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
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the recycling of electronic waste, a process often referred to as urban mining. Given that a metric tonne of recycled laptop circuit boards can have between 40 and 800 times more gold than found in a metric tonne of ore, it seems irrational to redeposit the precious metal into the earth via landfills. Despite this, and the fact that urban mining is growing more cost-effective by the day, only 20 per cent of all electronic waste is currently recycled. In 2017, the Global E-Waste Monitor projected that the amount of electronic waste generated by the end of 2021 would reach 52.2 million metric tonnes. Given these numbers, it is estimated that the value of the gold in our garbage exceeds €10 billion ($11.2 billion). On top of that, the many other precious metals in the garbage, such as silver, copper and platinum, add even more value to our waste. Therefore, given its economic and technological importance, it is time to consider whether other sources of gold, which are not yet decidedly viable, can also be exploited in the future.
experts in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the year 2000. In fact, the total usage that year was half as much as predicted. Not because there were fewer humans, but because human inventiveness allowed more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water.
In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 per cent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow.
Could mining gold from waste reduce its great cost?
as a driver you just open the truck’s rear doors, reverse up to one of the loading bays, a red light comes on on the wall of the RDC, the shutter door on the warehouse opens, you feel fork lifts moving in and out of the back of your truck, then the light turns green, you pull forward to close the doors, and off you go. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was interested and went inside to have a look I needn’t have had any contact with anyone during the whole process.
Some of my other driving jobs involve providing the materials for the glass and steel office structures that we are still allowing to reshape our city centres. I was struck the other day by the increasing similarities between the cathedrals of consumerism and these cathedrals of bureaucracy. In both we are seeing the onward march of automated processes that take what used to be human labour and trim them down to the maximum repeatable efficiency. Skeleton staff who oversee the process, and radically reduced interchange with the outside world.
The capabilities of AI and automation are currently being oversold and are underdelivering, like every other technology that has preceded them. But it is clear that as more of our day to day work takes place in entirely digital environments the prospects for systems learning from our patterns and replicating them increases by the day. Add to this the fact that once the essential patterns are understood the inessential stuff can be trimmed away, and much of the current bureaucratic business that currently employs the bulk of the middle class disappears.
We need to start thinking about what we all do when that happens…
Cathedrals of the future
‘But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?’ For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink.
As for Britain, our consumption of ‘stuff’ probably peaked around the turn of the century — an achievement that has gone almost entirely unnoticed. But the evidence is there. In 2011 Chris Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the UK was now using not just relatively less ‘stuff’ every year, but absolutely less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.
We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously
This is a vital signal that is a MUST READ.
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.
Read Yuval Harari's blistering warning to Davos in full
Humanity faces three existential threats this century, warned historian Yuval Harari at Davos 2020.
Technology risks dividing the world into wealthy elites and exploited "data colonies," he explained.
"If you like the World Cup - you are already a globalist," he said, making the case for better cooperation to tackle the challenges.
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first Century, humanity faces so many issues and questions, that it is really hard to know what to focus on. So I would like to use the next twenty minutes to help us focus of all the different issues we face. Three problems pose existential challenges to our species.
These three existential challenges are nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. We should focus on them.
Now nuclear war and ecological collapse are already familiar threats, so let me spend some time explaining the less familiar threat posed by technological disruption.
This is a great podcast featuring Cesar Hidalgo of The Atlas of Economic Complexity. A broad ranging conversation of the role of complexity and information.
César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe
Maxwell’s Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do useful work such as pushing a piston. This is a classic example of converting information (what the gas molecules are doing) into work. But of course that kind of phenomenon is much more widespread — it happens any time a company or organization hires someone in order to take advantage of their know-how. César Hidalgo has become an expert in this relationship between information and work, both at the level of physics and how it bubbles up into economies and societies. Looking at the world through the lens of information brings new insights into how we learn things, how economies are structured, and how novel uses of data will transform how we live.
César Hidalgo received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Notre Dame. He currently holds an ANITI Chair at the University of Toulouse, an Honorary Professorship at the University of Manchester, and a Visiting Professorship at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. From 2010 to 2019, he led MIT’s Collective Learning group. He is the author of Why Information Grows and co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity. He is a co-founder of Datawheel, a data visualization company
Video games are evolving into mainstream activities signaling the emergence of new institutions.
