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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
In the spring of 1822 an employee in one of the world’s first offices – that of the East India Company in London – sat down to write a letter to a friend. If the man was excited to be working in a building that was revolutionary, or thrilled to be part of a novel institution which would transform the world in the centuries that followed, he showed little sign of it. “You don’t know how wearisome it is”, wrote Charles Lamb, “to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four.” His letter grew ever-less enthusiastic, as he wished for “a few years between the grave and the desk”. No matter, he concluded, “they are the same.”
The world that Lamb wrote from is now long gone. The infamous East India Company collapsed in ignominy in the 1850s. Its most famous legacy, British colonial rule in India, disintegrated a century later. But his letter resonates today, because, while other empires have fallen, the empire of the office has triumphed over modern professional life.
Even before coronavirus struck, the reign of the office had started to look a little shaky. A combination of rising rents, the digital revolution and increased demands for flexible working meant its population was slowly emigrating to different milieux. More than half of the American workforce already worked remotely, at least some of the time. Across the world, home working had been rising steadily for a decade. Pundits predicted that it would increase further. No one imagined that a dramatic spike would come so soon.
It’s too early to say whether the office is done for. As with any sudden loss, many of us find our judgment blurred by conflicting emotions. Relief at freedom from the daily commute and pleasure at turning one’s back on what Philip Larkin called “the toad work” are tinged with regret and nostalgia, as we prepare for another shapeless day of WFH in jogging bottoms.
The most transformatory aspect of offices was less the buildings themselves than the sheer amount of time we spent in them. This would have seemed alien to many earlier societies. Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University, notes that elite Romans strived to switch off as much as possible. “Our division between leisure and work is reversed in the Roman world. What we mostly do is work and, when we’re not working, we’re at leisure.” In Rome it was the other way round for the elite: “The normal state of play is otium, it’s leisure. And sometimes, you’re not at leisure, you’re doing business, which is negotium.” Though the English word “business” has an inbuilt aura of action and industry, the Latin neg-otium – literally “not leisure” – has an almost grudging sense of pleasure denied.
When time-and-motion studies examine offices today, their results can be dispiriting. Office-work takes up not merely the bulk of our time but the best part of it, the hours when we are alert and alive. Home, and its occupants, has the husk.
Death of the office
Why are ‘apocalyptic’ stories of civilisational collapse so appealing in contrast with the more complex and nuanced narratives tentatively suggested by many archaeologists? At least since the early 20th century, we have been looking forward to the end, on a global scale. Spanning popular and academic culture, the father of modern futurology, H G Wells, announced in a 1902 lecture to the Royal Institution in London that:
It is impossible to show why certain things should not utterly destroy and end the human race and story; why night should not presently come down and make all our dreams and efforts vain … something from space, or pestilence, or some great disease of the atmosphere, some trailing cometary poison, some great emanation of vapour from the interior of the Earth, or new animals to prey on us, or some drug or wrecking madness in the mind of man.
Stories of mass destruction, societal breakdown and civilisational collapse run deep in our culture, from Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by a wrathful god, to the destruction of Atlantis, submerged under the sea after a massive earthquake. No matter whether literally true or not, these remain two of the most well-known stories in our society – dramatic and vivid, easy to imagine and see. The destruction of Pompeii has captivated audiences for centuries, spawning theatrical reconstructions known as ‘volcano entertainments’, replete with dancers, fireworks and an erupting volcano, novels such as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s bestselling novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), and feature films and documentaries, in addition to the many popular and scholarly books.
Do civilisations collapse?
The emergence of a global intelligent smart logistics network seems inevitable on our good days. Such is a signal of the possibility of a shift to a global consciousness and also the possibilities of global surveillance. This is a good article exploring the supply chain.
I set out to find the answer, and what I found surprised me. We consumers are not the only ones afflicted with this selective blindness. The corporations that make use of supply chains experience it too. And this partial sight, erected on a massive scale, is what makes global capitalism possible.
