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Bill Fulkerson

The Soil Talks Back - 0 views

wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/...soil-talks-back

soil

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 19 May 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 19 May 20
     
    ]. "The narrow strip of soil around the plant's root teems with millions of microorganisms, making it one of the most complex ecosystems on earth. To determine whether the composition of this "root microbiome" triggers changes within the plant, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elisa Korenblum and other members of a team headed by Prof. Asaph Aharoni of Weizmann's Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, created a hydroponic set-up in which they split the roots of tomato seedlings in two. In a series of experiments, the researchers placed one side of the split roots in vials, progressively diluting the soil suspensions several times. Each dilution altered the soil's microbial composition and reduced the diversity within the microbial community, so that the different suspensions ended up containing root microbiomes with high, medium and low diversity levels. The other side of the roots was submerged in a vial with a clean, soil-free solution. If the soil microbes communicate with the plant, one would expect to detect signs of their messages on both sides of the root system. That was exactly what the scientists found…. 'Our ultimate goal is to decipher the chemical language - one could call it 'Plantish' - used by plants and the soil to interact with one another,' Korenblum
Bill Fulkerson

COVID-19 in Mauritius and Other Tourist Paradises: A Progress Report | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...radises-a-progress-report.html

mauritius tourist capitalism coronavirus

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 29 May 20
     
    When they are strict and prolonged, the public health and social measures to contain Covid-19 have proven difficult to respect. This column gives evidence of the different outcomes, as of 23 May, across a sample of 20 tourist-dependent island states with populations of between 100,000 and 10 million. If tourist-dependent islands have been hit hard by the shock, most have fared well, particularly those - like Mauritius - that acted early and imposed a strict lockdown.
Bill Fulkerson

Viral and host factors related to the clinical outcome of COVID-19 | Nature - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41586-020-2355-0

outcome viral factors clinical

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 27 May 20
     
    In December 2019, the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province, China1 and soon spread across the world. In this ongoing pandemic, public health concerns and the urgent need for effective therapeutic measures require a deep understanding of its epidemiology, transmissibility and pathogenesis. Here we analyzed the clinical, molecular and immunological data from 326 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Shanghai. Genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 assembled from 112 quality samples together with sequences in the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) showed a stable evolution and suggested two major lineages with differential exposure history during the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan. Nevertheless, they exhibited similar virulence and clinical outcomes. Lymphocytopenia, especially the reduced CD4+ and CD8+ T cell counts upon admission, was predictive of disease progression. High levels of IL-6 and IL-8 during treatment were observed in patients with severe or critical disease and correlated with decreased lymphocyte count. The determinants of disease severity seemed to stem mostly from host factors such as age, lymphocytopenia, and its associated cytokine storm, whereas viral genetic variation did not significantly affect the outcomes.
Steve Bosserman

Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501104

democracy urban design ecosystems diversity neighborhoods

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
  • I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
  • Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
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  • Reduced to a word, Jacobs’s argument is that a city, or neighborhood, or block, cannot succeed without diversity: diversity of residential and commercial use, racial and socioeconomic diversity, diversity of governing bodies (from local wards to state agencies), diverse modes of transportation, diversity of public and private institutional support, diversity of architectural style. Great numbers of people concentrated in relatively small areas should not be considered a health or safety hazard; they are the foundation of a healthy community. Dense, varied populations are “desirable,” Jacobs wrote,
  • Madison argued that as you increase the “variety of parties and interests” contained within a republic, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
  • “We need all kinds of diversity,” Jacobs concluded in Death and Life, “so the people of cities can sustain (and further develop) their society and civilization.”
  • In her comparative study of fallen empires, Jacobs identifies common early indicators of decline: “cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.
  • In the foreword to the 1992 Modern Library edition of Death and Life, Jacobs likens cities to natural ecosystems. “Both types of ecosystems,” she writes, “require much diversity to sustain themselves … and because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.”
Steve Bosserman

Trump's pledges to reverse climate-change policies worry some | The Columbus Dispatch - 0 views

www.dispatch.com/...hange-policies-worry-some.html

change climate change environmentalism

shared by Steve Bosserman on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Recent progress on climate change has been vital, environmentalists say. Although some say that the work is fragile at best and could be undone by the Trump administration, others remain certain that the grass-roots nature of environmental work will protect it from any sweeping federal changes. “Real change — the change that makes a difference — has been made at regional or local levels,” said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor in Ohio State University’s School of Earth Sciences and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. “It’s coming from the bottom up, (and) these changes will come no matter who’s in charge, what we believe or what we hope for.”
Bill Fulkerson

