Showing posts with label digital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital. Show all posts

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Friday Thinking 23 Oct 2020

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 value of uncertainty

Thirty glorious years

Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias


Articles:

Opposition to a Universal Basic Income lies in how we think about the relationship between work and one's right to live.

Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?

Singapore Has An Innovative New Way To Design Its Buildings

Fresh Off Her Nobel Prize Win, Jennifer Doudna Predicts What’s Next for CRISPR

Fecal Transfer from Moms to Babies After C-Section: Trial Results

Sludge-powered bacteria generate more electricity, faster

World first study shows that some microorganisms can bend the rules of evolution

Stacking and twisting graphene unlocks a rare form of magnetism

If recycling plastics isn’t making sense, remake the plastics

How your browser can make your online life a little more private





even from a predictive processing perspective, staying locally within the bounds of the expected is only one part of a much more complex story. For those very same predictive brains were designed to drive mobile, inquisitive creatures like ourselves. Such creatures must productively surf the waves of their own uncertainty. To do so, they probe and sample the world in ways that aim to reveal just where the key uncertainties lie, so that by future actions they can resolve them and move on. They seek new information, and they engage in complex rituals such as art and science whose role (we’ll argue) is in part at least to safely reveal and stress-test their own deepest assumptions.

Creatures like us, it seems, have added some brand-new layers to our relationship with the space of our own predictions, errors and uncertainties, turning that space into a kind of concrete arena that affords deeper and more challenging explorations than those undertaken by most other living organisms. We have discovered ways of turning our own best models (including our self-model) into objects apt for explicit questioning.

The examined human life reflects, we suggest, a new kind of relationship with our own expectations and uncertainty. Yet it is one that we have somehow constructed within the inviolable bounds of a biologically bedrock drive to minimise long-term prediction error. How is this neat trick possible?

Unexpected uncertainty arises when – for example – an environmental change causes us to become uncertain about our own generative model. Volatility is subtly different: it names a situation in which the frequency of changes in the environmental contingencies are themselves rapidly changing. Volatility is thus the most potentially anxiety-provoking species of uncertainty. It is uncertainty about the space of uncertainty itself.

When confronted with unexpected uncertainty, our brain reacts by increasing its learning rate

The many ways that we can fall prey to our own predictive brains correspond to the various ways in which we can become trapped by our own estimations of the reliability of different predictions. 

The value of uncertainty




Perhaps the most extraordinary transformation took place in Japan. The rebuilding of the Japanese economy after the war, under the direct control of the occupying US forces, involved a dramatic redistribution of wealth and influence away from ruling elites, in particular landowners and the bureaucratic and military elites responsible for Japanese expansionism. The US occupiers, under the unlikely direction of General Douglas MacArthur, levied eye-watering taxes such as 70 per cent on the largest fortunes, and expropriated absentee landlords. The biggest family-owned industrial conglomerates were dismantled and senior management fired. Meanwhile, the war more or less wiped out wealth held in stocks and corporate shares. Labour reforms boosted union membership leading to higher wages and enhanced job security. The purpose behind these reforms was clear: to uproot the concentration of wealth and power around a reactionary elite…

Democratic capitalism redressed the balance between the brutal inequalities of early industrial capitalism and the need for social consent to secure political stability. It rested on three broad pillars: a redistributive welfare state that provided economic security while narrowing income gaps between rich and poor, corporatist dialogue between employers and the labour force, and highly regulated capital markets. Aspects of this form of capitalism sometimes existed in nondemocratic societies too. But as a basic set of socioeconomic institutions it was most associated with the democratic form of government in which competitive elections and representative political parties incorporated citizen demands into policymaking. 

The increased role for government in distributing the fruits of economic growth meant that inequality and poverty fell to unprecedented levels. Taxes became far more progressive. In the 1950s, top marginal rates of income tax exceeded 90 per cent in Italy, the UK and the US. Unemployment benefits, pensions and family allowances expanded to provide secure incomes to households all across the income distribution. By taxing the rich and transferring money to the poor and middle-income groups, welfare states substantially reduced material hardship and ensured economic gains reached the least fortunate. The government also became a major employer, offering well-paid jobs with good working conditions and pension rights in the public administration and services such as the police, healthcare and education. All these measures meant that growth in living standards was spread across income groups.

