Thursday, February 16, 2017

Friday Thinking 17 Feb. 2017

Hello all – 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.

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content
Quotes:


Articles:
First Gene Drive in Mammals Could Aid Vast New Zealand Eradication Plan



At its height back in 2000, the U.S. cash equities trading desk at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters employed 600 traders, buying and selling stock on the orders of the investment bank’s large clients. Today there are just two equity traders left.


Automated trading programs have taken over the rest of the work, supported by 200 computer engineers. Marty Chavez, the company’s deputy chief financial officer and former chief information officer, explained all this to attendees at a symposium on computing’s impact on economic activity held by Harvard’s Institute for Applied Computational Science last month.


The experience of its New York traders is just one early example of a transformation of Goldman Sachs, and increasingly other Wall Street firms, that began with the rise in computerized trading, but has accelerated over the past five years, moving into more fields of finance that humans once dominated. Chavez, who will become chief financial officer in April, says areas of trading like currencies and even parts of business lines like investment banking are moving in the same automated direction that equities have already traveled.


Today, nearly 45 percent of trading is done electronically, according to Coalition, a U.K. firm that tracks the industry. In addition to back-office clerical workers, on Wall Street machines are replacing a lot of highly paid people, too.


Goldman Sachs has already begun to automate currency trading, and has found consistently that four traders can be replaced by one computer engineer, Chavez said at the Harvard conference. Some 9,000 people, about one-third of Goldman’s staff, are computer engineers.

Goldman Embraces Automation, Masters of the Universe Are Threatened



...the emergence of low-cost computers and networking appeared to augur a peer-to-peer, fluid, and more open economic landscape, one where we all step off the industrial-age, punch-the-clock treadmill and work in our own time, collaboratively, on creative pursuits, from home, in our underwear. Instead, we’re getting an exacerbation of some of extractive corporatism’s worst effects: joblessness, disenfranchisement, wealth disparity, corporate lethargy, artificial growth, and financialization.


Why aren’t we getting new, digitally enabled forms of community currency, worker-owned businesses, networked cooperatives, and peer-to-peer marketplaces? It turns out it is not because they don’t work; it’s simply because there are entrenched powers and limited visions preventing their rise. They find it hard to see digital technology as anything other than an investment opportunity. A company is not a provider of goods or services, but a “disruptor” capable of overturning an existing marketplace and generating 100x returns to the early shareholders. It doesn’t matter what the company does, if anything, after that.


The rules of capitalism were invented by human beings, at particular moments in history, with particular goals and agendas. It’s like a computer program, with accumulated lines of code written by developers throughout history with specific functions in mind. By refusing to acknowledge this, we end up incapable of getting beneath the surface. We end up transacting, and living, at the mercy of a system—of a medium, really.

Silver Lining of Anti-Globalism Might be Creation of a True Digital Economy




Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of The Attention Merchants, says it's as though Facebook were an industrial park. Users started setting up offices in the park, using the roads to travel, treating it like a public utility. But legally, it's private. So when Facebook shuts off the road that goes to your shop, or puts in a new toll, he says, "That's it, you're done."


Two very different people — one is a meme-maker in Florida, the other an investigative journalist from Zimbabwe — got stopped in their tracks as they were doing their work on Facebook, because of the company's decisions and refusal to talk, human-to-human. That caused them tangible harm. Their stories illustrate how much Facebook controls people's access to the online world, and how opaque the company is about this power.

Building, And Losing, A Career On Facebook




Unfortunately, whether they are running corporations or foreign ministries or central banks, some of the best minds of our era are still in thrall to an older way of seeing and thinking. They are making repeated misjudgments about the world. In a way, it’s hard to blame them. Mostly they grew up at a time when the global order could largely be understood in simpler terms, when only nations really mattered, when you could think there was a predictable relationship between what you wanted and what you got. They came of age as part of a tradition that believed all international crises had beginnings and, if managed well, ends.


This is an important distinction: the idea that we need to be gardeners instead of craftsmen. When we are merely creating something we have a sense of control; we have a plan and an end state. When the shelf is built, it's built.


Being a gardener is different. You have to prepare the environment; you have to nurture the plants and know when to leave them alone. You have to make sure the environment is hospitable to everything you want to grow (different plants have different needs), and after the harvest you aren’t done. You need to turn the earth and, in essence, start again. There is no end state if you want something to grow.

A Cascade of Sand: Complex Systems in a Complex Time




When the history of the 21st century is written, we’ll see that by 2017 the inflection point in the global energy rebuild had already occurred. We’ll see the new energy economy was just the next stage of the the larger technology transformation obviously well underway.
We’ll see that the energy revolution of the next 20 years looked a lot like the Internet revolution of the last 20 years.

Renewables are no longer ‘alternative.’ Fossil fuels are ‘legacy.’



This is an exciting signal of the potential re-imagining of a 20th century organization into a 21st century institution - a civil liberties watchdog for the digital environment.
Still: a 97-year-old nonprofit corporation doing inside a startup factory? It’s a move that has raised eyebrows among some ACLU supporters, who worry that the organization’s embrace of Silicon Valley could warp its values. “I wish I was excited [about] this,” tweeted Laura Weidman Powers, CEO of Code 2040, a nonprofit that seeks to create opportunities for black and Latino workers in the tech industry. “But I’m nervous [because] principles of tech growth have not historically been inclusive or benefitted all.”

How the ACLU became Silicon Valley’s favorite startup

The 97-year-old organization just joined the incubator that gave us Airbnb and Dropbox. Now what?
In the wake of President Donald Trump banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the American Civil Liberties Union recorded $24 million in online donations over a single weekend.


Silicon Valley has historically been wary of politics, but Trump’s executive order spurred a series of large donations. Lyft donated $1 million. Twitter employees donated $1.59 million. Googlers raised $4 million to be divided among the ACLU and three nonprofits that support immigrants and refugees. Google Ventures made a separate donation of undisclosed size. “It’s the most important investment we’ll make all year,” David Krane, the firm’s managing partner, told portfolio companies at a private dinner last week.


At more than 750,000 members, the ACLU is hardly a fringe group. Founded in 1920, it first came to fame during the Scopes Trial, in which the group defended a Tennessee high school teacher who was prosecuted for teaching human evolution. It prominently opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and racial segregation in public schools during the civil rights movement.


