Merry Seasonings Everyone
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.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
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.’
“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon
Content
Quotes:
Monopoly Was Invented to Reveal the Toxic Greed of Capitalism
Why Behavioral Economics is Itself Biased
Catherine Dulac Finds Brain Circuitry Behind Sex-Specific Behaviors
Articles:
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Viruses, microscopy and fast radio bursts: 10 remarkable discoveries from 2020
China plans rapid expansion of 'weather modification' efforts
Researchers create entangled photons 100 times more efficiently than previously possible
Researchers Have Achieved Sustained Long-Distance Quantum Teleportation
Google, Harvard unveil Android medical research app
Scientists develop novel self-healing human-machine interactive hydrogel touch pad
The world's first DNA 'tricorder' in your pocket
Bacteria can travel from one continent to another in atmospheric dust particles
Giant Viruses Can Integrate into the Genomes of Their Hosts
Distinct Microbiome and Metabolites Linked with Depression
‘Buy land – they aren’t making it any more,’ quipped Mark Twain. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there.
The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.
Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?).
The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a ‘practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences’ and hence to understand how different approaches to property ownership can lead to vastly different social outcomes. ‘It might well have been called “The Game of Life”,’ remarked Magie, ‘as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.’
Parker Brothers bought up Magie’s patent, but then re-launched the board game simply as Monopoly, and provided the eager public with just one set of rules: those that celebrate the triumph of one over all.
Monopoly Was Invented to Reveal the Toxic Greed of Capitalism
Maybe it’s better to be right twice a day than to be the clock that is always two hours too slow.
Behavioural scientists have a better insight into this than many. We know that people aren’t just selfishly trying to maximise their income, wealth or consumption.
Yet, despite this, when we assess people’s behaviour in the wild, we often assess the rationality of their behaviours against a rather narrow set of outcomes, such as how their decisions benefit their finances or health in the long-term. We then try to nudge them in that direction.
Yet, that’s often not what people want.
Why Behavioral Economics is Itself Biased
Merleau-Ponty’s insights started from the simple idea that we don’t so much ‘have’ as ‘inhabit’ our bodies, living with them and through them in a complex social world. To make this clear, he distinguished between two notions of the body. There’s the ‘objective body’ that, like other physical objects, has a particular size, weight, buoyancy and so on; it’s what you assess when you weigh yourself on the scales, say, or when you pose for a selfie. But far more important is what he called the ‘lived body’: the body through which we touch and feel and move. And this latter notion, he wrote, grounds us as being ‘body-subjects’ before all else.
This is especially pertinent in the digital era, and not only because of the ‘noise’ of limitless distractions. More pervasively, it pushes against the ‘solutionism’ that radiates outwards from Silicon Valley, in which human lives are interpreted as a series of problems to be solved through sophisticated analysis of data. On this view, things such as mindfulness practices – which can involve resting your attention on the sensations of breathing – become just another ‘life hack’. It’s true that these techniques can offer a host of benefits, including a boost to our capacity for metacognitive awareness – an awareness of our own negative (or positive) thoughts as thoughts rather than as unfiltered reality, which can help prevent relapses into anxiety and depression. But connecting to the aliveness of the breathing body offers us something more basic: these moments literally re-source us, putting us in contact, as body-subjects, with our most primordial mode of being. In tech circles, ‘dwell time’ is used to refer to how long a user spends on a particular webpage – but perhaps we can reclaim the expression for time spent intentionally dwelling in a state of embodied presence without seeking to ‘get’ anything out of it.
The body as mediator
I would say that until our work, there was this idea, at least for mammals, about rigid structural differences in the brain between males and females. What we found is that it is more complicated than that. It’s not as if the brains of a male and female are identical, but they are way more similar than anticipated. Yes, there are early hormonal actions that make a male brain more prone to display male-typical behavior and a female more prone to display behavior that is female-typical.
But that doesn’t mean that those brains are so different that one cannot display the behavior of the other.
Catherine Dulac Finds Brain Circuitry Behind Sex-Specific Behaviors
This is a vital issue for a flourishing economy in a society of accessible opportunity. A healthy market and a viable democracy requires a level enough playing field - monopolies, monopsonies, oligarchies and strong-long intellectual property regimes - threaten social and economic health.
investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."
This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.
In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.
Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.
One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."
Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).
But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers.
Many may already be aware of the work the EU is undertaking to renew how it regulates the Internet to protect citizens and a democratic society - this is an important signal.
