Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) 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 will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
You could spend a lifetime studying an individual water molecule and never deduce the precise hardness or slipperiness of ice. Watch a lone ant under a microscope for as long as you like, and you still couldn’t predict that thousands of them might collaboratively build bridges with their bodies to span gaps. Scrutinize the birds in a flock or the fish in a school and you wouldn’t find one that’s orchestrating the movements of all the others.
How Complex Wholes Emerge From Simple Parts
Fluids should be easy. They’re ordinary, classical things — water, air currents, maple syrup — described by physical laws first written down nearly two centuries ago. And yet when a tornado rips open the roof of the table-tennis factory, just try to predict where all the ping pong balls are going to land.
This is hard because of turbulence, a problem that gives physicists and mathematicians more trouble than you might think. On the physical side, turbulence happens when a smooth fluid flow starts to split into smaller eddies and vortices. These swirls then break into smaller swirls, with those swirls begetting ever-smaller whorls, an unpredictable cascade that dissipates the energy from the original smooth stream. These whorls all affect one another, making it impossible to precisely predict what is going to happen to any particular particle in the fluid you’re measuring. On the large scale, energy dissipates gradually and with a semblance of order. On the small scale, chaos abounds.
The Trouble With Turbulence
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-turbulence-is-a-hard-physics-problem-20190128
Why are we still struggling to fulfill the dreams of Follett, Mayo, McGregor and the rest? Four reasons: Orthodoxy, timidity, fragmentation and irrelevance.
Orthodoxy — As management thinkers and practitioners, many of us remain captive to bureaucratic orthodoxy. Until we’re willing to explore radically new paradigms, we’ll remain stuck — like carmakers trying to wring the last bit of efficiency out of internal combustion engines.
Timidity — We also suffer from ADD — “ambition deficit disorder.” Too often, when challenged to do something radical, we ask, “Who’s already done it?” Instead we should ask, “Is it worth doing?” That’s the question that prompted NASA to send an $850 million drill — the InSight Lander — to the surface of Mars. Would that management researchers were half as ambitious.
Fragmentation — Most researchers work in silos. They seldom reach across disciplines and seem more interested in carving out their own reputational niches than in collaborating on messy, ecosystem-level problems.
Irrelevance — There’s not much management research that is both bold and practical, and thus of interest to those with pockets deep enough to fund field research. Consider this: In a recent year, businesses spent $2.6 billion funding life sciences research in U.S. universities. Another $1 billion went to engineering disciplines. A scant $51 million went to business schools, or barely 1% of corporate-funded university research.
No single organization can create the post-bureaucratic future on its own. What’s needed is a consortium of laboratory companies and a network of inspired innovators all eager to reinvent the way human beings work at scale.
Global research consortia are already common in the sciences. There were, for example, 3,000 co-authors on the paper that confirmed the existence the Higgs Bosun. It’s time for a similarly bold collaborative effort in management — the organizational equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider or the International Brain Laboratory.
Gary Hamel - The [New] Human Movement
We are told that America is divided and polarized as never before. Yet when it comes to many important areas of policy, that simply isn’t true.
About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leave attracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.
The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.
Tim Wu - The Oppression of the Supermajority
A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three- to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note.) The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare, rather than by a desire to look good.
We’re not as selfish as we think we are. Here’s the proof
Changing the way we communicate is the way we change organizations. Changing the conversation is not a major program or change process. It is about understanding and influencing participation. It is sometimes about new connections, new conversations, new agendas, and new people taking actively part. It is often about asking different kind of questions and pointing to different kinds of issues.
There can be no change without changes in the patterns of communication.
Organizations of any kind, no matter how large or how small they are, are continuously reproduced and transformed in the ongoing communicative interaction. The patterns of interaction in an organization are highly correlated with its performance.
Thus we should pay much more attention to the strength and number of relationships and wideness and depth of networked thinking.
The distinctive characteristic of a high productivity organization is the capacity to generate expansive emotional states. Low connectivity, self-orientation and negativity can trap organizations and people into rigid patterns of thinking and limiting behaviour. “There is a human habit of getting stuck in a certain way of thinking” as Murray Gell-Mann put it.
