Happy New Year - may 2021 - Be the Year of Refreshing Civilization
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:
On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring
What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.
THE GARDEN OF FORKING MEMES: HOW DIGITAL MEDIA DISTORTS OUR SENSE OF TIME
Articles:
Sense-Making in our Post AlphaGo World
Immersive art opens a window on the mystery of other minds
A Quarter Century of Hype - 25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle
Researchers achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation
DeepMind's MuZero conquers and learns the rules as it does
Atomic-scale nanowires can now be produced at scale
Study suggests link between word choices and extraverts
Scientists patch photosynthesis glitch to make plants grow 40 percent larger
2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm
Wind powers more than half of UK electricity for first time
Research breakthrough could transform clean energy technology
#micropoem
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’ (1986) has a memorable opening: ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.’ He characterises bullshit as emanating from a lack of regard for the truth, and suggests that this might make it even worse than lying. The bullshitter, he explains, ‘does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.’ Similarly, shit-stirring has become the great enemy of good-faith debate in contemporary philosophical ethics.
On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring
Overall, today’s young adults attain markers of adulthood far later than their parents did, and in a far less clear-cut sequence. Analysing US census data, one report found that, in 1960, more adults aged 18 to 34 lived with a spouse than with their parents; by 2014, more young adults lived with their parents than with a husband or wife. At a time when work and personal relationships are more and more fragile, when the traditional markers of a good adult life can no longer be counted on to be there – from a secure job to a secure marriage – it’s neither surprising nor unreasonable that this generation of adults is focused on the one thing they can still control: the pursuit of their own growth and life satisfaction. Estrangement is sometimes part of that effort.
We used to do more for families in the US. The political scientist Jacob Hacker noted a ‘great risk shift’ that occurred during the 1980s when government and corporations shifted healthcare, college expenses and other financial burdens on to the backs of parents. During that time, a narrative of ‘We’re all in this together’ changed to ‘Government is the problem’ and ‘You have no one to blame but yourself for your lack of success.’ References to ‘survival of the fittest’ in the media escalated considerably during that time.
The task of distinguishing individuals can be difficult — and not just for scientists aiming to make sense of a fragmented fossil record. Researchers searching for life on other planets or moons are bound to face the same problem. Even on Earth today, it’s clear that nature has a sloppy disregard for boundaries: Viruses rely on host cells to make copies of themselves. Bacteria share and swap genes, while higher-order species hybridize. Thousands of slime mold amoebas cooperatively assemble into towers to spread their spores. Worker ants and bees can be nonreproductive members of social-colony “superorganisms.” Lichens are symbiotic composites of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. Even humans contain at least as many bacterial cells as “self” cells, the microbes in our gut inextricably linked with our development, physiology and survival.
“Twentieth-century biology was a biology of things, Twenty-first-century biology is a biology of processes.”
What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.
Every policy is a prediction. Tax cuts will boost the economy. Sanctions will slow Iran’s nuclear program. Travel bans will limit the spread of COVID-19. These claims all posit a causal relationship between means and ends. Regardless of party, ideology, or motive, no policymaker wants his or her recommended course of action to produce unanticipated consequences. This makes every policymaker a forecaster. But forecasting is difficult, particularly when it comes to geopolitics—a domain in which the rules of the game are poorly understood, information is invariably incomplete, and expertise often confers surprisingly little advantage in predicting future events.
...the limits of imagination create blind spots that policymakers tend to fill in with past experience. They often assume that tomorrow’s dangers will look like yesterday’s, retaining the same mental map even as the territory around them changes dramatically.
A Better Crystal Ball
My parents, for instance, still have a very hard time remembering that Netflix shows do not “come on” at a certain time. This seemingly trivial confusion points to deeper psychological differences between children of the television and children of the internet. Until the invention of “time shifting” and DVR, television viewers were beholden to a schedule that was designed by faraway producers/timekeepers. As a rule, twentieth century time was imposed on people from the top-down. Twenty-first century time is a bottom-up choose your own adventure story that allows people to make their own time machines and live anywhen.
Digital databases are unparalleled memory machines that have radically transformed how information and stories flow between grandparents and children, students and teachers, politicians and voters, journalists and citizens. What Marshall McLuhan called the perfect memory of computers has, in our time, spawned a garden of competing narratives and conceptions of the past/present/future.