The Commission missed the mark on giving users more freedom and control over their Internet experience, as rules on interoperability are absent from the proposal. That may be addressed in the Digital Markets Act draft proposal. If the EU wants to break the power of platforms that monopolize the Internet, it needs regulations that will enable users to communicate with friends across platform boundaries, or be able to follow their favorite content across different platforms without having to create several accounts.
European Commission’s Proposed Digital Services Act Got Several Things Right, But Improvements Are Necessary to Put Users in Control
The European Commission is set to release today a draft of the Digital Services Act, the most significant reform of European Internet regulations in two decades. The proposal, which will modernize the backbone of the EU’s Internet legislation—the e-Commerce Directive—sets out new responsibilities and rules for how Facebook, Amazon, and other companies that host content handle and make decisions about billions of users’ posts, comments, messages, photos, and videos.
This is a great opportunity for the EU to reinvigorate principles like transparency, openness, and informational self-determination. Many users feel locked into a few powerful platforms and at the mercy of algorithmic decision systems they don’t understand. It’s time to change this.
We obtained a copy of the 85-page draft and, while we are still reviewing all the sections, we zeroed in on several provisions pertaining to liability for illegal content, content moderation, and interoperability, three of the most important issues that affect users’ fundamental rights to free speech and expression on the Internet.
A signal - about the current state of the zoom.
Federal prosecutors accuse Zoom executive of working with Chinese government to surveil users and suppress video calls
The case is a stunning blow for the $100 billion video-call giant and raises questions about how the California-based company protects users’ data around the world
A security executive with the video-tech giant Zoom worked with the Chinese government to terminate Americans’ accounts and disrupt video calls about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, Justice Department prosecutors said Friday.
The case is a stunning blow for Zoom, one of the most popular new titans of American tech, which during the pandemic became one of the main ways people work, socialize and share ideas around the world. The California-based company is now worth more than $100 billion.
But the executive’s work with the Chinese government, as alleged by FBI agents in a criminal complaint unsealed Friday in a Brooklyn federal court, highlights the often-hidden threats of censorship on a forum promoted as a platform for free speech. It also raises questions about how Zoom is protecting users’ data from governments that seek to surveil and suppress people inside their borders and abroad.
Here’s a nice summary of some of the positive wonders of 2020 - just because it was a hell of a year for most things.
Viruses, microscopy and fast radio bursts: 10 remarkable discoveries from 2020
Highlights from News & Views published this year.
Matter–antimatter symmetry violated
Jet stream stops shifting as ozone layer recovers
Incest uncovered at elite prehistoric Irish burial site
Satellites could soon map every tree on Earth
Latent HIV gets a shock
Engineering a picky eater
A fast radio burst in our own Galaxy
Cryo-electron microscopy reaches atomic resolution
Interferon deficiency can lead to severe COVID
This is a really big signal - and whether successful or not - harkens other initiatives with geo-forming modifications for mitigating climate change - and who knows - shaping climate itself.
China plans rapid expansion of 'weather modification' efforts
Ambition to cover area more than one and a half times size of India likely to concern country’s neighbours
China is planning a rapid expansion of its weather modification programme to cover an area more than one and a half times the size of India, in a move likely to raise concerns among the country’s neighbours.
The decision, announced by the cabinet on Wednesday night, would increase fivefold the world’s biggest cloud-seeding operation, which already employs an estimated 35,000 people.
For six decades, the communist nation has deployed military aircraft and anti-aircraft guns to lace clouds with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen to thicken water droplets to the point where they fall as snow or rain. The technology has mostly been used at a local level to alleviate droughts or clear skies ahead of major events, such as the 2008 Olympics or last October’s 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
But the proposed enlargement is on a scale that could affect regional weather patterns. The cabinet said it wanted to extend the artificial rain and snow programme to cover at least 2.1m sq miles (5.5m sq km) of land by 2025. The long-term plan envisages that by 2035, the country’s weather modification capabilities would reach an “advanced” level and focus on revitalising rural regions, restoring ecosystems and minimising losses from natural disasters.
An important signal in the progress of basic science - not just of the emerging quantum computing paradigm - but of basic matter. Who knows what affordances will be revealed with implementation and further progress.
"It's long been suspected that this was possible in theory, but we're the first to show it in practice," said Yuping Huang, Gallagher associate professor of physics and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering.
"This is a huge milestone for quantum communications," said Huang, whose work will appear in the Dec. 17 issue of Physical Review Letters.