The goal is to create emotional spaces that open possibilities for effective action, creativity and learning. It is not about having common goals and sharing the same values. It all starts with acknowledgment and recognition evolving into a more responsive and attuned sense of consciousness between different people having different backgrounds and thus different approaches.
What would it be like to live in a world where acknowledgement was the accepted rule, that we loved to fulfill, any time, any place, and with anybody.
Esko Kilpi - Changing the conversation
This is a short piece from the creator of the Web Tim Berners-Lee.
30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?
Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go.
The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online and those who are not increases, making it all the more imperative to make the web available for everyone.
And while the web has created opportunity, given marginalised groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.
...The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time. Today, half of the world is online. It is more urgent than ever to ensure the other half are not left behind offline, and that everyone contributes to a web that drives equality, opportunity and creativity.
The Contract for the Web must not be a list of quick fixes but a process that signals a shift in how we understand our relationship with our online community. It must be clear enough to act as a guiding star for the way forward but flexible enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology. It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future.
This 9 min video signals multiple issues and possible trajectories - not just answering many arguments against Universal Basic Income - but the new salient roles of cities as the key levels of government more responsive to citizens.
Pawar Drives Initiative to Test Universal Basic Income
A new resolution to bring universal basic income to Chicago may soon be making its way to City Council for a vote. Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th Ward, joins us in discussion.
This is an interesting research project that is related to Universal Basic Income and the question of human cooperation. The website offers their published papers and computational models.
The Human Generosity Project
The Human Generosity Project is the first large-scale transdisciplinary research project to investigate the interrelationship between biological and cultural influences on human generosity. We use multiple methodologies to understand the nature and evolution of human generosity including fieldwork, laboratory experiments and computational modeling.
This is a very important and strong signal of the potential for deep significant collaboration despite polarization - perhaps we can learn about what conditions are productive of collaborating beyond differences of opinion.
Wikipedia’s civil wars show how we can heal ideological divides online
Social networks have developed a reputation as bitterly polarised places, populated with churlish arguments over clashing politics. Yet an analysis of millions of Wikipedia articles suggests that ideologically diverse groups can not only cooperate effectively, but also produce better work than homogenous groups. How did Wikipedia succeed where much of the online world failed?
To see how ideological opponents can find common ground, Misha Teplitskiy at Harvard University and his colleagues looked at the editors of Wikipedia articles on politics, science and social issues.
They scored the editors’ political leanings as -1 for the most liberal and +1 for the most conservative, based on whether they were predominantly editing articles on liberal or conservative subjects.
The most active editors were clustered around the ideological extremes and the more editors an article attracted, the more likely it was to attract them from both sides of the political spectrum. For example, the 11,813 editors who pored over Margaret Thatcher’s Wikipedia entry had an average score of 0.068.
By examining Wikipedia’s Talk pages, where editors discuss their thoughts about an article, the team found that the intense disagreement that happens between ideologically polarised editors often led to a more focused debate, with editors on both sides admitting the process had improved the final article.
This is a brief account with some pictures of some of the key people driving the open source movement - well worth the view.
Faces of Open Source: The Humans Behind the Movement
A techie turned photographer captures the heroes who launched a tech revolution
One thing we never forget at IEEE Spectrum is that technology doesn’t automatically condense out of the laws of physics, like dew on leaves. Every bit of tech that exists, exists because someone worked to make it so. But it’s a harsh irony of engineering that the better designed something is, the more inconspicuous its creator becomes.
This is especially true for software “down the stack”—the protocols, servers, operating systems, and other infrastructure upon which every app depends.
Peter Adams is trying make some of those creators more visible—literally—with his online Faces of Open Source project. Adams takes striking photographs of contributors to the open source movement, from Unix designer Ken Thompson to more recent players such as information-security expert Yan Zhu.
