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:
Noam Chomsky - “Marx’s Old Mole is Right Beneath the Surface”
Articles:
Sustainable community development: from what's wrong to what's strong
Marshall McLuhan’s “Learning a Living” Meme Anticipated Today’s “Learning a Living”
The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation
Toward deep-learning models that can reason about code more like humans
Illegal Content and the Blockchain
First Report of Horizontal Gene Transfer Between Plant and Animal
The Power of Multisolving for People and Climate | Elizabeth Sawin | TEDxSunValley
Sunlight to solve the world's clean water crisis
Experts' predictions for future wind energy costs drop significantly
Google Lens expands beyond mobile and comes to desktop web with OCR in Google Photos
Hume was a great philosopher. He wrote an important essay, “Of the First Principles of Government” (1741), one of the classic texts on what we now call political philosophy or political science. He opens his study by raising a question. He’s surprised, he says, to see the “easiness” with which people subordinate themselves to power systems. That’s a mystery, because the people themselves really have the power. Why do they subject themselves to masters? The answer, he says, must be consent: the masters succeed in what we now call manufacturing consent. They keep the public in line by their belief that they must subordinate themselves to power systems. And he says this miracle occurs in all societies, no matter how brutal or how free.
Hume was writing in the wake of the first democratic revolution, the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, which led to what we call the British constitution—basically, that the king will be subordinate to parliament. Parliament at that time basically meant merchants and manufacturers. Hume’s close friend, Adam Smith, wrote about the consequences of the revolution. In his own famous book The Wealth of Nations (1776), he pointed out that the now sovereign “merchants and manufacturers” are the true “masters of mankind.” They used their power to control the government and to ensure that their own interests are very well taken care of, no matter how “grievous” the effect on the people of England—and even worse, on those who are subject to what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” referring mainly to the British rule in India.
The year before Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the American Revolution broke out. About a decade later the American Constitution was formed, very much like during the first democratic uprising.
But that’s not the whole story. There was also the general public, which didn’t want to be ruled by either king or parliament. It was a lively pamphlet period. Itinerant workers and ministers reached much of the general public. Their pamphlets and talks called for being ruled by fellow countrymen, who know the people’s wants, not by knights and gentlemen who only want to oppress the people. They called for universal health, universal education, and many things. But they were ultimately crushed. Hume and Smith both wrote after the victory of the merchants and manufacturers in Britain—not only over the king, but over the general public.
Noam Chomsky - “Marx’s Old Mole is Right Beneath the Surface”
To think like an expert detective, you have to embrace a so-called ‘investigative mindset’. The terms ‘possibly’ and ‘could’ should be your watchwords as they are in every real investigation and at every crime scene. In detective handbooks, this is called the ABC principle:
Assume nothing
Believe nothing
Challenge and check everything
Nothing should be taken for granted or accepted at face value. Expert detectives will always take a sceptical approach to any information or evidence. All stories are possible, until they are not. Always ask yourself ‘What do I know?’ and ‘What do I not know?’ Doing this is sometimes very hard, but even just attempting to slow down your otherwise conclusion-jumping brain will prove helpful. Keep reminding yourself: correlation does not imply causation. Hence, the safest way to test any hypothesis is to try to disprove it. Suppose you think your house keys are lost or stolen. In this situation, it might be a good idea to double-check and eliminate all other options before you decide to change your locks. The only true investigative mantra was formulated in 1890 by Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It goes like this: ‘[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
It might sound pretty straightforward, but believe me, it’s not. There’s a reason why Sherlock Holmes is considered a genius. The hardest thing is to resist our automatic assumptions and deep-seated need for closure.
complexity has gone from something found mainly in large systems, such as cities, to something that affects almost everything we do: the life we live, the jobs we have, and the projects or organisations we run. As a consequence, the gap between our first idea and reality has almost exploded. Most of this increase stems from the information-technology revolution of the past few decades. Phenomena that used to be hidden, constant or separate are now tangible, interconnected and interdependent. Complex systems interact in unexpected ways. New patterns form, and the outlier is often more significant than the average. Making matters even worse, our analytical tools haven’t kept up with these developments. Collectively, we know a good deal about how to navigate complexity but this knowledge hasn’t been transformed into effective tools. Some predict that artificial intelligence might be our salvation, while others see it as our downfall.
