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 Many Vital Uses of Sugars
There’s a reason why genomics and proteomics have leapt ahead of glycomics: The sheer complexity of sugars makes them more difficult to study. DNA, RNA and proteins are linear molecules built according to defined sets of rules, and scientists have the tools to sequence, analyze and manipulate them. But glycans are branching structures that assemble without a known template. The same site on two identical proteins might be occupied by very different glycans, for instance. Glycans also have exponentially more potential configurations than DNA or proteins: Three different nucleotides can make six distinct DNA sequences; three amino acids can make six unique peptides; three glycan building blocks can form more than a thousand structures. Glycans are flexible, wobbly and variable; intricate, dynamic and somewhat unpredictable. Their analysis demands greater technical expertise and more sophisticated equipment.
Without taking sugars into account, we can’t fully understand how proteins and cells interact and function. “Imagine a world in which each of us knew only a fraction of the alphabet,” wrote Jamey Marth, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a recent letter to Nature Cell Biology.
Sugary Camouflage on Coronavirus Offers Vaccine Clues
In complex environments, the way to proficiency is to recombine successful elements to create new versions, some of which may thrive.
the new networks involve relations of dynamic interdependence. … Minimal hierarchy, organizational diversity and responsiveness characterize these architectures. They are a necessary response to the increasing fuzziness of strategic horizons and short half-life of designs. Because of greater complexity, coordination cannot be planned in advance. Authority needs to be distributed; it is no longer delegated vertically but emerges horizontally. Under distributed authority work teams and knowledge workers need to be accountable to other work teams and other knowledge workers. Achievement depends on learning by mutual accountability and responsiveness.
Success is based on continuous redefinition of the organization itself. It is about recombining options and contributions in a competitive and cooperative environment. Creativity is the default state of all human work. Even the most creative people are more remixers of other peoples’ ideas than lone inventors. Technology and development in general are not isolated acts by independent thinkers, but a complex storyline.
Collaborative and Competitive Creativity
For decades, Lovelock has warned of the global heating that will permanently alter human and nonhuman ways of life. His recent publications reveal an understanding, shared with Spinoza, that these natural transformations are profoundly amoral. Gaia strives to preserve itself, to preserve life as such: Gaia, God or nature doesn’t have any interest in preserving this or that species, or any particular configuration of the Earth. Lovelock also shares with Spinoza the understanding that human transformations of the Earth are part of nature, however much we might think of certain actions as harming or destroying nature. By seeking our own advantage and transforming our environment, human beings don’t destroy nature: we are nature, transforming itself. The effects of these activities are, from nature’s point of view, neither good nor bad.
For Spinoza, ‘power’ (potentia) refers to a thing’s capacity to be what it is and to act from its nature. Each thing strives to persevere in its being, to seek its own advantage, and to do those things that follow from its nature to achieve these ends. Spinoza links power to virtue and explains that the more we strive for what is advantageous to our being and acting, the more powerful, and therefore virtuous, we are. We seek to do those things that preserve our being and increase our power to act. As we act in ways that are good for us but bad for nature, it is easy to see how our power appears fearful. Seeking to preserve our being and increase our power to act involves being bound up in complex systems of energy extraction and food production that contribute directly to climate change.
Fear of our own power means that we fear what follows from our own nature: we fear our essential tendency to seek our advantage. We fear our power only to the extent that we doubt its effects. Fear is a sadness that arises from imagining an uncertain future outcome. Once doubt about the future has been removed, fear becomes either despair or confidence. Where there is doubt about the outcome of seeking our advantage, we fear our power; where there is no doubt that our actions are destructive, we despair of it.
We are nature
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying were:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
This is a long read - but well worth it.
The first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected. In fact, disasters, I found while living through a medium-sized one (the 1989 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area) and later writing about major ones (including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 TÅhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan), are crash courses in those connections.
I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.
Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do is return to things as they were.
'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope
In the midst of fear and isolation, we are learning that profound, positive change is possible.
Disasters begin suddenly and never really end. The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be what they were at the outset of this year. The particulars are startling: companies such as GE and Ford retooling to make ventilators, the scramble for protective gear, once-bustling city streets becoming quiet and empty, the economy in freefall. Things that were supposed to be unstoppable stopped, and things that were supposed to be impossible – extending workers’ rights and benefits, freeing prisoners, moving a few trillion dollars around in the US – have already happened.