Adams embarked on his photographic mission in 2014. “Consumers don’t have much awareness that underneath the shiny wrappers that the commercial companies like Apple and Google are making is a foundation of open source software. I felt it was an incredible story that trillions of dollars of economic value could be created on the work of a relatively small group of people who essentially gave their intellectual property away for free. I started to really get interested in that, and meeting these people, and seeing who they really were,” says Adams.
The site with all the pictures is here Just to put a time frame around this - the term ‘open source’ is only 20 years old.
Christine Peterson is a futurist and lecturer in the field of nanotechnology. Peterson coined the term “open source” in 1998 as part of a concerted effort to make source code sharing more appealing to commercial software developers and the broader business community.
Faces of Open Source
an on-going photographic documentation of the people behind the development and advancement of the open source revolution that has transformed the technology industry.
Computers. The Internet. Smartphones. The Web. Many of the technologies we use each day are powered by software so critical that even minor flaws in its source code could stop the world in its tracks.
Yet much of this software is “open source” — a technology commons that can be freely used and contributed to by anyone, but at the same time, is controlled by no one person or corporation.
Originally pioneered by computer programmers who believe in freely sharing the source code of their software with the world, this radical idea eventually grew into a full blown revolution to “open source” everything from encyclopedic knowledge, to the mapping of the human genome, to heirloom seeds.
And, yet, despite its wide ranging impact, the open source revolution remains all but unknown to most people who now, more than ever before, depend on its survival.
This project is an attempt to change that.
Faces of Open Source is an on-going photographic documentation of the people behind the open source revolution. The project is comprised of portraits of notable and unsung heroes who dedicate themselves to the creation and advancement of our open source technologies.
While this 4 min video is aimed at the US situation - it is well worth the view. It presents wealth inequality in a very easily understood visual. This is something all of us have to understand if we want a flourishing and progressive society and economy.
A better way to tax the rich
American wealth inequality is staggering. A wealth tax, which would hone in on the money people actually have, rather than just the money we earn and spend, could be a solution.
An astounding amount of American wealth lies with very few ultrarich people. But it isn’t taxed by the federal government. That's because most of the taxes we pay only happen when money changes hands — when we earn it or spend it.
On the other hand - this is a very important project - signaling what Marshall McLuhan might call a revival of tribal moral regulation.
By 2020, China aims to have a file on every Chinese citizen that includes all the data collected on their behavior. Once the files are successfully collected, the hope is that authorities will be able to search for them based on fingerprints and other biometrics.
China banned millions of people with poor social credit from transportation in 2018
China banned people from buying plane or train tickets 23 million times last year because their social credit scores were too low, according to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of a government report.
The government rolled out the travel ban on people with low social credit scores last May. According to a report from China’s National Public Credit Information Center from last week, people have been blocked 17.5 million times from purchasing airplane tickets, and 5.5 million times from buying high-speed train tickets. These people had become “discredited” for unspecified behavioral crimes. That’s up from only 6.15 million citizens being blocked from taking flights as of 2017, according to China’s supreme court.
Social credit scores are also supposed to help prevent annoying behavior on public transport, such as one case where a passenger who took up another person’s reserved seat and refused to get up. The video of the passenger refusing to budge went viral, with Chinese users calling for more punishment for people who act this way.
This is a great signal that should make us all consider the appropriate protections required to ensure a level of transparency to keep data companies honest and people to share in the benefits of data use.
these 121 entities represent just a fraction of the broader data economy: The Vermont law only covers third-party data firms–those trafficking in the data of people with whom they have no relationship–as opposed to “first-party” data holders like Amazon, Facebook, or Google, which collect their own enormous piles of detailed data directly from users.
Piles of personal data are flowing to political consultants attempting to influence your vote (like Cambridge Analytica) and to government agencies pursuing non-violent criminal suspects (like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Meanwhile, people-search websites, accessible to virtually anyone with a credit card, can be a goldmine for doxxers, abusers, and stalkers. (The National Network to End Domestic Violence has assembled a guide to data brokers.)
Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information
You’ve probably never heard of many of the data firms registered under a new law, but they’ve heard a lot about you. A list, and tips for opting out.