Supply chains are robust precisely because they’re decentralized and self-healing. In this way, these physical infrastructures distributed all over the world are very much like the invisible network that makes them possible: the internet.
Walmart demands perfect control over certain aspects of its supply chain, like price and delivery times, while at the same time refusing knowledge about other aspects, like labor practices and networks of subcontractors.
This peculiar state of knowing-while-not-knowing is not the explicit choice of any individual company but a system that’s grown up to accommodate the variety of goods that we demand, and the speed with which we want them. It’s embedded in software, as well as in the container ships that are globalization’s most visible emblem.
See No Evil
Software helps companies coordinate the supply chains that sustain global capitalism. How does the code work—and what does it conceal?
I had heard similar claims about other industries. There was the Fairphone, which aimed at its launch in 2013 to be the first ethically produced smartphone, but admitted that no one could guarantee a supply chain completely free from unfair labor practices. And of course one often hears about exploitative labor practices cropping up in the supply chains of companies like Apple and Samsung: companies that say they make every effort to monitor labor conditions in their factories.
Putting aside my cynicism for the moment, I wondered: What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain?
The thing that still confused me is how reliable supply chains are, or seem to be. The world is unpredictable—you’ve got earthquakes, labor strikes, mudslides, every conceivable tragedy—and yet as a consumer I can pretty much count on getting what I want whenever I want it. How can it be possible to predict a package’s arrival down to the hour, yet know almost nothing about the conditions of its manufacture?
In the past twenty years, popular and academic audiences have taken a growing interest in the physical infrastructure of global supply chains. The journalist Alexis Madrigal’s Containers podcast took on the question of how goods travel so far, so quickly. The writer Rose George traveled the world on a container ship for her book Ninety Percent of Everything. And Marc Levinson’s The Box startled Princeton University Press by becoming a national bestseller. Most recently, Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics offered a surprisingly engrossing history of that all-important industry.
while workplace abuses get a lot of attention when they take place in the supply chains of large, prestigious companies like Apple and Samsung, working conditions are actually most opaque and labor abuse is most rampant in other industries, like apparel and agriculture. “Apparel, every quarter they have 100 percent turnover in the clothing that they make, so it’s a whole new supply chain every season. And with food, there’s millions of farmers involved. So in these places, where there’s way too many nodes for anyone to see without a computer, and where the chain changes by the time you’ve monitored it—those are the places where we see a lot of problems and instability.”
This is an excellent account of the rise, spread and mutations of the COVID-19 virus. It also signals the progress and speed that the capacity of gene sequencing has made. The graphics are accessible and worth the view.
How Coronavirus Mutates and Spreads
The coronavirus is an oily membrane packed with genetic instructions to make millions of copies of itself. The instructions are encoded in 30,000 “letters” of RNA — a, c, g and u — which the infected cell reads and translates into many kinds of virus proteins.
A New Coronavirus Dec. 26
In December, a cluster of mysterious pneumonia cases appeared around a seafood market in Wuhan, China. In early January, researchers sequenced the first genome of a new coronavirus, which they isolated from a man who worked at the market. That first genome became the baseline for scientists to track the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it spreads around the world.
This is another good article explaining some of the confusion about SARS-CoV-2 virus.
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease that it causes. The two aren’t the same. The disease arises from a combination of the virus and the person it infects, and the society that person belongs to. Some people who become infected never show any symptoms; others become so ill that they need ventilators. Early Chinese data suggested that severe and fatal illness occurs mostly in the elderly, but in the U.S. (and especially in the South), many middle-aged adults have been hospitalized, perhaps because they are more likely to have other chronic illnesses. The virus might vary little around the world, but the disease varies a lot.
Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend
….much else about the pandemic is still maddeningly unclear. Why do some people get really sick, but others do not? Are the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been infected? How long must social restrictions go on for? Why are so many questions still unanswered?