What this rising complexity means in practice is that, whenever you’re confronted by a real-life dilemma that involves abductive reasoning – such as working out why a product launch failed, why your kid is struggling at school, or why your smartphone has stopped working – it’s more important than ever that you learn how to think more systematically. More like a detective.
How to think like a detective
Universal Basic Everything is the idea that there are systems, tangible and intangible, that we need to survive and thrive. These relationships and friendships, products and services need to be co-created, accessible to everyone, open source, simple in their design, circular in their production.
We already have an incredible set of universal services in the UK, most notably our National Health Service and public schooling. We have the important concept of Universal Basic Income that is being tested in places across the world, and a version of which is being currently enacted by the current UK government through the Covid 19 furlough schemes.
We have universal services at local authority level, such as libraries, rubbish collection and road maintenance. What these all have in common is that they are top down services, provided by government for citizens,
Universal Basic Everything
A great TED talk for thinking about re-imagining the local in preparation for a post-covid community - that learns its living.
Sustainable community development: from what's wrong to what's strong
How can we help people to live a good life? Instead of trying to right what's wrong within a community Cormac argues we need to start with what's strong. We need to help people discover what gifts they have and to use those gifts to enrich those around them.
Cormac Russell is Managing Director of Nurture Development, the leading Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) organisation in Europe, and faculty member of the ABCD Institute at Northwestern University, Illinois.
McLuhan continues to deepen his insights as we develop the digital environment.
Marshall McLuhan’s “Learning a Living” Meme Anticipated Today’s “Learning a Living”
Marshall McLuhan anticipated that learning and work would become increasingly interrelated: “… it is becoming clear that the main “work” of the future will be education, that people will not so much earn a living as learn a living…. Industry and the military, as well as the arts and sciences, are beginning to consider education their main business” (McLuhan & Leonard, 1967, 25). In this, he was in agreement with and possibly influenced by his friend and colleague Peter Drucker, who coined the phrase “knowledge worker” in his 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow, writing in his 1994 essay The Age of Social Transformation:
“The great majority of the new jobs require qualifications the industrial worker does not possess and is poorly equipped to acquire. They require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. They require a different approach to work and a different mind-set. Above all, they require a habit of continuous learning. Displaced industrial workers thus cannot simply move into knowledge work or services the way displaced farmers and domestic workers (the dominant jobs at the turn of the last century – R.M) moved into industrial work. At the very least they have to change their basic attitudes, values, and beliefs”.
Here are some additional McLuhan quotes on Learning a Living to drive home the point:
The emerging new political-economic paradigms is already being felt as we manage Covid 19 - this signal a far more effective paradigm to navigate paths to flourishing for all.
The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation
ABSTRACT
The job guarantee (JG) is a public option for jobs. It is a permanent, federally funded, and locally administered program that supplies voluntary employment opportunities on demand for all who are ready and willing to work at a living wage. While it is first and foremost a jobs program, it has the potential to be transformative by advancing the public purpose and improving working conditions, people’s everyday lives, and the economy as a whole.
This working paper provides a blueprint for operationalizing the proposal. It addresses frequently asked questions and common concerns. It begins by outlining some of the core propositions in the existing literature that have motivated the JG proposal. These propositions suggest specific design and implementation features. (Some questions are answered in greater detail in appendix III). The paper presents the core objectives and expected benefits of the program, and suggests an institutional structure, funding mechanism, and project design and administration.
One more signal in the ‘what can be automated - will be’ paradigm.
"Unless you're really careful, a hacker can subtly manipulate inputs to these models to make them predict anything," says Shashank Srikant, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "We're trying to study and prevent that."
Toward deep-learning models that can reason about code more like humans
Whatever business a company may be in, software plays an increasingly vital role, from managing inventory to interfacing with customers. Software developers, as a result, are in greater demand than ever, and that's driving the push to automate some of the easier tasks that take up their time.
