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:
Bruce Sterling - State of the World 2021
An externalist approach to creativity: discovery versus recombination
Time Is the Universal Measure of Freedom
Articles:
Only by taking leave of our senses can we plunge into reverie
As Wikipedia turns 20 it aims to reach more readers
A framework to assess the importance of variables for different predictive models
Drones could help create a quantum internet
Rare quadruple-helix DNA found in living human cells with glowing probes
Designer protein helps paralyzed mice walk again in breakthrough study
Inspired by kombucha tea, engineers create 'living materials'
Scientists make sustainable polymer from sugars in wood
Yellow mealworm safe for humans to eat, says EU food safety agency
I think that this year the surveillance debate will improve. I see hints of some new common-sense emerging. It's a little bit like pitifully afraid of wicked spies under the bed, but when you're actually governed by wicked spies, as the Russians are, you're less irrationally respectful of them, and you get a better understanding of their inherent limits as power-players. Not that the problems go away, mind you; you just get a better grip on the existent situation.
Little Tech used to move fast and break things, but Big Tech moves slow and still breaks things, so they make a much easier target than they once did. And, they know that. So they're adjusting — but not nimbly. They move like elephants now.
"Information wants to be free" is long over in MMXXI. It was a historic moment, but it was replaced by the surveillance-capital Big Tech doctrine "Information about you wants to be free to us."
However, that profiteering doctrine also got old and stale, and the contemporary problem is an identity-politics crisis. It's about the deeper, culture-war reality of Us not really being Us and You never really being You; the Jekyll-and-Hyde horror of having to denounce your own face in the mirror, while you have to batter the people who love you best.
The Electronic Frontier's just not a frontier now, it's densely settled, it's got all kinds of wealth and infrastructure to quarrel over, and it's got a blooming plethora of economic, legal, social and ethical problems.
The WELL really was a purple-haze cyberspace ivory tower for quite a while, I can fondly remember how thrilling that was, but nowadays it is what it is, which is a funky little mom-and-pop legacy-media niche. That's what the passage of time does, it's the nature of history and futurity, there's a melancholy beauty to it. You shouldn't whine about it any more than you ought to wring your hands about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Bruce Sterling - State of the World 2021
In this way of thinking, we leave behind the western notion of the self-governing, independent individual for a different notion, of interdependent people whose identities are established in interaction with each other. From this perspective, individual change cannot be separated from changes in the groups to which an individual belongs. And changes in the groups don’t take place without the individuals changing. We form our groups and our followerships and they form us at the same time, all the time.
Identity is a pattern in time.
Richer connections and more challenging, more exploratory conversations leave people feeling more alive, more inspired and capable of far more.
I am not I
Arthur Schopenhauer stated that talent hits the target others cannot hit while genius hits the target others cannot see.
Consider two examples of mathematical creativity. In the first case, a student has to find a solution to a difficult algebraic problem. The student may apply all known rules and the solution lies somewhere inside the huge solution space offered by traditional mathematics. In the second case, consider the invention of imaginary numbers. They allow the solution of otherwise intractable mathematical problems but at the cost of expanding the original solution space. Creativity is involved in both cases, but there is a clear difference between the two. The former does not emerge from the original solution space, while the latter reaches a new state of affairs in the world (all those situation that may be conveniently modeled by imaginary numbers). Yet, even the second case is not a totally arbitrary addition to the original space. In fact, if one could arbitrarily add new rules, it would be possible to solve any problem simply by imagination. This is not the case. There is a sort of creative imagination that is able to provide new rules and a new solution space that have some sort of coherence with the external world.
An externalist approach to creativity: discovery versus recombination
Steward also saw consumerism as a way to achieve an industrialized democracy. Mass enjoyment of the prosperity that an industrial economy creates was necessary to keep the engine running; for Steward, “consumerism” meant the ability of workers to buy the things they need through their own fair share of what they were creating. He saw it as a method for harnessing and deploying working-class power as well as stabilizing the economy. He attacked those who used the concepts of thrift and self-denial to discipline the working-class. The “charge of extravagance” against working people “is made to sustain the claim that wages ought not to be any higher.” Consumerism wasn’t just about individuals satisfying their own desires and preferences, but a way for workers to claim a share of the economy that they produced for themselves. This consumerism allowed workers to build a culture and gain control over their time and neighborhoods, to keep their traditions and communities, and ease the experience of the often brutal working conditions they faced. Shorter working hours contribute to freedom by creating the time and cultural space necessary for civil society to thrive.