Thanks to the “perfect memory” of digital media, internet subcultures are able to create their own visions of past, present, and future. The internet has freed them from the top-down schedules and narratives of mass media. With nearly all of recorded history at their fingertips, they can cherry-pick interesting scraps of information from the archives and construct new grand narratives with unprecedented ease.
In a 2019 interview with the popular philosophy YouTuber Contrapoints, Ezra Klein reflected on how digital media has re-shaped the ideological landscape over the last decade:
It’s amazing to me how much esoteric ideological and social theory is back operating within near-to-popular discourse now. As somebody who’s kind of a nerd for a lot of this stuff, I find it lovely, but also I’m really stunned to see people discussing tankies and neoliberalism and anarchism. It seems to me that, through the way Reddit and YouTube and social media work, there’s such an emphasis on creating distinctions and communities, and it’s just created an explosion of interest in ideological sub-groupings that had been completely forgotten. I started in politics in the early ‘00s, and it just didn’t have this flavor. If you were a kid looking to get into politics then, you couldn’t find these incredibly fine-grained sub-groupings to become part of and then start meme-ing yourself into a community with. It really feels different to me than when I was growing up in it.
The conversations of internet subcultures often feel substantive and expansive compared to the shallow discourse of presidential debates, op-ed pages, and cable TV shows. Mainstream news cycles rarely last more than a few hours, and their narratives are constantly shifting. They don’t tend to give a big-picture sense of where we came from or where we’re going. Internet subcultures, by contrast, are building grand narratives and meme worlds that help people feel their way through the chaos that’s currently unfolding. These stories cut deep, down to the most foundational questions of race and religion and destiny. We shouldn’t be too surprised that complex conspiracy theories, intergenerational trauma, and age-old religious fervor are coming to the fore — in a contest of narrative memes, deep history is a serious competitive advantage.
Digital media has re-shuffled the balance of power by making it easy for people to create historical narratives that attract lots of followers. The “time zones” of Old Media and internet subcultures are getting increasingly out of sync, despite attempts by the former to get out ahead of the latter. And the clocks and narratives of 20th century institutions lose influence in a media environment where everyday people can have the kind of reach that was once reserved for elites.
The algorithmic feeds that grew to prominence in the 2010s are a circus that set up shop in the lobby of the Library of Alexandria. As we spin round and round the carousels, everything seems to dissolve into an atemporal soup at the end of history. “History ends not when the stream of apparently historic events ends,” writes Venkatesh Rao, “but when the world loses a sense of a continuing narrative, and arrives at what psychologists call narrative foreclosure” — a hollowing out of the collective imagination, a sense of the future being cancelled. The ghosts of yesteryear float around the Cloud, hoping we’ll continue to embody their trauma, fight their battles, and live out their dreams and memes.
THE GARDEN OF FORKING MEMES: HOW DIGITAL MEDIA DISTORTS OUR SENSE OF TIME
This is a must view 45 min Youtube - the future of learning as Knowledge Management - individual and organizational. The collective tacit knowledge for fluency in collective learning by doing.
Sense-Making in our Post AlphaGo World
From the April 20th, 2017 #mediaX2017 Conference, "Sense-Making & Making Sense", John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation addresses how new AI - deep learning systems, raise fundamental ethical issues while they also influence and enable new behaviors and social practices.
This is an interesting signal of the future of digital immersion - many have been there in their personal sound bubbles via earbuds - that they take almost everywhere. As well as the increasing number of screen sourrounding our movements. VR is ever closer as is Augmented Reality.
Immersive art opens a window on the mystery of other minds
At Senscapes, the art and science venture I co-founded, you can experience what it’s like to be in an altered state of consciousness. You sit, stand or lie down in an exhibition space, and we project light and immersive music, created from brain data of people in altered states, around you. At the same time, we play an audio recording from someone immersed in one of these experiences, such as those under the influence of psychedelic drugs. They might describe how they began to feel sensations of bodily warmth, of light becoming sharper and more brilliant, and then a sudden feeling of great meaning in things that had seemed so mundane before. In these exhibitions, our vision is to create immersive experiences so you can explore someone else’s personal, and often mysterious, inner world.
This is a great 9 min video - a signal of signals - the Gartner Hype Cycle and the insights that can be gleaned from analysis of the 25 years of its annual production. Worth the view.
