resilience, the ability to go back to the original state after a large perturbation; or adaptation, the ability to change the system itself to remain functional and survive. Complex systems with these properties are known as complex adaptive systems.
Examples: an immune system continuously learning about pathogens; a colony of termites that repairs damages caused to its mound; terrestrial life that has survived numerous crisis events in billions of years of its history.
Complex systems appear in all scientific and professional domains, including physics, biology, ecology, social sciences, finance, business, management, politics, psychology, anthropology, medicine, engineering, information technology, and more. Many of the latest technologies, from social media and mobile technologies to autonomous vehicles and blockchain, produce complex systems with emergent properties that are crucial to understand and predict for societal well-being. A key concept of complexity science is universality, which is the idea that many systems in different domains display phenomena with common underlying features that can be described using the same scientific models. These concepts warrant a new multidisciplinary mathematical/computational framework. Complexity science can provide a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary analytical approach that complements traditional scientific approaches that focus on specific subject matter in each domain.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."– George Box
You can download a booklet version, for free
What is Complexity Science?
This is a great signal of the impact of Youtube and other video sharing platforms on Canadians. For anyone interested in the future of work - this has some important insights. The full pdf of the report can be downloaded.
Watchtime Canada - How YouTube Connects Creators and Consumers
This report was produced by Audience Lab at Ryerson University’s Faculty of Communication and Design (FCAD). It was commissioned by Google.
YouTube is the world’s largest online video sharing platform with an astounding growth rate of more than 500 hours of uploaded video per minute. The platform attracts the second largest audience in the world (after its parent company, Google). YouTube has 2 billion monthly logged in users including 24 million Canadians. Further underscoring the platform’s growth are the number of channels with at least 1 million subscribers has doubled in the last year.
The report contains two types of content: our original research findings, and contextual information about YouTube collected from public sources. The contextual information about YouTube includes nearly 25 images, and is purposed to familiarize the reader with the platform on and behind the screen.
The bulk of the report presents, describes and analyzes our research findings. Our study is anchored by quantitative and qualitative data resulting from two surveys, of both YouTube creators and consumers, with more than 1,200 and 1,500 participants respectively. In addition to over 50 charts that represent the quantitative data, the research generated more than 9,000 qualitative comments. As presented in the report, this qualitative data helps bring the quantitative findings alive.
Top Findings
YouTube is the first media space where Canadians go to learn.
Seventy percent of Canadian YouTube consumers rank YouTube as the first media space they go to learn things.
YouTube’s benefits are provided at no cost to the system.
While YouTube costs an estimated $6B+ per year to maintain, the platform is free for creators and consumers, incurring no technological or administrative cost to Canada’s media ecosystem.
The rise of the creative entrepreneur.
YouTube has facilitated the rise of a new group of 160,000 Canadian creators including 40,000 who have achieved sufficient audience traction to monetize their channels. These YouTube entrepreneurs have created nearly 28,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs for themselves and others. 15% of YouTube channels generate more than $50,000 annually in gross revenue; 12% generate $75,000 or more; 9% generate $100,000 or more; and 6% report $150,000 or more.
Diversity of creators and perspectives.
Canadians value the diversity they see on YouTube including genres, perspectives, voices, languages, geographies, genders, and ethnicities that are not as visible on other media.
Michael Geist interviews one of the authors in a ½ hour podcast here.
Canada’s Quiet Success Story – Irene Berkowitz on the Canadian YouTube Creative Sector
The LawBytes Podcast, Episode 19:
A long read - but worth the effort for a glimpse into the emerging world of drones - autonomous and otherwise. This is the emergence of a new form of collective sensorium and consciousness.
‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’
The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.
Drones have come to define the United States’ forever war, the so-called war on terror. The expansion of drone systems developed by the military into new territories — including the continental United States — embodies this era’s hyper-paranoid ethos: new threats are ever imminent, conflict is always without resolution. At the same time, non-militarized drones have entered civilian life in a number of ways, from breathtaking cinematography to flight control at Heathrow airport. There are many avid documenters of this new technology, but no one seems to understand its many facets quite like Arthur Holland Michel, founder and co-director of the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone, which catalogs the growing use of drones around the world. Now, Holland Michel has written Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, a book of startling revelations about drone surveillance in the United States.