New AI system will help us discover the most effective behaviour change strategies - 0 views

theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org/...viour-change-strategies-100057

AI change behavioral

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 20 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • hanging people’s behaviour is key to tackling the world’s health, social and environmental problems, such as obesity, sustainable living and cybersecurity. To change behaviour, though, we need to know what works, for whom, where and how. But research is generated far faster than humans can access and use it. A search on Google Scholar for “behaviour change” produced over 60,000 hits for the first six months of 2018. Evidence on behaviour change interventions is also messy. Different terms are often used to describe similar things – “physical activity” and “exercise”, for example. This means different people can often mean different things when discussing or researching behaviour change. This lack of shared vocabulary limits our progress in discovering what interventions work best.
Steve Bosserman

Why I am afraid of global cooling - Nexus Newsfeed - 0 views

www.nexusnewsfeed.com/...-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling

climate change global cooling global warming

shared by Steve Bosserman on 21 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • I think we already have enough of the quantifiable (although it is poorly distributed, a separate though deeply related issue). What we need more of are the things that are hard to quantify. The rising tide of suicide and depression in the developed world is not caused by shrinking residential floor space or lack of access to 4G cell service. It probably has something to do with the disintegration of community, the withering of connection, loss of purpose and meaning, chronic pain and unresolved trauma, unprocessed grief, ambient anxiety, and the other accoutrements of Separation. This point seems obvious here at my brother’s farm where I write this, because my life is rich here; rich in relationship to the natural world through my hands, my senses, my labor, and yes, my bare feet, and rich in relationship to the human world as well through shared labor, common purpose, and mutual reliance. And the point seems equally unobvious when I’m separated from all these things. In the busy world of cars and clocks and screens, faster and more of them seems like progress.
Steve Bosserman

Uber has cracked two classic '80s video games by giving an AI algorithm a new type of m... - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...algorithm-a-new-type-of-memory

algorithms artificial intelligence machine learning reinforcement

shared by Steve Bosserman on 27 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the algorithms forget about promising areas they have visited, meaning they do not return to them to see if they lead to new states.”
  • The team’s new family of reinforcement-learning algorithms, dubbed Go-Explore, remember where they have been before, and will return to a particular area or task later on to see if it might help provide better overall results. The researchers also found that adding a little bit of domain knowledge, by having human players highlight interesting or important areas, sped up the algorithms’ learning and progress by a remarkable amount. This is significant because there may be many real-world situations where you would want an algorithm and a person to work together to solve a hard task.
Steve Bosserman

Tiny Lab-Grown 'Brains' Raise Big Ethical Questions - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ns-raise-big-ethical-questions

autism lab brain ethics

shared by Steve Bosserman on 02 May 18 - No Cached
  • These clusters of living brain cells are popularly known as minibrains, though scientists prefer to call them cerebral organoids. At the moment, they remain extremely rudimentary versions of an actual human brain and are used primarily to study brain development and disorders like autism.
  • But minibrain research is progressing so quickly that scientists need to start thinking about the potential implications now, says Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and the director of Duke Science and Society.
  • "If you're talking about something like schizophrenia or autism, if you want to model those things, it is difficult to do so with animal models and it is ethically impossible in many instances to do so with living humans," She says. But it is possible to grow a minibrain from cells with genetic mutations associated with like autism and watch how it develops.
Steve Bosserman

The wealth of our collective data should belong to all of us | Chris Hughes - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ook-google-data-tax-regulation

data mining

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Nearly every moment of our lives, we’re producing data about ourselves that companies profit from. Our smartwatches know when we wake up, Alexa listens to our private conversations, our phones track where we go, Google knows what we email and search, Facebook knows what we share with friends, and our loyalty cards remember what we buy. We share all this data about ourselves because we like the services these companies provide, and business leaders tell us we must to make it possible for those services to be cheap or free.
  • We should not only expect that these companies better protect our data – we should also ensure that everyone creating it shares in the economic value it generates. One person’s data is worth little, but the collection of lots of people’s data is what fuels the insights that companies use to make more money or networks, like Facebook, that marketers are so attracted to. Data isn’t the “new oil”, as some have claimed: it isn’t a non-renewable natural resource that comes from a piece of earth that a lucky property owner controls. We have all pitched in to create a new commonwealth of information about ourselves that is bigger than any single participant, and we should all benefit from it.
  • The value of our data has a lot in common with the value of our labor: a single individual worker, outside of the rarest professions, can be replaced by another with similar skills. But when workers organize to withhold their labor, they have much more power to ensure employers more fairly value it. Just as one worker is an island but organized workers are a force to be reckoned with, the users of digital platforms should organize not only for better protection of our data, but for a new contract that ensures everyone shares in the historic profits we make possible.
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  • A data dividend would be a powerful way to rebalance the American economy, which currently makes it possible for a very small number of people to get rich while everyone else struggles to make ends meet.
  • A data dividend on its own would not be enough to stem growing income inequality, but it would create a universal benefit that would guarantee people benefit from the collective wealth our economy is creating more than they do today. If paired with fairer wages, more progressive taxation, and stricter enforcement of monopoly and monopsony power, it could help us turn the corner and create a country where we take care of one another and ensure that everyone has basic economic security.
Steve Bosserman

