Thursday, June 4, 2020

Friday Thinking 5 June 2020

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.

To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.

'There are times, when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.'

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9

Content

Quotes:

A touch of absurdity can help to wrap your mind around reality

Review of Stuart Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics and Its Parallel with McLuhan’s Reversal of Cause and Effect

Are there laws of history?

The power thinker


Articles:

How a Canadian Newsroom Launched a Co-Op to Save Itself from Bankruptcy

African scientists leverage open hardware

Teens on TikTok are exposing a generational rift between parents and kids over how they treat Black Lives Matter protests

Society Is Becoming Germaphobic. Let’s Not Stay That Way.

The information theory of individuality

The Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD)

Humans and Neanderthals: Less different than polar and brown bears

City foxes are becoming more similar to domesticated dogs as they adapt to their environment

New molecule stops drug cravings in mice, with fewer side effects

New technology enables fast protein synthesis

Researchers develop 'poisoned arrow' to defeat antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Spreading the Word on a Possible Alzheimer’s Treatment

What happens when we experience the ‘Ground’ as the ‘Figure’?





According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world. The findings also suggest new ways to improve education, and even help to explain our responses to some of the more absurd political events of recent years.


The meaning maintenance model was first proposed by three psychologists – Steven Heine, Travis Proulx and Kathleen Vohs – in 2006. They were inspired by the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, who argued that the human mind continuously attempts to construct a view of reality as a single, coherent whole – an urge he described in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) as ‘nostalgia for unity’.


Heine and his team proposed that our mental representation of the world is like a delicate web of interconnected beliefs, documenting the relations between ourselves and the people, places and objects around us. When we are confronted with an apparently inexplicable event that appears to break that framework, we feel profound uncertainty – the ‘feeling of the absurd’.

A touch of absurdity can help to wrap your mind around reality

https://psyche.co/ideas/a-touch-of-absurdity-can-help-to-wrap-your-mind-around-reality?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=9fe151e629-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_25_07_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-9fe151e629-71392152 




Kauffman (2019, 12 - 13) states that Weinberg is categorically wrong and points out, “One thing missing in the world according to physics is the crucial idea of agency… Given agency, meaning exists in the universe.” He then asks "How did the universe get from matter to mattering? In the meaningless, numb universe of Weinberg, where does mattering come from?” Mattering, in Kauffman’s play on words, is simply meaning or information and information is about the informing of a living agent that is able to

propagate its organization. Physics has no explanation of agency or an agent capable of propagating its organization.


A living agent to create and propagate its organization must be able to take energy from its environment and convert it into work which requires constraints. The constraint of the cylinder in an automobile engine that directs the energy of the gasoline air mixture explosion to push against the piston and hence do work is an example of the necessity of constraints to do work. In a paper entitled Propagating Organization: An Enquiry (Kauffman, Logan, et al. 2007) we argued that the constraints are information and hence possess meaning or meaningfulness. According to Kauffman, this ability for a system to self-organize in such a way as to propagate its organization is the extra ingredient that cannot be explained by physics.

Review of Stuart Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics and Its Parallel with McLuhan’s Reversal of Cause and Effect

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj/article/view/34237/26220




When datasets are created and archives accessed digitally, users aren’t viewing a simple facsimile of the original materials. They are looking at computer files that will have undergone a series of transformations that mask the assumptions built into the digital architecture, as well as the conditions under which the data was produced. Besides, for the majority of historians, ‘historical facts’ are not discrete items that exist independently, awaiting scholars who will hunt them down, gather them up and catalogue them safely. They need to be created and interpreted. Textual archives might seem relatively easy to reproduce, for example, but, just as with archaeological digs, the physical context in which documents are found is essential to their interpretation: what groups, or items, or experiences did past generations value and record, and which of these must be salvaged from the margins of the archives? What do the marginalia tell us about how the meanings of words have changed?


Mathematical, data-driven, quantitative models of human experience that aim at detachment, objectivity and the capacity to develop and test hypotheses need to be balanced by explicitly fictional, qualitative and imaginary efforts to create and project a lived future that enable their audiences to empathically ground themselves in the hopes and fears of what might be to come. Both, after all, are unequivocally doing the same thing: using history and historical experience to anticipate the global future so that we might – should we so wish – avoid civilisation’s collapse. That said, the question of who ‘we’ are does, always, remain open.

Are there laws of history?

https://aeon.co/essays/if-history-was-more-like-science-would-it-predict-the-future?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PRELAUNCH_PSYCHE_WEEKLY&utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=022dd70458-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_14_02_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-022dd70458-69459217 




Foucault argued that if you look at the way in which prisons operate, that is, at their mechanics, it becomes evident that they are designed not so much to lock away criminals as to submit them to training rendering them docile. Prisons are first and foremost not houses of confinement but departments of correction. The crucial part of this institution is not the cage of the prison cell, but the routine of the timetables that govern the daily lives of prisoners. What disciplines prisoners is the supervised morning inspections, the monitored mealtimes, the work shifts, even the ‘free time’ overseen by a panoply of attendants including armed guards and clipboard-wielding psychologists.


Importantly, all of the elements of prison surveillance are continuously made visible. That is why his book’s French title Surveiller et punir, more literally ‘Surveil and Punish’, is important. Prisoners must be made to know that they are subject to continual oversight. The purpose of constant surveillance is not to scare prisoners who are thinking of escaping, but rather to compel them to regard themselves as subject to correction. From the moment of morning rise to night’s lights out, the prisoners are subject to ceaseless behavioural inspection.