The confusion partly arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived. Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of the uncertainty.”
But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend. ...
Deaths are hard to tally in general, and the process differs among diseases. The CDC estimates that flu kills 24,000 to 62,000 Americans every year, a number that seems superficially similar to the 58,000 COVID-19 deaths thus far. That comparison is misleading. COVID-19 deaths are counted based either on a positive diagnostic test for the coronavirus or on clinical judgment. Flu deaths are estimated through a model that looks at hospitalizations and death certificates, and accounts for the possibility that many deaths are due to flu but aren’t coded as such. If flu deaths were counted like COVID-19 deaths, the number would be substantially lower. This doesn’t mean we’re overestimating the flu. It does mean we are probably underestimating COVID-19.
A brief article providing some tips on making homemade masks and some data on their effectiveness.
Homemade masks made of silk and cotton may boost protection: study
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people wear masks in public. Because N95 and surgical masks are scarce and should be reserved for health care workers, many people are making their own coverings out of fabric. Now, a preliminary study published in ACS Nano by University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory researchers suggests that a combination of masks made of high thread-count cotton with natural silk fabric or a chiffon weave can effectively filter out aerosol particles––if the fit is good.
Though the study does not attempt to replicate real-world conditions, the findings are a useful guide. The researchers pointed out that tightly woven fabrics, such as cotton, can act as a mechanical barrier to particles; whereas fabrics that hold a static charge, like certain types of chiffon and natural silk, can serve as an electrostatic barrier. The electrostatic effect serves to suck in and hold the tiniest particles, which might otherwise slip through holes in the cotton. This is key to how N95 masks are constructed.
However, Guha added, even a small gap reduced the filtering efficiency of all masks by half or more, emphasizing the importance of a properly fitted mask.
This is an important signal for the role our microbial profile plays in maintaining a robust immune system.
Fecal transplantation improves outcomes in patients with multi-drug resistant organisms
Transferring fecal matter from the digestive systems of healthy donors to extremely ill patients who had previously been infected with drug-resistant bacteria resulted in shorter hospital stays, fewer bloodstream infections and infections that were easier to treat, according to research that was selected for presentation at Digestive Disease Week (DDW) 2020. DDW data will be published in the May online supplements to Gastroenterology and GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.
The study's researchers conducted the transfer, known as fecal microbial transplantation or FMT, in 20 patients infected during extensive medical care with multi-drug resistant organisms, including carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (such as Escherichia coli), vancomycin-resistant enterococci or extended-spectrum beta-lactamase Enterobacteriaceae. Patients were followed for six months after the transplantation and their clinical course compared with six months prior to FMT.
While the resistant bacteria were cleared in only 41 percent of the 17 patients who completed the full follow-up, researchers found other benefits to the patients, who had been repeatedly hospitalized and treated for a variety of severe conditions. The sample included hematological cancer patients in need of stem-cell transplants and kidney transplant patients with urinary and bloodstream infections with bacteria that were multi-drug resistant.
This is a fascinating signal of our growing understanding of the bioecology that maintains our health and sense of self. If the immune system is the fundamental system that recognizes ‘self’ vs ‘other’ it is interesting how much ‘self depends on other’.
Scientists study growth rate effect of gut bacteria on degradation of dietary fiber
It is known that approximately 80% of the human immune system functions within the gastrointestinal tract. Gut bacteria and their metabolites play a fundamental role in the interaction between gut and other organs. Since the organic acids produced by colon bacteria (acetate, lactate, propionate, succinate and butyrate) activate a number of immune and hormonal processes, the microbiota composed of hundreds of different bacterial species is of vital importance for the normal functioning and health of the human body.
