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.’
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
The French Revolution as Illuminati Conspiracy
Complexity Scientist Beats Traffic Jams Through Adaptation
Articles:
Developers form coalition to press for app store changes
The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website
Ultra-low-cost hearing aid could address age-related hearing loss worldwide
Handheld device could provide fast method to diagnose concussions in youth athletes
Amazon will now let you pay with your palm in its stores
Dynamic tattoos promise to warn wearers of health threats
Tiny, magnetically controlled robots coax nerve cells to grow connections
Magnetic 'T-Budbots' made from tea plants kill and clean biofilms
New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster
Stem cells can repair Parkinson's-damaged circuits in mouse brains
California is ready to pull the plug on gas vehicles
Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.
Sex is real
the figure of the Illuminati allowed British conservative intellectuals to carve out aspects of Enlightenment thought that they liked while rejecting those associated with atheism, republicanism, and egalitarian ideals. Continental figures like Voltaire and Rousseau were out. British thinkers John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon were in—at least as interpreted by British conservatives who claimed them for a rationalist, Christian tradition.
Today, conspiracy theories continue to serve the purpose for believers: clearly distinguishing between the forces of good and evil, regardless of how messy and complicated world events may seem to those who haven’t been initiated.
The French Revolution as Illuminati Conspiracy
It is this unequal capacity to secure a future, design reliable plans, and make credible promises that defines our era, not merely the inequality of income and wealth. Working people are confined in an interminable present, unable to escape the short-term demands of rent, debt, and food; illiquidity looms large and overshadows daily life. In stark contrast, corporations and the rich are able to contend with the threat of illiquidity, relying on past savings and expected future income to ensure their survival. We have long recognized that the working class is spatially confined and cruelly underpaid; we must also emphasize that they simultaneously struggle under timelines they do not choose.
Colonizing the Future
what will be the effect of selfish versus cooperative drivers. It turns out that if you have a low density of cars on the roads, selfish drivers lead to more efficient traffic. But that’s only at low densities, and it’s just looking at efficiency. It’s more dangerous as well.
If you have medium densities, then when one driver cuts off another driver, it slows down everyone behind them. So it’s less effective. And if the density is too high, their selfishness doesn’t matter, because they cannot change lanes anyway.
The problem is that in the real world, the precise position of a vehicle at a time in the future depends not only on its acceleration and speed and so on, but on whether there are other cars or pedestrians or cyclists on the road. If other vehicles go slower or faster, there will be more or less space, based on whether everyone drives dangerously or not. There are strong interdependencies. You cannot predict where a car will be two minutes ahead because it depends on whether the cars ahead of it react to traffic lights on time, whether they get distracted, whether there is a bus, whether they stop where they shouldn’t, whether someone’s cleaning windshields and delaying everything.
If you try to solve a problem simplistically, without looking at the interactions, your solutions will be rather limited. There’s a saying in the urban mobility field [by the historian of technology Lewis Mumford]: “Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.” It’s a solution that doesn’t address the problem of the demand for transportation and how you will satisfy that demand.
Complexity Scientist Beats Traffic Jams Through Adaptation
There is so much negative press about AI these days - this is a great signal of efforts to change how we acknowledge research work.
When AI is the opposite of sinister: An MIT researcher is held up as model of how algorithms can benefit humanity
On Wednesday, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence named Barzilay as the inaugural recipient of a new annual award honoring an individual developing or promoting AI for the good of society. The award comes with a $1 million prize sponsored by the Chinese education technology company Squirrel AI Learning.
While there are already prizes in the AI field, notably the Turing Award for computer scientists, those existing awards are typically “more focused on scientific, technical contributions and ideas,” said Yolanda Gil, a past president of AAAI and an AI researcher at the University of Southern California. “We didn’t have any that recognized the positive impact that AI is having in our lives.”
With the new award, AAAI aims to counterbalance the widespread messages of concern circulated in the news media and by other commentators about the potential negative impacts of AI. “What we wanted to do with the award is to put out to the public that if we treat AI with fear, then we may not pursue the benefits that AI is having for people,” Gil said.
With the selection of Barzilay, AAAI’s award committee is honoring work in health care — widely seen as one of the most promising fields in which AI is being applied, but also a realm in which plenty can go wrong.