The crucial move of imprisonment is that of coaxing prisoners to learn how to inspect, manage and correct themselves. If effectively designed, supervision renders prisoners no longer in need of their supervisors. For they will have become their own attendant. This is docility.

The power thinker

https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PRELAUNCH_PSYCHE_WEEKLY&utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=022dd70458-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_14_02_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-022dd70458-69459217 





This is a good even if weak signal of a possible future trajectory for news media enterprises.

“If last fall we didn’t feel the community was ready to donate, contribute and participate, we probably would have had to stop everything,” said Gilles Carignan, Le Soleil’s director general. “Now, the focus on the community is clearer than ever.”

Readers’ eagerness to support the newsroom financially provided an unexpected jolt. “The biggest surprise for us at the time was a lot of readers wrote to us to say they wanted to help, saying, ‘Hey, I want to maintain local information in Quebec. But I don’t want paper, and you give everything free on the web,’” recalled Carignan.

How a Canadian Newsroom Launched a Co-Op to Save Itself from Bankruptcy

https://gijn.org/2020/05/29/how-a-canadian-newsroom-launched-a-co-op-to-save-itself-from-bankruptcy/ 

As COVID-19 has brought newsrooms worldwide to their knees, one French Canadian outlet is flourishing — less than a year after going bankrupt.


Quebec City’s Le Soleil doubled its number of readers this spring as the pandemic swept the globe. The French-language daily newspaper converted this into 3,500 new subscribers by the end of April, including 1,000 over a single 10-day period, according to Simon Audet, Le Soleil’s head of digital development.


Driving this success is a revamped, reader-first editorial strategy. But first, Le Soleil had to stave off bankruptcy. They did so by forming Canada’s largest newsroom cooperative. Along the way, they found their readers were eager to help save their local news source.


The co-op business model was just a first step. Any sustainable path forward for Le Soleil required an overhauled editorial approach, too, explained Carignan.


As Le Soleil restructured last fall, newsroom staff reached out to readers. They invested in conversations with them, and welcomed feedback. Readers wanted more than just surface-level reporting, Le Soleil found. “[Our readers] gave us all the answers we needed to adjust our content,” said Carignan. “People want content. They will be ready to invest in us, to subscribe if we give them local news but with substance.”



Another important signal of the future of citizen and open-source science and more.

“Open-science hardware is not only important in Africa but all over the world,” Chagas says. “If you have the blueprint for a piece of equipment, you can understand how it works. You can repair your equipment if it breaks down, and, even more importantly, adapt it to your local needs.”

African scientists leverage open hardware

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01606-z?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=ca5b00045f-briefing-dy-20200602&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-ca5b00045f-43585533 

A growing emphasis on do-it-yourself science is helping researchers to equip labs in resource-limited areas.

Founded in 2011 by Lucia Prieto-Godino, now at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Sadiq Yusuf at the Uganda Technology and Management University in Kampala and Tom Baden at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, TReND in Africa encourages do-it-yourself research with a focus on low-cost, open-source science. Courses cover such topics as fly genetics, neuroscience and hardware development.


In one example, TReND in Africa instructor and University of Sussex bioengineer André Maia Chagas joined a team including Prieto-Godino and Baden in 2017 to design a microscope. It was built using off-the-shelf and 3D-printed components, and dubbed the €100 lab.


At US$122.91, the device is a fraction of the cost of commercial systems, which can amount to $6,000 or more. The resulting paper in HardwareX helped Kumbol to secure funding from the Mozilla Foundation to organize a follow-up workshop last July at the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, Ghana. He has demonstrated Actifield at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and has built actimeters for the science department there.



What a fascinating signal that sort of blows up the notion of people on social media being in a bubble or echo-chamber. It also signals the challenge of educating and socializing the digital natives that are coming of age now and will come of age in the future.

Teens on TikTok are exposing a generational rift between parents and kids over how they treat Black Lives Matter protests

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/ 

TikTok has been flooded with #blacklivesmatter content following the killing of George Floyd in police custody, and the subsequent protests that have rippled across the globe. 

Many Gen Z kids have found themselves clashing with parents over racial justice issues.


Now, some are taking to TikTok to express their frustration over the difficult conversations they're having with the parents and relatives to bring them up to speed on the Black Lives Matter movement.


Social media is awash with earnest shows of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The best of these posts have been materially useful to the cause. Others, less so. But on TikTok, Gen Z is modeling the most important tenet of allyship: taking it upon yourself to research, point out, and confront racism, especially when it feels risky or uncomfortable to do so.  



This is an important signal for the future of our health.

Society Is Becoming Germaphobic. Let’s Not Stay That Way.

https://undark.org/2020/05/28/dont-stay-germaphobic/?ref=briefingday.com&curator=briefingday.com&utm_source=briefingday.com&utm_medium=email 

LET’S FACE IT. We’re all germaphobes now.

what if this anxiety crystallizes into a long-term, habitual fear of germs? I believe that such a cultural shift wouldn’t just be unhelpful, it would potentially be a danger to public health — and to the broader social sphere.