Time Is the Universal Measure of Freedom
As the 3rd decade of the 21st Century begins - it has become evident that social media and other media platforms - have some responsibilities regarding the protections of civil society - regarding hate speech and related contents - this is a signal of a good place to start.
So sure, condemn Parler, condemn Apple and Google for including them in the app stores, but please let's not pretend that "hate speech filters" exist as anything but grifty promises from overcapitalised snake-oil salesmen flogging their magic beans.
I am all for platforms (including app stores) having a variety of speech policies. After all, I expect different speech standards when I'm tucking my daughter in at night, when I'm in a professional meeting, when I'm having a conversation around a campfire, and when I'm in a political debate. I want to have a variety of conversational spaces that I can choose among based on my preferences about the suitability of the house rules to the context of the discourse I want to have.
Like the pandemic, Parler is revealing the latent fragility of our systems. Parler is vulnerable to takedown by a duopoly of app stores, by a oligopoly of cloud providers, by a tiny coterie of payment processors. [see state of the world 2021 - above]
Cory Doctorow
THE SANTA CLARA PRINCIPLES
On Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation
These principles are meant to serve as a starting point, outlining minimum levels of transparency and accountability that we hope can serve as the basis for a more in-depth dialogue in the future.
On the occasion of the first Content Moderation at Scale conference in Santa Clara, CA on February 2nd, 2018, a small private workshop of organizations, advocates, and academic experts who support the right to free expression online was convened to consider how best to obtain meaningful transparency and accountability around internet platforms’ increasingly aggressive moderation of user-generated content.
Now, on the occasion of the second Content Moderation at Scale conference in Washington, DC on May 7th, 2018, we propose these three principles as initial steps that companies engaged in content moderation should take to provide meaningful due process to impacted speakers and better ensure that the enforcement of their content guidelines is fair, unbiased, proportional, and respectful of users’ rights.
- Companies should publish the numbers of posts removed and accounts permanently or temporarily suspended due to violations of their content guidelines.
- Companies should provide notice to each user whose content is taken down or account is suspended about the reason for the removal or suspension.
- Companies should provide a meaningful opportunity for timely appeal of any content removal or account suspension.
This is an important piece that should be a contributor to knowledge generation, learning, the future of work - if we want the best from ourselves in ways that can enable a flourishing society. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone’s work had regular moments of reverie?
Only by taking leave of our senses can we plunge into reverie
If we are to understand reverie, we need to differentiate it from flow. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the flow state as the subjective experience of engaging in just-manageable challenges by tackling a series of clear proximal goals. But first comes a preparation period whereby we immerse ourselves into a group of problematic themes that stir up our interest and curiosity. Does the difference between talent and genius, certainty and uncertainty, embodiment and ecstasy reside in differences between flow and reverie? That reverie is simply intense flow is questionable, since reverie can be a sudden illumination and feel perilous. Indeed, the Norwegian psychoanalyst Eystein Våpenstad, quoting Steven Cooper, refers to ‘rougherie’.
Because reverie is indistinct, flow is better studied, and getting in among the material seems key to its initial stages. On hearing that ‘marble changes colour under different people’s hands’, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth realised that it was ‘not dominance which one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion, and above all greater co-ordination between head and hand.’ Absorbed in playing or making, we process feedback on our progress, and adjust our actions accordingly. This holds whether playing Fortnite (ludic) or making pinch pots (aesthetic). Brain-imaging studies have begun to map the interconnected brain areas that contribute to flow states. But the well of suppressed experience and imagery, drawn upon in reverie in combination with the flickering fragility of the state itself, is not so amenable to study.
This is an amazing signal - for something nobody predicted because it was inconceivable as a business model. Imagine a world where Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms - were non-profit foundations?
Wikipedia's non-profit status nature make it an outlier among today's internet dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook, and hark back to the web's early idealistic days when the open-source movement harnessed the talents of volunteers to offer free access to tools and knowledge.
That's really important that the next billion people, two billion people who come online are going to want to participate in Wikipedia, to grow their own storehouse of knowledge, and they're going to rely on us to support that work, and that's a big part of how I think about the future,
As Wikipedia turns 20 it aims to reach more readers
Wikipedia celebrates its 20th anniversary on Friday and the collaborative, volunteer-produced internet encyclopedia aims to spend the next 20 years further expanding free access to information.
Founded on January 15, 2001 by the American-British entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is now the seventh-most popular website in the world, with its more than 55 million articles being consulted 15 billion times every month.