As Esports Take Off, High School Leagues Get In The Game
Nowadays, if you're a teenager who's good at video games there's a lot more to be had than just a pot of virtual gold.
There's college scholarships, tournament money and high salary jobs.
Today, more than 170 colleges and universities participate. And there's money on the table — more than $16 million in college scholarships. Naturally, high schools have followed suit.
This year, 17 states and the District of Columbia are offering formal esports teams.
Kids perfect their skills alongside teammates with the help of a high school coach. They run drills, develop strategy, review game footage and compete against other teams across their state.
But most high schools don't house their esports teams under athletics. In Virginia, the league is considered an academic activity.
This is an interesting signal - sort of negative in one feature which involves the unwillingness of pharmaceutical companies to research natural medicine because they can’t be patented or when they do only because they can somehow control the intellectual property. The other feature is very positive - in that we have so much to learn about natural medicines and bioplastics.
Is turmeric-film packaging the future for supermarket shelves?
Researchers in Malaysia have developed a biopolymer film incorporating turmeric oil that stops the growth of a common food fungus and degrades well in soil. The film could provide an environmentally friendly way to extend food shelf life.
Turmeric is well known for its anti-microbial properties. Its bright orange root has been used in South Asian traditional medicine for thousands of years. Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) chemical engineer Junaidah Jai and colleagues were interested to see if they could use turmeric to stop the growth of the fungus Aspergillus niger, a common food contaminant.
They added varying amounts of turmeric oil to biopolymer films made from cassava starch, glycerol and carboxymethyl-cellulose. Different thicknesses of the films were coated onto brown packaging paper, which was then incubated with A. niger spores. The researchers found that the films were effective, with larger amounts of turmeric oil in thicker films being better at inhibiting A. niger growth.
Another signal of preventative disinfection.
the air dryers commonly used in the bathroom environment can aerosolize microbes and put them back in the air and even back on your hands. So there is room to utilize these engineered water nanostructures and develop an alternative that is airless and waterless—because it uses picogram levels of water, your hands will never get wet.
Researchers find ways to improve on soap and water
Nanosafety researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have developed a new intervention to fight infectious disease by more effectively disinfecting the air around us, our food, our hands, and whatever else harbors the microbes that make us sick. The researchers, from the School's Center for Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology, were led by Associate Professor of Aerosol Physics Philip Demokritou, the center's director, and first author Runze Huang, a postdoctoral fellow there. They used a nano-enabled platform developed at the center to create and deliver tiny, aerosolized water nonodroplets containing non-toxic, nature-inspired disinfectants wherever desired. Demokritou talked to the Gazette about the invention and its application on hand hygiene, which was described recently in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering.
It is fairly simple, you need 12 volts DC, and we combine that with electrospray and ionization to turn water into a nanoaerosol, in which these engineered nanostructures are suspended in the air. These water nanoparticles have unique properties because of their small size and also contain reactive oxygen species. These are hydroxyl radicals, peroxides, and are similar to what nature uses in cells to kill pathogens. These nanoparticles, by design, also carry an electric charge, which increases surface energy and reduces evaporation. That means these engineered nanostructures can remain suspended in air for hours. When the charge dissipates, they become water vapor and disappear.
we can now incorporate nature-inspired antimicrobials into their chemical structure. These are not super toxic to humans. For instance, my grandmother in Greece used to disinfect her surfaces with lemon juice—citric acid. Or, in milk—and also found in tears—is another highly potent antimicrobial called lysozyme. Nisin is another nature-inspired antimicrobial that bacteria release when they're competing with other bacteria.
When we put these nature-inspired antimicrobials into the engineered water nanostructures, their antimicrobial potency increases dramatically. But we do that without using huge quantities of antimicrobials, about 1 percent or 2 percent by volume. Most of the engineered water nanostructure is still water.
This is a signal not just of the transformation of global energy geopolitics - but a new level of implementation.