To understand why, it’s helpful to remind ourselves that viruses can have beneficial effects. Some viruses, including many bacteriophages, possess life-saving medical powers. Others, including herpesviruses, can lead to serious infections, but in their dormant state may also train the human immune system to fight Listeria food poisoning and bubonic plague. And studies have shown that moderate levels of exposure to pathogenic viruses during early childhood can offer a protective effect later on in life. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2016, for instance, found that children who attended daycare before their first birthday experienced fewer bouts of stomach flu later in childhood than peers who didn’t attend daycare. (That study tracked participants only up to age six, though the authors suggest that the protective effect may extend much longer.) In an attempt to completely rid our lives of viruses, we could rob ourselves of some of the protections they afford.


Moreover, the sanitizers and soaps we’re using to immobilize the new coronavirus can also wipe out bacteria that are essential to human health. The human microbiome, the diverse collection of microbes living in and on the human body, has now been established as hugely important to digestive health, metabolic function, and immune responses. Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, noted in an interview with Popular Science that hand sanitizer can disturb the microbiome of our skin. (This may allow more dangerous pathogens to take root.) Used excessively, Eisen added, hand sanitizers might also promote antibiotic resistance, another public health threat.



This is a very interesting signal of the future of our understanding of identity and the individual.

From the perspective of physics and chemistry, biological life is surprising. There is no physical or chemical theory from which we can predict biology, and yet if we break down any biological system into its elementary constituents, there is no chemistry or physics remaining unaccounted for

 recent work suggests that viruses like microbes form collective units that facilitate infection .... These observations suggest that viruses in aggregate are individuals but not in the conventional sense. Rather they are what Krakauer …  has called “chimerical individuals.” 

without a rigorous definition of both the environment and the agent it is difficult to speak consistently of individuals. This is analogous to figure-ground separation in gestalt psychology or computer vision. The background of an image carries as much if not more information than the object, and the challenge is to separate the two rather than assume that they are already distinct and independent.

The information theory of individuality

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7.pdf 

Abstract 

Despite the near universal assumption of individuality in biology, there is little agreement about what individuals are and few rigorous quantitative methods for their identification. Here, we propose that individuals are aggregates that preserve a measure of temporal integrity, i.e., “propagate” information from their past into their futures. We formalize this idea using information theory and graphical models. This mathematical formulation yields three principled and distinct forms of individuality—an organismal, a colonial, and a driven form—each of which varies in the degree of environmental dependence and inherited information. This approach can be thought of as a Gestalt approach to evolution where selection makes figure-ground (agent–environment) distinctions using suitable information-theoretic lenses. A benefit of the approach is that it expands the scope of allowable individuals to include adaptive aggregations in systems that are multi-scale, highly distributed, and do not necessarily have physical boundaries such as cell walls or clonal somatic tissue. Such individuals might be visible to selection but hard to detect by observers without suitable measurement principles. The information theory of individuality allows for the identification of individuals at all levels of organization from molecular to cultural and provides a basis for testing assumptions about the natural scales of a system and argues for the importance of uncertainty reduction through coarse-graining in adaptive systems. 


The question we seek to address is more limited. How do we identify individuals without relying on features like cell membranes that may be solutions to challenges faced by particular systems for maintaining integrity rather than foundational properties? We want to allow for the possibility that microbes and loosely bound ecological assemblages such as microbial mats and cultural and technological systems, when viewed with a mathematical lens, qualify as individuals even though their boundaries are more fluid than the organisms we typically allow. It may also be the case that entities currently considered individuals are indeed individuals but not in the way we think—organisms are more complicated than typical individuality definitions acknowledge.


Individuality can be nested. Given that life is hierarchically organized into trophic and functional levels, we allow the possibility of multiple, parallel levels of individuality. We take this position to be related to the recent suggestion of (Rieppel 2013) where he argues for individuals based on hierarchical complexes of homeostatic properties and (Flack 2017a) who has proposed biological systems are information hierarchies resulting from the collective effects of components estimating, in evolutionary or ecological time, regularities in their environments by coarse-graining or compressing time series data and using these perceived regularities to tune strategies. As coarse-grained (slow) variables become for components better predictors than microscopic behavior (which fluctuates), and component estimates of these variables converge, new levels of organization consolidate.



It may seem like a much longer time since the first full human genome was sequenced - but it is still very early days as not just the genome but proteonic and other molecules are being increasingly understood.

The Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD)

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-020-00002-x/index.html?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=d5ab42c08c-briefing-dy-20200528&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-d5ab42c08c-43585533 

A collection of research articles and related content from the gnomAD Consortium that describe and analyse human genetic variation.

The human genome comprises both our protein-coding genes and the regulatory information that controls when, and to what extent, those genes are expressed. While humans mostly share the same repertoire of genes and regulatory elements, the underlying sequences are as diverse as the people on Earth; each individual’s genome is unique. To reflect this diversity and to capture the extent of variation among a large group of individuals on an unprecedented scale, the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) has aggregated 15,708 whole genomes and 125,748 exomes (the protein-coding part of the genome). Analyses of this rich resource have created a catalogue of the different types of variation present, and revealed their potential functional impact and how this information could help to identify disease-causing mutations and to prioritize potential drug targets.



This is a good signal that despite apparent diversity - there is more in common with all humans.

"Our desire to categorize the world into discrete boxes has led us to think of species as completely separate units. Biology does not care about these rigid definitions, and lots of species, even those that are far apart evolutionarily, swap genes all the time. Our predictive metric allows for a quick and easy determination of how likely it is for any two species to produce fertile hybrid offspring. This comparative measure suggests that humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans were able to produce live fertile young with ease."

