Content
Quotes:
Our greatest invention was the invention of invention itself
Articles:
Book Review: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy
The House Has a Universal Fiber Broadband Plan We Should Get Behind
The Endangered Internet Archive Is Full of Treasures
Countries agree regulations for automated driving
California considers 1st-in-US electric truck sales rule
Quantum entanglement demonstrated aboard orbiting CubeSat
Folding@home's fight against COVID-19 enlists big tech, gamers, and pro soccer
From the lab, the first cartilage-mimicking gel that's strong enough for knees
Transgenic rice lowers blood pressure of hypertensive rats
Far-UVC Light Safely Kills 99.9% of Airborne Coronaviruses
Dor’s proposal, made in his book The Instruction of the Imagination (2015), is about the nature and origins of language. In outline, the story is this. As their societies became more collaborative, archaic humans needed to communicate in more complex ways, warning, assisting, advising and instructing each other. They did this pantomime-fashion, using gestures, expressions and vocal mimicry to direct attention to what they meant. Their object was what Dor calls ‘experiential mutual-identification’– to get their interlocutors to share and acknowledge their experience, to see what they saw, feel what they felt, react as they reacted. They were highly skilled at it. Yet this experiential-mimetic form of communication had a serious limitation. Because it worked by sharing experience, it was limited to communication about things that were on hand to be experienced. You could communicate that there was a wolf approaching only if you could get your hearers to see the creature for themselves. You couldn’t communicate about things distant in time and space. As early human societies became more complex, this limitation became more serious.
The trick was to take the sound or gesture already associated with a thing and use it in a new way – not as an invitation to experience the thing, but as an instruction to imagine it. When a speaker made the ‘wolf’ sound when no wolf was present, their hearers drew on their memories of wolves to imagine a wolf somewhere out of sight. If the speaker added the sound for ‘hill’, their hearers combined memories of wolves and hills to imagine a wolf on the hill, and reacted accordingly. With this, communication was released from the here and now. As Dor puts it, a Rubicon was crossed: ‘For the first time in the evolution of life, humans began to experience for others, and let others experience for them.’ This was the birth of language.
If Dor’s suggestion is right, then language would have paved the way for hypothetical thinking. Language enabled humans to learn about things they hadn’t experienced themselves. But it enabled more than that. By combining linguistic elements in different ways, speakers could issue instructions for imagining an unlimited range of things – not only things their hearers hadn’t experienced but things no one had experienced. They could instruct them to imagine what might happen, what should happen, even what could not happen. Gradually, they would have discovered that they could use this ability creatively, to tell stories, create myths, and deceive each other. And, crucially from our perspective, they would have discovered that they could use it to propose hypotheses. As they talked over a bad day’s hunting, they could suggest explanations for what went wrong, propose ways of doing things better, and put forward plans for the next day.
In brief, the idea is this. Once they developed language, our ancestors would sometimes talk to themselves, at first by accident. And when they did, they would hear their own utterances and, often, react to them as they did to other people’s. When they asked themselves a question, they answered; when they admonished themselves, they worked harder; when they reminded themselves, they focused more, and so on – these reactions being generated spontaneously by non-conscious processes. Sometimes, one utterance would provoke another, and that another, and so on, generating a lengthy train of thought. This process of mental self-stimulation helped to coordinate the resources of different brain systems, and it proved useful, enhancing self-control and promoting sustained patterns of behaviour. Humans formed habits of private speech and gradually developed the ability to talk to themselves silently in inner speech. They also adopted other forms of mental self-stimulation, such as drawing pictures or visualising them. Elaborated and refined, the stream of self-generated speech and other imagery, and the associated mental reactions, came to form what we call the conscious mind.
As they cultivated these habits, mentally stimulating themselves and paying careful attention to the results, humans did something else, too. They created the sense that there was a private world inside them, where their real self lived and thought, a world that sometimes seemed more real to them than the one around them. In a sense, they created their own conscious minds and selves.