Works begin at Dogger Bank, the world's largest off-shore wind farm
The waters surrounding the UK have long played home to some of the world's most ambitious renewable energy projects, with a line of off-shore wind farms one-upping each other over the years to assume the mantle as the world's largest. The title will soon be changing hands once again, with construction now underway at Dogger Bank, a gigantic off-shore wind power facility being built to outsize them all.
As a sign of how quickly things are moving when it comes to wind power in the UK, consider that the 500-MW Greater Gabbard Offshore Wind Farm, with its 140 turbines, was the world's largest when it entered operation in 2008. The London Arrray with its 175 turbines and 630 MW capacity usurped it in 2013, before an extension of the Walney off shore wind farm outstripped it in 2018, with a set of 189 turbines and capacity of 659 MW.
The Dogger Bank Wind Farm near the coastal village of Ulrome in England is set to dwarf them all, with a capacity totaling 3.6 GW. A joint project between energy companies SSE Renewables and Equinor, the farm will actually be made up of three wind farm sites in the North Sea, generating 1.2 GW apiece.
This is a still a weak signal - promising a new phase of nuclear energy that is safer and smaller.
"Rolls-Royce is leading a consortium to build small modular reactors (SMRs) and install them in former nuclear sites in Cumbria or in Wales. Ultimately, the company thinks it will build between 10 and 15 of the stations in the UK."
"small nuclear reactors are not new. We have been using them on nuclear submarines and other vessels for years. What is new is commercial SMRs for grid power."
Rolls-Royce factory plan puts nuclear reactors on mini scale
Rolls-Royce plans on building mini nuclear reactors, which could be in operation by 2029. They are less then the size of traditional nuclear reactors and they do not take as many years to build.
How mini is that? Roger Harrabin and Katie Prescott reporting in the BBC: "They are about 1.5 acres in size - sitting in a 10-acre space. That is a 16th of the size of a major power station such as Hinkley Point."
The company has stated that this is a low-cost alternative for a global market. "With a modular design that's built in a factory, it can improve certainty of delivery, reduce complexity, optimize safety."
Currently, they said, "nuclear power stations are large scale sites that typically cover an area of over 400,000m2. This is because traditionally once a company has gone through the time and expense of securing an appropriate site, it was more cost effective to build as much capacity on that site as possible. Construction of these sites can take years to complete and their complexity can lead to significant delays and escalating costs."
This is another signal of the transformation of the transportation industries.
The factory will be GM's first assembly plant to be fully dedicated to building electric vehicles.
"Through this investment, GM is taking a big step forward in making our vision of an all-electric future a reality," GM President Mark Reuss said in a statement. He was to announce the plans Monday at the plant with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
GM to invest $2.2B in Detroit to build electric vehicles
General Motors is spending $2.2 billion to refurbish an underused Detroit factory so it can build a series of electric and self-driving vehicles, eventually employing 2,200 people.
GM said in a statement Monday that the factory will start building the company's first electric pickup late in 2021, followed by a funky-looking self-driving shuttle for GM's Cruise autonomous vehicle unit.
The truck will be the first of several electric vehicles to be built at the plant, which straddles the border between Detroit and the enclave of Hamtramck. The company has plans to revive the Hummer nameplate for one of the vehicles.
This is a great signal of massive 3D printing as a construction innovation.
Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, has now set a goal to make 25% of its buildings 3D-printed by 2030.
Construction Completed on Largest 3D-Printed Building in the World
At 31 feet tall and 6,900 square feet, a new building in Dubai is the largest 3D-printed building in the world — and the first two-story structure of its kind.
The most impressive part of the project? U.S. company Apis Cor built the structure using only three workers and one printer.
Proving that the printer could handle a harsh environment, Apis Cor did the printing outdoors where there was no temperature or humidity control.
However, there was a logistical issue the printer did have to tackle: The square foot area of the building was larger than the printing area of the stationary machine. To solve this technological obstacle, a crane moved the 3D printer around the site.
A great signal of the transformation of construction - illustrating the new energy geopolitics.
at the core of the project is the well itself, a multimillion-litre underground hole that extends into the bedrock from below the lowest parking level to a few metres above sea level.
The solution stored in the well — it is not just water — will act as a giant thermal battery, said Gemming, cold in the summer for air conditioning and hot in the winter for heating.