In some ways, ACLU will be like any other nonprofit in Y Combinator. According to the ACLU, it’s getting a $200,000 donation. It will also get access to Y Combinator’s alumni network, which is lining up to offer its support, Altman said. “One of the cool things has been that many big YC companies have said whatever we can do — free services, discounts — multiply that by 10, [and that’s] what we’ll do for the ACLU,” Altman said. “Payments processing, [web] hosting, help with designing the payments flow and donations flow. We want to do that.”


In other ways, though, it will be different. The ACLU isn’t sending representatives to Silicon Valley to live and work with the other startups in the batch. Instead, Y Combinator will send advisers to the organization’s headquarters in New York City, Altman said — an unusual arrangement for the incubator, but not the first time it has worked with a remote organization.


Other details are still being worked out — what metric the ACLU might try to improve during its time in the accelerator, for instance.


This is another landmark in a long history of human relationship with night - from domesticating fire, to electricity, to television and now the Internet.
More surprising is that it takes about 16 years on average for Internet use to saturate in any given country. That’s significantly faster than other technologies that have revolutionized societies, such as steam power, which took about 100 years, and electrification, which took about 60 years.

The Trillion Internet Observations Showing How Global Sleep Patterns Are Changing

The way we use the Internet is beginning to reveal human behavior patterns on a previously unimaginable scale.
In 1995, some 40 million people all over the world were connected to the Internet. By 2000 that had grown to around 400 million, and by 2016 it reached 3.5 billion. That means almost half the global population is connected to a single technology.


That’s an extraordinary statistic and one that raises an interesting possibility. With so many people connected in this way, it should become possible to use this technology as a kind of demographic sensor that measures human behavior on an almost unimaginable scale.


Today, Klaus Ackermann at the University of Chicago and a couple of pals say they have done just this by studying how devices connected to, and disconnected from, the Internet between 2006 and 2013. They have done this on a global scale at a time resolution of every 15 minutes to produce a truly mind-boggling number of observations—one trillion of them.
So what does this enormous data set reveal about humanity?

This is not yet proven nor ready for primetime - but it may well be worth watching - disrupting again - the speed of our wifi networks.

This New Technology Can Send Data 10 Times Faster Than 5G

What are called the 5G or fifth-generation mobile networks are set to become available by 2020, with promises of improved connections and faster data transfer rates. But, what if we could get speeds faster than 5G before 2020? That’s the subject of a paper that was delivered this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) held in San Francisco, California.


The paper talks about a terahertz (THz) transmitter developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Panasonic Corporation, and Hiroshima University. This transmitter operates using a frequency range from 290 GHz to 315 GHz and is capable of transmitting digital data at a rate of 105 gigabits per second — which is a communication speed that’s at least 10 times as fast as 5G networks. The transmitter uses a frequency that falls within a currently unallocated range of 275 GHz to 450 GHz. Its use will be covered in the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) under the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Section (ITU-R).


The researchers were able to reach the speed levels described in the paper by using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which enhances the speed of a wireless link in the 300GHz band. These researchers managed to, for the first time, reach speeds exceeding 100 gigabits per second with an integrated circuit-based transmitter.

One of the most popular science fiction themes is the rise of AI against humanity. It has become a salient meme in many conversations about the future. This article is the result of a conference with the aim of creating a set of guiding principles. The conference attendees include many of the who’s who in the AI world.

ASILOMAR AI PRINCIPLES

These principles were developed in conjunction with the 2017 Asilomar conference
Artificial intelligence has already provided beneficial tools that are used everyday by people around the world. Its continued development, guided by the following principles, will offer amazing opportunities to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead. The 23 principles are divided into three categories: Research Issues; Ethics and Values; Longer-term Issues

This is interesting - for work that humans will still engage in, AI may become their coach and mentors - maybe our personal AI-ssistant will be more like Batman’s Alfred - butler and mentor.
call centers do not want to replace phone workers, but they are keen to improve the way they operate. “Humans are social beings,” he says. “We engage with each other for emotional reasons, and we want somebody to help us, to counsel us.”
Feast founded Cogito, in 2007, with Sandy Pentland, a professor in the MIT Media Lab who specializes in studying human dynamics. The company originally developed its technology with funding from DARPA as a way to detect a person’s mental state using his or her speech.

Socially Sensitive AI Software Coaches Call-Center Workers

Customer-service reps are getting real-time coaching from software that has learned to detect problems in a conversation.
Some call-center workers are now receiving real-time coaching from software that analyzes their speech and the nature of their dialogue interactions with customers. As they are talking to someone the software might recommend that they talk more slowly or interrupt less often, or warn that the person on the other end of the line seems upset.


This gives us a fascinating glimpse of how AI and humans might increasingly work together in the future. Plenty of routine work is becoming automated in call centers and other back office settings, but real human interaction seems likely to resist automation for a long while yet. Even so, AI software may change the way people interact with customers by serving in an advisory capacity.


The call-center software is supplied by Cogito, a company based in Boston. Its software automatically assesses the dynamics of a conversation, and has been trained to recognize certain pertinent characteristics. Rather than the substance of a conversation, it analyzes the raw audio. “Conversation is like a dance,” says Josh Feast, CEO of Cogito. “You can tell whether people are in sync, and it turns out this is a much better measure than language.”

The Internet-of-Things is getting closer - the visual on this page is worth the view. What is misdirected with the term ‘Internet-of-Things’ is an evocation of ‘things’ - a focus on nodes - rather than the emergence of a digital cloud or atmosphere through which we must navigate or wayfind.
At the conference, they described micro mote designs that use only a few nanowatts of power to perform tasks such as distinguish the sound of a passing car and measuring temperature and light levels. They showed off a compact radio that can send data from the small computers to receivers 20 meters away

Millimeter-Scale Computers: Now With Deep Learning Neural Networks on Board

Computer scientist David Blaauw pulls a small plastic box from his bag. He carefully uses his fingernail to pick up the tiny black speck inside and place it on the hotel café table. At one cubic millimeter, this is one of a line of the world’s smallest computers. I had to be careful not to cough or sneeze lest it blow away and be swept into the trash.


Blaauw and his colleague Dennis Sylvester, both IEEE Fellows and computer scientists at the University of Michigan, were in San Francisco this week to present ten papers related to these “micro mote” computers at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). They’ve been presenting different variations on the tiny devices for a few years.