It’s no secret that your personal data is routinely bought and sold by dozens, possibly hundreds, of companies. What’s less known is who those companies are, and what exactly they do.
Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates largely in the shadows, and often with few rules.
Even Vermont’s first-of-its-kind law, which went into effect last month, doesn’t require data brokers to disclose who’s in their databases, what data they collect, or who buys it. Nor does it require brokers to give consumers access to their own data or opt out of data collection. Brokers are, however required to provide some information about their opt-out systems under the law–assuming they provide one.
If you do want to keep your data out of the hands of these companies, you’ll often have to contact them one by one through whatever opt-out systems they provide; more on that below.
A full report is downloadable here
Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life
How thousands of companies monitor, analyze, and influence the lives of billions. Who are the main players in today’s digital tracking? What can they infer from our purchases, phone calls, web searches, and Facebook likes? How do online platforms, tech companies, and data brokers collect, trade, and make use of personal data?
This is a vital signal of the need to transform consumption of goods based on massed produced fashion - where industries either try to guess or shape our tastes.
We have to fix fashion if we want to survive the climate crisis
The industry churned out 100 billion pieces of clothing for 7 billion people in 2015. The problem is so bad, some brands are burning unsold inventory. The waste has got to stop.
Enough is enough. Stop making me think it is normal to shop all the time, not just when I need something. You make flimsy dresses in cheap factories, and I snap them up. You drop new items every day, then send me emails–freakily customized to my tastes–telling me I must buy them right now, or they will sell out. And I believe you. To make room for new outfits, I schedule regular trips to Goodwill to donate the old ones, which will likely end up in a landfill anyway. (In California alone, Goodwill spends $7 million on dumping clothes.)
For the past three decades, fashion brands have perfected the art of manufacturing cheap clothing by relying on poorly paid labor in developing countries, inventing inexpensive plastic-based materials, and increasing the speed of production. And because most brands project what customers will want to buy six to nine months in advance, designers rarely get their predictions right. There are always some looks that nobody wants to buy. When brands churn out thousands of new looks every season, the problem of unsold inventory just scales up. The New York Times reports that a power plant in Vasteras, the Swedish town where H&M launched, relies partly on burning products that the company cannot sell as a fuel source.
This is a weak signal - of more than extraction of biocrude from algae - but rather of quicker cheaper ways to extract any lipid algae are bioengineered to produce.
Engineers develop fast method to convert algae to biocrude
A team of chemical engineers have developed a new kind of jet mixer for creating biomass from algae that extracts the lipids from the watery plants with much less energy than the older extraction method. This key discovery now puts this form of energy closer to becoming a viable, cost-effective alternative fuel.
And here’s another signal about bacteria evolving to metabolize niche opportunities.
Scientists Capture Bacteria That Eat Pollution and Breathe Electricity
These impressive microorganisms found in Heart Lake Geyser Basin can convert pollution while generating energy in the process.
In Yellowstone National Park, lies the Heart Lake Geyser Basin. This area is home to pools of hot water, ranging from about 110 to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit, that carry some very impressive bacteria that eat pollution and breathe electricity.
Now, Washington State University's (WSU) Abdelrhman Mohamed and colleagues have captured these microorganisms straight from their source The microbes may hold the key to solving the problems of pollution and energy demand that plague us today.
Why? Because these specific microorganisms can literally eat pollution. They do this by turning toxic pollutants into less harmful substances and generating electricity in the process.
This is an excellent summary of battery technologies now being researched and/or developed.
10 disruptive battery technologies trying to compete with lithium-ion
The modern world runs on lithium-based batteries. Numerous chemistries and novel technologies are being developed to counter the limitations of Li-ion batteries though, including the high cost, raw materials sourcing and overheating. Chicago-based research intelligence firm PreScouter recently released a report detailing 10 new battery technologies poised to disrupt the market over the next decade and usher in the next wave of high-performance batteries. Here’s a high-level look at the report findings, including a review of these battery technologies most valuable to solar-plus-storage.
This is an emerging signal of the importance of our microbiome as well as of the imperative to transform business and health care models.
Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Americans with C. diff have been cured through fecal transplants, often with a single dose that can bring patients back from the brink of death. The treatment has more than an 80 percent success rate, according to several studies, and many patients feel better within hours of receiving the procedure, which is usually administered through colonoscopy or capsules containing desiccated fecal matter.
Drug Companies and Doctors Battle Over the Future of Fecal Transplants
As pharmaceutical companies seek to profit from the curative wonders of human feces, doctors worry about new regulations, higher prices and patients attempting DIY cures.
There’s a new war raging in health care, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and thousands of lives in the balance. The battle, pitting drug companies against doctors and patient advocates, is being fought over the unlikeliest of substances: human excrement.
The clash is over the future of fecal microbiota transplants, or F.M.T., a revolutionary treatment that has proved remarkably effective in treating Clostridioides difficile, a debilitating bacterial infection that strikes 500,000 Americans a year and kills 30,000.
The therapy transfers fecal matter from healthy donors into the bowels of ailing patients, restoring the beneficial works of the community of gut microbes that have been decimated by antibiotics. Scientists see potential for using these organisms to treat diseases from diabetes to cancer.
At the heart of the controversy is a question of classification: Are the fecal microbiota that cure C. diff a drug, or are they more akin to organs, tissues and blood products that are transferred from the healthy to treat the sick? The answer will determine how the Food and Drug Administration regulates the procedure, how much it costs and who gets to profit.
And finally a couple of interesting signals related to the transformation of energy geopolitics.
Chinese Officials Say Their "Artificial Sun" Will Be Completed This Year
https://www.sciencealert.com/chinese-researchers-design-an-artificial-sun-that-mimics-nuclear-fusion
In November, Chinese researchers announced that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor — an "artificial sun" designed to mimic the nuclear fusion process the real Sun uses to generate energy — had hit a milestone by achieving an electron temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius.
Now, officials are saying they believe they'll wrap up construction on a new artificial sun this year, and they claim this device will be able to hit a milestone in ion temperature — putting us one step closer to harnessing the power of nuclear fusion.
According to Duan, the HL-2M Tokamak will be able to achieve an ion temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius, about seven times hotter than the real Sun's ion temperature.
This meets meeting what the Global Times calls "one of the three challenges to reach the goal of harnessing the nuclear fusion."
If he's right, the device could serve as a template for future nuclear fusion reactors, bringing the dream of unlimited clean energy one step closer to reality.
There is a growing trend toward divestment from fossil fuels
“The objective is to reduce the vulnerability of our common wealth to a permanent oil price decline,” said Norway’s finance minister, Siv Jensen. “Hence, it is more accurate to sell companies which explore and produce oil and gas, rather than selling a broadly diversified energy sector.”
Norway's $1tn wealth fund to divest from oil and gas exploration
World’s largest sovereign wealth fund was created to invest North Sea oil profits
The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which manages $1tn (£770bn) of Norway’s assets, is to dump investments in firms that explore for oil and gas, but will still hold stakes in firms such as BP and Shell that have renewable energy divisions.
The Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), whose assets exceed those of rival sovereign wealth funds such as China’s, said it would phase out oil exploration from its “investment universe”.
The strategy shift, on the back of advice from the country’s central Norges Bank, will affect 1.2% of its equity holdings, worth about 66bn Norwegian krone (£5.7bn).
GPFG said the decision was motivated by a desire to protect the Norwegian economy by reducing exposure to oil price falls, rather than climate concerns.
It will retain stakes in fossil fuel companies as long as they have some involvement in renewable energy. Its stakes in large firms with renewable units include 2.4% of Shell and 2.3% of BP, because it believes they will play a major role in developing green energy.
It will sell stakes in 134 companies, including UK-listed firms Tullow Oil, Premier Oil, Soco International, Ophir Energy and Nostrum Oil & Gas, all of which experienced a fall in share price after the announcement, knocking £130m off their combined stock market value.
Shameless self-promotion - a first blog-post in a long while - aiming to extend the concept of sustainability to a better framework of flourishing evolution.