Thirty glorious years




The phrase comes from the English critic Raymond Williams. I think his point was that we have basic biological feelings just as animals, that are the same for all of us at all times, but in any given moment, for any individual, we interpret these basic animal feelings by way of language—we give the feelings names, and these come from a particular language and a culture too, and so they are different in different times and places and languages, and the differences can be seen later on as being quite significant. So each culture and moment has its own particular structure of feeling, based on their language and what’s happening in the world at that time.

 no one can predict the future that will really come to pass, so don’t even try to do that.  

Think of your postulated futures as hopes and fears, typically, with your hopes being utopian, your fears dystopian. Go ahead and imagine a lot of them, and see how you feel about them, and what you think is realistic in them, in terms of suggesting things you can do now to make a better future for yourself and everyone else.  


Don’t get too impressed by any one technology or ideology—we all suffer from a bit of monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything, but reality isn’t really like that, so you have to take a lot of factors into account, and realize they will mix in unexpected ways in your head as in the world.  

Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias






The Covid-Apocalypse has revealed a lot about many of the myths underlying the neoliberal economic paradigm - this is another strong signal about the inevitable requirement of - Universal Basic Income. The 7 min video is well worth the view.

Opposition to a Universal Basic Income lies in how we think about the relationship between work and one's right to live.

Study after study seems to show us that direct cash transfers do indeed work. The problem lies in convincing people that they are deserving of the money.
We’ve had numerous trials of direct cash transfers. At this point, we know that people constantly use the money for what they need. Even more so do we know that they benefit not only recipients but local communities as a whole.

Still, we face resistance in actually implementing them. That lies far more in existing stereotypical beliefs of how we perceive the relationship between work and life.


McLuhan noted that the message of the media is not its content - but its impact - this is a signal of the nature of the times - digital environment-in-austerity-economic-frameworks? Or a retrieval from the past

Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?

When the Pew Research Center recently reported that the proportion of 18-to-29-year-old Americans who live with their parents has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps you saw some of the breathless headlines hyping how it’s higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

From my perspective, the real story here is less alarming than you might think. And it’s actually quite a bit more interesting than the sound bite summary.

Yes, a lot of emerging adults are now living with their parents. But this is part of a larger, longer trend, with the percentage going up only modestly since COVID-19 hit. Furthermore, having grown kids still at home is not likely to do you, or them, any permanent harm. In fact, until very recently, it’s been the way adults have typically lived throughout history. Even now, it’s a common practice in most of the world.

Drawing on the federal government’s monthly Current Population Survey, the Pew Report showed that 52% of 18-to-29-year-olds are currently living with their parents, up from 47% in February. The increase was mostly among the younger emerging adults – ages 18 to 24 – and was primarily due to their coming home from colleges that shut down or to their having lost their jobs.


This must view 6 min video signals an emerging architectural and urban design paradigm.

Singapore Has An Innovative New Way To Design Its Buildings

Singapore has engaged a new approach to construction called biophilic design. It means architects embrace nature in their design, bringing nature into the city, replacing columns, walls and neon with trees, leaves and insects. Biophilic design turns cities into engines of environmental wellbeing with benefits not just for nature but the human beings that live there too.


This signals the ongoing progress in the domestication of DNA - and more.

Declared as one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century, CRISPR is faster, cheaper, and more accurate than previous gene-editing systems and has since become ubiquitous in labs around the world.

This is the thing about CRISPR: There’s so many different ways that it can be deployed.

Fresh Off Her Nobel Prize Win, Jennifer Doudna Predicts What’s Next for CRISPR

The new Nobel laureate chats with ‘Future Human’ about what her gene-editing companies are up to.
Doudna, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, share the award for the discovery of the gene-editing technology CRISPR. The two biochemists began collaborating in 2011 and just a year later published a groundbreaking paper on CRISPR, which has revolutionized our ability to edit genes.

Short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR is actually a naturally occurring bacterial immune system. When viruses attack bacteria, bacteria in turn grab snippets of genetic material from their viral invaders and incorporate these bits into their own DNA. This helps bacteria recognize viruses later on and thwart future invaders. Bacteria do this by producing an RNA molecule that acts as a guide, which cuts up the viral genome.

diseases that are caused by single genes or genetic mutations. A great example, and we’ve already seen early results from one trial, is for sickle cell disease. But I think going forward, we’ll see opportunities to use CRISPR for other kinds of blood disorders, genetic diseases of the eye, and then, maybe in the longer term, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, which are also genetic diseases.