Their broader goal is to make smarter, smaller sensors for medical devices and the internet of things—sensors that can do more with less energy. Many of the microphones, cameras, and other sensors that make up eyes and ears of smart devices are always on alert, and frequently beam personal data into the cloud because they can’t analyze it themselves. Some have predicted that by 2035, there will be 1 trillion such devices. “If you’ve got a trillion devices producing readings constantly, we’re going to drown in data,” says Blaauw. By developing tiny, energy efficient computing sensors that can do analysis on board, Blaauw and Sylvester hope to make these devices more secure, while also saving energy.


Another micro mote they presented at the ISSCC incorporates a deep-learning processor that can operate a neural network while using just 288 microwatts.

This is definitely a signal that more such plants are on their way.

Millions of Tesla battery cells are powering thousands of LA homes

396 Powerpacks can power 15,000 homes for four hours
An enormous Tesla-installed power storage facility is up and running at Southern California Edison’s Mira Loma substation in Ontario, California. The facility, announced last fall, holds enough energy to power 15,000 homes for four hours — 80 megawatt hours of electricity with a peak output of 20 megawatts.


It’s designed to reduce the need for “peaker plants” — electricity generation facilities that run when electricity demands are particularly high, such as on a hot afternoon when air conditioners are running full tilt. They’re expensive to install and maintain, especially when in some areas they might only be used for a few hours a day — or even a year.


The 396 Powerpacks that Tesla installed (it acted as its own general contractor) for SCE were all assembled at the company’s Gigafactory in Nevada. Though 80 megawatt hours of batteries might seem like a lot, it’s the same amount of battery capacity that the company puts into its cars in just three or four days of production.


The SCE facility at Mira Loma has 396 Powerpacks, each with 16 pods of batteries inside. Each pod has 12 bricks of cells, and each brick has 85 battery cells. Add ‘em all up and it’s 6,462,720 individual “2170” battery cells, so named because they’re 21 x 70mm cylinders.

Here’s another weak signal of potentially looming battery disruptions - once energy storage is inexpensive - then zero-marginal cost energy will accelerate even more.

Harvard’s New Battery Can Run For More Than a Decade

FLOW BATTERIES
Researchers have discovered a way to make the promising flow battery much more practical. Flow batteries store energy in liquid-filled tanks. Prior to this most recent discovery, flow batteries, after a number of charge-discharge cycles, would suffer from rapid storage capacity degradation.


In order to overcome the degradation hurdle, the researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) modified the structure of molecules in the solution to make them water soluble. This allowed for the electrolytes to be dissolved in neutral water, creating a battery that only loses one percent of its storage capacity every 1000 cycles. According to the official press release, the battery is able to run for ten years with only a minimum amount of upkeep.


Unlike other battery liquids, the solution in this new flow battery is both non-toxic as well as non-corrosive. Spilling it on skin or on the floor causes no injury or property damage.

This is ready for primetime - but it’s another signal of the rapid development of all sorts of robotics. Some of the images are worth the view.

This bipedal robot could deliver your packages one day

Bipedal robots have been a tough ask for engineers. Creating a bot that’s steady, self-balancing, and able to adapt to uneven terrain (one of the main advantages of going bipedal in the first place!) is a tough ask. But, as this newly unveiled bot from Agility Robotics proves, we’re getting good at it.


The bot’s name is Cassie, and, as reported by IEEE Spectrum, it comes from a fine lineage of bipedal robots. Agility Robotics is a spinoff company from Oregon State University, and the firm’s researchers previously created the ATRIAS robot. (You may remember ATRIAS from a video of it playing a slightly one-sided game of dodgeball.)


“ATRIAS was the first machine to demonstrate human-like gait dynamics and implement spring-mass walking, but it was not a practical machine for any use other than science demonstration.” Agility Robotics co-founder Jonathan Hurst told Spectrum. (“Spring-mass walking” basically uses the elasticity of springs to create a passive mechanism mimicking human muscles.)

The self-driving car, the autonomous drone and soon to a harbor near you maybe a self-driving ship.
"The development will start in a few countries, and these flag states will give the vessel permission to operate before we have international regulations in place."
A spokesman for the international maritime union Nautilus said: "The pace of change is a challenge to safety and there are also many unanswered questions about the legal implications of the way in which operational and management responsibilities are being taken away from ships’ staff.
International shipping expert Jonathan Moss, from law firm DWF, said: "The maritime industry as a whole may suffer in terms of employment levels.

Rolls-Royce plans to launch crewless ships by 2020

Tugboats and ferries are being developed first, with international cargo ships expected to follow later.
The engineering giant is working with government-backed groups across northern Europe on the autonomous vessels.


The company estimates that the move could cut sea transport costs by as much as 20%.
Rolls-Royce vice president of innovation Oskar Levander said tugboats and ferries will be developed first, ahead of cargo vessels which will sail across international waters.

The self-driving car becomes the key enabler of the future we’ve all grown up with - the flying car.
“They just need to press a button and then it vertically takes off, flies from point A to point B, and lands.”

Dubai To Put Autonomous Taxi Drones In The Skies 'This Summer'

When the ruling family decrees that a quarter of all journeys in a city state will be autonomous by 2030, someone somewhere is obliged to make that start happening as soon as possible.


In Dubai, that person is Mattar Al Tayer, chairman of the city’s Road and Transport Authority. He said Monday that he hopes Dubai will have autonomous taxi drones zipping around its skyline this summer. Actual drones that people can sit inside without fearing for their lives.


The flying taxis are being manufactured by Chinese drone-making firm EHang and can carry a person weighing up to 100 kilograms (about 220 pounds) along with a small suitcase. Passengers don’t need to learn how to fly the drones, EHang's co-founder Derrick Xiong told FORBES staff writer Aaron Tilley in an interview this time last year.

Somehow, I’m a bit skeptical of Ford’s strategy - seems a retreat into an old business model than a step into the 21st Century. While is supports the looming emergence of a change in the conditions of change as far as transportation and mass transit - it seems to be wanting to compete with a closed proprietary model rather than embracing a more robust open-source model that could make all AI and transportation safer, more agile and evolvable faster.

Ford spending $1 billion on self-driving artificial intelligence

Ford announced an investment in artificial-intelligence company Argo AI to foster development of its self-driving car technology.
Ford announced today a $1 billion investment in machine-learning startup Argo AI. Through the agreement, Argo AI will work exclusively for Ford on the software brains to enable self-driving.


