Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and 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.
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
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:
Author questions assumptions about smart cities
Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?
Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind
How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond
Articles:
New York unveils landmark antitrust bill that makes it easier to sue tech giants
Is the US about to split the internet?
Virus hastens newspapers' slide into shaky digital future
Microsoft tests hydrogen fuel cells for backup power at datacenters
EXXON RIPS UP $30-BILLION REBUILDING PLAN, COULD DECLARE STRANDED ASSETS AT KEARL LAKE
Transforming e-waste into a strong, protective coating for metal
3-D touchless interactive display detects finger humidity to change color
Glass-like wood insulates heat, is tough, blocks UV and has wood-grain pattern
New fabric could help keep you cool in the summer, even without A/C
Bacteria in the gut have a direct line to the brain
Water beetles can live on after being eaten and excreted by a frog
For Mates to Fuse Bodies, Some Anglerfish Have Lost Immune Genes
in contrast to smart-from-the-start cities built on green fields or the retrofitted ones we have to date, Halegoua prescribes an alternative model of smart-city development that she dubs the "social city."
"Social-city models are ones that aspire to something other than optimization and efficiency," she said. "Their planners and residents think more critically about the types of places that they're creating when they're implementing digital technologies and who the city and technologies are actually serving, who the smart cities are being built for."
Halegoua urges readers to keep in mind that the retrofitted smart city, anyway, builds upon and thus is "limited and restricted by preexisting inequities."
But with new paradigms, it doesn't have to be that way,
Author questions assumptions about smart cities
Instead of targeting a certain type of customer, advertisers target customers reading a certain type of article or watching a certain type of show.
This approach, known as contextual advertising, harkens back to the days before microtargeting. Until the last decade, when a company wanted to reach a certain type of reader, it had to buy an ad with a publication whose audience probably included that type. But technology has allowed contextual targeting to become much more precise—to operate on the level of the webpage, as opposed to the publication. Advertisers on NPO can pay to advertise on specific content—the Dutch version of Farmer Wants a Wife is still wildly popular in the Netherlands, it turns out—but can also choose to advertise on one of 23 curated “custom interest channels” based on what a user is reading or watching. (The software scrapes subtitles to tag video). Channels include things like sport and fitness, love and dating, religion and faith, and politics and policy.
In 2019, Ster ran an experiment with 10 different advertisers, including American Express, to compare the performance of ads shown to users who opted in or out of being tracked. On the most important metric, conversions—the share of people who ended up taking the action the advertiser cared about, whether it was adding an item to their cart or signing up for a subscription or credit card—contextual ads did as well or better than microtargeted ones.
Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?
We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part. Aspects of human societies that were formerly guided by habit and tradition, or spontaneity and whim, are now increasingly the intended or unintended consequences of decisions made on the basis of scientific theories of the human mind and human well-being.
The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Rather, these techniques change behavior by appealing to our nonrational motivations, our emotional triggers and unconscious biases. If psychologists could possess a systematic understanding of these nonrational motivations they would have the power to influence the smallest aspects of our lives and the largest aspects of our societies.
….. The deeper concern that Lewis’s happy narrative omits entirely is that behavioral scientists claim to have developed the capacity to manipulate people’s emotional lives in ways that shape their fundamental preferences, values, and desires. In Kahneman’s recent work he has developed the idea, originally set out in one of his papers with Tversky (who died in 1996), that we are not good judges of our own well-being. Our intuitions are unstable and conflicting. We may retrospectively judge an experience more enjoyable than our subjective reports suggested at the time. Kahneman, working with others in the field of positive psychology, has helped to establish a new subfield, hedonic psychology, which measures not just pleasure but well-being in a broader sense, in order to establish a more objective account of our condition than our subjective reflection can afford us.
…. Psychologists at the World Well-Being Project, at the University of Pennsylvania, have collaborated with Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, computational psychologists from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and developers of myPersonality. This was a Facebook application that allowed users to take psychometric tests and gathered six million test results and four million individual profiles. Scores on these tests could be combined with enormous amounts of data from the user’s Facebook environment. The application has been used in conjunction with personality measures such as the “big five,” also known as the OCEAN model, which purportedly measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Words such as “apparently” and “actually,” for example, are taken to correlate with a higher degree of neuroticism. The architects of myPersonality claim that these tests, in conjunction with other data, permit the prediction of individual levels of well-being.
The term “propaganda” has been replaced by “a behavioral approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results.”
Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind
To end the pandemic, the virus must either be eliminated worldwide — which most scientists agree is near-impossible because of how widespread it has become — or people must build up sufficient immunity through infections or a vaccine. It is estimated that 55–80% of a population must be immune for this to happen, depending on the country
How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond
This is still a weak signal - but a pervasive and popular sentiment pretty much everywhere - the key is electing representatives with courage and independence from corporate funding.