Our greatest invention was the invention of invention itself
Leadership. This ten letter word dominates the life of the modern Soldier. Echoing and reverberating up and down the ranks, the objective yet subjective, intuitive yet inculcated, defined yet indefinite, standards of leadership are expressed by leaders of all ranks daily. Soldiers become leaders in name by simple association with the Army. They inherit the responsibilities and obligations to lead by volunteering to serve. Guiding the Soldier Leader to the embodiment of leadership, are attributes, characteristics, ethos, and values all laid out and carefully considered. Each bullet point definition imperative and available for quick reference. While inclusive and detailed, the manuals on leadership are not definitive, as General Raymond Odierno, the former Army Chief of Staff, says in his opening statement of ADP 6–22,
“Army Leadership, describes our foundational leadership principles. I challenge each of you to study and build upon this doctrine to prepare yourselves, your peers, and your Soldiers to meet the challenges you are sure to face.”
Army Leadership is succinct, organized, foundational, and institutionalized. We are all products of this system which produces “leaders.” We were all given the same tools, the same definitions, and the same lessons. Yet, we all encounter (perceived or real) poor leadership, repeatably, across organizations and installations throughout the Army. We often throw out words like “Toxic,” “Deltas,” or “Leader-shit,” when we come across leadership styles we find insufficient. How could this be? How could there be so many inept leaders in a profession that specializes in generating leaders? Is there really a population of flawed leaders out there? Or is it our lens for assessing others that is flawed?
Our institutionally developed understanding of leadership forces an encounter between the perceived leader and the assessed non-leader, as our perspective for assessing leadership qualities is dominated by a focus on the individual. This is a dangerous and harmful frame of reference. It generates a competitive, lone warrior, mentality of comparison and evaluation between leaders— limiting organizational growth over the opportunity to improve the individual’s position/environment. Innovative and selfless leadership, built upon the Army Leadership principles, is essential to leading in this Army of Leaders, and innovation is created by cultural change, not individual specialization.
The tribal culture spectrum produced, moves from the individual victim to the enlightened team. The difference between each tribe is delineated by increasing emphasis on the group’s well being and a decreasing focus on the individual’s status within their environments.
Tribal Leadership in the Army
This is a must read for everyone concerned with having our nations meet the challenges of climate change, the recovery from COVID-19 and building the infrastructures, institutions and other structures for flourishing in the 21st Century
Kelton’s book achieves a revolution in political economy. Kelton’s first great achievement leaves the conventional hawk/dove conception of deficits shattered. She decisively shows there is no budgetary constraint on government spending; instead the only real constraints on government spending are the limits of real resources and the threat of inflation. Kelton’s second great achievement is to shift the normative grounds of government spending from the false and unproductive idea that federal deficits are evil, and to the productive political activity of deciding which spending programmes should be prioritised. Her Copernican achievements furthermore make esoteric debates on money accessible to a wide audience and wonky ‘pie-in-the-sky’ policy debates both comprehensible and realistic. The context of the current economic shutdown will place modern monetary theory and The Deficit Myth centre stage.
Book Review: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy
In The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, Stephanie Kelton dispels six key myths that have shaped the conventional understanding of deficits as inherently bad, instead arguing that deficits can strengthen economies and lead to faster growth. This book is a triumph, writes Professor Hans G. Despain, shifting normative grounds of government spending away from the false and unproductive idea that deficits are irresponsible and ruinous towards the productive political activity of deciding which spending programmes should be prioritised.
Kelton’s groundbreaking triumphs are twofold. The first is that Kelton shatters both the deficit hawk and deficit dove view of public debt. Deficit hawks constitute the conventional wisdom on debt and contend the government is being irresponsible when it has a deficit, and therefore needs to balance its budget at almost any cost. Deficit hawks argue that public debt is ruinous to a currency and the country itself. Deficit hawks argue a country should tighten its purse strings and suffer short-term consequences to avoid long-term disaster. Deficit doves agree, but contend deficits can be used in the short term for emergencies and overcoming economic crises.
To begin with, Kelton takes on the myth that governments should be fiscally run like a household (Chapter One). This is false because the government is nothing close to a household or private business. The big difference is that households and businesses are users of money, while governments are issuers of money (17 – 18).
Think of it this way: if you were granted the legal right and the ability to print as many US dollars as you wished, would that change your debt? The answer, of course, is yes. Your debt would no longer matter, because you can always just print more money.
Second, to view public deficits as overspending is a myth (Chapter Two), because a government deficit creates a surplus for someone else. The third myth is that deficits burden the next generation (Chapter Three). It is false that deficits make the next generation poorer, and it is also false that reducing deficits will make the next generation richer. Rather, the historical record shows high national debt creates wealth and increases the income of the next generation.