The website started in English but within two months had already launched in German and Swedish. It is now available in 309 languages.
But Wales doesn't intend to stop there, with the languages of the developing world in the website's sights.
This is an innovation in model making that is worth noting.
A framework to assess the importance of variables for different predictive models
Two researchers at Duke University have recently devised a useful approach to examine how essential certain variables are for increasing the reliability/accuracy of predictive models. Their paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, could ultimately aid the development of more reliable and better performing machine-learning algorithms for a variety of applications.
"Most people pick a predictive machine-learning technique and examine which variables are important or relevant to its predictions afterwards," Jiayun Dong, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "What if there were two models that had similar performance but used wildly different variables? If that was the case, an analyst could make a mistake and think that one variable is important, when in fact, there is a different, equally good model for which a totally different set of variables is important."
Dong and his colleague Cynthia Rudin introduced a method that researchers can use to examine the importance of variables for a variety of almost-optimal predictive models. This approach, which they refer to as "variable importance clouds," could be used to gain a better understanding of machine-learning models before selecting the most promising to complete a given task.
The term "variable importance clouds" comes from the idea that there are several models (i.e., a whole "cloud" of them) that one can assess in terms of variable importance. These clouds can help researchers to identify variables that are important and those that are not. Typically, the importance of one variable implies that another variable is less important (i.e., does not guide a given model's predictions as much).
This is an interesting signal of a plausible future internet - one that could also include Google’s project Loon and it’s own quantum capabilities.
Drones could help create a quantum internet
Scientists have used octocopters to send entangled photons to distant locations
Scientists have now used drones to transmit particles of light, or photons, that share the quantum linkage called entanglement. The photons were sent to two locations a kilometer apart, researchers from Nanjing University in China report in a study to appear in Physical Review Letters.
Entangled quantum particles can retain their interconnected properties even when separated by long distances. Such counterintuitive behavior can be harnessed to allow new types of communication. Eventually, scientists aim to build a global quantum internet that relies on transmitting quantum particles to enable ultrasecure communications by using the particles to create secret codes to encrypt messages. A quantum internet could also allow distant quantum computers to work together, or perform experiments that test the limits of quantum physics.
Quantum networks made with fiber-optic cables are already beginning to be used. And a quantum satellite can transmit photons across China. Drones could serve as another technology for such networks, with the advantages of being easily movable as well as relatively quick and cheap to deploy.
I’ve been thinking about our domestication of DNA for a few years now. It seems that there’s more to know about DNA.
"A different DNA shape will have an enormous impact on all processes involving it—such as reading, copying, or expressing genetic information.
"Evidence has been mounting that G-quadruplexes play an important role in a wide variety of processes vital for life, and in a range of diseases, but the missing link has been imaging this structure directly in living cells."
Rare quadruple-helix DNA found in living human cells with glowing probes
New probes allow scientists to see four-stranded DNA interacting with molecules inside living human cells, unraveling its role in cellular processes.
DNA usually forms the classic double helix shape of two strands wound around each other. While DNA can form some more exotic shapes in test tubes, few are seen in real living cells.
However, four-stranded DNA, known as G-quadruplex, has recently been seen forming naturally in human cells. Now, in new research published today in Nature Communications, a team led by Imperial College London scientists have created new probes that can see how G-quadruplexes are interacting with other molecules inside living cells.
An amazing signal - maybe bring real hope to so many people with paralysis.
Not only did motor neurons near the site of injection begin to produce hIL-6 themselves, but they passed it along through axonal side branches to other neurons responsible for actions like walking. And sure enough, within a few weeks the mice regained function in their hind legs, even after just a single injection.
Designer protein helps paralyzed mice walk again in breakthrough study
In a new study, German scientists have restored the ability to walk in mice that had been paralyzed after a complete spinal cord injury. The team created a “designer” signaling protein and injected it into the animals’ brains, stimulating their nerve cells to regenerate and share the recipe to make the protein.
Spinal cord injuries are among the most debilitating. Damaged nerve fibers (axons) may no longer be able to transmit signals between the brain and muscles, often resulting in paralysis to the lower limbs. Worse still, these axons cannot regenerate.
Previous studies have shown promise in restoring some limb function through spinal stimulation therapy, or by bypassing the injury site altogether. Other promising research in similar areas has involved using compounds that restore balance to the inhibitory/excitatory signals in the neurons of partially paralyzed mice, and transplanting regenerating nose nerve cells into the spines of injured dogs.