I think we’re going to see everything from high-throughput laboratory tests that require robotic equipment and experts to point-of-care tests that can be run in a research lab, a doctor’s office, or an emergency room. 

We’ve so much going on in the field. I think one interesting possibility is that we’ll see CRISPR being used not to edit genomes, or at least not to make permanent changes to genomes, but instead to regulate them, to control levels of human proteins that are produced from different genes. This is a newer way of using the CRISPR technology. I think it has a lot of potential to allow control of cells that doesn’t require actual permanent chemical changes being made to the DNA.

Agriculture is the other area where it’s going to be impactful. We’re already seeing a lot of use of CRISPR in making plants that have genetic changes that can enable things like better crop yield, resistance to drought, higher levels of nutritional value, things like that. I think that’s really exciting, and there’s clearly a lot more to be done there. That’s likely to be the area where we’ll see a broader impact in the near term.


The benefits of CRISPR will inevitably extend to the understanding of our microbial biomes. This is a good signal of how microbial transplants will likely be beneficial for treating and maybe curing illnesses and diseases.

Fecal Transfer from Moms to Babies After C-Section: Trial Results

Tiny doses of maternal poo mixed with breast milk and given to Cesarean-born infants makes their gut microbiota resemble those of babies born vaginally.
The composition of gut microbes in babies born via Cesarean section tends to differ from those in babies born vaginally, prompting speculation that this may have long-term health consequences. To enrich for beneficial bugs in babies’ bellies after C-section, researchers have performed mom-to-infant microbial transplants, described today (October 1) in Cell. In a clinical trial in which seven Cesarean-delivered babies were fed tiny amounts of their mothers’ fecal material, it was found that the babies’ guts became colonized with the sorts of bacteria normally present in infants delivered vaginally. While the procedure produced no ill effects in the infants, there are no data on whether it has any benefits to the baby, and experts warn it may be dangerous for mothers to attempt such a treatment themselves.

“This is a very well-balanced, important, and clinically relevant contribution to the field, with really nice, clear-cut conclusions,” says gut microbe researcher Tine Rask Licht of the Technical University of Denmark who was not involved in the research. “They have very nice data . . . [showing that] with fecal transfer they get a pattern of microbial development which is much more similar to that of children born vaginally.”

Epidemiological evidence indicates there may also be later life consequences to missing out on this bacterial baptism, as some call it. A recent study showed that Cesarean-born kids have a higher likelihood of developing immune disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and celiac disease. The growing prevalence of Cesarean deliveries makes these potential repercussions an increasing concern.


This is another weak signal about energy production, domesticating DNA and an emerging metabolic (circular) economy.

Sludge-powered bacteria generate more electricity, faster

Changing the surface chemistry of electrodes leads to the preferential growth of a novel electroactive bacterium that could support improved energy-neutral wastewater treatment.

To grow, electroactive bacteria break down organic compounds by transferring electrons to solid-state substrates outside their cells. Scientists have utilized this process to drive devices, such as microbial electrochemical systems, where the bacteria grow as a film on an electrode, breaking down the organic compounds in wastewater and transferring the resultant electrons to the electrode.

Scientists are now looking for ways to improve this process so it produces hydrogen gas at a negatively charged cathode electrode, which can then be converted to electricity to power wastewater treatment plants. This needs electroactive bacteria that efficiently transfer electrons to a positively charged anode electrode that do not use hydrogen for their growth.


This is a nice confirming signal of how horizontal gene transfer (hgt) - creates different rules regarding evolution - and help explain that the development of antibiotic resistance is more complex than the normal understanding of evolution would suggest.
"However, when scientists check environments without antibiotics, for example, forests or estuaries, antibiotic resistance genes can still be detected."
The researchers found that antibiotic resistance genes can spread into populations that are not experiencing selection with antibiotic, and that, even though these genes were at low levels, they prepared the population for future challenges with antibiotic.
"This could explain why antibiotic resistance evolves so quickly in hospitals," Dr. McDonald said.