Senior Researcher Kaarel Adamberg, head of the Microbiomics Research Group of TalTech Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, says, "Food is a crucial factor in modulating the gut microbiota and its metabolism. Very important nutrients for the colon bacteria are the dietary compounds that are not broken down by enzymes in the stomach and small intestine and, thus, reach the large intestine. A person requires at least 25 to 35 grams of fibre a day for normal bowel function. Water-binding fibers also promote the movement of food in the digestive tract."
This is an amazing signal that offers promise in the challenges of malaria as well as signaling progress in understanding disease ecologies.
Malaria 'completely stopped' by microbe
Scientists have discovered a microbe that completely protects mosquitoes from being infected with malaria.
The team in Kenya and the UK say the finding has "enormous potential" to control the disease.
Malaria is spread by the bite of infected mosquitoes, so protecting them could in turn protect people.
The researchers are now investigating whether they can release infected mosquitoes into the wild, or use spores to suppress the disease.
The malaria-blocking bug, Microsporidia MB, was discovered by studying mosquitoes on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. It lives in the gut and genitals of the insects.
The researchers could not find a single mosquito carrying the Microsporidia that was harbouring the malaria parasite. And lab experiments, published in Nature Communications, confirmed the microbe gave the mosquitoes protection.
Microsporidias are fungi, or at least closely related to them, and most are parasites.
However, this new species may be beneficial to the mosquito and was naturally found in around 5% of the insects studied.
When does something become part of our sense of self? Maybe when it becomes part of our sensorium.
"Our study shows that a prosthetic hand attached to the bone and controlled by electrodes implanted in nerves and muscles can operate much more precisely than conventional prosthetic hands. We further improved the use of the prosthesis by integrating tactile sensory feedback that the patients use to mediate how hard to grab or squeeze an object. Over time, the ability of the patients to discern smaller changes in the intensity of sensations has improved," says Max Ortiz Catalan.
Since receiving their prostheses, the patients have used them daily in all their professional and personal activities.
Mind-controlled arm prostheses that can 'feel'
For the first time, people with arm amputations can experience sensations of touch in a mind-controlled arm prosthesis that they use in everyday life. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine reports on three Swedish patients who have lived for several years with this new technology, one of the world's most integrated interfaces between humans and machines.
The advance is unique: The patients have used a mind-controlled prosthesis in everyday life for up to seven years. For the last few years, they have also lived with a new function—sensations of touch in the prosthetic hand. This is a new concept for artificial limbs, which are called neuromusculoskeletal prostheses, as they are connected to the user's nerves, muscles and skeleton.
"The most important contribution of this study was to demonstrate that this new type of prosthesis is a clinically viable replacement for a lost arm. No matter how sophisticated a neural interface becomes, it can only deliver real benefit to patients if the connection between the patient and the prosthesis is safe and reliable in the long term. Our results are the product of many years of work, and now we can finally present the first bionic arm prosthesis that can be reliably controlled using implanted electrodes, while also conveying sensations to the user in everyday life," continues Max Ortiz Catalan.
The discovery to the memristor happened about 12 years ago and promised some significant new computational capabilities. The excitement then was overblown - but progress continues - especially in combination with AI. This is a weak signal of the emergence of new computational capabilities.
A 3-D memristor-based circuit for brain-inspired computing
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate have recently created a 3-D computing circuit that could be used to map and implement complex machine learning algorithms, such convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This 3-D circuit, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, comprises eight layers of memristors; electrical components that regulate the electrical current flowing in a circuit and directly implement neural network weights in hardware.
"Previously, we developed a very reliable memristive device that meets most requirements of in-memory computing for artificial neural networks, integrated the devices into large 2-D arrays and demonstrated a wide variety of machine intelligence applications," Prof. Qiangfei Xia, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "In our recent study, we decided to extend it to the third dimension, exploring the benefit of a rich connectivity in a 3-D neural network."
Essentially, Prof. Xia and his team were able to experimentally demonstrate a 3-D computing circuit with eight memristor layers, which can all be engaged in computing processes. Their circuit differs greatly from other previously developed 3-D circuits, such as 3-D NAND flash, as these systems are usually comprised of layers with different functions (e.g. a sensor layer, a computing layer, a control layer, etc.) stacked or bonded together.