The fourth myth is that deficits crowd out private business (Chapter Four). Kelton argues that deficit spending properly targeted stimulates, or ‘crowds-in’, private business growth. The fifth myth is that deficits make us dependent on overseas nations (Chapter Five). Instead trade deficits should be understood as a ‘stuff’ surplus: e.g. China gets US Treasury bonds, and the US gets Apple computers and other ‘stuff’. The sixth myth is that Social Security and public health programmes are propelling us toward a fiscal crisis (Chapter Six); here, Kelton shows the governments can always meet demographic and healthcare fiscal obligations.
The future of this particular initiative remains uncertain - but the world needs to come to terms with the need for publicly funded and owned digital infrastructure - Canadians should be paying attention.
Fiber is a future-proofed infrastructure that is vastly superior to the current copper and cable networks available to most people. EFF’s technical analysis shows that it will continue to leapfrog past cable, wireless, and other transmission mediums. Because it can be useful for decades, sustaining older slower networks with government funds will actually cost more in the long term.
The House Has a Universal Fiber Broadband Plan We Should Get Behind
America is behind on its transition to a 21st-century, fiber-connected Internet with no plan for how to fix the problem. Until today. For the first time, legislation led by Majority Whip James Clyburn would begin a national transition of everyone’s Internet connection into multi-gigabit capable fiber optics has been introduced and is likely heading towards a vote on the House floor as part of the overall COVID-19 recovery effort. After that its future remains in the hands of the Senate.
The Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act (H.R. 7302) would create an $80 billion fiber infrastructure program run by a new Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth that would coordinate all federal infrastructure efforts with state governments. Such an ambitious program would have the United States match China’s efforts to build universal fiber with the U.S. completing its transition just a few short years after China. Without this law, the transition would take decades. This would ensure that the multi-gigabit innovations in applications and services can be created in the United States and also used by all Americans. A universal fiber program would also allow next-generation Wi-Fi and 5G to have national coverage as well as any future iterations of wireless technology. But perhaps most importantly of all, the issue of the digital divide would be solved in its entirety and properly relegated to the history books.
If we want a thriving political economy - both collaboration and competition have to be enabled - that means much more rigorous constraints on the granting of protection of copyright and patented ideas.
Adversarial Interoperability
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.
But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.
Adversarial interoperability was once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace, where the biggest firms could go from top of the heap to scrap metal in an eyeblink, where tiny startups could topple dominant companies before they even knew what hit them.
But the current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability. From the flurry of absurd software patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted in the dark years between the first software patents and the Alice decision to the growing use of "digital rights management" to create legal obligations to use the products you purchase in ways that benefit shareholders at your expense, Big Tech climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them.
The ephemeral nature of knowledge and information poses serious challenges to maintaining a history - when the growth of knowledge is exponential and the evaporation rate of the Internet is equally fast.
The Endangered Internet Archive Is Full of Treasures
The Internet Archive set out in the 1990s with an improbable mission to become the “Library of Alexandria Two”; by 2020, they’ve arguably surpassed that goal, plus delivered their collection straight to the masses. It’s the only repository where a NASA recap of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster logically coexists with a 1990 recording of the Grateful Dead live in Connecticut and a 1979 hip hop mix tape. Whether you need to settle a dispute over the origins of the Buffyverse, or you’re litigating trademark infringement, the Wayback machine’s vast archive of old webpages is admissible evidence. You can search for TV news videos by quotes. At this writing, the archive bot is quietly, surgically extracting rotten links and replacing them with Wayback pages (millions so far), and the archive is filling in over 100,000 book references with live links to pages in full texts. These are the guys who tell us to archive our shit and save it for us anyway when we don’t.
We don’t need to tell you, but we’re doing it, because many are worried that a recent copyright lawsuit brought by major publishing companies will decimate the Internet Archive. Maybe that’s hype—as Vox has pointed out, the maximum penalties under the lawsuit would amount to a little over $19 million dollars (the Internet Archive’s revenue in 2018 was $20 million)—and the complaint asks for a permanent injunction and destruction of “unlawful copies” of works. That would amount to 1.4 million scanned books, but it wouldn’t touch the Wayback Machine or public domain works. The Internet Archive’s volunteers seem to disagree with the tempered assessment; the Archive Team wiki currently lists the Internet Archive’s status as “endangered,” with a tongue-in-cheek reference link to a Vice article on the lawsuit.