Chris Hedges With Mark Crispin Miller on the Destruction of an Independent Press - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...uction-of-an-independent-press

mainstream media independent press streamlining

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Hedges calls attention to the algorithms of Facebook, Google and Twitter, and how they steer traffic away from anti-war and progressive websites, while Miller speaks of the frightening historical precedent of the homogenization of the press. "I think what we have seen over the decades since the mid-'70s, and I'm going to make a provocative comparison here, is something analogous to what the Nazis called gleichschaltung, which means streamlining," Miller says. "When they came to power, they made it their business to make sure that not only all media outlets but all industries, all sectors of the culture, would be streamlined, which meant getting rid of anyone who was not fully on board with the Nazi program."
Steve Bosserman

Will AI replace Humans? - FutureSin - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...ai-replace-humans-42c19c114cb8

humans robotics artificial intelligence

shared by Steve Bosserman on 26 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, some jobs will be wiped out, others will be in high demand, but all in all, around 5 million jobs will be lost. The real question is then, how many jobs will be made redundant in the 2020s? Many futurists including Google’s Chief Futurist believe this will necessitate a universal human stipend that could become globally ubiquitous as early as the 2030s.
  • AI will optimize many of our systems, but also create new jobs. We don’t know the rate at which it will do this. Research firm Gartner further confirms the hypothesis of AI creating more jobs than it replaces, by predicting that in 2020, AI will create 2.3 million new jobs while eliminating 1.8 million traditional jobs.
  • In an era where it’s being shown we can’t even regulate algorithms, how will we be able to regulate AI and robots that will progressively have a better capacity to self-learn, self-engineer, self-code and self-replicate? This first wave of robots are simply robots capable of performing repetitive tasks, but as human beings become less intelligent trapped in digital immersion, the rate at which robots learn how to learn will exponentially increase.How do humans stay relevant when Big Data enables AI to comb through contextual data as would a supercomputer? Data will no longer be the purvey of human beings, neither medical diagnosis and many other things. To say that AI “augments” human in this respect, is extremely naive and hopelessly optimistic. In many respects, AI completely replaces the need for human beings. This is what I term the automation economy.
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  • If China, Russia and the U.S. are in a race for AI supremacy, the kind of manifestations of AI will be so significant, they could alter the entire future of human civilization.
  • THE EXPONENTIAL THREATFrom drones, to nanobots to 3D-printing, automation could lead to unparalleled changes to how we live and work. In spite of the increase in global GDP, most people’s quality of living is not likely to see the benefit as it will increasingly be funneled into the pockets of the 1%. Capitalism then, favors the development of an AI that’s fundamentally exploitative to the common global citizen.Just as we exchanged our personal data for convenience and the illusion of social connection online, we will barter convenience for a world a global police state where social credit systems and AI decide how much of a “human stipend” (basic income) we receive. Our poverty or the social privilege we are born into, may have a more obscure relationship to a global system where AI monitors every aspect of our lives.Eventually AI will itself be the CEOs, inventors, master engineers and creator of more efficient robots. That’s when we will know that AI has indeed replaced human beings. What will Google’s DeepMind be able to do with the full use of next-gen quantum computing and supercomputers?
  • Artificial Intelligence Will Replace HumansTo argue that AI and robots and 3D-printing and any other significant technology won’t impact and replace many human jobs, is incredibly irresponsible.That’s not to say humans won’t adapt, and even thrive in more creative, social and meaningful work!That AI replacing repetitive tasks is a good thing, can hardly be denied. But will it benefit all globally citizens equally? Will ethics, common sense and collective pragmatism and social inclusion prevail over profiteers?Will younger value systems such as decentralization and sustainable living thrive with the advances of artificial intelligence?Will human beings be able to find sufficient meaning in a life where many of them won’t have a designated occupation to fill their time?These are the question that futurists like me ponder, and you should too.
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