This is a great weak signal for the future of the ‘quantified self’, social science research (e.g. like the sociometric badge) and the return of Google glass.
FitByte uses sensors on eyeglasses to automatically monitor diet
A new wearable from researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science helps wearers track their food habits with high fidelity.
FitByte, a noninvasive, wearable sensing system, combines the detection of sound, vibration and movement to increase accuracy and decrease false positives. It could help users reach their health goals by tracking behavioral patterns, and gives practitioners a tool to understand the relationship between diet and disease and to monitor the efficacy of treatment.
The device tracks all stages of food intake. It detects chewing, swallowing, hand-to-mouth gestures and visuals of intake, and can be attached to any pair of consumer eyeglasses. "The primary sensors on the device are accelerometers and gyroscopes, which are in almost every device at this point, like your phones and your watches.," said Mayank Goel, an assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
An infrared proximity sensor detects hand-to-mouth gestures. To identify chewing, the system monitors jaw motion using four gyroscopes around the wearer's ears. The sensors look behind the ear to track the flexing of the temporal muscle as the user moves their jaw. High-speed accelerometers placed near the glasses' earpiece perceive throat vibrations during swallowing. This technology addresses the longstanding challenge of accurately detecting drinking, and the intake of soft things like yogurt and ice cream.
Speaking of the ‘quantified self’ here’s a great weak signal of the emerging digital environment augmented with virtual information.
'Not just weeds': how rebel botanists are using graffiti to name forgotten flora
Pavement chalking to draw attention to wild flowers and plants in urban areas has gone viral across Europe – but UK chalkers could face legal action
Arising international force of rebel botanists armed with chalk has taken up street graffiti to highlight the names and importance of the diverse but downtrodden flora growing in the cracks of paths and walls in towns and cities across Europe.
The idea of naming wild plants wherever they go – which began in France – has gone viral, with people chalking and sharing their images on social media. More than 127,000 people have liked a photo of chalked-up tree names in a London suburb, while a video of botanist Boris Presseq of Toulouse Museum of Natural History chalking up names to highlight street flowers in the French city has had 7m views.
This is a good signal on a number of levels. One basic signal is that science is a deeply social collaborative effort. This is important to remember when we think the world is falling apart. This is also a signal of the ongoing work in profound basic science that will change this century. We have barely begun to see Big Data.
ALICE's 1,917 participants from 177 institutes and 40 nations are united in trying to better understand the nature of matter at extreme temperature and density.
Read's team delivered 3,276 circuit boards (plus 426 spares) for readout of the half a million TPC channels. The electronics upgrade makes it possible to digitize and distribute 5 million samples per second per channel.
"Non-stop data output totaling 3 terabytes per second will flow from the Time Projection Chamber, 24/7, during data taking," Read explained. "Historically, many experiments have dealt with megabyte per second, or even gigabyte per second, data rates. Real-time processing of streaming scientific data at 3 terabytes per second is approaching unique in the world. This is a big data problem of immense proportions."
Major upgrades of particle detectors and electronics prepare CERN experiment to stream a data tsunami
For a gargantuan nuclear physics experiment that will generate big data at unprecedented rates—called A Large Ion Collider Experiment, or ALICE—the University of Tennessee has worked with the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to lead a group of U.S. nuclear physicists from a suite of institutions in the design, development, mass production and delivery of a significant upgrade of novel particle detectors and state-of-the art electronics, with parts built all over the world and now undergoing installation at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
"This upgrade brings entirely new capabilities to the ALICE experiment," said Thomas M. Cormier, project director of the ALICE Barrel Tracking Upgrade (BTU), which includes an electronics overhaul that is among the biggest ever undertaken by DOE's Office of Nuclear Physics.