Giant Canadian construction project incorporates low carbon heating and cooling
The Well rising on the old Globe and Mail site digs for more green innovations
The company that made an international splash by air conditioning downtown Toronto without air conditioners has more energy-saving innovations in the works.
With the help of a gigantic purpose-built thermal reservoir, Enwave Energy will add an entire new neighbourhood to its underground low-carbon heating and cooling network with the project called The Well on the site that used to be headquarters for the Globe and Mail.
Not only will the seven-building retail, residential and office complex in the city's business centre be added to Enwave's lake-water cooling system, but the company is in the process of incorporating a series of revolutionary energy and carbon-saving techniques to keep residents and workers at The Well comfortable.
Another signal in the category of Moore’s Law is dead - Long live Moore’s Law.
Researchers expand microchip capability with new 3-D inductor technology
Smaller is better when it comes to microchips, researchers said, and by using 3-D components on a standardized 2-D microchip manufacturing platform, developers can use up to 100 times less chip space. A team of engineers has boosted the performance of its previously developed 3-D inductor technology by adding as much as three orders of magnitudes more induction to meet the performance demands of modern electronic devices.
In a study led by Xiuling Li, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Illinois and interim director of the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, engineers introduce a microchip inductor capable of tens of millitesla-level magnetic induction. Using fully integrated, self-rolling magnetic nanoparticle-filled tubes, the technology ensures a condensed magnetic field distribution and energy storage in 3-D space—all while keeping the tiny footprint needed to fit on a chip. The findings of the study are published in the journal Science Advances.
We have all heard about AI taking away jobs - this is an interesting signal about AI displacing (perhaps augmenting) human playing a game - this one would be FoldIt - a protein folding game played by many thousands of people.
I think that we shall be able to get a more thorough understanding of the nature of disease in general by investigating the molecules that make up the human body, including the abnormal molecules, and that this understanding will permit...the problem of disease to be attacked in a more straightforward manner such that new methods of therapy will be developed.
AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery
In our study published today in Nature, we demonstrate how artificial intelligence research can drive and accelerate new scientific discoveries. We’ve built a dedicated, interdisciplinary team in hopes of using AI to push basic research forward: bringing together experts from the fields of structural biology, physics, and machine learning to apply cutting-edge techniques to predict the 3D structure of a protein based solely on its genetic sequence.
Our system, AlphaFold – described in peer-reviewed papers now published in Nature and PROTEINS – is the culmination of several years of work, and builds on decades of prior research using large genomic datasets to predict protein structure. The 3D models of proteins that AlphaFold generates are far more accurate than any that have come before—marking significant progress on one of the core challenges in biology. The code is available here for anyone interested in learning more or replicating our results. We’re also excited by the fact that this work has already inspired other, independent implementations, including the model described in this paper, and a community-built, open source implementation, described here.
Another signal of emerging potential for ubiquitous screen that are inexpensive and paper like.
Nano-thin flexible touchscreens could be printed like newspaper
Researchers have developed an ultra-thin and ultra-flexible electronic material that could be printed and rolled out like newspaper, for the touchscreens of the future.
The touch-responsive technology is 100 times thinner than existing touchscreen materials and so pliable it can be rolled up like a tube.
To create the new conductive sheet, an RMIT University-led team used a thin film common in cell phone touchscreens and shrunk it from 3-D to 2-D, using liquid metal chemistry.
The nano-thin sheets are readily compatible with existing electronic technologies and because of their incredible flexibility, could potentially be manufactured through roll-to-roll (R2R) processing just like a newspaper.
The research, with collaborators from UNSW, Monash University and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET), is published in the journal Nature Electronics.
Well this is by far not a new signal - but it does indicate a potential breakthrough in spider silk manufacturing. A signal that keeps signaling.
A template for silk growth: Peptides bring control on many levels
Applications of silk fibers have ballooned in recent years. Traditionally attractive in textiles for its compact strength and luxurious soft sheen, silk has potential applications including filtration membranes and coatings to preserve foods, substrates for implantable electronics, and high-sensitivity biosensors. These technologies exploit not just the mechanical properties, but also the material's biocompatibility, biodegradability and intrinsic photonic properties, as well as the ability to dress the surface with optically active substances like quantum dots. No surprise, then, that scientists around the world have been hard at it to produce customized materials that exploit silk's multiple functional properties. Yet there remains a snag with silk-based biomaterials—getting the right material in scalable quantities. Now, researchers at MIT have demonstrated a way of templating the growth of silk that combines molecular control with scalable production.