World first study shows that some microorganisms can bend the rules of evolution

The dominant thinking in evolution focuses on inheritance between parent and offspring – or 'vertical gene transfer (VGT)'.

But now scientists are paying more attention to 'horizontal gene transfer (HGT)': the transmission of DNA other than from parent to offspring, as this transfer can tell us about the evolution of a number of other organisms such as bacteria. It can also help us to better understand antibiotic resistance.

In a world first, Monash University scientists have discovered that HGT can bend the rules of evolution.

The discovery is outlined in a study published today in PNAS, which was led by ARC Future Fellow Dr. Mike McDonald and Ph.D. candidate Laura Woods, both from the Monash University School of Biological Sciences.


This is a weak signal of emerging new forms of matter and electronics using graphene - discovered in the 21st Century.

Stacking and twisting graphene unlocks a rare form of magnetism

Since the discovery of graphene more than 15 years ago, researchers have been in a global race to unlock its unique properties. Not only is graphene—a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon arranged in a hexagonal lattice—the strongest, thinnest material known to man, it is also an excellent conductor of heat and electricity.

Now, a team of researchers at Columbia University and the University of Washington has discovered that a variety of exotic electronic states, including a rare form of magnetism, can arise in a three-layer graphene structure.

The findings appear in an article published Oct. 12 in Nature Physics.


Another weak signal of the inevitable need for a metabolic (upcycling) economy. It also signals that simply banning plastics doesn’t solve the problem of waste - it simply shifts it to something else.
Compared to traditional heating, the microwave heating released over 10 times as much hydrogen from the plastic, leaving very little other than pure carbon and some iron carbide behind. Better yet, the carbon was almost entirely in the form of carbon nanotubes, a product with significant value. 

If recycling plastics isn’t making sense, remake the plastics

New catalytic approaches convert plastic into liquid fuels, nanotubes.
A few years back, it looked like plastic recycling was set to become a key part of a sustainable future. Then, the price of fossil fuels plunged, making it cheaper to manufacture new plastics. Then China essentially stopped importing recycled plastics for use in manufacturing. With that, the bottom dropped out of plastic recycling, and the best thing you could say for most plastics is that they sequestered the carbon they were made of.

The absence of a market for recycled plastics, however, has also inspired researchers to look at other ways of using them. Two papers this week have looked into processes that enable "upcycling," or converting the plastics into materials that can be more valuable than the freshly made plastics themselves.


Here’s an account of different browsers in terms of the privacy they enable.

How your browser can make your online life a little more private

A new browser setting will do what Do Not Track didn’t, but you could switch to a more private browser right now.
Data privacy laws are still a work in progress, but one major improvement is coming: Global Privacy Control, which — assuming everything works out — will let you automatically opt out of having your data sold or shared at every website you visit. For now, it doesn’t do much, but it is available if you want to add it to your browser. If nothing else, the recent launch of the new specification is a great opportunity to check out your browser’s privacy options — and your browser options in general.

Trackers hidden on the vast majority of websites collect as much information about us as possible and try to link that data to our actions online as well as off, typically to send us targeted ads. The idea behind Global Privacy Control would be to place a setting on your browser that tells every site you visit that you don’t want your data to be sold or shared with anyone else, and websites would have to respect your wishes. While some browsers have built-in tools (or available extensions) meant to stop tracking in the first place, they aren’t always effective, and they can’t do anything once your data is collected. And while laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) give users the right to request that businesses not sell their data, those users have to make that request of every site they visit, a process that is too time-consuming for most people. With Global Privacy Control, that request would be automatic, relayed as soon as you visit the site, and, if you’re in a location where it’s legally required — like California — websites would have to abide by your request.