A Quarter Century of Hype - 25 Years of the Gartner Hype Cycle
A presentation of several novel ways to visualize 25 years of the Gartner Hype Cycle. The goal is to demonstrate how one's understanding of complex information can benefit greatly from viewing the data from a fresh perspective. The Hype Cycle journey of Virtual Reality is explored in greater detail and is illuminated by moments in the video creator's own personal journey through three decades of working on cutting edge VR research including close to a quarter century of using VR for theme park design and movie production.
Speaking of the hype cycle - quantum computing has been surfing the wave for a while - and will probably continue to do so for a long while more - but if we imagine that we understand the digital environment now - the future may well be magic.
Researchers achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation
A viable quantum internet—a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement—would transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing and computing, ushering in a new era of communication.
This month, scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory—a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory affiliated with the University of Chicago—along with partners at five institutions took a significant step in the direction of realizing a quantum internet.
In a paper published in PRX Quantum, the team presents for the first time a demonstration of a sustained, long-distance teleportation of qubits made of photons (particles of light) with fidelity greater than 90%.
The qubits were teleported over a fiber-optic network 27 miles (44 kilometers) long using state-of-the-art single-photon detectors, as well as off-the-shelf equipment.
By the time we have a quantum internet - where will AI be?
"For the first time, we actually have a system that is able to build its own understanding of how the world works and use that understanding to do this kind of sophisticated look-ahead planning that you've previously seen for games like chess
DeepMind's MuZero conquers and learns the rules as it does
Albert Einstein once said, "You have to learn the rules of the game, and then you have to play better than anyone else." That could well be the motto at DeepMind, as a new report reveals it has developed a program that can master complex games without even knowing the rules.
DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has previously made groundbreaking strides using reinforcement learning to teach programs to master the Chinese board game Go and the Japanese strategy game Shogi, as well as chess and challenging Atari video games. In all those instances, computers were given the rules of the game.
But Nature reported today that DeepMind's MuZero has accomplished the same feats—and in some instances, beat the earlier programs—without first learning the rules.
Programmers at DeepMind relied on a principle called "look-ahead search." With that approach, MuZero assesses a number of potential moves based on how an opponent would respond. While there would likely be a staggering number of potential moves in complex games such as chess, MuZero prioritizes the most relevant and most likely maneuvers, learning from successful gambits and avoiding ones that failed.
And finally another signal that we may well see in key devices sooner than we think.
Atomic-scale nanowires can now be produced at scale
Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices.
Electronics is all about making things smaller—smaller features on a chip, for example, means more computing power in the same amount of space and better efficiency, essential to feeding the increasingly heavy demands of a modern IT infrastructure powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. And as devices get smaller, the same demands are made of the intricate wiring that ties everything together. The ultimate goal would be a wire that is only an atom or two in thickness. Such nanowires would begin to leverage completely different physics as the electrons that travel through them behave more and more as if they live in a one-dimensional world, not a 3-D one.
This is a sad signal of the ‘truth’ in marketing? Is it a wonder that people don’t trust science? When we consider the real problems in the world and then the time-effort-resources taken to apply science to the worst of capitalism rather than human wellbeing.
Study suggests link between word choices and extraverts
The finding highlights the need for stronger linguistic indicators to be developed for use in online personality prediction tools, which are being rapidly adopted by companies to improve digital marketing strategies.
Today, marketing companies use predictive algorithms to help them forecast what consumers want based on their online behaviors. Companies are also keen to leverage data and machine learning to understand the psychological aspects of consumer behavior, which cannot be observed directly, but can provide valuable insights about how to improve targeted advertising.
The NTU team said the findings, which was published in the Journal of Research in Personality in December 2020, can provide marketers with well-founded linguistic predictors for the design of machine learning algorithms, improving the performance of software tools for personality prediction.
A good summary of advance in biology in 2020 - worth the read - I’m especially intrigued by the advance in our concepts of individuality.
The Year in Biology
While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent priority, biologists also learned more about how brains process information, how to define individuality and why sleep deprivation kills.
Progress was made on other scientific fronts, too, many of them of particular interest to Quanta readers. “Deep learning” artificial neural networks are proving helpful for understanding how the brain processes information (even though the brain’s computational complexity may also be much greater than scientists thought). Microbial ecologists were astonished to find cells inside basalt far under the ocean floor that have survived for perhaps more than 100 million years. And if you have been losing sleep over recent events in the news, well, science has finally learned why that is so bad for you, too.