Ford previously announced it will offer a self-driving car by 2021, although it would likely be limited to urban environments and be used by ride-hailing services as a kind of robo-taxi.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Argo AI is a new company dedicated to developing a software system to guide self-driving cars. CEO Bryan Salesky said of the investment that it would allow Argo AI to recruit the kind of talent needed to develop these systems.


Ford CEO Mark Fields said, "For accounting purposes, Argo AI will be a subsidiary of Ford, but have a lot of independence. Its sole focus over the next five years will be developing self-driving software for Ford vehicles."

Here’s a fascinating experiment bringing AI and robotics together - this could transform the popular reality show - Robot Wars.

Google’s DeepMind pits AI against AI to see if they fight or cooperate

Unsurprisingly, they do both
What happens if one AI’s aims conflict with another’s? Will they fight, or work together?
Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind has been exploring this problem in a new study published today. The company’s researchers decided to test how AI agents interacted with one another in a series of “social dilemmas.” This is a rather generic term for situations in which individuals can profit from being selfish — but where everyone loses if everyone is selfish. The most famous example of this is the prisoner’s dilemma, where two individuals can choose to betray one another for a prize, but lose out if both choose this option.


As explained in a blog post from DeepMind, the company’s researchers tested how AI agents would perform in these sorts of situations, by dropping them into a pair of very basic video games.

This article is interesting on several levels - even with cars become electric - they still will rely on fossil fuels to make tires. Except this innovation can transform that. Also this is important in understanding how harnessing microbial agents we may transform how we manufacture many things.
"Our team created a new chemical process to make isoprene, the key molecule in car tires, from natural products like trees, grasses, or corn," said Paul Dauenhauer, a University of Minnesota associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science and lead researcher of the study. "This research could have a major impact on the multi-billion dollar automobile tires industry."

Researchers invent process to produce renewable car tires from trees, grass

A team of researchers, led by the University of Minnesota, has invented a new technology to produce automobile tires from trees and grasses in a process that could shift the tire production industry toward using renewable resources found right in our backyards.


Conventional car tires are viewed as environmentally unfriendly because they are predominately made from fossil fuels. The car tires produced from biomass that includes trees and grasses would be identical to existing car tires with the same chemical makeup, color, shape, and performance.
The technology has been patented by the University of Minnesota and is available for licensing through the University of Minnesota Office of Technology Commercialization.


The new study is published by the American Chemical Society's ACS Catalysis, a leading journal in the chemical and catalysis sciences. Authors of the study, include researchers from the University of Minnesota, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Center for Sustainable Polymers, a National Science Foundation-funded center at the University of Minnesota.

Bringing healthcare to the world involves the ability to diagnose problems - here’s a significant leap forward toward an essentially costless diagnostic method.
"Enabling early detection of diseases is one of the greatest opportunities we have for developing effective treatments," Esfandyarpour said. "Maybe $1 in the U.S. doesn't count that much, but somewhere in the developing world, it's a lot of money."

Scientists develop 'lab on a chip' that costs one cent to make

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a way to produce a cheap and reusable diagnostic "lab on a chip" with the help of an ordinary inkjet printer.


At a production cost of as little as 1 cent per chip, the new technology could usher in a medical diagnostics revolution like the kind brought on by low-cost genome sequencing, said Ron Davis, PhD, professor of biochemistry and of genetics and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center.


A study describing the technology will be published online Feb. 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Davis is the senior author. The lead author is Rahim Esfandyarpour, PhD, an engineering research associate at the genome center.


The inexpensive lab-on-a-chip technology has the potential to enhance diagnostic capabilities around the world, especially in developing countries. Due to inferior access to early diagnostics, the survival rate of breast cancer patients is only 40 percent in low-income nations—half the rate of such patients in developed nations. Other lethal diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, also have high incidence and bad patient outcomes in developing countries. Better access to cheap diagnostics could help turn this around, especially as most such equipment costs thousands of dollars.

The gene drive technology derived from CRISPR has been a controversial news item for a while - Here’s another signal of its immanent deployment.

First Gene Drive in Mammals Could Aid Vast New Zealand Eradication Plan

Evolution-warping technology applied to mice is a step toward “synthetic” species conservation.
Scientists working in coördination with a U.S. conservation group say they’ve established an evolution-warping technology called a “gene drive” in mammals for the first time and could use it to stamp out invasive rodents ravaging seabirds on islands.


Gene-drive technology, so far demonstrated only in insects and yeast, is a powerful way of biasing the inheritance of DNA such that wild animals can be genetically altered as they reproduce, including to cause a population crash.


Now two scientific teams—one in Australia and one in Texas—say they’ve genetically engineered the house mouse, Mus musculus, so that its genome also harbors genetic surprises that could be unleashed on wild populations. The modified rodents were born in the last two months and the results are still preliminary.


The effort to establish gene drives in mammals is being coördinated by Island Conservation, a hard-charging conservation group based in Santa Cruz, California, whose specialty is bombing small islands with rat poison in order to save endangered seabirds. Its motto is “preventing extinctions.”


But poison doesn’t work to extirpate rodents on larger islands or heavily populated ones. That’s why the group thinks gene drives could be the “transformative technology” that allows it to extend its campaign to thousands more islands it says are infested. “We were looking for something really out of the box,” says Karl Campbell, a program director at the nonprofit, which has plans to spent about $7 million a year to speed the technique toward an initial test on a remote island surrounded by miles of ocean, if authorities allow it.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Friday Thinking 10 Feb. 2017

Hello all – 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.

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content
Quotes:

Articles:
Europe Is Trolling Trump with Wickedly Funny Parody Videos


The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior. Capture the people’s imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.

That’s how it becomes a movement. There’s something soothing in all that anger. Populism is built on the irresistible allure of simplicity. The narcotic of the simple answer to an intractable question. The problem is now made simple.

Populism can survive only amid polarization. It works through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy.

In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. How to let a populist beat you, over and over again.



Gamers are more likely to consider family a top priority than non-gamers (82% vs 68%) as well as placing a high importance on friends (57% vs 35%). Gamers and their parents are also more likely to have been college educated (43% and 52%, respectively) than non-gamers and their parents (36% and 37%, respectively).

When it comes to their occupation, 67% of gamers feel positive about their aspirations, while only 42% of non-gamers feel the same way. Gamers are also more likely to be employed full time than those who don’t partake in games (42% vs 39%). Sixty-one percent of gamers would describe themselves as natural leaders, compared to 35% of non-gamers.