Humans and Neanderthals: Less different than polar and brown bears

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-humans-neanderthals-polar-brown.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter 

Ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer than polar bears and brown bears, and so, like the bears, were able to easily produce healthy, fertile hybrids according to a study, led by the University of Oxford's School of Archaeology.

The study, published 3 June in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that the genetic distance values between humans and our ancient relatives were smaller than the distance between pairs of species which are known to easily hybridize and have fertile young.


When the distance values between humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were calculated, they were even smaller than the values between several pairs of species which are known readily and easily to hybridize—including polar bears and brown bears, and coyotes and wolves. This suggests we could have predicted the existence of Neanderthals and Denisovans in our genomes as soon as the first genetic sequences were generated.



An interesting signal of the evolution of evolution even in built environments.

while urban foxes are certainly not domesticated, they are changing in ways that move them closer to what is seen in many domesticated animals.

City foxes are becoming more similar to domesticated dogs as they adapt to their environment

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-city-foxes-similar-domesticated-dogs.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter 

Urban red foxes are becoming more similar to domesticated dogs as they adapt to their city environment, according to a new analysis.

A team led by Dr. Kevin Parsons, of the University of Glasgow's Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, has carried out an analysis into the differences between urban and rural red foxes in the UK.


Their findings go some way to explaining how dogs could have evolved into our current pets.


With our current lockdown measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic we are seeing a number of animals more frequently in our cities. It has been known for some time that cities create new habitats for wild populations. While many can't cope, it is recognized that some types of animals are especially good at living within cities. Red foxes are prevalent within several cities within the UK and elsewhere where they have become well-established.



This is an interesting signal for the future of some forms of drug addiction.

New molecule stops drug cravings in mice, with fewer side effects

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-molecule-drug-cravings-mice-side.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter 

Duke University researchers have developed a synthetic molecule that selectively dampen the physiological rewards of cocaine in mice. It also may represent a new class of drugs that could be more specific with fewer side effects than current medications.


In mice that were treated with the stimulant cocaine or methamphetamine, the new molecule was found to calm their drug-induced hyperactivity and interfere with the dopamine system's ability to change metabolism in the brain's rewards center.


In mice that were allowed to self-administer cocaine, the treatment slowed down their drug use in 20 minutes to an hour, and reduced the amount of drug they used by more than 80 percent, compared to a control group of mice.



This is a signal of the emerging progress in developing more types of proteins to explore their efficacy for various purposes.

"You could design new variants that have superior biological function, enabled by using non-natural amino acids or specialized modifications that aren't possible when you use nature's apparatus to make proteins," says Brad Pentelute, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study.

New technology enables fast protein synthesis

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-technology-enables-fast-protein-synthesis.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter 

Many proteins are useful as drugs for disorders such as diabetes, cancer, and arthritis. Synthesizing artificial versions of these proteins is a time-consuming process that requires genetically engineering microbes or other cells to produce the desired protein.


MIT chemists have devised a protocol to dramatically reduce the amount of time required to generate synthetic proteins. Their tabletop automated flow synthesis machine can string together hundreds of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, within hours. The researchers believe their new technology could speed up the manufacturing of on-demand therapies and the development of new drugs, and allow scientists to design artificial proteins by incorporating amino acids that don't exist in cells.


In a paper appearing today in Science, the researchers showed that they could chemically produce several protein chains up to 164 amino acids in length, including enzymes and growth factors. For a handful of these synthetic proteins, they performed a detailed analysis showing their function is comparable to that of their naturally occurring counterparts.



A signal of important ongoing work that promises very good news about antibiotic resistance.

"This is the first antibiotic that can target Gram-positives and Gram-negatives without resistance," said Zemer Gitai, Princeton's Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology and the senior author on the paper. "From a 'Why it's useful' perspective, that's the crux. But what we're most excited about as scientists is something we've discovered about how this antibiotic works—attacking via two different mechanisms within one molecule—that we are hoping is generalizable, leading to better antibiotics—and new types of antibiotics—in the future."

Researchers develop 'poisoned arrow' to defeat antibiotic-resistant bacteria

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-poisoned-arrow-defeat-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletter 

Poison is lethal all on its own—as are arrows—but their combination is greater than the sum of their parts. A weapon that simultaneously attacks from within and without can take down even the strongest opponents, from E. coli to MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus).


A team of Princeton researchers reported today in the journal Cell that they have found a compound, SCH-79797, that can simultaneously puncture bacterial walls and destroy folate within their cells—while being immune to antibiotic resistance.


Bacterial infections come in two flavors—Gram-positive and Gram-negative—named for the scientist who discovered how to distinguish them. The key difference is that Gram-negative bacteria are armored with an outer layer that shrugs off most antibiotics. In fact, no new classes of Gram-negative-killing drugs have come to market in nearly 30 years.



This is an interesting weak signal of the potential of new forms of treatment modalities - as we learn more about how entangled we are with all manner of phenomena.

“We had noticed in our own data, and in that of other groups, that 40-hertz rhythm power and synchrony are reduced in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease,” she said, as well as in patients with the disease. Apparently, if you have Alzheimer’s, your brain doesn’t produce strong brain waves in that particular frequency. In 2016, her graduate student Hannah Iaccarino reasoned that perhaps boosting the power of these weakened gamma waves would be helpful in treating this severe and irreversible dementia.