“Our laws on antitrust in New York are a century old and they were built for a completely different economy,” said Gianaris. “Much of the problem today in the 21st century is unilateral action by some of these behemoth tech companies and this bill would allow, for the first time, New York to engage in antitrust enforcement for unilateral action.”
New York unveils landmark antitrust bill that makes it easier to sue tech giants
The legislation comes as a federal panel is investigating the market power of Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google
New York state is introducing a bill that would make it easier to sue big tech companies for alleged abuses of their monopoly powers.
New York is America’s financial center and one of its most important tech hubs. If successfully passed, the law could serve as a model for future legislation across the country. It also comes as a federal committee is conducting an anti-trust investigation into tech giants amid concerns that their unmatched market power is suppressing competition.
Bill S8700A, now being discussed by New York’s senate consumer protection committee, would update New York’s antiquated antitrust laws for the 21st century, said the bill’s sponsor, Senator Mike Gianaris.
“Their power has grown to dangerous levels and we need to start reining them in,” he said.
We are all getting used to tremendous non-sense from our neighbor to the south - this is perhaps signals an inevitable crisis - of the Internet - remember how poor an intranet is - when compared to the real thing?
Is the US about to split the internet?
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he wants a "clean" internet.
What he means by that is he wants to remove Chinese influence, and Chinese companies, from the internet in the US.
But critics believe this will bolster a worrying movement towards the breaking up of the global internet.
The so called "splinternet" is generally used when talking about China, and more recently Russia.
The idea is that there's nothing inherent or pre-ordained about the internet being global.
For governments that want to control what people see on the internet, it makes sense to take ownership of it.
The Great Firewall of China is the best example of a nation putting up the internet equivalent of a wall around itself. You won't find a Google search engine or Facebook in China.
What people didn't expect was that the US might follow China's lead.
This signal should be no surprise - all the news fit to print - has been on life support for about a decade at least and COVID-19 may be a final stroke that transforms the newspaper business - into a new form of ‘news’ business.
"Times are hard. There are no advertisers and no-one is reading us," PPI executive director Ariel Sebellino told AFP.
Virus hastens newspapers' slide into shaky digital future
The coronavirus crisis has weighed heavily on print newspapers already battling for survival around the world, with the number of copies sold tumbling while less profitable digital readerships surge.
Simply delivering printed papers to the shops—or having customers come in to buy them—has become a challenge, worsening a years-long decline in sales and advertising revenue.
"Consumption of printed newspapers has fallen as lockdowns undermine physical distribution, almost certainly accelerating the shift to an all-digital future," the Reuters Institute's 2020 annual report said.
Major dailies in Brazil and Mexico have already switched to online-only or dropped some days' editions, while in the Philippines 10 of the 70 newspapers in the PPI association have shuttered.
This is still a weak signal - but indicates the potential of hydrogen as a clean energy to transform how we provide energy storage and power to homes and buildings.
In recent years, hydrogen fuel cell costs have plummeted to the point that they are now an economically viable alternative to diesel-powered backup generators. "And the idea of running them on green hydrogen fits right in with our overall carbon commitments," Monroe said.
Microsoft tests hydrogen fuel cells for backup power at datacenters
In a worldwide first that could jumpstart a clean energy economy built around the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen fuel cells have powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours, Microsoft announced Monday.
The feat is the latest milestone in the company's commitment to be carbon negative by 2030. To achieve that goal and accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels, Microsoft is also aiming to eliminate its dependency on diesel fuel by 2030.
Diesel fuel accounts for less than 1% of Microsoft's overall emissions. Its use is primarily confined to Azure datacenters, where, as in most cloud providers around the world, diesel-powered generators support continuous operations in the event of power outages and other service disruptions.
"They are expensive. And they sit around and don't do anything for more than 99% of their life," said Mark Monroe, a principal infrastructure engineer on Microsoft's team for datacenter advanced development.
This is a good signal of passing the point of peak oil demand - like all exponential change - it may still seem to be a crawling rate of change - the next decade - or even by 2025 should make the phase transition in energy geo-politics is upon us.
EXXON RIPS UP $30-BILLION REBUILDING PLAN, COULD DECLARE STRANDED ASSETS AT KEARL LAKE
ExxonMobil’s massive Kearl Lake mine north of Fort McMurray may be the latest tar sands/oil sands to be devalued as one of the world’s most determined colossal fossils considers designating up to one-fifth of its global oil and gas reserves as stranded assets, part of a company-wide scramble to respond to crashing oil prices and weak markets for its product.
On Monday, Bloomberg News reported that Exxon was “ripping up its debt-fueled, US$30 billion-a-year plan to rebuild an aging worldwide portfolio after cash flow evaporated and threatened the company’s vaunted dividend.” Then in a regulatory filing Wednesday, the company admitted that “certain quantities of crude oil, bitumen. and natural gas will not qualify as proved reserves at year-end 2020” if oil prices stay low through the end of the year—as many analysts expect.