Holland Michel has lived and breathed drone technology for the last six years, but nothing quite shocked him like the technology of Wide Angle Motion Imagery (WAMI). WAMI greatly expands the power that a camera attached to a drone can have; it is able to watch and record a much greater area while also tracking multiple specific targets within that area. In his book Holland Michel lays out how scientists and engineers created this surveillance technology through a Manhattan-project like mission. The name — a little too on the nose — that the scientists decided to give their new invention was “Gorgon Stare,” after the terrifying mythological creature whose mere glance could turn you to stone. Even from the very beginning, Gorgon Stare’s creators knew that its power would extend beyond its original stated purpose — to help prevent IED attack and track insurgents across conflict zones. Now, proponents of WAMI are finding uses for it in civilian life, and Holland Michel argues that the public must be involved in any decision before it is deployed above us. I met up with Arthur on a beautiful Spring day (perfect for flying drones) to discuss this profoundly troubling technology, how to prevent its worst potential from being realized, and maybe — just maybe — how drones can be used for good.
I was once asked if the future would provide humans with ‘new senses’ - I don’t think I answered that question very well - at the time. But I think we are on the brink of a phase transition in the percepts that the sensorium of a new extended mind will provide.
"This research is game-changing for imaging," said Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper. "Most cameras can typically only detect the intensity and color of light but can't see polarization. This camera is a new eye on reality, allowing us to reveal how light is reflected and transmitted by the world around us."
"Polarization is a feature of light that is changed upon reflection off a surface," said Paul Chevalier, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and co-author of the study. "Based on that change, polarization can help us in the 3-D reconstruction of an object, to estimate its depth, texture and shape, and to distinguish man-made objects from natural ones, even if they're the same shape and color."
Portable polarization-sensitive camera could be used in machine vision, autonomous vehicles, security and more
When the first full-length movie made with the advanced, three-color process of Technicolor premiered in 1935, The New York Times declared "it produced in the spectator all the excitement of standing upon a peak ... and glimpsing a strange, beautiful and unexpected new world."
Technicolor forever changed how cameras—and people—saw and experienced the world around them. Today, there is a new precipice—this one, offering views of a polarized world.
Polarization, the direction in which light vibrates, is invisible to the human eye (but visible to some species of shrimp and insects). But it provides a great deal of information about the objects with which it interacts. Cameras that see polarized light are currently used to detect material stress, enhance contrast for object detection, and analyze surface quality for dents or scratches.
However, like the early color cameras, current-generation polarization-sensitive cameras are bulky. Moreover, they often rely on moving parts and are costly, severely limiting the scope of their potential application.
Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a highly compact, portable camera that can image polarization in a single shot. The miniature camera—about the size of a thumb—could find a place in the vision systems of autonomous vehicles, onboard planes or satellites to study atmospheric chemistry, or be used to detect camouflaged objects.
We are not only domesticating DNA but humans are making progress in domesticating matter (beyond that made possible by pyrotechnologies). This is one interesting signal.
One step along the way to making matter out of light is to make individual packets of light, called photons, interact with each other like matter does. (Normally photons zip along at the speed of light and don't react to each other at all.)
By allowing photons to interact with these shaken atoms, the team has created what they call "Floquet polaritons"—quasi-particles which are part-light and part-atom, and unlike regular photons, interact with each other quite strongly. These interactions are essential for making matter from light. Making polaritons with shaken atoms can give the polaritons much more flexibility to move around and collide with each other in new ways.
Scientists combine light and matter to make particles with new behaviors
Every type of atom in the universe has a unique fingerprint: It only absorbs or emits light at the particular energies that match the allowed orbits of its electrons. That fingerprint enables scientists to identify an atom wherever it is found. A hydrogen atom in outer space absorbs light at the same energies as one on Earth.