…. the strobe lights had an additional effect on mice: They also cleared out amyloid plaques. But it wasn’t clear exactly how the optogenetic stimulation or the flashing-light therapy could do that.

Spreading the Word on a Possible Alzheimer’s Treatment

https://www.quantamagazine.org/stimulated-brain-waves-offer-a-possible-treatment-for-alzheimers-20200527/?mc_cid=2230c4f095&mc_eid=af018688b8 

Discoveries that transcend boundaries are among the greatest delights of scientific research, but such leaps are often overlooked because they outstrip conventional thinking. Take, for example, a new discovery for treating dementia that defies received wisdom by combining two formerly unrelated areas of research: brain waves and the brain’s immune cells, called microglia. It’s an important finding, but it still requires the buy-in and understanding of researchers to achieve its true potential. The history of brain waves shows why.


Scientists must specialize to succeed. Biologists studying microglia don’t tend to read papers about brain waves, and brain wave researchers are generally unaware of glial research. A study that bridges these two traditionally separate disciplines may fail to gain traction. But this study needed attention: Incredible as it may sound, the researchers improved the brains of animals with Alzheimer’s simply by using LED lights that flashed 40 times a second. Even sound played at this charmed frequency, 40 hertz, had a similar effect.


In an expanded study in Cell, they reported that just as seeing flashes at 40 hertz resulted in fewer plaques in the visual cortex, sound stimulation at 40 hertz reduced amyloid protein in the auditory cortex. Other regions were similarly affected, including the hippocampus — crucial for learning and memory — and the treated mice performed better on memory tests. Exposing the mice to both stimuli, a light show synchronized with pulsating sound, had an even more powerful effect, reducing amyloid plaques in regions throughout the cerebral cortex, including the prefrontal region, which carries out higher-level executive functions that are impaired in Alzheimer’s.



One signal exploring the possible evolution of a social self.

What happens when we experience the ‘Ground’ as the ‘Figure’?

http://www.johnverdon.com/2020/05/what-happens-when-we-experience-ground.html 

Human experience emerges through its entanglements with environments. Entanglements become evident in their own mutual-enactments. To exist is to simultaneously act – in-act/enact. To act is to make a change. A Change is a difference-that-makes-a-difference – which is simultaneously ‘taking a measure’ of a (or the) situation. Taking a measure of the situation – simultaneously enacts accounting -taking account-of the situation.


The question is which differences are ones that make a difference – because to make a difference-that-makes-a-difference – is an accounting of something of ‘value’ – of something worthy of ‘standing out’ – a way of valuing values.


Thursday, May 28, 2020

Friday Thinking 29 May 2020

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.

To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.

'There are times, when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.'

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content

Quotes

The Coming Disruption Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education

Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work

COVID-19 immunity passports and vaccination certificates: scientific, equitable, and legal challenges

Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly

The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy

The Law of Regression to the Tail: How to Mitigate Covid-19, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophic Risks


Articles:

A chat with Riel Miller: Futures Literacy and Futures & Foresight compared

Spain is about to bring in a basic income scheme which the government thinks will 'stay forever'

We Should Own the Internet—Not Silicon Valley Oligarchs

Can United States intelligence community analysts telework?

A new artificial eye mimics and may outperform human eyes

Once a coronavirus vaccine exists, this researcher's mailable patch could deliver it to millions

Exterminate! UV robot sent to Singapore mall to zap coronavirus

Bumblebees Bite Plants to Force Them to Flower (Seriously)

Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine

Swarm probes weakening of Earth's magnetic field

A system for robust and efficient wireless power transfer




The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford. Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods. We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” and there’s a huge round of applause. That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. We as academics and administrators have lost the script. It’s not true of everyone. The chancellor at Berkeley is working hard to expand seats. I think the University of California and the University of Texas both see that it’s important that those seats expand as the population grows.


But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply. Birkin bags are $12,000 because they create the illusion of scarcity. I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education.


What drives those margins?

Not education. It’s credentialing. The most value-added part of a university is not the professors; it’s the admissions department. They have done a fantastic job creating the most thorough and arduous job-interview process in modern history, between the testing, the anxiety, the review of your life up until that point, the references you need. If I’m applying for a job at New York Magazine, I’d give you a list of references and you’d call them. You don’t ask the references to write a two-page letter. Universities now do background checks to see if you’ve ever had a DUI or been accused of a crime. They look at your social media to see if you’re abusing alcohol or if you’ve made racist or bigoted statements. We’re screening people like crazy.

The Coming Disruption Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education




Working humans are so much more than “resources”. This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the Covid-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged.


How to avoid this unacceptable situation? By involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace – by democratising firms. By decommodifying work – by collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all. As we face the monstrous risk of pandemic and environmental collapse, making these strategic changes would allow us to ensure the dignity of all citizens while marshalling the collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet.


To the question of how firms and how society as a whole might recognise the contributions of their employees in times of crisis, democracy is the answer. Certainly, we must close the yawning chasm of income inequality and raise the income floor – but that alone is not enough. After the two world wars, women’s undeniable contribution to society helped win them the right to vote. By the same token, it is time to enfranchise workers.