Another useful signal about the emergence of a metabolic economy - where every output is designed or captured as an input to other processes-products.
Transforming e-waste into a strong, protective coating for metal
A typical recycling process converts large quantities of items made of a single material into more of the same. However, this approach isn't feasible for old electronic devices, or 'e-waste,' because they contain small amounts of many different materials that cannot be readily separated. Now, in ACS Omega, researchers report a selective, small-scale micro recycling strategy, which they use to convert old printed circuit boards and monitor components into a new type of strong metal coating.
In spite of the difficulty, there's plenty of reason to recycle e-waste: It contains many potentially valuable substances that can be used to modify the performance of other materials or to manufacture new, valuable materials. Previous research has shown that carefully calibrated high temperature-based processing can selectively break and reform chemical bonds in waste to form new, environmentally friendly materials. In this way, researchers have already turned a mix of glass and plastic into valuable, silica-containing ceramics. They've also used this process to recover copper, which is widely used in electronics and elsewhere, from circuit boards. Based on the properties of copper and silica compounds, Veena Sahajwalla and Rumana Hossain suspected that, after extracting them from e-waste, they could combine them to create a durable new hybrid material ideal for protecting metal surfaces.
This is a weak signal but pointing to other stronger signals about the emergence of touchless interfaces all around us - in the digital overlay of our environments.
User-interactive displays (UIDs) facilitate the visualization of invisible information that can be sensed such as touch, smell and sound, with potential applications in wearable and patchable electronics suited for a futuristic hyperconnected society.
3-D touchless interactive display detects finger humidity to change color
A novel three-dimensional (3-D) touchless interactive display can change color based on the distance of the user's finger from the screen by detecting subtle shifts in ambient relative humidity, according to a new study. The technology may find future applications in wearable electronics and electronic skins (e-skins) that artificially mimic human skin's ability to sense pressure, temperature, and humidity. While scientists have already developed a variety of interactive touch displays, most of these involve variations in the intensity of light emission or chromic reflection in response to a stimulus rather than changes in color, which can provide more striking and distinct visual feedback.
To develop a touchless interactive display based on changes in structural color, Han Sol Kang and colleagues in materials science, nano engineering and chemical engineering in the Republic of Korea and the U.S., designed a new display using chemically cross-linked, interpenetrated hydrogel network layers within photonic crystals that respond to changes in water vapor when a finger is moved from 1 to 15 millimeters from the surface. The process could shift the configuration of its surface structures to produce blue, green and orange colors. The researchers then demonstrated the possibility of easily transferring the photonic crystal-based film from one substrate to another by swapping it from a silicon surface to a printed one-dollar bill. By combining ionic liquid dopants (which alter a semiconductor's electrical properties) as printing inks, the researchers note applications of the technology for printable and rewritable displays.
This signals a transformation of how we build and architect our homes and cities with new materials.
Glass-like wood insulates heat, is tough, blocks UV and has wood-grain pattern
Need light but want privacy? A new type of wood that's transparent, tough, and beautiful could be the solution. This nature-inspired building material allows light to come through (at about 80%) to fill the room but the material itself is naturally hazy (93%), preventing others from seeing inside.
Materials engineers at the University of Maryland have transformed wood into a transparent building material that directs light for a diffused effect, is tougher and insulates better than glass, and has a natural wood-grain pattern. They published their results last week in the journal Nature Communications.
"In this patented research, we demonstrate the first esthetic wood with patterns following the density variation in natural wood. Such patterned, transparent wood can also block UV and heat, is mechanically strong, which could find many applications in buildings where sustainability and energy efficiency are desired," said Liangbing Hu, Herbert Rabin Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland, College Park.
A useful signal about the progress in ‘hacking matter’ of domesticating nanofabriction. The 3 min video is very informative. To imagine the next 50 years - requires including a significant role in human capacity to continue to enact the environment of human evolution.
New fabric could help keep you cool in the summer, even without A/C
Air conditioning and other space cooling methods account for about 10% of all electricity consumption in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a material that cools the wearer without using any electricity. The fabric transfers heat, allows moisture to evaporate from the skin and repels water. Watch a video about the new fabric here.
Cooling off a person's body is much more efficient than cooling an entire room or building. Various clothing and textiles have been designed to do just that, but most have disadvantages, such as poor cooling capacity; large electricity consumption; complex, time-consuming manufacturing; and/or high cost. Yang Si, Bin Ding and colleagues wanted to develop a personal cooling fabric that could efficiently transfer heat away from the body, while also being breathable, water repellent and easy to make.