The word “crisis” means, in medical terms, the crossroads a patient reaches, the point at which she will either take the road to recovery or to death. The word “emergency” comes from “emergence” or “emerge”, as if you were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient. The word “catastrophe” comes from a root meaning a sudden overturning.
We have reached a crossroads, we have emerged from what we assumed was normality, things have suddenly overturned. One of our main tasks now – especially those of us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties – is to understand this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make possible.
A disaster (which originally meant “ill-starred”, or “under a bad star”) changes the world and our view of it. Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges. Change is not only possible, we are swept away by it. We ourselves change as our priorities shift, as intensified awareness of mortality makes us wake up to our own lives and the preciousness of life. Even our definition of “we” might change as we are separated from schoolmates or co-workers, sharing this new reality with strangers. Our sense of self generally comes from the world around us, and right now, we are finding another version of who we are.
As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were having trouble focusing and being productive. It was, I suspected, because we were all doing other, more important work. When you’re recovering from an illness, pregnant or young and undergoing a growth spurt, you’re working all the time, especially when it appears you’re doing nothing. Your body is growing, healing, making, transforming and labouring below the threshold of consciousness. As we struggled to learn the science and statistics of this terrible scourge, our psyches were doing something equivalent. We were adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world.
When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.…..
For anyone wanting an excellent home made mask - this article has a link to DIY instructions.
The name N95 comes from the fact the masks filter 95% of airborne particles, such as viruses. Lab results show Tommye's masks block 96.5%.
This nurse didn't just create a replacement N95 mask—hers works better
As Tommye Austin made her way around the COVID-19 unit, she saw patients on ventilators fighting for each breath. She heard nurses, respiratory therapists and other workers talking about how anxious they were about being exposed to the coronavirus, and perhaps spreading it to their loved ones.
N95s weren't intended for all-day use, so they tend to carve painful, unsightly marks into noses, cheeks and chins. Hers don't.
With nowhere for exhaled carbon dioxide to escape, N95 wearers sometimes suffer dizziness or headaches. Hers have an air pocket so the C02 floats away.
The "TM 2020"—the letters stand for "Tommye Mask"—took about 10 days to create. And 24 hours to become an internet sensation.
The hospital was so inundated with requests for details that it posted step-by-step instructions later that week. (unlike Tommye Scribd requires you to sign up for a free account if you want to download the instructions).
This is a vitally important signal for adaptive re-imagining of our political economies and the future - not of work - but of how to enable every single person to create value in the digital environment of the rapidly emerging future.
Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds
First major study of scheme comes as economic toll of coronavirus prompts fresh interest in idea
Europe’s first national, government-backed basic income experiment did not do much to encourage recipients into work but did improve their mental wellbeing, confidence and life satisfaction, according to the first big study of a Finnish scheme that has attracted fresh interest in the coronavirus outbreak.
“The basic income recipients were more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain than the control group,” the study, by researchers at Helsinki University, concluded. “They also had a more positive perception of their economic welfare.”
The study comes as the devastating economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis - including soaring unemployment worldwide - sparks renewed interest in basic income schemes. The pope suggested in his Easter address that “this may be the time to consider a universal basic wage”.
The Spanish government said last month it aimed to roll out a basic income “as soon as possible” to about a million of the country’s poorest households, with the economic affairs minister, Nadia Calviño, saying the Socialist-led government hoped a universal basic income would become “a permanent instrument”.
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said this week the virus and its economic consequences had “made me much, much more strongly of the view that [universal basic income] is an idea that’s time has come”.
The adult entertainment industries have always been on the cutting edge or technology - adopting before other industries technologies, strategies. They may provide some important lessons for the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic - which will be challenging and vital to succeed.
“In many ways, what they are doing is a model for what we are trying to do with Covid,” said Ashish Jha, a physician who directs Harvard University’s Global Health Institute and has been calling for widespread national testing to contain the coronavirus. “The adult film industry teaches us that as a proof of concept, this can work. We just have to scale it up.”
Performers say they have a lot to teach the rest of the post-Covid-19 world. “We’re already used to working in an environment of risk. That’s something the rest of the normal world is just learning to do,”
Why the porn industry has a lot to teach us about safety in the Covid-19 era
LOS ANGELES — As states and employers furiously develop plans to safely reopen workplaces in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they’re grappling with what seems like an endless list of questions: where to test, who to test, and how often to test for the virus? Further complicating matters are issues of workers’ privacy, geography, politics, science, and cost. It’s a difficult mandate. But there is one place to look for guidance — the adult film industry.