Our health and lives cannot be ruled by market forces alone. Now thousands of scholars are calling for a way out of the crisis

Nancy Fraser, Susan Neiman , Chantal Mouffe, Saskia Sassen, Jan-Werner Müller, Dani Rodrik, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, Ha-Joon Chang, and many others….

Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work




Until a COVID-19 vaccine is available, and accessible, which is not guaranteed, the way out of this crisis will be built on the established public health practices of testing, contact tracing, quarantine of contacts, and isolation of cases. The success of these practices is largely dependent on public trust, solidarity, and addressing—not entrenching—the inequities and injustices that contributed to this outbreak becoming a pandemic. - The Lancet

COVID-19 immunity passports and vaccination certificates: scientific, equitable, and legal challenges




there are always individuals that don’t participate in the collective behavior — the odd bird or insect or mammal that remains just a little out of sync with the rest; the stray cell or bacterium that seems to have missed some call to arms. Researchers usually pay them little heed, dismissing them as insignificant outliers.


But a handful of scientists have started to suspect otherwise. Their hunch is that these individuals are signs of something deeper, a broader evolutionary strategy at work. Now, new research validating that hypothesis has opened up a very different way of thinking about the study of collective behavior.


The aggregated cell body comes with its own risks: It could get eaten by a predator or be overrun by “cheater” cells that take advantage of the slime mold’s collective behavior for their own selfish gain. And if nutrients return abruptly to the environment, the amoebas can’t reverse the aggregation process to access that food.

The loner cells might therefore serve as a form of insurance in case any of those situations transpire. By staying out of the group, “you leave behind these seeds,” Tarnita said — seeds that could regenerate the population and its multicellular dynamics all on their own.


bet hedging they observed occurs at the level of the collective. “Each cell is not making the decision to become a loner in isolation,” she said. “It’s actually a social decision in some sense. It’s a decision that depends on the rest of the world” — on the chatter of surrounding cells and the physical nature of the environment.

Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly




This article argues that the constitutionally-inflected conflict that we now face is, in no small part, attributable to a core failure of our system of intellectual property to address, definitively, the boundaries of software protection and the implications for source code secrecy. In a world of privatized decisionmaking, the largely consistent move towards closed code in software sectors, has a number of deleterious results for the public, particularly in the age of algorithmic dominance. 


However, this Article argues that source code also carries a paradoxical character that is peculiar to software: the very substance of what is secluded often stems from the most public of origins, and often produces the most public of implications. And it is the failures of intellectual property law that has made this possible. First, as I show, courts have shifted the boundaries of protection for software under both copyright and patent law, further amplifying the attractiveness of trade secrecy. 


Second, the law has been willing to entertain an unique – and paradoxical-- overlap between copyright, patent, and trade secrecy, even though the three regimes have opposing public goals. Copyright and patent law are oriented towards disclosure, trade secrecy the opposite. While this overlap of protection in software seemed, at first glance, to be a good thing for innovation policy, it has proven deleterious for the larger public, particularly criminal defendants and lower income populations, who are now increasingly governed by an invisible hand that they can no longer investigate or question. But, as I argue, it may also be deleterious for other innovators, as well. The Article concludes with a brief discussion of ways to offer greater transparency through a "controlled disclosure regime," offering areas of reform in intellectual property, contract law, and discovery.

The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy




Size-distributions of floods, forest fires, earthquakes, wars, terrorist attacks, crimes, and IT investments, e.g., have no population mean, or the mean is ill defined due to infinite variance. In other words, mean and/or variance do not exist. Regression to the mean is a meaningless concept for such distributions, whereas what one might call "regression to the tail" is meaningful and consequential.


Regression to the tail applies to any distribution with non-vanishing probability density towards infinity. The frequency of new extremes and how much they exceed previous records is decisive for how fat-tailed a distribution will be, e.g., whether it will have infinite variance and mean. Above a certain frequency and size of extremes, the mean increases with more events measured, with the mean eventually approaching infinity instead of converging. In this case, regression to the mean means regression to infinity, i.e., a non-existent mean. Deep disasters – e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, and wars – tend to follow this type of distribution.


The law of regression to the tail says there will always be an event even more extreme than the most extreme to date. It is only a matter of time until it appears.


Prudent decision makers will not count on luck – or on conventional Gaussian risk management, which is worse than counting on luck, because it gives a false sense of security – when faced with risks that follow the law of regression to the tail. Instead, decision makers will want to do two things: (a) "cut the tail," to reduce risk by mitigation, and (b) practice the "precautionary principle," i.e., avoid tail-risk altogether by overcaution. 


First, everyone needs to be honest about, and keep in mind, that there will be more pandemics in the future, and that one of these will be worse than the covid-19 pandemic. This uncomfortable fact follows directly from the power-law distribution of pandemics and the associated law of regression to the tail.


Four effective mitigation measures exist: (a) cutting the tail, (b) using the precautionary principle, (c) making sure the necessary contingencies are in place, and (d) taking action immediately, at speed, and at scale. These are the four basic principles for mitigating risk in the age of regression to the tail.


Covid-19 may end up being a mere dress rehearsal for the biggest and most urgent tail risk we face today: climate change

The Law of Regression to the Tail: How to Mitigate Covid-19, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophic Risks





This is a great discussion about futures literacy by Riel Miller - one of Canada’s great futurists.