Another small signal - suggesting that a metabolic economy is achievable.
"Cotton clothing is usually incinerated or it ends up in the landfill. Now it can be recycled several times to contribute to greater sustainability in fashion," says Lehmann. This will also broaden the base of raw source materials for pulp production in the textile industry. "The starter material for viscose rayon fibers has been wood-based cellulose. By optimizing the separating processes and intensifying the filtration of foreign fibers in the spinning process, we will eventually be able to establish recycled natural cotton fiber as a serious alternative source of cellulose and base raw material."
From old jeans to new T-shirt
The technical hurdles to recycling clothing made of cotton have been too high in the past, but now a team of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP and a Swedish company have cleared that obstacle. They are the first to produce a viscose filament yarn made of recycled cotton. This fiber can even serve to mass-manufacture textiles.
Producing viscose rayon is a complex process: The pulp is first activated with lye and then chemically derivatized. This yields a very pure alkaline viscose solution. Spinnerets riddled with several thousand 55 μm diameter holes then spin this solution in an acidic bath. The thousands of liquid jets emerging from the polymeric solution enable the derivatized cellulose to regenerate and continuously precipitate in the spinning bath to form a filament. The next step is to steadily reverse the chemical derivatization, and then wash and dry the filament for it to be wound onto a spool. Made of pure cellulose, this filament is ecofriendly. Rather than adding to the mountains of microplastics that pollute the oceans, it readily decomposes. This is a huge advantage over petroleum-based polyester fibers, which still predominate on the global market with a share of some 60 percent.
A weakish signal related to ongoing progress in learning AI using decentralized data.
"With Decentralized AI Training, the AI travels to the data, trains, and then moves to the next data source. Only the AI, which represents general learnings from the data, is shared, and never the private data themselves. This allows our team to train AI on private patient data that we never see."
The New Face of AI: Presagen's Federated Learning algorithm creates higher performing AI than traditional centralized learning
AI Healthcare company Presagen has developed a novel Federated Learning technique that can create better performing AI than traditional centralized training approaches.
Federated Learning is a technique that allows AI to train on data distributed in different locations throughout the world, without having to move or centralize the data, in order to protect data privacy. Presagen's patent-pending approach, called Decentralized AI Training, has AI traveling to the data rather than data traveling to the AI.
I find it fascinating how we are learning that our sense of self and our wellness and health - is so dependent on our microbiome. The uniqueness of our individual genome-interaction-with-microbiome - makes the progress toward customized diets and health regimes inevitable.
Bacteria in the gut have a direct line to the brain
With its 100 million neurons, the gut has earned a reputation as the body's "second brain"—corresponding with the real brain to manage things like intestinal muscle activity and enzyme secretions. A growing community of scientists are now seeking to understand how gut neurons interact with their brain counterparts, and how failures in this process may lead to disease.
Now, new research shows that gut bacteria play a direct role in these neuronal communications, determining the pace of intestinal motility. The research, conducted in mice and published in Nature, suggests a remarkable degree of communication between our nervous system and the microbiota. It may also have implications for treating gastrointestinal conditions.
"We describe how microbes can regulate a neuronal circuit that starts in the gut, goes to the brain, and comes back to the gut," says Rockefeller's Daniel Mucida, associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Mucosal Immunology. "Some of the neurons within this circuit are associated with irritable bowel syndrome, so it is possible that dysregulation of this circuit predisposes to IBS."
Well this is life passing through life - this seems more like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura - than a simple ‘excretion’.
Instead of succumbing to the frog’s digestive juices, an eaten Regimbartia attenuata traverses the amphibian’s throat, swims through the stomach, slides along the intestines and climbs out the frog’s butt, alive and well.
Water beetles can live on after being eaten and excreted by a frog
Surviving digestion-by-predator is rare, but not unheard of in the animal kingdom. Some snails survive the trip through fish and birds by sealing their shells and waiting it out. But research published August 3 in Current Biology is the first to document prey actively escaping through the backside of a predator.
Nature always is stranger than fiction - While lobsters have been subsumed to support arguments in favor of hierarchy - this primordial relationship between sexes - hint at chthonic fears of the loss of self. The image is uncanny.
For Mates to Fuse Bodies, Some Anglerfish Have Lost Immune Genes
In most vertebrates, the absence of adaptive immunity would be catastrophic, but in some deep-sea angler fish species, it enables their “wild” and “wacky” mating habits.
Krøyer’s deep-sea anglerfish, Ceratias holboelli, does not spawn, copulate, or do anything a fish would ordinarily do to mate. Instead, the male—just a few inches long—clasps onto the comparatively gigantic female’s body and never lets go. Slowly, his body morphs into hers, his cells becoming hers, including his testicles, which are used to make offspring. As he vanishes, two individuals become one—taking the concept of monogamy to a new level.