If a browser extension that tells websites your privacy preferences sounds familiar, that’s because something like this has been tried before. Do Not Track, introduced in 2010, was an attempt by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to institute a sort of digital equivalent to the Do Not Call list: a browser extension or setting that tells websites you visit that you don’t want to be tracked. The problem with Do Not Track was that websites weren’t legally required to comply with it, so very few of them did.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Friday Thinking 18 Sept 2020

 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




many threads all finally converge in the counterintuitive thesis of The Force of Nonviolence: that nonviolence is not the antithesis of self-defense but rather is self-defense. Butler raises this provocative claim as a rejoinder to left discourses of violent resistance. Counterviolence, so the argument goes, is required to defend the oppressed from the systemic violence they suffer. The Force of Nonviolence responds not by challenging the tactical wisdom of these arguments, but instead by questioning the very idea of self at their core. Once the self is seen in relational terms, sustained through bonds that exceed sovereign control, the goal of defending the self is turned inside out, since it must now encompass protecting and expanding the social infrastructure through which lives can be more equitably lived. Acts of violence that put these bonds at risk are not simply immoral, they are self-defeating. “Violence against the other is, in this sense,” Butler writes, “violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.” Nonviolence is the practice of tending to this web of “living interdependency,” or as she calls it elsewhere in the book, life itself.

Bonds of interdependence are the sources of both life and aggression. They endow us with worth and care, yet they also continually remind the ego of the limits of its power and its dependency on others.

Coupling confrontation and care means to do more than simply “expose” unseen violence, as Butler repeatedly suggest; it means to meet people where they are and help educate their judgments to see some issue—and their own relation to it—anew. This is interdependence as something to be made not found, a political project of constructing a new public around an issue rather than returning people to some existential facts of the human condition.

Inventing Nonviolence




Jaspers is one of the very few existentialist thinkers who did not seek to master, tame or conquer the unknowable and finite condition of human life. Instead, he tried to cultivate a relationship to this essential quality of life and engage it on its own terms. He repeatedly insisted that ‘I do not accomplish my freedom. I did not make myself. I do not exist by my own means.’ Rather, I depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world. Only because our lives are contingent and vulnerable can we experience love, freedom and purpose as something meaningful. The attempt to prove love or catch the ephemeral presence of beauty would likely take away the experience. 

What we come to understand in moments of happiness, loss and tragedy is that we cannot possess meaning, we cannot own who we authentically are or determine our identity. Uncertainty was not something to overcome for Jaspers. He rather considered it the ground of ideas such as freedom, truth and justice that can be defined only negatively, through what they are not, or not yet.

But how should it be possible to think this relational truth and uncertainty together? Jaspers believed that we might not be able to come to an agreement about who we are and what we want to be, but we can agree on what we don’t know and how we’d like to act toward this nonknowledge. There is containment in the expression of uncertainty. It generates a humble, but highly resistant and communicative approach to the world. ‘All thoughts,’ Jaspers therefore concluded, ‘could be judged by this touchstone question, do they aid or hinder communication.’ 

To Karl Jaspers, uncertainty is not to be overcome but understood






This is an interesting and testable insight - AI-ssistants for everyone - the question is who is the AI-ssistant assisting
Experiment if you’re game: start a social media account and follow people and places that have the opposite of your ideology. Watch what the algorithm feeds that account. Compare to yours. We are not that different. We are being pitted against each other. IMOIMOIMO


This is a great 14min video of Kevin Kelly giving 68 great tips on his 68th birthday

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.


I think we can expect to see this as a mass produced product soon - even if Covid-19 is controlled via a vaccine - there are all manner of uses now and in the future.

Researchers develop anti-bacterial graphene face masks

Face masks have become an important tool in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, improper use or disposal of masks may lead to "secondary transmission". A research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has successfully produced graphene masks with an anti-bacterial efficiency of 80%, which can be enhanced to almost 100% with exposure to sunlight for around 10 minutes. Initial tests also showed very promising results in the deactivation of two species of coronaviruses. The graphene masks are easily produced at low cost, and can help to resolve the problems of sourcing raw materials and disposing of non-biodegradable masks.

The research is conducted by Dr. Ye Ruquan, Assistant Professor from CityU's Department of Chemistry, in collaboration with other researchers. The findings were published in the scientific journal ACS Nano, titled "Self-Reporting and Photothermally Enhanced Rapid Bacterial Killing on a Laser-Induced Graphene Mask".


This is a long - but very interesting history of what seems to be a ubiquitous aspect of our reality - a metaphor for understanding culture, language and more. 