Since the late 1990s, when an outbreak of HIV infections threatened to shutter the multibillion-dollar industry, the mainstream porn community has implemented procedures that require all performers to be tested for HIV and a host of other sexually transmitted infections every 14 days before they can be cleared to work. Any HIV-positive test leads to an immediate shutdown of all U.S. sets, followed by detailed contact tracing before sets can reopen. While not perfect, those in the industry say the nationwide PASS program works to protect thousands of performers, ensures safer workplaces, and curtails the spread of disease.
In the 20 years it has been in place, PASS has met, and overcome, many of the same challenges that any large-scale coronavirus testing program might encounter, from issues of keeping databases of private medical information secure, preventing the forging of test results, dealing with false positive results, and educating workers about the need for repeated testing to keep workplaces safe. Those devising strategies to reopen workplaces and the larger economy during the coronavirus pandemic say their plans would involve, at their core, processes of rigorous testing, isolation, and contact tracing similar to those used in the adult film industry.
We are learning so much about biology - if only we could treat ‘fat heads’. This is a promising signal for enabling better health for humans suffering abundance of food.
"We've developed a proof of concept here that you can regulate weight gain by modulating the activity of these inflammatory cells," said principal investigator Steven L. Teitelbaum, MD, the Wilma and Roswell Messing Professor of Pathology & Immunology. "It might work in a number of ways, but we believe it may be possible to control obesity and the complications of obesity by better regulating inflammation."
Obesity prevented in mice treated with gene-disabling nanoparticles
Disabling a gene in specific mouse cells, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have prevented mice from becoming obese, even after the animals had been fed a high-fat diet.
The researchers blocked the activity of a gene in immune cells. Because these immune cells—called macrophages—are key inflammatory cells and because obesity is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation, the researchers believe that reducing inflammation may help regulate weight gain and obesity.
The study is published May 1 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
When people are obese, they burn fewer calories than those who are not obese. The same is true for mice. But according to co-first author Wei Zou, MD, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology and immunology, the researchers found that obese mice maintained the same level of calorie burning as mice that were not obese—after the research team deleted the ASXL2 gene in the macrophages of the obese mice and, in a second set of experiments, after they injected the animals with nanoparticles that interfere with the gene's activity.
This is an important signal - relating to the death of Moore’s Law - Long Live Moore’s Law. Yes - this is not specifically about integrated circuits and chips - but it is about exponential progress in computational capabilities.
AI and Efficiency
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012 the amount of compute needed to train a neural net to the same performance on ImageNet classification has been decreasing by a factor of 2 every 16 months. Compared to 2012, it now takes 44 times less compute to train a neural network to the level of AlexNet (by contrast, Moore’s Law would yield an 11x cost improvement over this period). Our results suggest that for AI tasks with high levels of recent investment, algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency.
Algorithmic improvement is a key factor driving the advance of AI. It’s important to search for measures that shed light on overall algorithmic progress, even though it’s harder than measuring such trends in compute.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is a great signal of emerging capacity to see more than ever before - even the movement of light.
"We envision applications in a rich variety of extremely fast phenomena, such as ultrashort light propagation, wave propagation, nuclear fusion, photon transport in clouds and biological tissues, and fluorescent decay of biomolecules, among other things,"
New ultrafast camera takes 70 trillion pictures per second
The new camera developed in the lab of Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, is capable of taking as many as 70 trillion frames per second. That is fast enough to see waves of light traveling and the fluorescent decay of molecules.
The camera technology, which Wang calls compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP), is similar in some respects to previous fast cameras he has built, such as his phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography, or pCUP, device, which can take 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena.
This is another signal of the advancing trajectory of human ability to sense - in this case visually.
"It may be possible for a modified mobile phone to have images of the nano-world,"
Through very precise control of these LEDs, which are about 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, the ChipScope imaging system has a spatial resolution of just below 200 nanometres—which is the usual limit with visible light.
It could readily provide images of airborne nanoparticles, including those smaller than 2.5 microns, considered the most dangerous to human health.
'Microscope on a chip' could bring medical expertise to distant patients
Scientists are reducing the size and costs of medical microscopes to make it possible to use them more widely, and hook them up to experts able to diagnose an illness even from far away.
