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:
Takers and Makers: Who are the Real Value Creators?
The history of humiliation points to the future of human dignity
The Hard Lessons of Modeling the Coronavirus Pandemic
Articles:
Twitter and Interoperability: Some Thoughts From the Peanut Gallery
An army of sewer robots could keep our pipes clean, but they'll need to learn to communicate
Tiny bio-inspired swarm robots for targeted medical interventions
Sensors, the other quantum revolution
Record-breaking laser link could provide test of Einstein's theory
The cloak-and-dagger tale behind this year’s most anticipated result in particle physics
Researchers create new form of cultivated meat
Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificial intelligence
If value is defined by price – set by the supposed forces of supply and demand – then as long as an activity fetches a price (legally), it is seen as creating value. So if you earn a lot you must be a value creator. I will argue that the way the word ‘value’ is used in modern economics has made it easier for value-extracting activities to masquerade as value-creating activities. And in the process rents (unearned income) get confused with profits (earned income); inequality rises, and investment in the real economy falls. What’s more, if we cannot differentiate value creation from value extraction, it becomes nearly impossible to reward the former over the latter. If the goal is to produce growth that is more innovation-led (smart growth), more inclusive and more sustainable, we need a better understanding of value to steer us.
Takers and Makers: Who are the Real Value Creators?
Mass opposition to the politics of humiliation began from the early 19th century in Europe, as lower-class people increasingly objected to disrespectful treatment. Servants, journeymen and factory workers alike used the language of honour and concepts of personal and social self-worth – previously monopolised by the nobility and upper-middle classes – to demand that they not be verbally and physically insulted by employers and overseers.
This social change was enabled and supported by a new type of honour that followed the invention of ‘citizens’ (rather than subjects) in democratising societies. Citizens who carried political rights and duties were also seen as possessing civic honour. Traditionally, social honour had been stratified according to status and rank, but now civic honour pertained to each and every citizen, and this helped to raise their self-esteem and self-consciousness. Consequently, humiliation, and other demonstrations of the alleged inferiority of others, was no longer considered a legitimate means by which to exert power over one’s fellow citizens.
The history of humiliation points to the future of human dignity
humans have often understood the nervous system in terms of the flourishing technologies of their era, as the scientist and historian Matthew Cobb explained in The Idea of the Brain (2020). Thomas Hobbes, in his book Leviathan (1651), likened human bodies to ‘automata’, ‘[e]ngines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch’. What is the heart, Hobbes asked, if not ‘a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings …?’ Similarly, Descartes described animal spirits moving through the nerves according to the same physical properties that animated the hydraulic machines he witnessed on display in the French royal gardens.
The rise of electronic communications systems accelerated this trend. In the middle of the 19th century, the surgeon and chemist Alfred Smee said the brain was made up of batteries and photovoltaic circuits, allowing the nervous system to conduct ‘electro-telegraphic communication’ with the body. Towards the turn of the 20th century, the neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal described the positioning of different neural structures ‘somewhat as a telegraph pole supports the conducting wire’. And, during the First World War, the British Royal Institution Christmas lectures featured the anatomist and anthropologist Arthur Keith, who compared brain cells to operators in a telephonic exchange.
The technologies that have come to dominate many of our lives today are not primarily hydraulic or photovoltaic, or even telephonic or electro-telegraphic. They’re not even computational in any simplistic sense. They are predictive, and their infrastructures construct and constrain behaviour in all spheres of life. The old layers remain – electrical wiring innervates homes and workplaces, and water flows into sinks and showers through plumbing hidden from view. But these infrastructures are now governed by predictive technologies, and they don’t just guide the delivery of materials, but of information. Predictive models construct the feeds we scroll; they autocomplete our texts and emails, prompt us to leave for work on time, and pick out the playlists we listen to on the commute that they’ve plotted out for us. Consequential decisions in law enforcement, military and financial contexts are increasingly influenced by automated assessments spat out by proprietary predictive engines.