Introduction: The Software Age

1953 - “Software” was merely a prank
1963 - “Software” became an industry
1973 - “The Software Age” has begun!
In October, 1953, I coined the word 'software.'
The notion of software as a separate thing from hardware took years to assert itself. Sure, the computer (popularly referred to as a "giant brain" in the early fifties) was unable to do anything but consume electrical power until a "programmer" came along to "program" it, and the consequent "routines" resided in the computer's "memory" thereafter. One did not, in the beginning, take a program written for one computer and put it into another.  A half-century later, most people will find that hard to imagine.

As originally conceived, the word 'software' was merely an obvious way to distinguish a program from the computer itself. A program comprised sequences of written -- changeable -- instructions each endowed with the power to command the behavior of the permanently crafted machinery -- the "hardware."

For the origin of the word 'software,' most dictionaries give an unknown source and 1960 as the date, but [expletive deleted] I was there! That's the only exclamation point I intend to use in this introduction.


This is a fascinating signal - of the power of easily producing many versions - can illustrate the flaws of one version - this is especially important as the digital environment can enable a form of transparent accessible comparisons of policy.
The party that controls the maps can grab power through packing or cracking. In packing, politicians cram voters from the opposing party into just a few districts, securing the remaining districts for their own party. The blue ruling party created one all-red district, and three majority blue districts. In cracking, politicians spread voters from the opposing party across districts, blocking them from gaining a majority.

How next-gen computer generated maps detect partisan gerrymandering

Researchers are ready to expose hidden biases when redistricting begins in 2021
In October 2019, a state court determined that North Carolina’s congressional districts had been severely gerrymandered and struck down the state’s map. The court’s ruling was informed, in part, by tens of thousands of alternative maps demonstrating that the district boundaries had very likely been manipulated for political gain, the very definition of gerrymandering.

Researchers had generated a slew of alternative, computer-generated maps designed to help identify potential patterns of bias. The approach is increasingly used, alongside other tests, to ferret out alleged gerrymandering. District manipulations can be so subtle that they’re undetectable just by looking at them. “The eyeball test is no good,” says Jonathan Katz, a political scientist and statistician at Caltech.

U.S. states redraw their district lines every 10 years to adjust for changing demographics picked up by the national census. The last round a decade ago raised eyebrows, most notably for districts drawn in Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

“The post-2010 round of redistricting is widely viewed as a time of extreme, even egregious, partisan gerrymandering,” retired political scientist Richard Engstrom wrote in the January 2020 Social Science Quarterly.


This is a very interesting weak signal - although the discussion is focused on the belief in God - if we replace the concept of ‘god’ with ‘conspiracy theory’ this could contribute to an understanding of how people with capacity to reason - fall prey to - well conspiracies.

"This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods. Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power,"

"A brain that is more predisposed to implicit pattern learning may be more inclined to believe in a god no matter where in the world that brain happens to find itself, or in which religious context,"

Study suggests unconscious learning underlies belief in God

Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.

Their research, reported in the journal, Nature Communications, is the first to use implicit pattern learning to investigate religious belief. The study spanned two very different cultural and religious groups, one in the U.S. and one in Afghanistan.

The goal was to test whether implicit pattern learning is a basis of belief and, if so, whether that connection holds across different faiths and cultures. The researchers indeed found that implicit pattern learning appears to offer a key to understanding a variety of religions.


This is an interesting signal about emerging depths of knowledge and the domestication of DNA - and relationships to behavioral consequences.

Discoverer of neural circuits for parenting wins US$3 million Breakthrough Prize

Biologist Catherine Dulac netted one of four big life-sciences awards. Also announced were one for mathematics and two for physics.
Discovering the “on-and-off switch” for good parenting in both male and female mouse brains has earned Catherine Dulac, a molecular biologist at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes — the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. Three other major prizes in biology, plus two in physics and one in mathematics, were also announced on 10 September, together with a number of smaller prizes.

“Catherine Dulac has done amazing work that has really transformed the field,” says biologist Lauren O’Connell, at Stanford University, California. Dulac’s team provided the first evidence that male and female mouse brains have the same neural circuitry associated with parenting, which is just triggered differently in each sex1. “It went against the dogma that for decades said that male and female brains are organized differently,” says O’Connell.

To elucidate the neural mechanisms at play, Dulac identified a protein called galanin that is expressed by neurons involved in parenting. Killing the neurons in females stopped them parenting, while activating them in virgin males made them maternal. “It’s like an on-and-off switch for parenting,” says Dulac. “It’s extraordinary.” Her team then used the galanin marker to track the specific circuitry associated with the motivational, hormonal and behavioural changes needed for nurturing.