Socially-speaking, gamers are much more likely to value personally making a positive impact on society (76% vs 55%) while preferring to shop at corporations backing social causes (58% vs 36%). Ethical business practices matter to 78% of gamers, compared to 65% of non-gamers.

Gamers also appear to be more tech-savvy than non-gamers, as they are more likely to use technology like smart phones, tablets, or streaming devices (like Google Chromecast) while at a friend’s house (42% vs 15%), on vacation (40% vs 18%), at work (20% vs 10%), commuting (19% vs 5%) or at a restaurant (18% vs 6%). With gamers being connected so frequently, they could be influencing how media content is distributed. Broadcast television tune-in frequency is down 12% in 2014 when compared to 2011 as part of the trend away from traditional media and coming toward online sources.

Playing video games has been linked to a boost in brain volume and creating a sharper mind, though those studies both called for games to be played in moderation. The majority of gamers (63%) reported playing games for fewer than 10 hours per week, which isn’t all that bad.

Gamers More Likely To Be Social, Educated Than Non-Gamers




This is a MUST VIEW 3 min video (transcript -below video) by Yannis Varoufakis - the best concise explanation of why we need a universal basic dividend (livable income).

The West needs a New Deal

This video, prepared by and for BBC Newsnight, foreshadows DiEM25’s European New Deal – which will be made available in full during February.

Having dismissed their poverty as a personality defect and their zero hour contracts as efficiency improvements, the Deep Establishment now looks on in despair as a Nationalist International triumphs. Two are its handmaidens:
  • Involuntary under-employment – the bitter price of austerity
  • And involuntary migration – the bitter fruit of concentrating decent jobs in small areas. People do not move to London for the theatre scene or to Britain for the climate; they move because they must!
Neither globalisation nor electrified border fences will fix this. It’s delusional to think that Britain or America can prosper sustainably when neighbouring nations are in crisis.


India is one of a number of countries that are serious about exploring a guaranteed basic income.

India Considers Fighting Poverty With a Universal Basic Income

Annual economic survey looks at possibility of replacing messy welfare programs with a stipend paid to every Indian
The Ministry of Finance’s annual survey of the economy, released Tuesday, explores how the country might replace its various welfare programs with a universal basic income, or a uniform stipend paid to every adult and child, poor or rich. Guaranteeing all citizens enough income to cover their basic needs would promote social justice, the survey says, and empower the poor to make their own economic choices. It would also be easier to administer than India’s current anti=poverty programs, which are plagued by waste, corruption and abuse.

But Arvind Subramanian, the ministry’s chief economic adviser and lead author of the economic survey, took pains to emphasize that concerns about how a universal income would be enacted—and how the government would pay—mean India is still quite far from putting the concept into practice.

“It’s an idea whose time is ripe for further deliberation and discussion, and not necessarily for immediate implementation,” Mr. Subramanian told reporters.


One has to wonder which countries are embracing the emerging technologies for a society in the 21st century.
And it’s working. The government as well as different financial institutions are now allowing people to avail financial services using their phone number, doing away with the need of going to banks and wasting tons of paper.

India is giving senior citizens a biometrics enabled health card, and nobody knows why

India’s audacious push to bring and make use of Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometrics database, was one of the highlights at the annual financial budget unveiled in the country today.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced that senior citizens in the country will soon get Aadhaar-based smart cards. These cards would feature their health and other information, Jaitley added. The government will first run a pilot project in 15 districts during the 2017-18 fiscal year.

Aadhaar is a biometrics-backed (fingerprint, iris, or facial features) national ID system that the government is positioning as a solution to bring its 1.3 billion people to the digital age. Over one billion people and 99% of the country's adult population are already enrolled in the system.

One of the biggest applications of Aadhaar so far has been seen in Unified Payment Interface, an effort by the government to make digital exchange of money as simple as sending a text message.


Another signal related to the emerging Blockchain technology - this time in reference to a Canadian.
“Looking ahead, it is possible that virtual currencies and FinTech-based providers, particularly where they gain direct membership to central bank payment systems, could begin to displace traditional bank-based payment services and systems.” Mark Carney, BoE Governor

Central Bank Governor says Digital Currencies could displace traditional banking systems

The Governor of the Bank of England (BoE) and Chair of the Financial Stability Board and Monetary Policy Committee, Mark Carney, recently gave a speech about FinTech, financial inclusion, and BoE research into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).

While noting FinTech's potential in promoting financial inclusion, Carney said that “authorities have essential, supporting roles in reinforcing them and managing the associated risks to financial stability.”

The BoE is already expanding central bank access to Payments Service Providers (PSPs), that are not banks, which Carney first announced in June last year. There were over 1,000 non-bank PSPs as of June, but they currently have to rely on one of four agent banks for settlement.
The central bank governor said that as they grow, some PSPs will want to rely less on the very banks with whom they are competing, “re-selling services ultimately provided by banks limits these firms’ growth, potential to innovate, and competitive impact.”

Opening up the Central Bank system to PSPs will allow them to compete directly with banks. While some banks' profitability may be hit, overall this “supports innovation, competition and financial stability,” Carney states.


This is an excellent 24 min video interview with Andreas Wagner. His most recent book - Paradoxical Life: Meaning, Matter, and the Power of Human Choice is a must read - for anyone interested in knowledge, meaning, language, innovation and evolution. This book extends the philosophical work of Wittgenstein by bringing in into the world of physics and biology - presenting a case for a paradigm change in how we engage with science and with the domain of human experience.

Andreas Wagner 2011 WORLD.MINDS INTERVIEW

Interview discusses  evolutionary biology, space of possibilities, mutations, metabolic pathway, protein structure, innovation, innovability,


This is an excellent must read - 3min article with some great simple graphics.

Why do we need teams? Teams can make complex decisions correctly and perform highly complex tasks.

One person can only know so much: There is a limited number of different things that a person can respond to successfully. Highly complex tasks exceed an individual’s capacity to perform or understand. Specialization enables a group of individuals to perform more complex tasks by routing one set of tasks to one individual and a different set to a different individual. This is what happens, for example, in healthcare where there are many specialists and there is someone who directs individuals to the right specialist

The number of distinct tasks that can be performed by the system of specialists grows linearly with the number of individuals (it is the sum of the number of types of tasks each individual can perform). For example, if there are 5 individuals and each can do 10,000 different tasks, then together they can do 50,000 different things. This is helpful, but teams do even more.