The world of Corporate Empires are not new - nor is the idea of corporate ‘warfare’ - this signals the ongoing conflict between platforms and their necessary ecologies.
Developers form coalition to press for app store changes
Major app developers including Fortnite maker Epic Games and streaming music giant Spotify announced Thursday they had formed a coalition to press for new terms to the major online marketplaces operated by Apple and Google.
The announcement of the new Coalition for App Fairness advocacy group will seek legal and regulatory changes for the app stores which serve as gatekeepers for much of the mobile software distributed to consumers.
The move comes amid rising criticism of the fees and terms imposed by the app stores, and legal challenges by both Epic and Spotify to Apple's 30 percent commission for online subscriptions.
The new Washington-based organization also includes Match Group, which operates the Tinder dating service, software maker Basecamp, the French-based music service Deezer and the European Publishers Council.
The group appeared to focus on Apple, which has faced pressure in recent months for how it operates its App Store.
For anyone concerned with privacy - this is a good signal of the sort of applications everyone should have to ensure transparency.
The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website
Trackers piggybacking on website tools leave some site operators in the dark about who is watching or what marketers do with the data
To investigate the pervasiveness of online tracking, The Markup spent 18 months building a one-of-a-kind free public tool that can be used to inspect websites for potential privacy violations in real time. Blacklight reveals the trackers loading on any site—including methods created to thwart privacy-protection tools or watch your every scroll and click.
We scanned more than 80,000 of the world’s most popular websites with Blacklight and found more than 5,000 were “fingerprinting” users, identifying them even if they block third-party cookies.
We also found more than 12,000 websites loaded scripts that watch and record all user interactions on a page—including scrolls and mouse movements. It’s called “session recording” and we found a higher prevalence of it than researchers had documented before.
This is a very nice signal of a number of domains - open-source manufacturing, 3D printing, addressing the needs of an aging population very inexpensively and the move toward a renewal of local repair.
"The challenge we set for ourselves was to build a minimalist hearing aid, determine how good it would be and ask how useful it would be to the millions of people who could use it," said M. Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "The need is obvious because conventional hearing aids cost a lot and only a fraction of those who need them have access."
Ultra-low-cost hearing aid could address age-related hearing loss worldwide
Using a device that could be built with a dollar's worth of open-source parts and a 3-D-printed case, researchers want to help the hundreds of millions of older people worldwide who can't afford existing hearing aids to address their age-related hearing loss.
The ultra-low-cost proof-of-concept device known as LoCHAid is designed to be easily manufactured and repaired in locations where conventional hearing aids are priced beyond the reach of most citizens. The minimalist device is expected to meet most of the World Health Organization's targets for hearing aids aimed at mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss. The prototypes built so far look like wearable music players instead of a traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids.
Details of the project are described September 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.
This is a great signal of emerging technology that will be everywhere physical sports are played.
Handheld device could provide fast method to diagnose concussions in youth athletes
Building upon years of research, a new study from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has demonstrated how a specific assessment of the eye could someday help properly diagnosis and monitor concussions. The findings were published today in JAMA Ophthalmology.
In the first study of its kind, the research team demonstrated that quantitative pupillary light reflex (PLR) metrics, which determine how the pupil responds to light and are obtained by using a hand-held dynamic infrared pupillometer (DIP), and can be used to differentiate concussed adolescent athletes from healthy adolescents.
The study found significant differences between concussed athletes and healthy adolescents for all PLR metrics except latency, or the time it takes for the pupil to respond to the light. Athletes with concussion had larger maximum and minimum pupil diameter, greater percentage constriction, and greater peak and average constriction and dilation velocity compared with healthy athletes. When the data were restricted to only concussions assessed within seven days of injury, seven out of the nine PLR metrics remained sensitive to identifying concussion as compared with healthy individuals.
The researchers also examined sex differences in the data. No sex differences were found in the healthy control group for any pupillary metric, confirming previously published research. However, there were differences observed for females with a concussion, who exhibited longer time to 75% pupillary re-dilation than males, which warrants further investigation to better characterize any sex differences in concussion.