Researchers create entangled photons 100 times more efficiently than previously possible
Super-fast quantum computers and communication devices could revolutionize countless aspects of our lives—but first, researchers need a fast, efficient source of the entangled pairs of photons such systems use to transmit and manipulate information. Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have done just that, not only creating a chip-based photon source 100 times more efficient than previously possible, but bringing massive quantum device integration within reach.
To create photon pairs, researchers trap light in carefully sculpted nanoscale microcavities; as light circulates in the cavity, its photons resonate and split into entangled pairs. But there's a catch: at present, such systems are extremely inefficient, requiring a torrent of incoming laser light comprising hundreds of millions of photons before a single entangled photon pair will grudgingly drip out at the other end.
Huang and colleagues at Stevens have now developed a new chip-based photon source that's 100 times more efficient than any previous device, allowing the creation of tens of millions of entangled photon pairs per second from a single microwatt-powered laser beam.
And another quantum of progress.
Researchers Have Achieved Sustained Long-Distance Quantum Teleportation
The breakthrough, made by researchers at Caltech, Fermilab and NASA, among others, is a step towards a practical quantum internet.
In a major breakthrough for the quest toward quantum internet, a technology that would revolutionize computing in myriad ways, a consortium of well-regarded institutions have announced the first demonstration of sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation over long distances.
Led by Caltech, a collaboration between Fermilab, AT&T, Harvard University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Calgary reports the successful teleportation of qubits, basic units of quantum information, across 22 kilometers of fiber in two testbeds: the Caltech Quantum Network and the Fermilab Quantum Network.
Though the collaboration knew it had “achieved significant results” by the spring of 2020, Spiropulu added, they refrained from sharing the news, even informally on social media, until the publication of the full study this week.
The researchers say their experiment used "off-the-shelf" equipment that is compatible with both existing telecommunications infrastructure and emerging quantum technologies. The results “provide a realistic foundation for a high-fidelity quantum Internet with practical devices,” according to a study released on Tuesday in the journal PRX Quantum report.
This is a small signal of the future of public and personal wellbeing in the digital environment - yes I know privacy - but when the choice is health for everyone - in order for health for oneself - mhm
"Android represents probably a more diverse dataset [than iPhone]. We're pretty excited about the ability to leverage that," he said.
Google, Harvard unveil Android medical research app
Google has partnered with Harvard Medical School to launch an app that allows anyone with an Android phone to participate in medical studies.
The Google Health Studies app, available now, will train its sights first on respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 and the common flu.
With this new app, participants can provide data either through response to surveys or through sensory readings such as heart rate and temperature obtained through the phone.
The project is being joined by Boston Children's Hospital.
Dr. John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer of the Boston Children's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, emphasized the importance of such a potentially powerful tool in the effort to combat the epidemic.
Apple initiated a similar project last year with its Research app. Those studies collected data on menstrual cycles, hearing and heart health. Apple provided a ResearchKit program that allowed researchers to craft their own iPhone apps.
This is a small signal of the emerging blurring of the line between human-computer-environment entanglement. An 11 sec video illustrates the prototype.
Scientists develop novel self-healing human-machine interactive hydrogel touch pad
A research group led by Prof. Chen Tao at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), developed a novel soft self-healing and adhesive human-machine interactive touch pad based on transparent nanocomposite hydrogels, in cooperation with the researchers from the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems of CAS. The study was published in Advanced Materials.
With the rapid development of information technology and the Internet of things, flexible and wearable electronic devices have attracted increasing attention. A touch pad is a requisite input device for a mobile phone, smart appliance and point-of-information terminal. Indium tin oxide (ITO) has been used as the dominant transparent conductive film for manufacturing commercial touch pads, which inevitably have obvious shortcomings, like fragility.
To improve the stretchability and biocompatibility of touch pads to allow their interaction with humans, the researchers at NIMTE developed highly transparent and stretchable polyzwitterion-clay nanocomposite hydrogels with transmittance of 98.8% and fracture strain beyond 1500%.
This is still a small signal - but it points to an inevitable development - but one that will be independent of who makes your mobile device.
The world's first DNA 'tricorder' in your pocket
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists developed the world's first mobile genome sequence analyzer, a new iPhone app called iGenomics. By pairing an iPhone with a handheld DNA sequencer, users can create a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the "tricorder" featured in Star Trek. The iGenomics app runs entirely on the iOS device, reducing the need for laptops or large equipment in the field, which is useful for pandemic and ecology workers. Aspyn Palatnick programmed iGenomics in CSHL Adjunct Associate Professor Michael Schatz's laboratory, over a period of eight years, starting when he was a 14-year-old high school intern.