A chat with Riel Miller: Futures Literacy and Futures & Foresight compared

This video captures a discussion between Alessandro Fergnani and Riel Miller about Futures Literacy. During their conversation they dive into a number of different questions, such as:


Are there different degrees of Futures Literacy?

What are the most effective ways to acquire Futures Literacy?

Is Futures Literacy an individual or social competency?

What is the relationship between Futures Literacy and creativity?

Do futures literacy and Futures & Foresight overlap?

What future research directions are there in Futures Literacy? 



Well if Spain is going to do this - does it signal a global shift - I think we should very seriously enact our own versions.

Spain is about to bring in a basic income scheme which the government thinks will 'stay forever'

The Spanish government will next week approve a basic income programme which will provide a guaranteed income for poorer Spaniards.


The scheme's introduction has been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, which could trigger the deepest global recession on record.


Up to 1 million families will receive the new benefit, which is expected to cost Spain between 3 billion ($3.24 billion) and 3.5 billion euros ($3.78 billion) annually.


Spain's Economy Minister said that, if the scheme proves effective, the government hopes that it 'stays forever, that it becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument.'



This is another signal - for a growing awareness of the vital role the digital environment now plays in our societies and for enabling citizens a fuller participation in both their self-governance, their economic, physical and psychological wellness.

We Should Own the Internet—Not Silicon Valley Oligarchs

It’s time to stop treating high-speed internet as a luxury commodity and instead place it under democratic and public control.

In early May, the New York Times published a photo of Beth Revis, a fiction writer in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, scrunched into the back of a small vehicle in a parking lot. There, she was using her smartphone to try to teach a class, using the only reliable internet connection she had access to—the free Wi-Fi signal emanating from inside a local public elementary school. 


As schools shut down and workplaces go remote as the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of millions of Americans like Revis have become increasingly reliant on internet access for their jobs, education and social interactions.


This crisis has clearly illustrated how digital infrastructure—the core assets and services on which a vast array of information technologies rely—has become critical to the functioning of our economy and society. It is, in a sense, the modern equivalent of the interstate highways, railway tracks, telephone networks and electricity systems that formed the backbones of the 20th-century economy.


However, in the United States, market-led deployment of this critical infrastructure—along with service provision dominated by a small oligopoly of giant telecommunications corporations—has led to inadequate development and severe inequities. For instance, according to the Federal Communication Commission’s estimates (which many experts think are highly understated), more than 21 million Americans don’t have access to even a minimal high-speed broadband connection of at least 25 mbps. Internet access in the United States is also generally far slower and more expensive than in most other advanced countries.



The ‘interesting times’ we live in includes some significant challenges to the security community. How to practice physical distancing and working in secure environments.

Can United States intelligence community analysts telework?

ABSTRACT

This article argues that United States Intelligence Community analysts can and should periodically telework as routine professional development and as a research supplement to traditional all-source intelligence analysis. We offer four key benefits to tapping into this reservoir of unclassified information that would improve the quality of the intelligence product, enable better liaison and academic exchange, and steward the profession. We conclude that an overdue rebalancing of classified and publicly available sources could be aided by telework, but only once analysts break free from ‘the cult of the SCIF’ will publicly available information receive the analytical attention that it deserves.



This is an amazing signal of the inevitable emergence of post-human-cyborg capabilities. Still far away (how far is far today - will be different tomorrow).

A new artificial eye mimics and may outperform human eyes

The high-tech device boasts a field of view and reaction time similar to that of real eyes

Scientists can’t yet rebuild someone with bionic body parts. They don’t have the technology. But a new artificial eye brings cyborgs one step closer to reality.


This device, which mimics the human eye’s structure, is about as sensitive to light and has a faster reaction time than a real eyeball. It may not come with the telescopic or night vision capabilities that Steve Austin had in The Six Million Dollar Man television show, but this electronic eyepiece does have the potential for sharper vision than human eyes, researchers report in the May 21 Nature.


“In the future, we can use this for better vision prostheses and humanoid robotics,” says engineer and materials scientist Zhiyong Fan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The human eye owes its wide field of view and high-resolution eyesight to the dome-shaped retina — an area at the back of the eyeball covered in light-detecting cells. Fan and colleagues used a curved aluminum oxide membrane, studded with nanosize sensors made of a light-sensitive material called a perovskite, to mimic that architecture in their synthetic eyeball. Wires attached to the artificial retina send readouts from those sensors to external circuitry for processing, just as nerve fibers relay signals from a real eyeball to the brain.



Another amazing signal - not only for the vaccine we are all hoping for - but for all manner of therapeutics.

Once a coronavirus vaccine exists, this researcher's mailable patch could deliver it to millions

Someday, hundreds of millions of vaccinations against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 could show up in people's mailboxes and be applied as simply as slapping on a Band-Aid.

That's the vision of Guizhi "Julian" Zhu, Ph.D., at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy.

Zhu, an assistant professor in the school's Department of Pharmaceutics, is researching a way to use tiny needles embedded in a small patch to give vaccinations.


"People, no matter who they are, can apply the patch to their own arm," Zhu said. "And that's it. People are vaccinated."

Laboratories and governments around the world are racing to find and test a vaccine to protect against the deadly coronavirus—a process that most experts say will take at least a year.


But even when a vaccine is ready, another enormous hurdle will remain: delivering that vaccine to millions or even billions of people.