But in the new study, researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) in Germany took a different path, aiming to repair the damaged axons with a protein they call hyper-interleukin-6 (hIL-6). As the name suggests, this is a synthetic version of a naturally occurring peptide, which has been tweaked to stimulate nerve cell regeneration.
I love this signal of the future of manufacturing and materials creation.
"We foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralized manufacturing," says Timothy Lu, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering.
Inspired by kombucha tea, engineers create 'living materials'
Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the "kombucha mother" used to ferment tea.
Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the researchers were able to produce cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants. They also showed that they could incorporate yeast directly into the material, creating "living materials" that could be used to purify water or to make "smart" packaging materials that can detect damage.
Lu and Tom Ellis, a professor of bioengineering at Imperial College London, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Materials. The paper's lead authors are MIT graduate student Tzu-Chieh Tang and Cambridge University postdoc Charlie Gilbert.
To demonstrate the potential of their microbe culture, which they call "Syn-SCOBY," the researchers created a material incorporating yeast that senses estradiol, which is sometimes found as an environmental pollutant. In another version, they used a strain of yeast that produces a glowing protein called luciferase when exposed to blue light. These yeasts could be swapped out for other strains that detect other pollutants, metals, or pathogens.
I love this signal of metabolic plastic - Personally I don’t want to ban plastic - I want to ban landfill and create plastic that can be metabolized easily into new forms or new materials.
additional functionality could be added to this versatile polymer by binding other chemical groups such as fluorescent probes or dyes to the sugar molecule, for biological or chemical sensing applications
This polymer is particularly versatile because its physical and chemicals properties can be tweaked easily, to make a crystalline material or more of a flexible rubber, as well as to introduce very specific chemical functionalities
Scientists make sustainable polymer from sugars in wood
Scientists from the University of Bath have made a sustainable polymer using the second most abundant sugar in nature, xylose.
Not only does the new nature-inspired material reduce reliance on crude oil products, but its properties can also be easily controlled to make the material flexible or crystalline.
The researchers, from the University's Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies, report the polymer, from the polyether family, has a variety of applications, including as a building block for polyurethane, used in mattresses and shoe soles; as a bio-derived alternative to polyethylene glycol, a chemical widely used in bio-medicine; or to polyethylene oxide, sometimes used as electrolyte in batteries.
This is a good signal - showing the positive power of the open community of idea - technology - the Internet - and people with good intentions.
Guy Struggles Picking Up His Parkinson’s Meds, TikToker Helps By Designing Pill Bottle For People With Shaky Hands
It is estimated that around 10 million people in the world live with Parkinson’s disease. If you’re not aware, Parkinson’s is a brain disorder that leads the person to experience shaking, muscle stiffness, and difficulty with walking, balance, and coordination.
One of the most renowned and inspiring people with Parkinson’s disease (PD), Jimmy Choi, went to TikTok to rant about the pill containers that his Parkinson’s medication comes in—despite it being for PD patients, it’s not really designed for that.
Another TikTok user saw this and was heartbroken, prompting him to come up with a solution to this.
The future of food promises all manner of new sources of nourishment.
Yellow mealworm safe for humans to eat, says EU food safety agency
Move paves way for high-protein maggot-like insect to be approved for consumption across Europe
Yellow mealworm finger foods, smoothies, biscuits, pasta and burgers could soon be mass produced across Europe after the insect became the first to be found safe for human consumption by the EU food safety agency.
The delicacies may not be advisable for everyone, however. Those with prawn and dustmite allergies are likely to suffer a reaction to the Tenebrio molitor larvae, whether eaten in powder form as part of a recipe or as a crunchy snack, perhaps dipped in chocolate.
The conclusion of scientists at the EU food safety agency, following an application by France’s first insect-for-food production company, Micronutris, is expected to lead to EU-wide approval within months of yellow mealworm as a product fit for supermarket shelves and kitchen pantries across the continent.
#micropoem
but the visioning -
was so cone-of-possibilities -
linear-intuitive constrained -
old-dogs who know the world -
smart young pups -
ready to game the world -
betting the future -
is playing probabilities smartly -
blind to wise paradox -
kons -
The cat is in superposition -
unalive-undead -
The cat observed -
COLLAPSES into 'a' state -
unalive -
undead -
We are observing a world in a superposition
of possibilities -
Can we can observe it -
in such a way -
that it collapses -
to a better -
alive-ness -