Speaking of handheld devices - this is a fascinating and possibly scary signal (depending on who’s controlling the data). If you can believe in their privacy claims
Amazon will collect data on where Amazon One customers shop when they use the payment option, but it will not know what shoppers purchase or how much they spend inside third-party retail stores. An Amazon spokesperson said the company has “no plans to use transaction information from third-party locations for Amazon advertising or other purposes,” and shoppers can sign up for the service without linking it to an Amazon customer account if they choose.
Amazon will now let you pay with your palm in its stores
And, it hopes, at other retailers’ stores in the future.
Amazon accounts for nearly 40 percent of e-commerce sales in the US today, and it takes a cut of even more online shopping by selling payments services and other technologies to external shopping sites. Now, the online retail giant is making a play to grab a piece of brick-and-mortar shopping, too — and it wants customers to literally lend a hand to do it.
Amazon on Tuesday is unveiling a new biometric technology called Amazon One that allows shoppers to pay at stores by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out. The first time they register to use this tech, a customer will scan their palm and insert their payment card at a terminal; after that, they can simply pay with their hand. The hand-scanning tech isn’t just for Amazon’s own stores — the company hopes to sell it to other retailers, including competitors, too.
The technology will be available at the entrance of two of the company’s Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores in Seattle, Washington, starting Tuesday, and will roll out to the rest of the chain’s 20-plus stores in the future, Amazon Vice President Dilip Kumar told Recode in an interview Monday. Recode reported in December that Amazon had filed a patent application for such a hand-payment technology.
This is a good signal of the future of our skin as an interface with internal sensors as well as the eventual transformation of skin-as-screen.
Dynamic tattoos promise to warn wearers of health threats
In the sci-fi novel “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson, body art has evolved into “constantly shifting mediatronic tattoos” – in-skin displays powered by nanotech robopigments. In the 25 years since the novel was published, nanotechnology has had time to catch up, and the sci-fi vision of dynamic tattoos is starting to become a reality.
The first examples of color-changing nanotech tattoos have been developed over the past few years, and they’re not just for body art. They have a biomedical purpose. Imagine a tattoo that alerts you to a health problem signaled by a change in your biochemistry, or to radiation exposure that could be dangerous to your health.
You can’t walk into a doctor’s office and get a dynamic tattoo yet, but they are on the way. Early proof-of-concept studies provide convincing evidence that tattoos can be engineered, not only to change color, but to sense and convey biomedical information, including the onset of cancer.
Another small signal in the progress toward the use of nanobots to fix, heal, and enhance humans.
Tiny, magnetically controlled robots coax nerve cells to grow connections
New research could point to additional treatments for people with nerve injuries
Tiny robots can operate as nerve cell connectors, bridging gaps between two distinct groups of cells. These microscopic patches may lead to more sophisticated ways to grow networks of nerve cells in the laboratory, and perhaps even illuminate ways to repair severed nerve cells in people, researchers report September 25 in Science Advances.
Engineers Eunhee Kim and Hongsoo Choi, both of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, and colleagues first built rectangular robots that were 300 micrometers long. Slender horizontal grooves, about the width of nerve cells’ tendrils that exchange messages with other cells, lined the top.
These microrobots were fertile ground for rat nerve cells, the researchers found. As the cells grew, their message-sending axons and message-receiving dendrites neatly followed the robots’ lined grooves.
A small signal of how ancient practices of training attention - enables a better mind-machine-interface.
Meditation for mind-control
Carnegie Mellon Biomedical Engineering Department Head Bin He and his team have discovered that mindful meditation can help subjects learn and improve the ability to mind-control brain computer interfaces (BCIs).
A BCI is an apparatus that allows an individual to control a machine or computer directly from their brain. Non-invasive means of control like electroencephalogram (EEG) readings taken through the skull are safe and convenient compared to more risky invasive methods using a brain implant, but they take longer to learn and users ultimately vary in proficiency.
He and collaborators conducted a large-scale human study enrolling subjects in a weekly 8-week course in simple, widely-practiced meditation techniques, to test their effect as a potential training tool for BCI control. A total of 76 people participated in this study, each being randomly assigned to the meditation group or the control group, which had no preparation during these 8 weeks. Up to 10 sessions of BCI study were conducted with each subject. He's work shows that humans with just eight lessons in mindfulness-based attention and training (MBAT) demonstrated significant advantages compared to those with no prior meditation training, both in their initial ability to control BCI's and in the time it took for them to achieve full proficiency.