Productivity tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio suggest snippets of code that developers can easily drop into their work as they write. These automated features are powered by sophisticated language models that have learned to read and write computer code after absorbing thousands of examples. But like other deep learning models trained on big datasets without explicit instructions, language models designed for code-processing have baked-in vulnerabilities.
In a new paper, Srikant and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab unveil an automated method for finding weaknesses in code-processing models, and retraining them to be more resilient against attacks. It's part of a broader effort by MIT researcher Una-May O'Reilly and IBM-affiliated researcher Sijia Liu to harness AI to make automated programming tools smarter and more secure. The team will present its results next month at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
This is a great analysis of some aspects of the Blockchain and how all technologies can become weaponized - and perhaps the inverse too - all weapons have affordances for positive uses.
Imagine someone using this idea to evade government censorship. Most Bitcoin mining happens in China. What if someone added a bunch of Chinese-censored Falun Gong texts to the blockchain?
What if someone added a type of political speech that Singapore routinely censors? Or cartoons that Disney holds the copyright to?
information must reside somewhere. Code is written by and for people, stored on computers located within countries, and embedded within the institutions and societies we have created. To trust information is to trust its chain of custody and the social context it comes from. Neither code nor information is value-neutral, nor ever free of human context.
Illegal Content and the Blockchain
Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery network Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe.
It’s best to avoid explaining the mathematics of Bitcoin’s blockchain, but to understand the colossal implications here, you need to understand one concept. Blockchains are a type of “distributed ledger”: a record of all transactions since the beginning, and everyone using the blockchain needs to have access to — and reference — a copy of it. What if someone puts illegal material in the blockchain? Either everyone has a copy of it, or the blockchain’s security fails.
To be fair, not absolutely everyone who uses a blockchain holds a copy of the entire ledger. Many who buy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t bother using the ledger to verify their purchase. Many don’t actually hold the currency outright, and instead trust an exchange to do the transactions and hold the coins. But people need to continually verify the blockchain’s history on the ledger for the system to be secure. If they stopped, then it would be trivial to forge coins. That’s how the system works.
Some years ago, people started noticing all sorts of things embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. There are digital images, including one of Nelson Mandela. There’s the Bitcoin logo, and the original paper describing Bitcoin by its alleged founder, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. There are advertisements, and several prayers. There’s even illegal pornography and leaked classified documents. All of these were put in by anonymous Bitcoin users. But none of this, so far, appears to seriously threaten those in power in governments and corporations. Once someone adds something to the Bitcoin ledger, it becomes sacrosanct. Removing something requires a fork of the blockchain, in which Bitcoin fragments into multiple parallel cryptocurrencies (and associated blockchains). Forks happen, rarely, but never yet because of legal coercion. And repeated forking would destroy Bitcoin’s stature as a stable(ish) currency.
Our understanding of the processes driving evolution has been challenge in the last few decades with our understanding of horizontal gene transfer and other similar mechanisms of change.
“This study is seriously cool,” says Charles Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. It “demonstrates yet another nice example of how horizontal gene transfer among eukaryotes confers evolutionary novelty.”
First Report of Horizontal Gene Transfer Between Plant and Animal
Whiteflies overcome a toxin in plants they eat through the use of the plant’s own genetic protection, likely ferried from plant to insect millions of years ago by a virus.
In the first known example of horizontal gene transfer between a plant and an animal, a common pest known as the whitefly (Bemisia tabaci) acquired a gene from the one of the various plants it feeds on, researchers reported today (March 25) in Cell. The gene, BtPMaT1, protects the insects from phenolic glycosides, toxins that many plants produce to defend themselves against such pests, thus allowing the whiteflies to feast.
Horizontal gene transfer is the nonsexual swapping of genes between species. It’s been documented previously between single-celled organisms and even between some eukaryotes such as fungi and beetles. There are a number of ways that horizontal gene transfer can occur. Genetic material can be transferred via phages or other viruses, and some organisms may take up free DNA from the environment.
This is a great signal of an good approach to the local and the global dimensions to meeting the challenges of Climate Change.
The Power of Multisolving for People and Climate | Elizabeth Sawin | TEDxSunValley
Is the way we are thinking about climate change preventing us from solving it? Elizabeth Sawin tells how we can solve the climate issue by helping other people solve their problems.