If successful, his design for a vaccine patch offers a number of advantages over standard vaccinations, Zhu said.



This is a great signal of the future of hygiene and disease prevention through the use of robots, AI and ubiquitous sensors.

Exterminate! UV robot sent to Singapore mall to zap coronavirus

A shopping mall in Singapore is deploying a newly developed smart robot to fight the novel coronavirus, not with chemicals - but with light.

While spraying has become the norm in many places around the world, the robot uses ultraviolet lamps to disinfectant not only surfaces, but tricky-to-reach crevices and even the air.


According to Derrick Yap, whose firm, PBA Group, developed the Sunburst UV Bot, the novel coronavirus pandemic presented an opportunity to test out a robot for a role that was “dangerous, dull and dirty”.


“It’s dangerous because UVC shouldn’t be deployed when there’s humans around,” he said, referring to the short-wave germicidal type of ultraviolet radiation.



This is an interesting signal - of the entanglement of ecological systems - is there any living system that doesn’t change its environment? Do bees farm flowers? Is the flower the bee’s technology of food production? I the bee the flower’s technology of fertilization? 

Bumblebees Bite Plants to Force Them to Flower (Seriously)

The behavior could be an evolutionary adaptation that lets bees forage more easily

Bumblebees are a resourceful bunch: when pollen is scarce and plants near the nest are not yet flowering, workers have developed a way to force them to bloom. Research published on Thursday in Science shows that the insects puncture the plants’ leaves, which causes them to flower, on average, 30 days earlier than they otherwise would. How the technique evolved and why the plants respond to bumblebee bites by blooming remain unclear. But researchers say the discovery of a new behavior in such a familiar creature is remarkable.


“This is one of those really rare studies that observes a natural phenomenon that hadn’t been documented before,” says John Mola, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center in Colorado, who was not involved in the study. The new finding “offers all sorts of questions and potential explanations” about how widespread the behavior is and why it occurs, he says.


Study co-author Consuelo De Moraes, a chemical ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), says she and her colleagues were observing one species of bumblebee in an unrelated laboratory experiment when they noticed the insects were damaging plant leaves and wondered why. “Initially we wanted to see if they were removing the tissue or feeding on the plants or taking [leaf material] to the nest,” she says. And because previous research had shown stress could induce plants to flower, De Moraes and her colleagues also wondered whether the bees might be creating blooms on demand.


To find out, the team placed pollen-deprived bumblebees together with tomato and mustard plants in mesh cages. The bees soon cut several holes in the leaves of each plant using their mandibles and proboscises. As a test, the researchers tried to replicate the bumblebee damage in additional plants with forceps and a razor. Both sets of plants with injured leaves bloomed faster, but the ones punctured by the bees flowered weeks earlier than those cut by the scientists, suggesting that chemicals in the insects’ saliva may be involved as well.



This is a worthwhile signal of the possibilities of a vaccine for COVID-19. Even if it doesn’t accurately describe our current crisis - the future may require serious attention to life in more dense populations.

Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine

Politicians have become more cautious about immunisation prospects. They are right to be

It would be hard to overstate the importance of developing a vaccine to Sars-CoV-2 – it’s seen as the fast track to a return to normal life. That’s why the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the UK was “throwing everything at it”.


But while trials have been launched and manufacturing deals already signed – Oxford University is now recruiting 10,000 volunteers for the next phase of its research – ministers and their advisers have become noticeably more cautious in recent days.



If climate change is not enough this is a good signal building on others of the shifts in the earth’s magnetic field.

From 1970 to 2020, the minimum field strength in this area has dropped from around 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000, while at the same time the area of the anomaly has grown and moved westward at a pace of around 20 km per year. Over the past five years, a second centre of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa—indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.

Swarm probes weakening of Earth's magnetic field

In an area stretching from Africa to South America, Earth's magnetic field is gradually weakening. This strange behaviour has geophysicists puzzled and is causing technical disturbances in satellites orbiting Earth. Scientists are using data from ESA's Swarm constellation to improve our understanding of this area known as the 'South Atlantic Anomaly.'


Earth's magnetic field is vital to life on our planet. It is a complex and dynamic force that protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun. The magnetic field is largely generated by an ocean of superheated, swirling liquid iron that makes up the outer core around 3000 km beneath our feet. Acting as a spinning conductor in a bicycle dynamo, it creates electrical currents, which in turn, generate our continuously changing electromagnetic field.


This field is far from static and varies both in strength and direction. For example, recent studies have shown that the position of the north magnetic pole is changing rapidly.


Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.



I think the original Nikola Tesla dream of this - a weak signal of the future of energy transfer and the powering of our techno-economy.

A system for robust and efficient wireless power transfer

Current methods for charging electronic devices via wireless technology only work if the overall system parameters are set up to match a specific transfer distance. As a result, these methods are limited to stationary power transfer applications, which means that a device that is receiving power needs to maintain a specific distance from the source supplying it in order for the power transfer to be successful.


Researchers at Stanford University have recently developed a new technique that could enable more efficient wireless power transfer regardless of the distance between a device and its power source. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could help to overcome some of the current limitations of existing tools for the wireless charging of elecronic devices.


"The main purpose of our study was to overcome the barrier to dynamic wireless charging," Sid Assawaworrarit, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "Our idea is based on parity-time symmetry (PT symmetry), which concerns systems with balanced gain and loss."