While physicists have learned how electric and magnetic fields can manipulate this fingerprint, the number of features that make it up usually remains constant. In work published July 3 in the journal Nature, University of Chicago researchers challenged this paradigm by shaking electrons with lasers to create "doppelganger" features at new energies—a breakthrough that lets scientists create hybrid particles which are part-atom and part-light, with a wide variety of new behaviors.
The research is part of a greater effort in Assoc. Prof. Jonathan Simon's lab to break down the walls between matter and light, in order to investigate their fundamental properties. In addition to learning about how materials behave at the quantum level, this work could one day help create more powerful computers or virtually "unhackable" quantum communications.
We know that complex and living systems by definition exist ‘far from equilibrium’ - thus they are regulated via systems that actively intervene to sustain a homeostasis of innumerable variables (many antithetical to each other) within viable ranges. We don’t know which variables determine the conditions of a complex living system.
Bruno Latour’s recent book “Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime” argues that Gaia is an active agent - and humans are now co-creators of the living system that is earth.
The question is how is Gaia as an agent enacting homeostatic change? The 1 min video is worth the view.
Scientists discover the biggest seaweed bloom in the world
In patchy doses in the open ocean, Sargassum contributes to ocean health by providing habitat for turtles, crabs, fish, and birds and producing oxygen via photosynthesis like other plants. "In the open ocean, Sargassum provides great ecological values, serving as a habitat and refuge for various marine animals. I often saw fish and dolphins around these floating mats," Wang said.
But too much of this seaweed makes it hard for certain marine species to move and breathe, especially when the mats crowd the coast. When it dies and sinks to the ocean bottom at large quantities it can smother corals and seagrasses. On the beach, rotten Sargassum releases hydrogen sulfide gas and smells like rotten eggs, potentially presenting health challenges for people on beaches who have asthma, for example.
In general, predicting future blooms is difficult, Hu said, because the blooms depend on a wide-ranging spectrum of factors that are hard to predict. There's a lot left to understand, too, such as whether and how the Sargassum belt affects fisheries.
"We hope this provides a framework for improved understanding and response to this emerging phenomenon," Hu said. "We need a lot more follow-on work."
I remember the first time I saw a friend with a Sony Walkman. I was perplexed why anyone would want to walk around in their own sound bubble. So much for a natural foresight perspective.
A great many of the products that Sony once dominated with have been replaced, or have been consolidated into other devices. Over the years, Sony has made fantastic camcorders, stereo components, cameras, portable media players, and phones. Relatively few people buy most of these products anymore, with the smartphone usurping many of these devices’ functions, and all-in-one media players from the likes of Sonos and Amazon taking a large bite out of the home audio market.
The brand that kicked off the portable music revolution is now a walking zombie
Forty years ago this week, the Sony Walkman cassette player first went on sale.
The beautifully designed, easy-to-use TPS-L2 was the device that liberated the cassette from living room hi-fis and car tape decks to truly make music portable. It allowed you to walk, man. It changed the way we listened to music, and when and where we listened to it. Without it, there would likely be no iPod, no iPhone, no devices to enjoy entertainment wherever we are, whenever we’re there.
For Sony’s 35th anniversary, The Verge highlighted that the company had sold over 400 million Walkman-branded devices since the first one went on sale in 1979. Sony defined many of the eras of portable music technology since the first tape player, always managing to adapt the Walkman brand as necessary. It added radios to its Walkman, then it shifted to the CD Walkman (or sometimes, the “Discman”), and then onto the Minidisc Walkman, and finally onto the MP3 player. At one point, there was even a digital voice recorder, presumably marketed towards journalists, called the Scoopman.