This is a great signal - one that we should track. The idea of banning single use plastic is short sighted as it sustains the same business model that will seek another product. Instead we should ban landfill, waterfill and airfill - requiring every and any product to be designed for metabolizing into other products.
"This is a big deal," Tour said. "The world throws out 30% to 40% of all food, because it goes bad, and plastic waste is of worldwide concern. We've already proven that any solid carbon-based matter, including mixed plastic waste and rubber tires, can be turned into graphene."
"By strengthening concrete with graphene, we could use less concrete for building, and it would cost less to manufacture and less to transport," he said. "Essentially, we're trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that waste food would have emitted in landfills.
Lab turns trash into valuable graphene in a flash
That banana peel, turned into graphene, can help facilitate a massive reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials. While you're at it, toss in those plastic empties.
A new process introduced by the Rice University lab of chemist James Tour can turn bulk quantities of just about any carbon source into valuable graphene flakes. The process is quick and cheap; Tour said the "flash graphene" technique can convert a ton of coal, food waste or plastic into graphene for a fraction of the cost used by other bulk graphene-producing methods.
As reported in Nature, flash graphene is made in 10 milliseconds by heating carbon-containing materials to 3,000 Kelvin (about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The source material can be nearly anything with carbon content. Food waste, plastic waste, petroleum coke, coal, wood clippings and biochar are prime candidates, Tour said. "With the present commercial price of graphene being $67,000 to $200,000 per ton, the prospects for this process look superb," he said.
Tour said a concentration of as little as 0.1% of flash graphene in the cement used to bind concrete could lessen its massive environmental impact by a third. Production of cement reportedly emits as much as 8% of human-made carbon dioxide every year.
For Coffee lovers.
How to brew a better espresso, according to science
A study offers tips and tricks for a more consistent and affordable brew
New research challenges conventional wisdom that brewing a strong shot of espresso requires very finely ground coffee beans.
Well-ground beans typically are thought to be best for making strong shots because smaller grounds dissolve more readily, while water flows through such grounds more slowly — allowing more time for the water to soak up coffee.
In brewing espresso and running computer simulations of the same process, researchers found that using finer grounds generally did allow water to absorb a higher percentage of the dried coffee — but only to a point. When filtered through beans ground to the finest setting on a standard machine, the hot water extracted a lower percentage of coffee than water filtered through slightly coarser grounds, researchers report online January 22 in Matter.
Both the experiments and simulations showed that, with the finest grounds, very small particles wedge in the gaps between other particles, says Jamie Foster, a mathematician at the University of Portsmouth in England. That means water flows unevenly through the grounds, oversampling some parts while missing others, which wastes coffee and produces inconsistent flavors.
According to data on sales for a year beginning in September 2018, brewing espresso shots with 15 grams of coarse grounds rather than 20 grams of fine grounds saved more than $3,600.
This is a wonderful signal of new approaches to live theatre with audience participation and integrated technology. I encourage everyone who will be in Ottawa during the performance to join the action.
Strata Inc.
Dates: March 6, 7, 13, and 14, at 8pm
Location: Rebel.com, 377 Dalhousie Street
Tickets available here:
Written by Megan Piercey Monafu
Sound design by Johnny Wideman
As a teen, Victoria was an infamous hacker. Now a young adult, she has created a powerful virtual reality platform and agreed to work for a giant corporation to bring that platform to a huge audience. As users plunge into, trip over, and run away from the new Internet reality of VR experiences, exploring online privacy, connection, security, and access, Victoria must choose: run the multinational responsible, or escape from her own invention.
Strata Inc. is based on real developments in VR as it intersects with marketing, the world of work, and new outlets for the imagination. Strata Inc. uses individual audience headphones, sound design, and mic’d actors to echo the transportational abilities of VR while creating an in-person communal audio experience.