John B Watson, a founder of behaviourist psychology in the early 20th century, argued that his discipline’s ‘theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour’ – in service of the needs of ‘the educator, the physician, the jurist, and the businessman’.
the mission of nearly every corporation. Collect data. Write code: if/then/else. Detect patterns. Predict behaviour. Direct action. Encourage consumption. Influence elections.
The problem with prediction
The Kafkaesque aspect of Gödel’s work and character is expressed in his famous Incompleteness Theorem of 1930. Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final, ultimate truth. A bit more precisely, the Incompleteness Theorem shows that human beings can never formulate a correct and complete description of the set of natural numbers, {0, 1, 2, 3, . . .}. But if mathematicians cannot ever fully understand something as simple as number theory, then it is certainly too much to expect that science will ever expose any ultimate secret of the universe.
Scientists are thus left in a position somewhat like K. in The Castle. Endlessly we hurry up and down corridors, meeting people, knocking on doors, conducting our investigations. But the ultimate success will never be ours. Nowhere in the castle of science is there a final exit to absolute truth.
Memories of Kurt Gödel
Manrubia’s group was discovering a depressing reality: The peak of an epidemic could never be estimated until it happened; the same was true for the end of the epidemic. Work in other labs has similarly shown that attempting to predict plateaus in the epidemic curve over the long term is just as fruitless. One study found that researchers shouldn’t even try to estimate a peak or other landmark in a curve until the number of infections is two-thirds of the way there.
“People say, ‘I can reproduce the past; therefore, I can predict the future,’” Manrubia said. But while “these models are very illustrative of the underlying dynamics … they have no predictive power.”
The Hard Lessons of Modeling the Coronavirus Pandemic
This is an important article by Cory Doctorow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation - signaling that we remain at a tipping point about the governance of the digital environment.
Wise kings are great in theory, but in practice, they are just as fallible as any dunderhead. When the platform gets it wrong, you should be able to pick up and leave -- and still reach your friends, show and sell your art, and advocate for your causes.
Twitter and Interoperability: Some Thoughts From the Peanut Gallery
Late in 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey floated "Project Blue Sky," a plan for an interoperable, federated, standardized Twitter that would let users (or toolsmiths who work on behalf of users) gain more control over their participation in the Twitter system. This was an exciting moment for us, a significant lurch towards an interoperable, decentralized social media world. We were especially excited to see Dorsey cite Mike Masnick's excellent Protocols, Not Products paper.
It’s been more than a year, and Twitter has marked its progress with an “ecosystem review” that sets out its view of the landscape of distributed systems. The world is a very different place today, with social media playing a very different role in 2021 than it played in 2019. Locked down, with the legitimacy of the US political system under threat, with social media moderation policies taking on national significance, the question of how a federated, decentralized internet would work has become even more salient...and urgent.
Broadly speaking, there are two broad approaches: the first is to fix the tech giants and the second is to fix the Internet.
The advocates for fixing Big Tech are implicitly saying that the net is a fait accompli, with the tech giants destined to reign over all forever. Fixing Big Tech means demanding that these self-appointed dictators be benevolent dictators, that the kings be wise kings.
By contrast, the fix-the-Internet people want a dynamic Internet, where there are lots of different ways of talking to your friends, organizing a political movement, attending virtual schools, exchanging money for goods and services, arguing about politics and sharing your art.
Now this is a great signal of the urban future - not only for maintaining the subterranean infrastructure - but imagine a swarm of bots geared to keep city streets, sidewalks and more importantly driveway entrances and driveways clear of snow?
An army of sewer robots could keep our pipes clean, but they'll need to learn to communicate
Hidden from sight, under the UK's roads, buildings and parks, lies about one million kilometers of pipes. Maintaining and repairing these pipes require about 1.5 million road excavations a year, which causes either full or partial road closures. These works are noisy, dirty and cause a lot of inconvenience. They also cost around £5.5 billion a year.
It doesn't have to be this way. Research teams like mine are working on a way of reducing the time and money that goes into maintaining pipes, by developing infrastructure robots.