This is an entertaining 5 min video about the intelligence of a single celled organism.
The Blob: a cell that learns
A network of cells that can learn and adapt...and all this without a brain! The Blob continues to fascinate scientists like Audrey Dussutour, who has studied it for years. She hopes that it will reveal new properties and insights into the mystery of life itself.
This is an interesting signal for both climate change and food security.
Scientists patch photosynthesis glitch to make plants grow 40 percent larger
photosynthesis isn’t perfect despite many eons of evolutionary refinement. Scientists from the University of Illinois have worked to correct for a flaw in photosynthesis, and that could improve crop yields by as much as 40 percent.
At the heart of the new research is a process in plants called photorespiration, which is not so much part of photosynthesis as it is a consequence of it. Like many biological processes, photosynthesis doesn’t work correctly 100 percent of the time. In fact, one of the main reactions in photosynthesis is only about 75 percent effective. The change comes in the process that plants undertake because of that inefficiency.
The team developed three alternate pathways using new genetic sequences. They optimized these pathways across 1,700 different plants to identify the best approaches. Over the course of two years, the researchers tested the sequences using modified tobacco plants. That’s a common plant in science because its genome is exceptionally well-understood.
Those plants produced about 40 percent more biomass than non-modified plants. That indicates the more efficient photorespiration pathways save the plant considerable energy that can instead go toward growth. The next step is to incorporate the genes into food crops like soybean, cowpea, rice, and tomatoes.
This is a great signal of the future of local food production.
2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm
Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company’s chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.
In recent years, farmers on flat farms have been using new tools for making farming better or easier. They’re using drones and robots to improve crop maintenance, while artificial intelligence is also on the rise, with over 1,600 startups and total investments reaching tens of billions of dollars. Plenty is one of those startups. However, flat farms still use a lot of water and land, while a Plenty vertical farm can produce the same quantity of fruits and vegetables as a 720-acre flat farm, but on only 2 acres!
A solid signal of the revolution in energy geopolitics.
"Britain has experienced a renewables revolution over the last decade with the growth of biomass, wind and solar power,"
Wind powers more than half of UK electricity for first time
Wind power accounted for more than half of Britain's daily generated electricity on Saturday in the wake of Storm Bella, according to energy giant Drax.
The percentage of wind power in the country's energy mix hit a record 50.67 percent on Saturday, the company said over the weekend, beating the previous record of 50 percent in August.
"For the first time ever (on Saturday), amid #StormBella, more than half of Great Britain's electricity was generated by the wind," Drax Group tweeted.
Another important signal in the transformation of global energy geopolitics.
"We have been developing new quantum mechanics techniques to understand the oxygen evolution reaction mechanism for more than five years, but in all previous studies, we could not be sure of the exact catalyst structure. Zhang's catalyst has a well-defined atomic structure, and we find that our theoretical outputs are, essentially, in exact agreement with experimental observables ... This provides the first strong experimental validation of our new theoretical methods, which we can now use to predict even better catalysts that can be synthesized and tested. This is a major milestone toward global clean energy."
Research breakthrough could transform clean energy technology
By some estimates, the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the earth in one year is greater than the sum of all the energy we could ever produce using non-renewable resources. The technology necessary to convert sunlight into electricity has developed rapidly, but inefficiencies in the storage and distribution of that power have remained a significant problem, making solar energy impractical on a large scale. However, a breakthrough by researchers at UVA's College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, the California Institute of Technology and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory could eliminate a critical obstacle from the process, a discovery that represents a giant stride toward a clean-energy future.
One way to harness solar energy is by using solar electricity to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen produced by the process is stored as fuel, in a form that can be transferred from one place to another and used to generate power upon demand. To split water molecules into their component parts, a catalyst is necessary, but the catalytic materials currently used in the process, also known as the oxygen evolution reaction, are not efficient enough to make the process practical.
Using an innovative chemical strategy developed at UVA, however, a team of researchers led by chemistry professors Sen Zhang and T. Brent Gunnoe have produced a new form of catalyst using the elements cobalt and titanium. The advantage of these elements is that they are much more abundant in nature than other commonly used catalytic materials containing precious metals such as iridium or ruthenium.
#micropoem
to make -
the whole thing work -
takes more tools -
than we know -