A collaborative team enables each individual to contribute a different dimension to the task performed by the group, so that the number of types of tasks can be as high as the product of the number of tasks each individual can perform. In this case 5 individuals can do 10,000 x 10,000 x 10,000 x 10,000 x 10,000 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10^20 different things, many more possible tasks than the specialist system.

The advantage of working together is to get a complex task right, to be successful at making the right decision. The higher the complexity, the more specialists cannot be successful, but teams can be.


Here’s a good research update to the Wisdom of Crowds - worth the read.
“In situations where there is enough information in the crowd to determine the correct answer to a question, that answer will be the one [that] most outperforms expectations,” says paper co-author Drazen Prelec, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the Department of Economics and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Better wisdom from crowds

MIT scholars produce new method of harvesting correct answers from groups.
The wisdom of crowds is not always perfect. But two scholars at MIT’s Sloan Neuroeconomics Lab, along with a colleague at Princeton University, have found a way to make it better.

Their method, explained in a newly published paper, uses a technique the researchers call the “surprisingly popular” algorithm to better extract correct answers from large groups of people. As such, it could refine wisdom-of-crowds surveys, which are used in political and economic forecasting, as well as many other collective activities, from pricing artworks to grading scientific research proposals.

The new method is simple. For a given question, people are asked two things: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer.


When we think of teams it may be important to remember that today the best chess players aren’t individual humans, not individual Artificial Intelligence - but teams of human and AI together. And another breakthrough has been made although it has seemed to have gained the press coverage of beating the Go Champion.
“This challenge is so huge and complicated that it’s been elusive to AI researchers until now,” said Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science Tuomas Sandholm who, along with his PhD student Noam Brown, built Libratus.
Sandholm said he “wasn’t confident at all” that Libratus would beat the poker pros. “The international betting sites put us as 4-1 underdog and the humans expected to win.”
“Poker is the least of our concerns here,” said Roman V Yampolskiy, a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville. “You have a machine that can kick your ass in business and military applications. I’m worried about how humanity as a whole will deal with that.”

Oh the humanity! Poker computer trounces humans in big step for AI

Libratus, an artificial intelligence robot, has won chips worth $1.5m from four of the world’s top poker players in a three-week challenge at a Pittsburgh casino
The Brains vs Artificial Intelligence competition saw four human players – Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay – spend 11 hours each day stationed at computer screens in the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh battling a piece of software at no-limit Texas Hold’em, a two-player unlimited form of poker. Libratus outmanoeuvred them all, winning more than $1.7m in chips. (Thankfully for the poker pros, they weren’t playing with real money)

It’s a crushing defeat for humanity, but a major milestone for artificial intelligence.

Machines have already become smart enough to beat humans at other games such as chess and Go, but poker is more difficult because it’s a game with imperfect information. With chess and Go, each player can see the entire board, but with poker, players don’t get to see each other’s hands. Furthermore, the AI is required to bluff and correctly interpret misleading information in order to win.

The algorithms that power Libratus aren’t specific to poker, which means the system could have a variety of applications outside of recreational games, from negotiating business deals to setting military or cybersecurity strategy and planning medical treatment – anywhere where humans are required to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information.


Speaking of teams whether they are people or AI - this is an interesting article about some research on Twitter. Qualifications of the findings would have to include the current constraints of political conversation on social media today - including the corrosive impact of trolling on inter-group conversation and the influence of ‘bots’ in shaping the environment of inter-personal and intergroup conversation in a world where political conversation has become highly polarized (for many reasons including the deliberate intentions of increasing polarization).

Twitter accounts really are echo chambers, study finds

As in ancient human cultures, users of the social media site interact most with those who share their political views, Demos report reveals
A study of 2,000 Twitter users who publicly identified as either Labour, Tory, Ukip or SNP supporters has found they are far more likely to interact with others from the same party and to share articles from publications that match their views. Ukip supporters are also far more engaged with “alternative” media outlets, including Breitbart and Infowars, two US-based sites identified with the alt-right that have been regularly accused of publishing misleading or false stories.

The research was carried out by the thinktank Demos, which looked at the tweets sent between May and August last year by 2,000 people who have publicly stated their political allegiance on their profiles and who had at some point addressed a member of parliament in their tweets.

Report author Alex Krasodomski-Jones said that while the accounts looked at were not representative of either the broader population or Twitter users, they provided a sample of Twitter’s “political classes” who were also more likely to be engaged in political debate and action outside the platform.


This is definitely gruesome - but does suggest that Alpha’s have to be wary of the ‘general will’ of the group.

Chimps beat up, murder and then cannibalise their former tyrant

It was a gruesome scene. The body had severe wounds and was still bleeding despite having been lying for a few hours in the hot Senegalese savanna.
The murder victim, a West African chimpanzee called Foudouko, had been beaten with rocks and sticks, stomped on and then cannibalised by his own community.

Thirteen years ago, Foudouko reigned over one of the chimp clans at the Fongoli study site, part of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project. As alpha male, he was “somewhat of a tyrant”, Pruetz says.

Foudouko gained alpha status in his late teens and ruled alongside his right-hand chimp, Mamadou, the group’s beta male. In 2007, Mamadou was severely injured and separated from the group for weeks, returning frail and holding a lower rank in the social hierarchy.

Because Foudouko maintained an alliance with his now-weak partner, he was ostracised and then ousted by the others. He lived alone on the outskirts of chimp society for years, only being observed by researchers in the field once or twice a year.


Marshall McLuhan noted that when confronted with information overload the needed strategy was to shift to pattern recognition. Extending this observation today one could argue that if the Internet is a global nervous system - the the emerging capabilities of AI and machine learning algorithms represents the evolution of a cyber ‘neo-cortex’ and other brain-like clusters.
This article is pointing out how a firm wants to use AI to automate the ‘legal world’ - I can now imagine having an AI-ssistant that actually reads all those ‘end-user license agreements’ and can tell me what they mean and even whether they are in fact ‘legal’.