In the future, these robots will work around and for us to repair our roads, inspect our water and sewer pipes, maintain our lamp posts, survey our bridges and look after other important infrastructure. They will be able to go to places difficult or dangerous for humans, such as sewer pipes full of noxious gases.
This is another signal of a common science fiction theme - nanobots augmenting our biology.
"External-field-induced robots are an attractive concept because they do not require an onboard power supply or intricate moving parts, which means that they can be scaled down to nanometer-sized resolution" Ahmed said. "In addition, both acoustic and magnetic fields are safe for humans, are non-invasive, can penetrate deeply into the human body, and are well-developed in clinical settings."
Tiny bio-inspired swarm robots for targeted medical interventions
Micro-sized robots could bring a new wave of innovation in the medical field by allowing doctors to access specific regions inside the human body without the need for highly invasive procedures. Among other things, these tiny robots could be used to carry drugs, genes or other substances to specific sites inside the body, opening up new possibilities for treating different medical conditions.
Researchers at ETH Zurich and Helmholtz Institute Erlangen–Nürnberg for Renewable Energy have recently developed micro and nano-sized robots inspired by biological micro-swimmers (e.g., bacteria or spermatozoa). These small robots, presented in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, are capable of upstream motility, which essentially means that they can autonomously move in the opposite direction to that in which a fluid (e.g., blood) flows. This makes them particularly promising for intervening inside the human body.
"We believe that the ideas discussed in our multidisciplinary study can transform many aspects of medicine by enabling tasks such as targeted and precise delivery of drugs or genes, as well as facilitating non-invasive surgeries," Daniel Ahmed, lead author of the recent paper, told TechXplore.
This is a good signal of the future of sensors.
Sensors, the other quantum revolution
Medicine, civil engineering, telecommunications, natural resources management... Quantum sensors offering both unique sensitivity and accuracy are about to revolutionise detection in a number of fields.
Identifying every pipe and cavity beneath our cities, anticipating a volcanic eruption, or observing brain activity in the most minute detail, these are only some of the tantalising promises made by a new type of instrument with unprecedented sensitivity: quantum sensors. Of all the quantum technologies under development, they are among the most advanced, with some even emerging from the laboratory and reaching the market!
Some advances in basic science research as well as a large range of communications may loom soon.
Record-breaking laser link could provide test of Einstein's theory
In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, Australian researchers teamed up with researchers from the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) and the French metrology lab Systèmes de Référence Temps-Espace (SYRTE) at Paris Observatory.
The result is the world's most precise method for comparing the flow of time between two separate locations using a laser system transmitted through the atmosphere.
"If you have one of these optical terminals on the ground and another on a satellite in space, then you can start to explore fundamental physics," he said. "Everything from testing Einstein's theory of general relativity more precisely than ever before, to discovering if fundamental physical constants change over time."
The technology's precise measurements also have practical uses in earth science and geophysics. "For instance, this technology could improve satellite-based studies of how the water table changes over time, or to look for ore deposits underground," Dr. Schediwy said.
There are further potential benefits for optical communications, an emerging field that uses light to carry information. Optical communications can securely transmit data between satellites and Earth with much higher data rates than current radio communications.
Another fascinating signal of the possibility of advances in fundamental theory of physics - it also signals the significant effort we have to take to not unconsciously skew results - even in physics.
To avoid subconsciously steering the frequency toward the value they want, the experimenters blind themselves to the true frequency until they’ve finalized their analysis.
The cloak-and-dagger tale behind this year’s most anticipated result in particle physics
As early as March, the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) will report a new measurement of the magnetism of the muon, a heavier, short-lived cousin of the electron. The effort entails measuring a single frequency with exquisite precision. In tantalizing results dating back to 2001, g-2 found that the muon is slightly more magnetic than theory predicts. If confirmed, the excess would signal, for the first time in decades, the existence of novel massive particles that an atom smasher might be able to produce, says Aida El-Khadra, a theorist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “This would be a very clear sign of new physics, so it would be a huge deal.”