Falling ill in a remote part of the world can mean difficulty in finding the right care. Even where medical help may be available, it may be impossible to get a definitive diagnosis because of a lack of specialist expertise and laboratory equipment, such as microscopes.
Advanced miniaturisation means patients could benefit from a 'microscope on a chip," according to Dr. Angel Dieguez, senior lecturer in the Department of Electronics and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Barcelona, Spain.
He runs a project called ChipScope, which uses some of the smallest light sources ever manufactured to push the limits of conventional optics, in a device potentially compact enough to fit in a pocket.
Dr. Dieguez estimates the microscope and control electronics cost less than €1,000 for the prototype being developed, and that further development and economies of scale could bring this down to as little as €10 or so.
This is a weak signal - but is seriously important of the trajectory of new science breakthroughs and new ways of sensing.
Scientists demonstrate quantum radar prototype
Physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have invented a new radar prototype that uses quantum entanglement as a method of object detection. This successful integration of quantum mechanics into devices could significantly impact the biomedical and security industries. The research is published in the journal Science Advances.
Now, scientists from the research group of Professor Johannes Fink at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) along with collaborators Stefano Pirandola from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of York, UK, and David Vitali from the University of Camerino, Italy—have demonstrated a new type of detection technology called microwave quantum illumination that utilizes entangled microwave photons as a method of detection. The prototype, which is also known as a quantum radar, is able to detect objects in noisy thermal environments where classical radar systems often fail. The technology has potential applications for ultra-low power biomedical imaging and security scanners.
Using quantum entanglement as a new form of detection
The working principles behind the device are simple: Instead of using conventional microwaves, the researchers entangle two groups of photons, which are called the signal and idler photons. The signal photons are sent out towards the object of interest, whilst the idler photons are measured in relative isolation, free from interference and noise. When the signal photons are reflected back, true entanglement between the signal and idler photons is lost, but a small amount of correlation survives, creating a signature or pattern that describes the existence or the absence of the target object—irrespective of the noise within the environment.
Understanding ourselves and any part of ourselves (e.g. the brain) has always depended on some metaphor - from an internal homunculus to a mechanical automaton to a computer. Advances always arise when we can evolve our metaphors - especially when incorporating the necessity of error in learning.
Researchers develop a new model for how the brain processes complex information
The human brain is a highly advanced information processor composed of more than 86 billion neurons. Humans are adept at recognizing patterns from complex networks, such as languages, without any formal instruction. Previously, cognitive scientists tried to explain this ability by depicting the brain as a highly optimized computer, but there is now discussion among neuroscientists that this model might not accurately reflect how the brain works.
Now, Penn researchers have developed an different model for how the brain interprets patterns from complex networks. Published in Nature Communications, this new model shows that the ability to detect patterns stems in part from the brain's goal to represent things in the simplest way possible. Their model depicts the brain as constantly balancing accuracy with simplicity when making decisions. The work was conducted by physics Ph.D. student Christopher Lynn, neuroscience Ph.D. student Ari Kahn, and professor Danielle Bassett.
This new model is built upon the idea that people make mistakes while trying to make sense of patterns, and these errors are essential to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. "If you look at a pointillist painting up close, you can correctly identify every dot. If you step back 20 feet, the details get fuzzy, but you'll gain a better sense of the overall structure," says Lynn.
This is still a weak signal - but also an important indicator of progress in domesticating photosynthesis.
Cyber-spinach turns sunlight into sugar
Combination of biological membrane and artificial chemistry could power future synthetic organisms.
There’s a new way to eat carbon dioxide. Researchers have built an artificial version of a chloroplast, the photosynthetic structures inside plant cells. It uses sunlight and a laboratory-designed chemical pathway to turn CO2 into sugar.
Artificial photosynthesis could be used to drive tiny, non-living, solar-powered factories that churn out therapeutic drugs. And because the new chemical pathway is more efficient than anything nature has evolved, the team hopes that a similar process could some day even help to remove CO2 from the atmosphere — although it is not clear whether it could be turned into a large-scale, economically feasible operation. The work was published in Science on 7 May
Although it’s just a proof of principle, it’s already possible to think of ways in which the artificial chloroplasts could be put to work, the authors say. Because of advances in synthetic biology, microbes can now be engineered to churn out useful molecules such as pharmaceutical drugs. But there are limits to what can be synthesized inside living cells. Erb says that the artificial chloroplasts could power non-living mini-reactors to produce molecules that living cells cannot.