An AI Law Firm Wants to ‘Automate the Entire Legal World’

Unchanged for the past hundred years, the legal industry now faces its turn to be automatized. The idea of legal tech is not new, however not until today have algorithms been ready to seriously transform the legal industry.
Whether it’s a new employment contract, a rental contract, or sale contract, it needs to be checked before signing. Everyone knows the struggle of working through the dreaded small print, searching for pitfalls hidden in the tiniest details, and trying to make sense out of the bizarre language of law.

In fairness to the layman, contract review is also a hustle for lawyers themselves. In 2014, commercial lawyer Noori Bechor got sick of the fact that 80 percent of his work was spent reviewing contracts. He figured the service could be done much cheaper, faster, and more accurately by a computer. Hence, he started LawGeex, a platform for automatized contract review.

On LawGeex, users upload a contract and, within a short period of time (an hour on average), they receive a report that states which clauses don’t meet common legal standards. The report also details any vital clauses that could be missing, and where existing clauses might require revision. All of this is calculated by algorithms.


Another breakthrough that can be filed under the “Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law’ file. Only this is a shift to quantum computing. There are two short videos and one long one.

First ever blueprint unveiled to construct a large scale quantum computer

An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.

This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances (1). It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.

Once built, the computer's capabilities mean it would have the potential to answer many questions in science; create new, life-saving medicines; solve the most mind-boggling scientific problems; unravel the yet unknown mysteries of the furthest reaches of deepest space; and solve some problems that an ordinary computer would take billions of years to compute.

The work features a new invention permitting actual quantum bits to be transmitted between individual quantum computing modules in order to obtain a fully modular large-scale machine capable of reaching nearly arbitrary large computational processing powers.


The certainty of causality - is being challenged by a paradigm of meaning and purpose - a logocentric approach. This is a fascinating article providing a great discussion about how there is more than one way to achieve a function. This really is a must read - for anyone interested in complexity, agility and new paradigms arising out biological sciences.
This fluidity—dubbed “intrinsic disorder”—endows proteins with a set of superpowers that structured proteins don’t have. Folded proteins tend to bind to their targets firmly, like a key in a lock, at just one or two spots, but their more stretched-out wiggly cousins are like molecular Velcro, attaching lightly at multiple locations and releasing with ease. This quick-on-quick-off binding’s effect in the cell is huge: It allows intrinsically disordered proteins—or IDPs, for short—to receive and respond to a slew of molecular messages simultaneously or in rapid succession, essentially positioning them to serve as cellular messaging hubs, integrating these multiple signals and switching them on and off in response to changes in the cell’s environment and to keep cellular processes ticking along as they should.

The Shape-Shifting Army inside Your Cells

Proteins work like rigid keys to activate cellular functions—or so everyone thought
Structure equals function: If there’s one thing we all learned about proteins in high school biology, that would be it. According to the textbook story of the cell, a protein’s three-dimensional shape determines what it does—drive chemical reactions, pass signals up and down the cell’s information superhighway, or maybe hang molecular tags onto DNA. For more than a century, biologists have thought that the proteins carrying out these functions are like rigid cogs in the cell’s machinery.

Of course, exceptions would occasionally crop up. A scientist might bump into a protein that performed its functions perfectly well yet didn’t have rigid structures. Most researchers chalked these cases up to experimental error, or dismissed them as insignificant outliers.

More recently, however, biologists have begun paying attention to these shapeshifters. Their findings are tearing down the structure-function dogma.


Talking about shape-shifting biological entities - here’s an article about the Do-It-Yourself capability to domesticate DNA.
“I think it will be easier to teach dog breeders CRISPR than it will be to teach dog breeders why pure breeding is a bad thing,”

A Biohacker’s Plan to Upgrade Dalmatians Ends Up in the Doghouse

The FDA wants to regulate animals altered using the gene-editing technique CRISPR.
David Ishee is a Mississippi kennel operator with a passion for dogs and a plan to improve them using a gene-editing technology called CRISPR from a modest laboratory he’s built in a plywood shed.

Sound unlikely? It’s serious enough that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in a phone call last week, told Ishee he wouldn’t be able to sell any edited dogs without its approval.

Ishee, a member of what’s called the “biohacker” movement, says he is hoping to use inexpensive new gene-editing techniques to modify the genes of Dalmatians. By repairing a single DNA letter in their genomes, Ishee believes, he can rid them of an inherited disease, hyper uricemia, almost as closely associated with the breed as their white coats and black spots.

In early January, Ishee sent the agency a sketch of his plans to fix Dalmatians, expecting to be told no approval was needed. He didn’t immediately hear back—and soon found out why. On January 18, the agency released a sweeping new proposal to regulate cattle, pigs, dogs, and other animals modified with gene-editing.

The federal health agency already regulates transgenic animals—those with DNA added from a different species. But what about a dog whose genome has been tweaked to repair a disease gene? Or to endow it with the gene for a trait, like fluffy fur, already found in another canine? According to the newly proposed regulations, such creations will also need federal approval before entering the marketplace.


A key concern many critics make about too much reliance on renewable energy is the need for energy storage - but this may be much less of a problem than most imagine - there are many ways to store energy.

4 New Ways to Store Renewable Energy With Water

Stash it away in concrete bunkers, undersea bags, and other strange places
If Elon Musk has his way, in the future we’ll all be storing renewable electricity inside big banks of lithium-ion batteries. But let’s not forget the energy storage situation today. In the United States, 97 percent of utility-scale storage in 2014 was in pumped-storage hydroelectric plants, according to research by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.

In traditional pumped hydro, a dam separates a lower reservoir from an upper reservoir. When a utility company needs to store energy, the system pumps water from the bottom to the top. It generates electricity when water flows back down through a turbine. In 2015, Citibank estimated that the cost of power from pumped hydroelectric was about 5 percent of the cost of grid-scale battery-stored electricity.

The problem is that there are many places that “consume high amounts of power but don’t have geological opportunities to build conventional pumped-storage plants,” says Jochen Bard, an energy processing technology manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology (IWES), in Germany.
In 2017, a number of new pumped-hydro technologies should achieve milestones. They aim to bring the low cost of the technology to geographies that ordinarily wouldn’t allow it. Here are four you might hear about


Here an update on the robotics being created by Boston Dynamics (which is still owned by Alphabet) - not so sure it’s really ‘nightmare’ inducing - given what we already have seen in many sci-fi movies - but it does show how reality is keeping up with popular science fiction.  The very short videos are a MUST SEE.