The iPhone app was developed to complement the tiny DNA sequencing devices being made by Oxford Nanopore. Palatnick, now a software engineer at Facebook, was already experienced at building iPhone apps when joining the Schatz laboratory.
There has been some research that has linked the presence of pollution with an increase in community transmission of covid-19. This article gives that research some more plausibility.
Bacteria can travel from one continent to another in atmospheric dust particles
Researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) have discovered that some microorganisms, such as bacteria, can travel from one continent to another 'hidden' in atmospheric dust.
Scientists from the UGR's Department of Edaphology and Agricultural Chemistry, Department of Applied Physics, and Center for Scientific Instrumentation have deciphered the enigma of the inter-continental transport of microorganisms via iberulites ('giant' atmospheric particles potentially inhalable by humans) and atmospheric dust, with the consequent risk of disease transmission that this implies.
Iberulites are giant polymineralic atmospheric bioaerosols, measuring on average one hundred microns approximately (although they can reach up to 250 µm). They travel across continents, defying the laws of gravity and transporting live microorganisms (acting rather like a launch vehicle). They were discovered in 2008 by researchers from the Department of Edaphology and Agricultural Chemistry of the UGR and the Andalusian Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (IFAPA).
NASA made the discovery public on its website in October of that year. But it is not until now that the UGR's multidisciplinary scientific team has revealed the mechanism by which bacteria are involved in the genesis and formation of atmospheric iberulites.
The theory of evolution is itself evolving from the simple concept of Darwinian selection. This is one signal of nature doing its own genetic modifications.
Giant Viruses Can Integrate into the Genomes of Their Hosts
Rather than introducing small chunks of DNA as other viruses do, some giant viruses can contribute more than 1 million base pairs to a host’s genome, broadening the ways in which viruses may shape eukaryote evolution.
In the ultimate game of genetic hide and seek, scientists at Virginia Tech have identified several instances in which they found giant virus genomes embedded—some in their entirety—in the genomes of their hosts. The results, published today (November 18) in Nature, suggest that such integration by giant viruses may be more common than previously believed and that these viruses are likely an underappreciated source of genetic diversity in eukaryotes.
“We always assumed that [giant viruses] that can integrate into host genomes were not common,” Karen Weynberg, a virologist at the University of Queensland in Australia who was not involved in the work, tells The Scientist. “Now they’ve shown that these viruses are able to integrate on a much wider scope than we ever really perceived. It’s going to be groundbreaking, and I think people will be looking more into where these viruses are popping up.”
Giant viruses, so named because they tend to be about 10 times larger than the average virus, have challenged traditional ideas in virology since their discovery in 2003. In addition to their unusually large size, their genomes sometimes include genetic contributions from bacteria and eukaryotes, including metabolic genes. Because of this, “they don’t necessarily look viral” at the genomic level, says Frank Aylward, a virologist at Virginia Tech and a coauthor of the study.
Another signal of an emerging conception of ‘self’ as a homeodynamic ecology.
Distinct Microbiome and Metabolites Linked with Depression
The gastrointestinal tracts of people with major depressive disorder harbor a signature composition of viruses, bacteria, and their metabolic products, according to the most comprehensive genomic and metabolomic analysis in depression to date.
The human gut microbiome is a world in miniature, populated by a chatty community of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa nestled within various gastrointestinal niches. Over the past decade, researchers have linked disturbances within this complicated microbial society to a variety of diseases. Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one such condition, but the studies have been small and the findings imprecise. A study published December 2 in Science Advances changes all that with its vivid description of a distinct microbiome associated with major depressive disorder, as well as the profile of molecules these organisms produce. The researchers were able to use this microbial “fingerprint” to distinguish between individuals with MDD and healthy controls, solely on the composition of a few microbes and compounds in their fecal matter.
They found that 18 bacterial species were more abundant in people with MDD (mainly belonging to the genus Bacteroides) and 29 were less common (primarily the genera Blautia and Eubacterium) compared to healthy controls. Hu and his team also found three bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) whose levels were different in MDD versus healthy controls, the first time the virome has been studied in MDD.
#Micropoem
The corrosion of -
marketing -
a root of faux-news -
culture -
belief-making -