Elizabeth Sawin is Co-Director of Climate Interactive, a think tank that applies systems analysis to climate change and related issues. A biologist with a Ph.D. from MIT, Beth trained in system dynamics and sustainability with Donella Meadows and worked at Sustainability Institute, the research institute founded by Meadows, for 13 years. Beth’s work focuses on helping people find solutions that prevent future climate change, build resilience to unavoidable climate impacts, and provide opportunities to people who need them most. She writes and speaks on this topic to local, national, and international audiences. She is a member of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among humanities scholars, writers, artists and climate scientists. Beth’s work also focuses on capacity building, helping leaders achieve bigger impact. She has trained and mentored global sustainability leaders and Dalai Lama fellows. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
A great signal of progress towards clean water for all.
Sunlight to solve the world's clean water crisis
A team led by Associate Professor Haolan Xu has refined a technique to derive freshwater from seawater, brackish water, or contaminated water, through highly efficient solar evaporation, delivering enough daily fresh drinking water for a family of four from just one square meter of source water.
At the heart of the system is a highly efficient photothermal structure that sits on the surface of a water source and converts sunlight to heat, focusing energy precisely on the surface to rapidly evaporate the uppermost portion of the liquid.
While other researchers have explored similar technology, previous efforts have been hampered by energy loss, with heat passing into the source water and dissipating into the air above.
Another signal in the phase transition of global energy geopolitics.
Experts' predictions for future wind energy costs drop significantly
Technology and commercial advancements are expected to continue to drive down the cost of wind energy, according to a survey led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) of the world's foremost wind power experts. Experts anticipate cost reductions of 17%-35% by 2035 and 37%-49% by 2050, driven by bigger and more efficient turbines, lower capital and operating costs, and other advancements. The findings are described in an article in the journal Nature Energy.
The study summarizes a global survey of 140 wind experts on three wind applications—onshore (land-based) wind, fixed-bottom offshore wind, and floating offshore wind. The anticipated future costs for all three types of wind energy are half what experts predicted in a similar Berkeley Lab study in 2015. The study also uncovered insights on the possible magnitude of and drivers for cost reductions, anticipated technology trends, and grid-system value-enhancement measures.
I have come to really love Google Lens when trying to identify plants and animals - with my Android mobile - I take a picture - then open it up and touch the lens icon - and a series of images and websites are displayed with suggested identifications - I’ve learned about cormorants, golden eye ducks, poison ivy, and many more plants with this simple awesome tool.
Google Lens expands beyond mobile and comes to desktop web with OCR in Google Photos
Besides being its own app, Google Lens is also available in Image Search, Photos, and integrated across Android. Google is now bringing Lens to the desktop web inside Google Photos for convenient text copying through optical character recognition (OCR).
Opening an image with words reveals a “Copy text from image” suggestion chip that features the (old) Lens logo and dismiss button. It appears to the left of Share, Edit, Info, and other controls for Google Photos.
Tapping launches Google Lens with the same analysis animation of pulsating dots appearing over the picture for a brief second. Afterwards, all text in an image is selected by default and everything appears in the right panel. You can “Deselect text” from the top-right corner to just highlight specific passages and copy with a floating button over the image.
OCR is a very convenient Google Lens capability and the only capability live in this web version of Photos, which is widely rolled out today. The visual search tool does not currently work to recognize monuments or plants, and could help people explore their images and memories.
This is the first time Lens has expanded beyond mobile.
#micropoem
yesterday
television is what bring families together -
by setting them apart [attentionally] -
a tacit presencing -
psytuationally bubbled -
today
Internet is what brings the world together -
by netting them a part -
in-magic-nation stages -
psytuationally hubbled -
The boundaries of the Local -
expand & contract -
alway in motion -
We all serve purposes -
key is to be more than a purpose -
it's to always be a possibility -
we can NEVER be -fully independent -
and be human -
we can grow our agency -
in an aware interdepence -
mhm -
At best –
ethics serves to name shaping aspirations –
despite enternal uncertainty -
of any resulting consequence of actions -
while at best -
moral accounting aims -
to enable honest social chemistry -
despite eternal uncertainty -
of any gaming consequences -