An interesting signal about the future of medicine - the domestication of our microbiomes.

Live bacteria spray is showing promise in treating childhood eczema

Here’s a shorthand way to think of my research: Using bugs as drugs may one day bring hope to soaps.
Patients with atopic dermatitis, more commonly known as eczema, suffer from dry, itchy skin and rashes, and have a higher risk of developing hay fever, asthma and food allergies. The cause of eczema is still unknown, but studies completed by my team and others continue to suggest that manipulating the skin microbiome – the community of all the bacteria and other microorganisms living on the surface of the skin – may offer therapeutic benefits to patients.

We hypothesized that if we directly sprayed live bacteria named Roseomonas mucosa - a naturally occurring skin microbe - on the skin of patients with eczema, those healthy bacteria might make for healthy skin.


This is still a weak signal - but imagine a swarm of biobots delivering medicine and/or being the medical device for all manner of ‘taking out the garbage’ and adding the nutrients and more in our bodies and environment and agriculturing activities (remembering that every single technology can be weaponized).

Scientists create a robot made entirely of living cells

'Xenobots' could be used to clean up microplastics or deliver medication in the body
Scientists have unveiled the first ever "living robot," an organism made up of living cells, which can move around, carry payloads, and even heal itself.

"All of the computational people on the project, myself included, were flabbergasted," said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont.  

"We didn't realize that this was possible."

Teams from the University of Vermont and Tufts University worked together to build what they're calling "xenobots," which are about the size of a grain of salt and are made up of the heart and skin cells from frogs.

"The particular frog that we borrowed these cells from is known as Xenopus laevis," Bongard told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.

"But Xeno is also in Greek stands for alien, or unknown, or different, or new, and we think both interpretations apply to this new kind of technology."


Learning to control our bio-nano-computational bots and fabrication technologies - is vital.

Flipping light on-off turns bacteria into chemical factories

Researchers at Princeton University have created a new and improved way to more precisely control genetically engineered bacteria: by simply switching the lights on and off. Working in E. coli, the workhorse organism for scientists to engineer metabolism, researchers developed a system for controlling one of the key genetic circuits needed to turn bacteria into chemical factories that produce valuable compounds such as the biofuel isobutanol.

"All you need is illumination," said José Avalos, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University and at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment", and senior author of the findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology. "There are lots of potential benefits, one of them being the ability to easily tune and reverse the induction signal."

The new work builds on Avalos and his colleagues' previous work, described in Nature in 2018, in which they engineered of yeast to produce chemicals in the presence or absence of light. E. coli, however, is even more widely used by scientists and engineers than yeast.


This is another good signal of our exploration into the inner space of our own ecology - the digital environment is exponentially creating massive data through ever more sensors - in ever more places. Finding out about who we really are.

Sampling the gut microbiome with an ingestible pill

Gut microbes affect human health, but there is still much to learn, in part because they're not easy to collect. But researchers now report in ACS Nano that they have developed an ingestible capsule that in rat studies captured bacteria and other biological samples while passing through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.

Currently, researchers obtain gut microbes by collecting stool samples or using techniques such as colonoscopy or endoscopy. However, stool samples can't capture all the microorganisms in the upper GI tract, and they can't keep microbes from different parts of the tract separate. Colonoscopy and endoscopy are invasive procedures, which deters some patients. Sarvesh Kumar Srivastava and colleagues wanted to avoid these drawbacks by designing a device that could be swallowed and then eliminated.

The researchers developed a self-polymerizing reaction system of poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate monomer, iron chloride and ascorbic acid—all loaded into tiny hollow cylinders. The cylindrical microdevices were packaged in miniature gelatin capsules, which were coated with a protective layer to prevent digestion in the stomach's acidic environment. After they were fed to rats, the capsules remained protected in the stomach but disintegrated in the small intestine's more-neutral pH, releasing the microdevices. Exposure to intestinal fluid caused the cylinders' chemical cargo to polymerize, forming a hydrogel that trapped microbes and protein biomarkers in its surroundings, much like an instant snapshot of the intestine.