A good signal of institutional preparation for the emergence of autonomous transportation.
"This is the first binding international regulation on so-called 'Level 3' vehicle automation," UNECE said in a statement.
"The new regulation therefore marks an important step towards the wider deployment of automated vehicles to help realise a vision of safer, more sustainable mobility for all."
Countries agree regulations for automated driving
More than 50 countries, including Japan, South Korea and the EU member states, have agreed common regulations for vehicles that can take over some driving functions, including having a mandatory black box, the UN announced Thursday.
The binding rules on Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) will come into force in January 2021.
The measures were adopted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, which brings together 53 countries, not just in Europe but also in Africa and Asia.
At Level 3—Level 5 is fully automated—the driver is not driving when the automated systems are engaged, but can step in at any time and must take over at the system's request.
Another signal of the role of government in enabling the emergence of emission-free transportation.
California considers 1st-in-US electric truck sales rule
California regulators are scheduled to approve new rules on Thursday that would force automakers to sell more electric work trucks and delivery vans, a first-of-its-kind rule aimed at helping the nation's most populous state clean up its worst-in-the-nation air quality.
The rules would require a certain percentage of work truck sales each year to be zero emission vehicles. By the time its fully implemented in 2035, the board estimates at least 20% of the 1.2 million trucks on the road would run on electricity.
"It's the only way we think we can make significant progress on the most stubborn air pollution problems," said Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board. "This will have a really transformational impact not just in our state but around the world when people see that it can be done."
Work trucks and delivery vans, while just a small fraction of all vehicles on the road, are some of the largest sources of air pollution in the transportation sector. They travel many more miles than passenger vehicles and often have diesel engines, which are more powerful but produce more pollution than gasoline engines.
The transformation of communication and computation is foreseen in this small signal.
"Progress toward a space-based global quantum network is happening at a fast pace," said Villar. "We hope that our work inspires the next wave of space-based quantum technology missions and that new applications and technologies can benefit from our experimental findings."
Quantum entanglement demonstrated aboard orbiting CubeSat
In a critical step toward creating a global quantum communications network, researchers have generated and detected quantum entanglement onboard a CubeSat nanosatellite weighing less than 2.6 kilograms and orbiting the Earth.
"In the future, our system could be part of a global quantum network transmitting quantum signals to receivers on Earth or on other spacecraft," said lead author Aitor Villar from the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. "These signals could be used to implement any type of quantum communications application, from quantum key distribution for extremely secure data transmission to quantum teleportation, where information is transferred by replicating the state of a quantum system from a distance."
In Optica, The Optical Society's (OSA) journal for high impact research, Villar and an international group of researchers demonstrate that their miniaturized source of quantum entanglement can operate successfully in space aboard a low-resource, cost-effective CubeSat that is smaller than a shoebox. CubeSats are a standard type of nanosatellite made of multiples of 10 cm × 10 cm × 10 cm cubic units.
This should be a familiar signal of the power of grid-computing - the ability of masses of networked computers to become a form of supercomputer for application to large and complex problems. Imagine if all government computers were harnessed in this way?
Folding@home's fight against COVID-19 enlists big tech, gamers, and pro soccer
The crowdsourced supercomputing project Folding@home harnesses the combined processing power of computers whose owners download the project's software and run simulations to model protein motion. In response to COVID-19, individuals, universities and companies have joined the effort. In the video, new simulations already have modeled how the coronavirus' spike protein opens up to bind to the ACE2 receptor—found on the surface of many human cells—and causes infection.
When the crowdsourced supercomputing project Folding@home first announced a shift to coronavirus research and asked for new volunteers to run its software and expand its computing capacity, organizations and citizen scientists from all walks of life heeded the call. Now, about four months later, the number of volunteers has increased a hundredfold.
Based at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the computing project simulates the movements—or folding—of proteins involved in disease. Researchers leading the effort pivoted quickly to COVID-19 and found a wealth of people eager to help. Before the switch to the novel coronavirus, about 30,000 devices were running Folding@home software. With the prospect of contributing to coronavirus research, new volunteer "folders" have boosted that number to over 4 million to date, with major companies and organizations eager to donate their own computing resources to the cause.