A weak signal of a new approach that could enable the development of custom combinations of nature-and-nanotech to treat microbes.
Magnetic 'T-Budbots' made from tea plants kill and clean biofilms
Biofilms—microbial communities that form slimy layers on surfaces—are difficult to treat and remove, often because the microbes release molecules that block the entry of antibiotics and other therapies. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have made magnetically propelled microbots derived from tea buds, which they call "T-Budbots," that can dislodge biofilms, release an antibiotic to kill bacteria, and clean away the debris.
The researchers ground some tea buds and isolated porous microparticles. Then, they coated the microparticles' surfaces with magnetite nanoparticles so that they could be controlled by a magnet. Finally, the antibiotic ciprofloxacin was embedded within the porous structures. The researchers showed that the T-Budbots released the antibiotic primarily under acidic conditions, which occur in bacterial infections. The team then added the T-Budbots to bacterial biofilms in dishes and magnetically steered them. The microbots penetrated the biofilm, killed the bacteria and cleaned the debris away, leaving a clear path in their wake. Degraded remnants of the biofilm adhered to the microbots' surfaces. The researchers note that this was a proof-of-concept study, and further optimization is needed before the T-Budbots could be deployed to destroy biofilms in the human body.
This is a good signal of the emergence of a metabolic economy - where every output can be used as an input - elsewhere.
“When we linked the enzymes, rather unexpectedly, we got a dramatic increase in activity,“ said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK. “This is a trajectory towards trying to make faster enzymes that are more industrially relevant. But it’s also one of those stories about learning from nature, and then bringing it into the lab.”
New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster
Breakthrough that builds on plastic-eating bugs first discovered by Japan in 2016 promises to enable full recycling
A super-enzyme that degrades plastic bottles six times faster than before has been created by scientists and could be used for recycling within a year or two.
The super-enzyme, derived from bacteria that naturally evolved the ability to eat plastic, enables the full recycling of the bottles. Scientists believe combining it with enzymes that break down cotton could also allow mixed-fabric clothing to be recycled. Today, millions of tonnes of such clothing is either dumped in landfill or incinerated.
The super-enzyme was engineered by linking two separate enzymes, both of which were found in the plastic-eating bug discovered at a Japanese waste site in 2016. The researchers revealed an engineered version of the first enzyme in 2018, which started breaking down the plastic in a few days. But the super-enzyme gets to work six times faster.
Combining the plastic-eating enzymes with existing ones that break down natural fibres could allow mixed materials to be fully recycled, McGeehan said. “Mixed fabrics [of polyester and cotton] are really tricky to recycle. We’ve been speaking to some of the big fashion companies that produce these textiles, because they’re really struggling at the moment.”
Another weak signal of the emerging progress of stem cell therapy - to repair and eventually to enhance.
Stem cells can repair Parkinson's-damaged circuits in mouse brains
The mature brain is infamously bad at repairing itself following damage like that caused by trauma or strokes, or from degenerative diseases like Parkinson's. Stem cells, which are endlessly adaptable, have offered the promise of better neural repair. But the brain's precisely tuned complexity has stymied the development of clinical treatments.
In a new study addressing these hurdles, University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers demonstrated a proof-of-concept stem cell treatment in a mouse model of Parkinson's disease. They found that neurons derived from stem cells can integrate well into the correct regions of the brain, connect with native neurons and restore motor functions.
Coupled with an increasing array of methods to produce dozens of unique neurons from stem cells, the scientists say this work suggests neural stem cell therapy is a realistic goal. However, much more research is needed to translate findings from mice to people.
This is one more signal of the phase transition in global energy geopolitics.
California is ready to pull the plug on gas vehicles
California will ban the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger cars and trucks in 15 years, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday, establishing a timeline in the nation's most populous state that could force U.S. automakers to shift their zero-emission efforts into overdrive.
The plan won't stop people from owning gas-powered cars or selling them on the used car market. But in 2035 it would end the sale of all new such vehicles in the state of nearly 40 million people that accounts for more than one out of every 10 new cars sold in the U.S.
California would be the first state with such a mandate while at least 15 other countries have already made similar commitments, including Germany, France and Norway.