Leaked video shows new ‘nightmare-inducing’ wheeled robot from Boston Dynamics

If this new leaked footage is any indication, it seems like the robot creators at Boston Dynamics finally found a way to improve on humanity’s primitive two-legged design: By adding a pair of wheels to their new self-balancing robot, giving the bot some impressive new capabilities.

Venture Capitalist Steve Jurvetson was at a presentation given by Boston Dynamics’ founder Marc Raibert, who revealed a new two-legged robot called Handle. The bot swaps articulated feet for a pair of wheels that it can balance on like it’s riding a Segway. But while that human transporter is regarded as a genuine failure, this footage—which Boston Dynamics told us was not meant to be seen outside the presentation—shows a sweet robot creation.

Unlike ATLAS, who can carefully walk over uneven terrains, making it ideal for exploring almost any environment on earth, Handle appears to be limited to mostly smooth surfaces, where it can roll with minimal resistance. The trade-off would allow Handle to move much faster and more efficiently, in a factory or warehouse environment where it doesn’t have to worry about ever having to tackle rubble or debris. But as demonstrated in this video, Handle is still able to tackle some obstacles, including leaping over a short wall.


Here might be the next Starbuck’s coffee chain in every building, mall or anyplace where there’s a healthy market for good, fresh coffee.

This Robot Barista Makes a Dang Good Latte

SOMETIMES A COFFEE means something: it’s an opportunity to catch up with friends, sit quietly among strangers, or unofficially pay a morning’s rent on your Starbucks office. That’s when you want a big, spacious cafe rich with the sound of typing and dense with the smell of roasted beans and five-minute pour-overs the price of a steak. Other times, though, a coffee is pure fuel: a jolt of caffeine to kick you up and out of your sleepy doldrums. Cafe X is for those times.

When you go to Cafe X, there are no hipster bartenders, and no judgy glances when you ask for a bit of half-and-half. There’s not even a cafe. It’s just a small, rounded kiosk, white on the bottom, with a large glass panel that lets you watch while an industrial robot pumps caramel into your latte. You order at an iPad-powered kiosk, or using Cafe X’s app. Pick your espresso drink, choose from three kinds of beans, and decide whether you want a little syrup, a lot of super, or Insane Syrup. Then pay, and press order. The robot barista then spins around, grabs a cup from the dispenser, and sticks it under the industrial-grade WMF espresso machine. One robot can make several drinks at once, and each takes about 20 seconds. Once your drink is ready, you type in a four-digit pin code, reach into the hatch, and grab your white cup printed with Cafe X’s logo.

One Cafe X robot has been serving coffee at the Hong Kong Science Park for a while now, but the first American kiosk opens today at the Metreon shopping center in San Francisco, after months of preparation. Mostly paperwork, actually: the health department couldn’t figure out what to make of Cafe X, eventually deciding to classify it like a food truck. “We even offered to put wheels on it!” says Stephen Klein, Cafe X’s general manager, but their only eventual requirement was to add a sink, which sits in some closed-off room down the hall. Now that the government understands Cafe X, CEO Henry Hu says they can set up another robot in half an hour.


I have to say I love this idea - a sort of motorized backpack - you have to see the picture.

This Robot Will Carry Your Stuff and Follow You Around

Vespa maker Piaggio’s new robot servant is yet another sign of the transportation industry reinventing itself.
The light-blue robot, called Gita, is almost spherical, with two wheels about the size of those you’d find on a mountain bike. A nearby laptop shows the world as perceived by the robot: a “point-cloud” of dots representing the 3-D shape of the room and the hallway outside, generated using a series of cameras attached to the bot’s body.

Gita was developed by Piaggio, an Italian automotive company that makes various lightweight vehicles but is most famous for making the iconic Vespa scooter. The robot is an experimental new way of transporting stuff. The top of the robot opens up, allowing it to store up to 40 pounds of whatever you might otherwise lug around yourself. The company is about to begin testing Gita in a number of industrial settings, including factories and theme parks. But the hope is that the robot may also appeal to consumers who might want a robot assistant as they walk, run, or ride a bike (it has a top speed of 22 mph).

Gita is a clear sign of the technological revolution currently shaking the world of transportation. As new technologies start to upend modes of mobility that have changed barely at all in decades, the automotive world is rapidly reinventing itself (see “Rebooting the Automobile”).


For Fun - Maybe
This is a new and interesting game - that some might really enjoy and others might find worthy of study.

The Founder: A Game About The Dark Side Of Silicon Valley

"The only way to win is not play," says designer Francis Tseng.
The year is 2001.
You've just started a company and are working out of your apartment with a few employees and your cofounder. You're hoping to disrupt an industry—any industry—with your social network and advertising service. But as you work to keep your board of investors happy, that means expanding into more and more verticals—mobile and hardware at first, but soon you're working in defense and biotech. By 2020, you're building drones for the government and a brain implant that helps with decision-making. Your research team is looking into artificial gravity, bioprinting, and the possibility of a building a colony on Mars so there are new markets to expand into. You're investing heavily in lobbying because it has big payouts. Your financial products have an impact on the world economy, and your mobile hardware business is contributing to climate change—so much so that your server farms, built along the California coast, begin to flood.

This dystopian future is one possible outcome of the startup simulator game The Founder. Created by the designer and developer Francis Tseng, the game is like The Sims for startups: You start by naming your company, choosing a cofounder, and picking a city in which to launch. Then, it's time to build products, and, more than likely for newcomers to the game, watch them fail miserably.
The actual game is here


This is Hilarious - it’s true - the greatest hilarious - huge hilarious - better hilarious than anyone else….

Europe Is Trolling Trump with Wickedly Funny Parody Videos

A Dutch answer to The Daily Show kicked off the trend, in which European countries farcically campaign to come second to America.
By now, we all know that under Donald Trump’s administration, the United States’s guiding principle is going to be “America first”—as the president stressed in his dystopian inauguration speech. The world got the message loud and clear—and now, European countries are beginning to counter with rallying cries of their own.

The trend began with a viral parody video from the Netherlands, courtesy of the news satire show Zondag met Lubach. The clip, a faux introduction to the Netherlands that mocks Trump by imitating the president’s signature verbiage—”We’ve got the best words. All the other languages failed”—has racked up more than 16 million views on YouTube since last week.

Now, several other countries have hopped on the bandwagon, all sarcastically clamoring to come in “second” to America’s interests by making their cases in terms Trump can understand.
The rest of the short videos are here