We are all Covid-19-Fatigued - and we want some normalcy to return - however this is a very good signal of future possibilities of university/college education.
Higher Ed: Enough Already
It’s time to end the consensual hallucination between university leadership, parents, and students that in-person classes will resume in the fall. The bold statements from presidents and provosts are symptomatic of the viruses that also plague American leadership and business: exceptionalism that has morphed into arrogance and an idolatry of money that supplants regard for the commonwealth.
These statements strike a similar tone to a CEO in the midst of a disastrous earnings call who demonstrates near-delusional optimism so investors don’t sell shares. The declarations could be interpreted as: “Parents, please send in your deposits. Nothing wrong here, nope, all good!” A combination of self-aggrandizement and elitism has convinced American universities that our services are worth indebting generations of young people, and now risking becoming agents of spread.
There are more people over 65 than under 15 - this is a very good signal for those of us with or looking forward to knee problems.
Moving the material from the lab to the clinic would take another three years at least, Wiley said. Initial safety tests suggest the material is nontoxic to lab-grown cells. The next step is to design an implant that they can test in sheep.
From the lab, the first cartilage-mimicking gel that's strong enough for knees
The thin, slippery layer of cartilage between the bones in the knee is magical stuff: strong enough to withstand a person's weight, but soft and supple enough to cushion the joint against impact, over decades of repeat use. That combination of soft-yet-strong has been hard to reproduce in the lab. But now, Duke University researchers say they've created an experimental gel that's the first to match the strength and durability of the real thing.
The material may look like a distant cousin of Jell-O—which it is—but it's incredibly strong. It's 60% water, but a single quarter-sized disc can bear the weight of a 100-pound kettlebell without tearing or losing its shape.
Its developers say it's the first hydrogel—a material made of water-absorbing polymers—capable of withstanding tugging and heavy loads as well as human cartilage, without wearing out over time.
A good signal of the future of food (based on the domestication of DNA and related chemistry) for sustaining, augmenting health.
Transgenic rice lowers blood pressure of hypertensive rats
In the future, taking your blood pressure medication could be as simple as eating a spoonful of rice. This "treatment" could also have fewer side effects than current blood pressure medicines. As a first step, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have made transgenic rice that contains several anti-hypertensive peptides. When given to hypertensive rats, the rice lowered their blood pressure.
High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and stroke. A common class of synthetic drugs used to treat hypertension, called ACE inhibitors, target the angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE), which is involved in blood pressure regulation. However, ACE inhibitors often have unpleasant side effects, such as dry cough, headache, skin rashes and kidney impairment. In contrast, natural ACE inhibitors found in some foods, including milk, eggs, fish, meat and plants, might have fewer side effects. But purifying large amounts of these ACE-inhibitory peptides from foods is expensive and time-consuming. Le Qing Qu and colleagues wanted to genetically modify rice—one of the world's most commonly eaten foods—to produce a mixture of ACE-inhibitory peptides from other food sources.
An interesting signal that offers some hope for moving forward.
“Because it’s safe to use in occupied spaces like hospitals, buses, planes, trains, train stations, schools, restaurants, offices, theaters, gyms, and anywhere that people gather indoors, far-UVC light could be used in combination with other measures, like wearing face masks and washing hands, to limit the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.”
Far-UVC Light Safely Kills 99.9% of Airborne Coronaviruses
More than 99.9% of seasonal coronaviruses present in airborne droplets were killed when exposed to a particular wavelength of ultraviolet light that is safe to use around humans, a new study at Columbia University Irving Medical Center has found.
“Based on our results, continuous airborne disinfection with far-UVC light at the current regulatory limit could greatly reduce the level of airborne virus in indoor environments occupied by people,” says the study’s lead author David Brenner, PhD, Higgins Professor of Radiation Biophysics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
The research was published on June 24, 2020, in Scientific Reports.
Based on their results, the researchers estimate that continuous exposure to far-UVC light at the current regulatory limit would kill 90% of airborne viruses in about 8 minutes, 95% in about 11 minutes, 99% in about 16 minutes, and 99.9% in about 25 minutes.