It came up with some truly iconic designs along the way, as well as technical firsts, like the first portable CD player, the first minidisc player, and the first digital noise-canceling headphones. Looking at Sony’s own list of all its groundbreaking Walkman models over the years shows how impressive Sony’s technological prowess has been over the years, but it also highlights perhaps the company’s biggest problem: It apparently hasn’t released anything noteworthy since 2011, which is the last entry for a technology milestone listed in the “personal audio” section of its list of company milestones.
This is such an important signal for many reasons - the progression of our understanding of evolution, the need for transdisciplinary experiences, the need for multiple lines of evidence and multiple ways of reasoning.
Whereas most researchers work with only a handful of well-studied animals, such as fruit flies and mice, Extavour’s success comes from her penchant for less-ubiquitous lab critters, such as sand fleas and crickets. Typical model organisms harbour just a fraction of the diversity found in nature, so alongside the usual suspects, she examines a wide range of animals that help to reveal which genetic tools evolution most commonly uses.
All insect eggs have the same function — to protect and provide energy for the developing bug — but their huge variety of shapes and sizes has puzzled biologists for centuries.
analysis revealed a surprise: the evolution of egg shape and size depends largely on where the eggs are laid. Eggs laid in water are often small and spherical; those deposited into the body of another animal are also small, but tend to be oddly shaped.
The biologist using insect eggs to overturn evolutionary doctrine
Cassandra Extavour has transformed understanding of animal development — while championing diversity, and nurturing a side career as a soprano.
Even with time running out, Extavour was unwilling to take his word for it. She embarked on a months-long series of experiments to prove to herself that the gene did what he said. In the process, she built her own tools to ask a question that nobody had addressed before. “That’s the kind of project that I really love,” she says.
Two decades later, Extavour is still pursuing original research questions and overturning convention as she investigates some of the most fundamental aspects of animal development. In her lab at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Extavour wants to understand how single-celled entities blossomed into multicellular organisms during evolution, and how the intricate bodies of such organisms can develop from cells that all have the same genetic blueprint. “I have never heard of a problem that I thought was more interesting than that,” she says.
Extavour’s curiosity and rigorous thinking have led her to test, and in some cases disprove, widely accepted hypotheses about development and evolution. She upended the leading theory of how most animals generate the precursors of eggs and sperm1, and in a Nature paper this week, she and her team have cracked a long-standing question about the astonishing diversity of insect eggs.
In the Digital Environment - where everything and everyone is known - we still need moments of anonymity.
How to stop your emails from being tracked
Pixel trackers can hide in your email images
All of those obnoxious marketing emails that crowd your inbox aren’t just pushing a product. They’re also tracking whether you’ve opened the email, when you opened it, and where you were at the time by using software like MailChimp to embed tracking software into the message.
How does it work? A single tracking pixel is embedded into the email, usually (but not always) hidden within an image or a link. When the email is opened, code within the pixel sends the info back to the company’s server.
There have been some attempts to restrict the amount of information that can be transmitted this way. For example, since 2014, Google has served all images through its own proxy servers, which could hide your location from at least some tracking applications. And extensions such as Ugly Mail and PixelBlock have been developed to block trackers on Chrome and Firefox.
There is also a simple basic step you can take to avoid trackers: stop your email from automatically loading images since images are where the majority of these pixels hide. You won’t be able to avoid all of the trackers that can hide in your email this way, but you will stop many of them.
Here’s how to do it in the major desktop and mobile email apps:
It should be obvious - that the earth has become an ‘art project’ co-created with humans (as Bruno Latour notes and as McLuhan suggested in the 60s). Meeting our challenges - climate change, economic equality, generative flourishing of life and diversity - and inevitable more - requires a response-ability. - Imagine solar energy powered desalination to irrigate the Sahara?
“What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis
Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide
Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.
As trees grow, they absorb and store the carbon dioxide emissions that are driving global heating. New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.
The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined. Tropical areas could have 100% tree cover, while others would be more sparsely covered, meaning that on average about half the area would be under tree canopy.
The scientists specifically excluded all fields used to grow crops and urban areas from their analysis. But they did include grazing land, on which the researchers say a few trees can also benefit sheep and cattle.