The measures that g-2 experimenters are taking to ensure they don’t fool themselves into claiming a false discovery are the stuff of spy novels, involving locked cabinets, sealed envelopes, and a second, secret frequency known to just two people, both outside the g-2 team. “My wife won’t pick me for responsible jobs like this, so I don’t know why an important experiment did,” says Joseph Lykken, Fermilab’s chief research officer, one of the keepers of the secret.
The cultivation of many types of food is ages old - but with the domestication of DNA we can look forward to a new sense of ‘processed meats’ - including the cultivated hot dog.
Researchers create new form of cultivated meat
McMaster researchers have developed a new form of cultivated meat using a method that promises more natural flavor and texture than other alternatives to traditional meat from animals.
Researchers Ravi Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi, both of the university's School of Biomedical Engineering, have devised a way to make meat by stacking thin sheets of cultivated muscle and fat cells grown together in a lab setting. The technique is adapted from a method used to grow tissue for human transplants.
The sheets of living cells, each about the thickness of a sheet of printer paper, are first grown in culture and then concentrated on growth plates before being peeled off and stacked or folded together. The sheets naturally bond to one another before the cells die.
This a great signal for many older men - but also of new forms of diagnostic testing.
Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificial intelligence
Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men. Patients are determined to have prostate cancer primarily based on PSA, a cancer factor in blood. However, as diagnostic accuracy is as low as 30%, a considerable number of patients undergo additional invasive biopsy and thus suffer from resultant side effects, such as bleeding and pain.
The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that the collaborative research team led by Dr. Kwan Hyi Lee from the Biomaterials Research Center and Professor In Gab Jeong from Asan Medical Center developed a technique for diagnosing prostate cancer from urine within only 20 minutes with almost 100% accuracy. The research team developed this technique by introducing a smart AI analysis method to an electrical-signal-based ultrasensitive biosensor.
This is another good signal of the emerging progress in understanding what plant-based psychogenics can contribute to helping humans heal and expand consciousness.
many researchers are excited. Several trials show dramatic results: in a study published in November 2020, for example, 71% of people who took psilocybin for major depressive disorder showed a greater than 50% reduction in symptoms after four weeks, and half of the participants entered remission. Some follow-up studies after therapy, although small, have shown lasting benefits
How ecstasy and psilocybin are shaking up psychiatry
Regulators will soon grapple with how to safely administer powerful psychedelics for treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Once dismissed as the dangerous dalliances of the counterculture, these drugs are gaining mainstream acceptance. Several states and cities in the United States are in the process of legalizing or decriminalizing psilocybin for therapeutic or recreational purposes. And respected institutions such as Imperial; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City have opened centres devoted to studying psychedelics. Several small studies suggest the drugs can be safely administered and might have benefits for people with intractable depression and other psychological problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One clinical trial involving MDMA has recently ended, with results expected to be published soon. Regulators will then be considering whether to make the treatment available with a prescription.
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could provide needed options for debilitating mental-health disorders including PTSD, major depressive disorder, alcohol-use disorder, anorexia nervosa and more that kill thousands every year in the United States, and cost billions worldwide in lost productivity.
But the strategies represent a new frontier for regulators. “This is unexplored ground as far as a formally evaluated intervention for a psychiatric disorder,” says Walter Dunn, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who sometimes advises the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on psychiatric drugs. Most drugs that treat depression and anxiety can be picked up at a neighbourhood pharmacy. These new approaches, by contrast, use a powerful substance in a therapeutic setting under the close watch of a trained psychotherapist, and regulators and treatment providers will need to grapple with how to implement that safely.
#micropoem
Betting against -
ecologies of algorithmic attractors -
gaming bounded phase spaces -
enacting complex adaptive systems -
catalyzing crowd-sourcing moral accounting -
each word-strings -
meta-fores -
afford-dances -
The truth is dead - long live honesty
Entailing honest accounts and holding accounts honest
Science teaches us skepticism -
Entailing multiple lines of evidence
For reliable knowledge
Complexity teaches us relative perspectives -
Entailing multiple ways of reasoning
For relevant wisdom
Collective wisdom emerges in our institutions of conversation
Entailing good faith listening and hearing
For adaptive evolving
